When Nathan Wright, Richard’s father left the family while Richard was still at a young age, it began the spiraling whirlwind of events that would be Richard’s childhood, and these events became the foundation of his personality. Richard admits to us that his father “was always a stranger…always somehow alien and remote” (8). So, it wasn’t necessarily that when Richards father left, Richard was so wounded he became distrustful towards other people and therefore self-reliant. In reality, it was the effects and other events caused by the absence of his father that would form Richard’s qualities. First, Richard comes to understand what his father is, a symbol of what black men are supposed to be according to white standards. After watching his father play dumb in front of a white judge and after experiencing his father refuse to fulfill his obligations to help Ella and Richard pay for necessities, Richard realizes that he can never be what his father is, a “Black Boy.” Plus, due to the lack of financial support from his disloyal father, Richard and his family are forced into poverty and starvation. Through Richard’s constant hungriness we see Richard’s constant battle with his environment, at one point while at a restraint in which his mother was working he expressed his confusion towards society, “Watching the white folk eat would make my empty stomach churn and I would grow vaguely hungry. Why could I not eat when I was hungry? Why did I always have to wait until others were through? I could not understand why some people had enough food and others did not. (19)” We see even as an extremely young child Richard struggles to accept that he is flawed to due skin color and economic status. His dad’s absence also leads to an environment that limits his experiences to boredom, hunger, fear, and hate so imagination becomes his defence system against the affects of reality and help assist Richard with his education.
Another major factor in the outcome of his beliefs was his mother’s unrelenting sickness. After his mothers second paralytic stroke, while Richard is summarizing his feelings towards his mother’s illness, he illustrates some of his key beliefs, “My mother’s suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness, the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread, the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life, colored the men and women I was to meet in the future, conditioned my relation to events that had not yet happened, determined my attitude to situations and circumstances I had yet to face. A somberness of spirit… that was to make me stand apart and look upon excessive joy with suspicion, that was to make me self-conscious, that was to make me keep forever on the move,” (100). The quote above, had to be seen in it’s entirety to fully understand it’s meaning, one in which Richard clearly explains how his mother’s illness effected him. He starts by explaining, that his mothers sickness represents and parallels the obstacles that he is facing. And because she taught Richard how to handle his problems, he inherited the traits that he now cherishes. For example, when she makes Richard keep going to get some groceries even when a gang of boys continuously rob and beat Richard every time he goes to the store. When Richard told her he was to scared to go back to the store, because he was worried about being beaten and robbed, Ella responded by locking the door and telling Richard, ”’I’m going to teach you this night to stand up and fight for yourself,’” (17.) Richard wasn’t naturally ready to fight, or to accept any consequence for a chance at living by his own standards, his mother instilled him with these qualities. And because of this, even after she fell sick, Richard was prepared for and situation that could possibly arise. But through his mother’s sickness Richard comes to a revelation that gives him a justified reason to fight for equality. The reason he had is “a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering,” (100). Here Richard says, through his mom he learned that he doesn’t have the right to reach his goals, he has to fight for them. He realized that life is only meaningful when we make it meaningful, and by being the stereotypical black boy even though he was truly immensely brilliant wouldn’t make his life significant.
So perhaps, these were the most two important events in shaping who Richard is as he reflects on the first 15 years of his life. Possibly because while his mother prepared him for any situation, his father set him up and lit the flame that “lifted [him] up in its burning arms and borne [him] toward alien and undreamed-of shores of knowing, (35).”
