As we enter Black History Month, I ask you please to listen to my stories of two giants of African-American literature who experienced the freeing power of literacy.
In 1946, a young black man named Malcolm Little was locked away in the Norfolk Prison Colony to serve a term for robbery. In 1952, the same man, a converted Muslim now called Malcolm X, was released. But in many ways, he gained his freedom through language years before his physical liberation.
In “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (1964), Malcolm tells how he rose from a world of thieving, pimping and drug peddling to become one of the most articulate and dynamic leaders of the black revolution in America. Frustrated by his inability to express himself in writing, he borrowed a dictionary from the prison school and slowly, painstakingly, began to copy, word by word and page by page, the entire dictionary onto his tablet: “With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia.”
As his vocabulary expanded, an already powerful speaker experienced a new empowerment through literacy. He read all day and even at night, in the faint glow of a corridor light:
“Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened up. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge. … Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I had never been so truly free in my life.”
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Richard Wright spent his childhood in another kind of prison — the Jim Crow South, a prison of poverty, fear and racism. He was born on a farm near Natchez, Miss., and, when he was 5, his sharecropper father deserted the family. Richard, his mother and his brother had to move from one community to another throughout the South so that he seldom remained in one school for an entire year. Yet somehow Richard Wright escaped the prison of hunger and hatred to become one of the most significant black writers in America, the author of “Native Son” (1940) and “Black Boy” (1945), two watershed books in our literature.
In “Black Boy,” Wright’s unsparing autobiography, he describes his liberation at the age of 18. Because black people were not allowed library privileges, Wright used the card of a friendly white man along with a forged note that said, “Dear Madam: Will you please let this n—– boy have some books by H.L. Mencken.” He obtained a copy of Mencken’s “A Book of Prefaces”, and all at once the sun of great literature burst through the window of his prison:
“That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my pork and beans in the sink, I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? … I stood up, trying to realize what reality lay behind the meaning of the words. Yes, this man was fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. … Then, maybe, perhaps, I could use them as a weapon.”
The titles of his first three works — “Uncle Tom’s Children,” “Native Son” and “Black Boy” — keep alive the abiding memory that Richard Wright always carried for the child who opened a book by H.L. Mencken and discovered a world, for the son who never felt himself native to the country of his birth and for the boy who struggled out of the depths to speak for those who remained behind.
Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com