ABSTRACT
Early in the pages of his autobiography Black Boy (1945/1993a), Richard Wright tells us of his encounter with “Once upon a time.” Those magical four words ushered the young boy into an undiscovered realm of his imagination. Never before had he experienced such a world as that portrayed in the fairy tale of Bluebeard and his wives. “My imagination blazed,” he writes of the story (p. 45). Before that, he had lived, a hungry and hungering child, in the isolation of a misery born of deprivation so profound that not even his mother could salve him. Indeed, even his mother tormented him. In those Jim Crow days, Richard Wright’s mother and grandmother tried to teach Richard to be subservient to the White man’s cruel and unjust laws. They beat him physically, believing that the stings from a wet towel or a hard stick could subdue his rebellious spirit. But those physical torments, hard as they were, did nothing to deter the young boy from his interest in “the forbidden and enchanting land” (p. 47) of words.
