Richard Wright and the Library Card

This is a fairly old book, but I decided to include it because it’s Black History Month (for a couple more days) and because I remain a stalwart Richard Wright reader. Most of his work is probably not suited for children, and with adults he seems to have gone out of fashion. It’s been argued that Wright’s fiction was not particularly nuanced; the good vs evil (white being evil) was too heavy handed in his work. And some of his contemporaries hinted that his difficulty with personal relationships in general influenced his portrayals of the Jim Crow South and of South Side Chicago.

But because of his commercial success, Wright did offer the American public the truth from a Black man’s perspective in the late 1930s. Maybe for the first time, with Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son, white readers saw an American underclass in all its awful vividness. Richard Wright and the Library Card (32 pages, Lee & Low Books) examines a small but seminal incident in the author’s life. The book shows the danger he (and others of his status) lived in perpetually, regarding even the most seemingly mundane matters. Young readers will understand that in another era, a young boy had to use cunning and guile simply to check books out of a library. But, as if he had a biological need to, Wright got books into his possession and in doing so, educated himself in a way that the inferior schools for Blacks at the time could never have done. This story is not exactly as I remember in the accounts of his I’ve read, but it captures the essence of his small triumph.

The painted illustrations by Gregory Christie are impressionistic, slightly abstract, utilizing inviting colors. The book is listed as appropriate for readers ages 6 and up. And for the adults, it wouldn’t hurt to reread “Big Boy Leaves Home” from Uncle Tom’s Children, just to remind us of where we used to be.