Nibaw African American Literature blog

Throughout Richard Wright's "Down by the Riverside", the main character Mann is vexed by one tribulation after another. There are two ultimate causes of his misfortune: the flood and the racism of the white people who are in positions of power. Those two amorphous antagonists conspire to force Mann to run an unending gauntlet, finally terminating in his death. By putting the protagonist in an unenviable position to begin with and then showing how Jim Crow erases any hope of escape, Wright is condemning it and calling for Black people to be treated equally and not as merely an exploitable group of semi-human creatures.   Richard Wright Mann's first challenge is the flood. He needs to escape from his house and the rising waters that are swirling around it while also getting his pregnant wife to the hospital. He starts on his way out at night, with the storm opposing him at every turn, eventually reaching a home where he hopes to be able to call the hospital. Here racism...

Fundamentally, Charles Chesnutt's "The Wife of His Youth" is about the process of reconciling two people's life stories, which, having once been intertwined under slavery, had since diverged, especially after the Civil War. Mr. Ryder, who before the war had run away from slavery in Missouri, had by some unspecified method escaped to the North, where he had gotten a job and worked his way up to a middle-class life. His wife, on the other hand, had spent the same 25 years traveling around the country looking for him, supporting herself by working as a cook. The story is set in the city that Mr. Ryder had moved to at the time they finally encounter one another again. Their reunion captures in microcosm the ideal but also some of the difficulties of repairing the damage done by slavery.   Charles Chesnutt Mr. Ryder (originally known as Sam Taylor) was a mix of Black and white and had been born free, but upon being orphaned had gone to work for a slaveholder. His wife, Liz...