translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

naively assumed that the ‘white’ man had the right to beat the black
boy’s father. (23)
Anxiety over irrational attack by the whites is the locus where
Wright’s experience in the South is the most representative of the emotional
experience of fellow black boys. Yet, in the voice of the mature narrator,
Richard – the child already took issue with the submissiveness and selfhumiliation
that he witnessed among his fellows. He could not understand
how they stooped so low as to allow themselves to be hit, humiliated,
plundered, and even killed without putting up resistance, without
retaliating, or fighting together, as a group. 1
Class mates who could keep a job did so by virtue of acting out a
script into which they were socialized at home and in school. The script
consigned them to keeping their head down, to being always cheerful, to
always using “Sir” as a form of address to whites, to knowing when to be
quiet, how to vanish when whites were around, what to tolerate as
acceptable behavior from them, and how to master their reactions and
emotions. Failure to do so could be fatal, as a few white youth in a car warn
Richard, upon his omission to address one of them as “Sir.”
Conformity and complacency were worsened by self-degradation.
The climax of self-degradation appears to be embodied in Shorty, an
elevator operator in a Memphis hotel who, for a quarter, allows and
actually invites whites to hit him in the back. In the same city, women took
no offence at being slapped by whites, and Harrison, a fellow worker in
Memphis, has no scruples fighting Richard for money, for the pleasure of
the whites who had stirred them against each other and provided them
with knives.
Fear, hatred, hunger, submission and suffering are the defining
signposts of the Southern emotional landscape. In leaving the geographical
South, Wright is aware that he could
…never really leave the South, for my feelings had already been formed
by the South, for there had been slowly instilled into my personality
and consciousness, black though I was, the culture of the South. So, in
leaving, I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see
if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend
in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to
bloom… And if that miracle ever happened, then I would know that
there was yet hope in that southern swamp of despair and violence,
that light could emerge even out of the blackest of the southern night. I
would know that the South too could overcome its fear, its hate, its
cowardice, its heritage of guilt and blood, its burden of anxiety and
compulsive cruelty. (228)
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