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Chapters
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Chapters
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Black Boy has 20 chapters.
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Chapters20 items
Chapter 1
Richard is four years old and already in trouble. He sets fire to the curtains out of boredom and curiosity, nearly burns the house down, and gets a severe beating from his mother.
Chapter 2
Richard's father abandons the family, and the consequences are immediate and material. The family goes hungry.
Chapter 3
Richard's mother suffers a stroke, and the family enters a long period of crisis. Relatives take in the boys temporarily, splitting them up.
Chapter 4
Richard is living with his grandmother, Granny Wilson, a devout Seventh-day Adventist. Her household runs on religious rules: no work on the Sabbath, no secular books, no noise th…
Chapter 5
Richard is now in school more consistently and begins to show real academic ability. He writes his first story and shares it with a neighbor woman who is baffled by it, which only…
Chapter 6
Richard is now a teenager working various jobs in Memphis and Jackson, trying to scrape together money to eventually head north.
Chapter 7
Richard keeps working low-wage jobs while reading voraciously on the side. He discovers H.
Chapter 8
Richard is still in the South but working steadily toward leaving. He takes a job at an optical company and gets a glimpse of what it might look like to learn a real trade, but wh…
Chapter 9
Richard is getting closer to leaving. He steals to fund his escape north, a decision he makes with clear eyes and without much guilt.
Chapter 10
Richard finally leaves the South and arrives in Memphis as a first stop on the way to Chicago. The move north is not triumphant.
Chapter 11
Richard moves deeper into Memphis's Black working-class world, taking jobs and navigating white employers who expect deference he refuses to fully give.
Chapter 12
Richard continues working in Memphis and saving money, with his eye fixed on getting north. He watches the people around him absorb humiliation and wonders whether he is different…
Chapter 13
Richard finally leaves the South and arrives in Chicago. The city is loud, cold, and indifferent in ways the South never was.
Chapter 14
Richard works a series of jobs in Chicago and gets involved with the Communist Party's cultural circles, drawn in by the John Reed Club, which offers him a community of writers an…
Chapter 15
Richard's relationship with the Communist Party deteriorates. Party members grow suspicious of his independence and begin treating him as a problem.
Chapter 16
Richard arrives in Chicago, immediately struck by how different the North feels from the South. The city is loud, crowded, and indifferent in a way that is disorienting but also f…
Chapter 17
Richard deepens his involvement with the Communist Party and begins to see it as a possible vehicle for the kind of social change he has been searching for.
Chapter 18
Richard's disillusionment with the Communist Party accelerates. He is formally accused of being a suspicious element and faces a kind of internal trial.
Chapter 19
Richard continues writing and begins to find a small audience for his work. He reflects on what it has cost him to get this far, the family he could not save, the community he nev…
Chapter 20
The memoir closes with Richard still in motion, still unresolved, but committed. He has not achieved fame or safety or belonging.
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