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Symbols
Books symbolize a great deal of the memoir’s most important ideas. Books provide an imaginative escape for Richard, whose life is lived in grinding poverty and amid terrible racial suppression and violence. They allow Richard to develop as an individual, and provide windows onto different parts of the world, places Richard can only dream of visiting one day, after he has left the South. They are hard for Richard to obtain (Ella, for example, lends him some, and Falk allows Richard to use his library card), but once Richard has them, their ideas can never be taken away. Thus books offer a respite from the difficulties of Richard’s life. They are also a means of escaping that life, of attempting to set up a new and better home in Chicago. Finally, it is Richard’s education in literature that allows him to write Black Boy itself. The memoir describes Richard’s young life and Southern upbringing as forming his intellectual path, and included in the book are the events, and texts, that have shaped him. By the memoir’s end, Richard is writing his own material—he is contributing to the “conversation” between books that has captured his attention since childhood.
Books and Novels Quotes in Black Boy
The Black Boy quotes below all refer to the symbol of Books and Novels. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 6
Quotes
What grade are you in school?
Seventh, ma’am.
Then why are you going to school?
Well, I want to be a writer.
A what?
A writer.
For what?
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Chapter 7
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Son, you ought to be more serious. You’re growing up now and you won’t be able to get jobs if you let people think that you’re weak-minded. Suppose the superintendent of schools would ask you to teach here in Jackson, and he found out that you had been writing stories?
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Chapter 11
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Where might you be from?
Jackson, Mississippi.
You act mighty bright to be from there.
There are bright people in Jackson.
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Chapter 14
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Yet, deep down, I knew that I could never really leave the South, for my feelings had already been formed by the South, for there had been slowly instilled into my personality and consciousness, black though I was, the culture of the South. So, in leaving, I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, and bend in strange winds . . . .
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Chapter 15
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My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment which seemed supremely worth struggling for. If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative.
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Chapter 19
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Stalin’s book had showed how diverse minorities could be welded into unity, and I regarded it as a most politically sensitive volume that revealed a new way of looking upon lost and beaten peoples. Of all the developments in the Soviet Union, the method by which scores of backward peoples had been led to unity on a national scale was what had enthralled me.
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Books and Novels Symbol Timeline in Black Boy
The timeline below shows where the symbol Books and Novels appears in Black Boy. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...teaches Richard how to recite the numbers. Richard also begins picking his way through children’s books left on the street by schoolchildren.
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Chapter 2
...skin. She has a young girl board with her, a teacher named Ella. Ella reads novels frequently, and tells Richard the plot of the novel Bluebeard after Richard repeatedly asks what...
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Chapter 4
...he is supposed to be praying, Richard’s mind wanders, and he begins thinking of a book on Native Americans he read recently. He quickly drafts a story of a young Native...
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Chapter 5
Granny and Addie will not give Richard money for “earthly books,” meaning anything that is not the Bible, and they continue to feed him on a...
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...Richard is nonetheless ashamed. Richard works hard that year in school, and reads whatever dime-store novels he can get his hands on in his spare time. As summer begins, however, Granny...
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Chapter 6
...searches for employment in order to make enough money to buy food for himself and books to read. He asks his fellow students if they know of any work helping white...
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Chapter 7
...continues, and Richard looks again for better-paying work to enable him to eat and buy books. He gets a job as a water-boy at a brickyard, where he is bitten by...
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...writer. Although his family finds this dream “foolish” and “weak-minded,” Richard has convinced himself, from novels he has read secretly in his spare time, that the life of a writer is...
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Chapter 11
...marriage. After dinner, Richard and Bess talk for a moment, and she shows him her schoolbooks (she is 17 but only in fifth grade); Richard goes up to his room that...
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Chapter 13
...that any writer believed to be dangerous by Southern whites must be a writer worth reading, and decides he will get his hands on Mencken’s books from the public library, which...
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...“Falk’s” note to the librarian at the Memphis library, and she agrees to lend the book to Richard “for Falk,” although she worries for a moment that Richard himself will read...
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Richard begins staying up most nights reading. He checks out more books from the library, using Falk’s card, including novels by Dreiser...
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Chapter 14
...he’s leaving, and though they ask why he’s going to Chicago, and wonder if the books he reads have encouraged him to leave, Richard simply replies that he is moving North...
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Chapter 15
...the surprise of the “boss lady” at the diner when she realizes that Richard reads The American Mercury , H. L. Mencken’s magazine. No one else on the staff concerns themselves with that...
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...in, and they live in close quarters together. Richard spends much of his free time reading (Gertrude Stein and Dostoevsky especially), and he practices his own writing, despite his family’s disapproval...
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...his project of intellectual betterment, though it’s difficult to maintain his schedule, continue his broad reading, and deal with his family, who are confused by his dedication to books. Although he...
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Chapter 16
...friends with a group of Jewish and Irish self-taught intellectuals, who discuss some of the books and pamphlets they’ve been reading, including discussions of contemporary society. Richard is dismayed to discover,...
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