Nature Vs. Nurture In Richard Wright's Black Boy

The hardships Richard Wright faces living as an African American in the early 1900s shows the argument of Nature vs. Nurture in his memoir Black Boy. Richard Nathaniel Wright is an African American author who was born on September 4, 1908 in Roxie, Mississippi. His parents raised him for a short amount of time because his father deserted them, and then his mother grew very ill. The fact that his parents were not in the picture was the reason that Wright lived in an array of places, and it exposed him to different types of people in the south. He wrote his first piece of literature, which was a short story, in middle school and it is called “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre,” in the Jackson South Register. The book that established Wright as an

Slavery was abolished, but it was hard for colored people to get jobs to support their families, and when they did get a job, they had to work long and hard hours to earn enough money for bills. Sometimes it was not enough for food. This left young children unsupervised for hours, and at a young age they had to learn to support themselves. By fifteen, many had jobs. In the memoir, Richard frequently went to a bar at six years old because he was hungry and did not know where to find food. Random people would feed him, give him drinks, and even pay him if he said inappropriate things to other people in the bar. If his father was around, and his mother did not work long hours then that would not have happened

He always looked at his father as a stranger living in his house and he never connected with him; he felt as if his presence stifled his voice and laughter. When his father abandoned their family, he became associated with the hunger he left behind since there was never much money to buy food and Wright would go days without eating. Whenever his stomach grumbled he would think of how much enmity he had for his dad (Dykema-VanderArk). After a long time Richard saw his father working on a plantation as a sharecropper. Wright realized that his father went to the city to better himself, but he failed. So he returned to the south to go back to his original job, a sharecropper. After realizing what he and his father both went through in the city he thought, “I was overwhelmed to realize that he could never understand me or the scalding experiences that had swept me beyond his life and into an area of living that he could never know… my father was a black peasant who had gone to the city seeking life… that same city which lifted me in its burning arms and borne me toward alien and undreamed of shores” (Wright 90). This shows that his journey and his father’s were much different. Wright fought to get to where he was, and he did not just give up when the going got rough. He had much more success in the city then his father did. He never dreamed that he