Memory Believes Before Knowing Remembers

Richard Wright does a great job of depicting the trajectory of his logic and reason throughout the early years of his life. His story of lighting the curtains, and half of his house on fire at age four, is a useful analogy of Wrights quest for knowledge. From Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass' books, I learned that knowledge and the quest to understand the world for what it really is, is a crucial part in attaining ones freedom and autonomy. When reading the text, Wright attains two types of knowledge, knowledge of advise and knowledge of experience. In his story of burning the curtains, Wright tests the advise of his mother (to keep quiet and stay out of trouble) and brother (that lighting the curtains is wrong) by choosing to go forth with the experiment. He burns half of his house down, gets beat unconscious and thrown into a fever for days after, but what does he learn? I think he learns that some knowledge and the quest to achieve it, can be deadly. If the experience it takes to answer ones questions doesn't kill you, the social environment that looks down upon attaining such knowledge can surely bring one close to death as well. This is seen again when the "uncle" that Aunt Maggie was dating, kills a woman and burns down her house. Richard attains the knowledge that this man killed someone, but he was unable to share this knowledge with anyone, for fear of being lynched.

Following the growth of Wrights knowledge in these first couple chapters, I also begin to see a struggle between the knowledge that is spoken to him and the knowledge that he gains through experience. He is raised with the Christian morals of his parents and grandparents, but he has a hard time applying what he sees everyday to such standards. We see this conflict surface when he so kindly tells his grandmother to kiss his ass, oblivious to crossroads of religion and culture he just reached. This struggle is present in his experience of beating the neighborhood bullies in order to get groceries for his mother as well. Wright is sent into confusion when his mother repeatedly sends him back to deal with the bullies. Eventually he is given a stick, and he must physically break his preconceived conceptions of fighting as improper, in order to survive reality.

What becomes more and more interesting is his knowledge of race and racism. I really enjoyed reading the conversation on page 48, between Wright and his mother. He is trying to ascertain whether his grandmother is black or white, his mother, speaking quite carefully on the subject, relays the facts to him, but refrains from applying reason, emotion or sentiment to the statements she provides. Wright is left to sort out a bunch of facts without the framework of racism to apply the reasoning behind them. I cant for certain say much more on this development, but I imagine what it would be like to read a bunch of statistics based on race, without knowing the racial context of society. It would provide me with as much confusion as Wright seems to get from his conversation with his mother.