Tragically, and dramatically, many of Wright's battles are against members of his own race, even members of his own family, who in order to survive had been forced to internalize the brutal teachings of segregation and were trying to pass them on to Richard for "his own good." Richard resists this internalized agenda to defend fairness and decency as if his life were at stake.
This conflict underlies a number of the book's extremely dramatic confrontations--for instance, Richard's refusing to bow to the threats of his junior high school principle over his valedictorian's speech, his violent responses to his extremely strict aunt and grandmother, and his threatening to kill his Uncle Jack rather than be whipped by him because he thought Richard needed whipping generally.
As Richard grows into his teens, he feels an increasing tension between the world of his hopes and imagination and the world around him, and yet he knows he cannot be other than he is. The result is that he lives with a panic-level fear of being caught. As Wright dramatically describes his situation at the age of fifteen: "Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and, without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the bells and the screams that filled the air." (Ch. VII) Wright knew that for him, it was escape or die.
Woodcock, John A.
Excerpted, with permission, from the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database at New York University School of Medicine, © New York University.