Big Boy Leaves Home

Wright was born in 1908 near Natchez, Mississippi. His grandparents were formerly enslaved people, his mother was a teacher, and his father was a one-time sharecropper. Abandoned by his father when he was five years old, Wright grew up in poverty, living with various relatives around the southern United States. Southern states adopted a set of policies in the late 19th century that restricted the rights of Black people and legalized racial segregation. Known as Jim Crow Laws, these legal forms of oppression demanded, among other things, separate schools, restaurants, toilets, and drinking fountains for white and Black people. The laws, which were in full force during Wright’s lifetime, were accompanied by extralegal violent repression that usually went entirely unprosecuted. African American men were subject to assault and lynching, living with the constant threat of violence.

In the “autobiographical sketch” that precedes “Big Boy Leaves Home” in Uncle Tom’s Children, Wright presents various “lessons” in his “Jim Crow education”—a series of experiences that were meant to teach him to stay in his place and accept his subjection. For instance, he recalls an incident at a hotel where he worked, in which a Black bellboy who was caught with a white sex worker was castrated and driven out of town.