Richard Wright describes here the fears he had in the orphan house. He was afraid of Miss Simon, he was constantly hungry, he did not understand the rules he was supposed to obey. It was very difficult for him to adapt himself. He finally lost the contact with his mother because Miss Simon told Ella that her visits were inappropriate. Miss Simon claimed that Richard always felt homesick after Ella had left. The fact that Richard could not see his mother any more caused that he started to be depressed.
Along with this kind of hunger, Wright also had an uncontrollable hunger for language and stories: when he hears the story Bluebeard and His Seven Wives for the first time, he is ecstatic; he is determined to hear or read more. In some moods,…show more content… But what Wright hungered for most was life itself, as well as the chance to understand it without fearing violence or rejection.
A third major thematic concern in Black Boy is Wright’s view of religion, in his case several versions of black Protestant Christianity, as social control. Wright was a one-worlder, that is to say, he thought that there was one world, and we are in it, so any notion of some ‘‘other’’ world was offensive to his intellectual sensibility. After he killed the kitten, his mother made him repeat after her a prayer in which Wright asks God to spare his life even though he did not spare the kitten’s. Wright views the incident as an example of how religion uses terror to enforce norms that the community finds acceptable. In Black Boy religion translates as a form of violence and threat by other means. So strongly does Wright feel about the unethicalness of religion that he devotes almost all of chapter 4 to this theme. He felt the emotional appeal of religion, but, as he puts it, he had enough sense to see a doctor if he saw an angel. In Wright’s view, the use of religion in the household of his grandmother, a Seventh-Day Adventist (one who believes that Saturday should be the day of worship and that Christ’s second coming to the earth and the Last Judgment will occur soon), was
