Childhood down the Ohio River

memory and racism in Richard Wright’s Black Boy

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the representations of childhood memory in the autobiographical narrative Black Boy, by Richard Wright, published in 1945. The focus is set on the theme of racism, which means how the experience of racial violence is elaborated in the mnemonic process, and consequently, in the narrative project. To accomplish this goal, in the first section memory and its narrative construction are discussed through Ricoeur (2007, 2010), and Umbach (2008), mainly. In the aftermath, I present the literary analysis on Black Boy taking as an analytical key the crossings of racism in the narrative representation of childhood memory. Considering this, I observe that by the double time in the narrative, the traumatic memory of racial oppression comes to the text: the adult narrator, from the narrative present, models the experience of the child character, in the narrative past.