Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 2, 1995 TAG: 9509070012
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL E. HILL THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Yet in the end, like a number of other African-American artists of his day, author Richard Wright fled the country that had shaped, praised and then scorned him, only to live out his days in self-imposed exile in France.
Where once he had enjoyed adulation from the literary world, in his last days, Wright knew only the quiet desperation of poverty, paranoia and ill health.
Paranoia? Well, they did find electronic bugs in his Paris flat.
Ill health? Yes, there were signs he was not well, but whether his death was from natural causes is still being questioned by some of those close to him.
Poverty? Yes, the man who wrote ``Native Son'' was, in the end, sustaining himself by writing album liner notes.
That is the sweep of Wright's 52-year life described so eloquently on PBS in ``Richard Wright: Black Boy,'' a documentary from the Independent Television Service and Mississippi Educational Television (airing Monday night at 10 on WBRA-Channel 15).
The piece, titled after Wright's biography, ``Black Boy,'' airs 50 years after that work's publication and on the 87th anniversary of Wright's birth.
It follows his childhood in Mississippi as a son of an illiterate sharecropper, the development of his gift for language, his migration to Chicago, his pursuit of fame in New York, and his flight from the Untied States.
The story is told through the testimony of a rich group of spokesmen, including former classmates, fellow literary lights Ralph Ellison (in a final interview before his death last year) and Amiri Baraka, as well as Wright's daughter, Julia.
The Chicago days were amazing. Producer-director Madison Davis Lacy (``Eyes on the Prize II'') weaves together a number of themes: Wright's involvement with and ultimate split from the Communist Party and his growing stature as a writer, beckoning him to the publishing houses of New York. In 1937, as he eyed the East Coast, Wright was offered the security of a job in the Chicago Post Office, a veritable beehive of talented black people barred from the better jobs they were educated for.
Instead, Wright chose New York. In 1938, ``Uncle Tom's Children'' was published to good reviews. In 1940, he struck literary gold with the best-selling ``Native Son,'' a milestone in American letters. The novel, the first by a black author to be a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man who makes a frightening and tragic mistake. Five years later Wright produced ``Black Boy,'' an account of his Southern childhood.
The glory days of New York gave way to his period of scrutiny by the FBI, aroused by his Communist affiliation and his outspoken views on social issues.
By 1947, the heyday of feature spreads in Life magazine and literary acclaim gave way to permanent residence abroad.
While there, he wrote an article entitled ``I Choose Exile,'' in which he asserted that a black man could find more freedom on a single block in Paris than he could in all of America. Wright could not find a publisher for the piece.
He lived the rest of his life as an expatriate, and things were never the same again - interesting and intriguing, for sure, but never the same.
``He had $700 in the bank in 1960 at the time of his death,'' Julia Wright said in an interview. ``He died poor.''
The documentary is a reminder of how well television can treat American history. Unfortunately, there is relatively little footage of Wright himself.
And there are lingering questions.
Julia Wright, born in 1942 and the elder of Wright's two daughters, believes her father was murdered. She plans to offer details in a book she expects to publish in 1997.
``He was a deeply wounded man,'' she said, reflecting on her father's sufferings. But, she said, his life experiences ``also awoke his gift.''
She also offered a sketch of her father not realized in the documentary.
``He was a very affable man, with a grand laugh,'' she said. ``It had that mixture of suffering and happiness and joy.''
by CNB