Literary Ruralism (XX): Black Boy, by Richard Wright

This passage about Richard Wright's father, whom he calls a "black peasant," comes at the end of the first chapter of Wright's memoir, Black Boy (1945).  Wright's father had abandoned the family in Memphis, when Richard was quite young.  The last time Richard Wright saw his father, prior to the scene excerpted below, was in Memphis, where his father had taken up with another woman after leaving Wright's mother.  On that prior occasion, Richard Wright's mother had gone to Wright's father to ask for money to help feed and support Richard and her brother.  On that occasion, Wright's father had refused to give money but had offered to keep Richard, to have Richard stay with him.

All we know about the work Wright's father did in Memphis is that he was a porter in a hotel.  We also know at this point that Wright's family had first migrated to Memphis from a rural are in Mississippi. Thus, Richard Wright's father's tale is one of rural-to-urban-to rural migration:

A quarter of a century was to elapse between the time when I saw my father sitting with the strange woman and the time when I was to see him again, standing alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation, a sharecropper, clad in ragged overalls, holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled, veined hands—a quarter of a century during which my mind and consciousness had become so greatly and violently altered that when I tried to talk to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality. That day a quarter of a century later when I visited him on the plantation—he was standing against the sky, smiling toothlessly, his hair whitened, his body bent, his eyes glazed with dim recollection, his fearsome aspect of twenty-five years ago gone forever from him—I was overwhelmed to realize that he could never understand me or the scalding experiences that had swept me beyond his life and into an area of living that he could never know. I stood before him, poised, my mind aching as it embraced the simple nakedness of his life, feeling how completely his soul was imprisoned by the slow flow of the seasons, by wind and rain and sun, how fastened were his memories to a crude and raw past, how chained were his actions and emotions to the direct, animalistic impulses of his withering body… 

From the white landowners above him there had not been handed to him a chance to learn the meaning of loyalty, of sentiment, of tradition. Joy was an unknown to him as was despair. As a creature of the earth, he endured, hearty, whole, seemingly indestructible, with no regrets and no hope. He asked easy, drawling questions about me, his other son, his wife, and he laughed, amused, when I informed him of their destinies. I forgave him and pitied him as my eyes looked past him to the unpainted wooden shack. From far beyond the horizons that bound this bleak plantation there had come to me through my living the knowledge that my father was a black peasant who had gone to the city seeking life, but who had failed in the city; a black peasant whose life had been hopelessly snarled in the city, and who had at last fled the city—that same city which had lifted me in its burning arms and borne me toward alien and undreamed-of shores of knowing.