Ellen Wright Excerpt from Black Boy by Richard Wright. Copyright © 1937, 1942, 1944, 1945 by Richard Wright; renewed © 1973 by Ellen Wright. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

During Reading Strategy
Use Word Attack Strategies

Vocabulary from the Selection

apprehension baleful deception decipher dupe endow

elicit enthralled evasively intrugue summon

Guided Reading Question 1
What did Wright’s grandmother do to help support the household?
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To help support the household my grandmother boarded a colored schoolteacher, Ella, a young woman with so remote and dreamy and silent a manner that I was as much afraid of her as I was attracted to her. I had long wanted to ask her to tell me about the books that she was always reading, but could never quite summon enough courage to do so. One afternoon I found her sitting alone upon the front porch reading.

“Ella,” I begged, “please tell me what you are reading.”

“It’s just a book,” she said evasively, looking about with apprehension.

“But what’s it about?” I asked.

“Your grandmother wouldn’t like it if I talked to you about novels,” she told me.

I detected a note of sympathy in her voice.

“I don’t care,” I said loudly and bravely.

“Shhh—You mustn’t say things like that,” she said.

“But I want to know.”

“When you grow up, you’ll read books and know what’s in them,” she explained.

“But I want to know now.”

She thought a while, then closed the book.

“Come here,” she said.

I sat at her feet and lifted my face to hers.

“Once upon a time there was an old, old man named Bluebeard,” she began in a low voice.

Guided Reading Question 2
What is Ella reading on the front porch?
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She whispered to me the story of Bluebeard and His Seven Wives and I ceased to see the porch, the sunshine, her face, everything. As her words fell upon my new ears, I endowed them with a reality that welled up from somewhere within me. She told how Bluebeard had duped and married his seven wives, how he had loved and slain them, how he had hanged them up by their hair in a dark closet. The tale made the world around me be, throb, live. As she spoke, reality changed, the look of things altered, and the world became peopled with magical presences. My sense of life deepened and the feel of things was different, somehow. Enchanted and enthralled, I stopped her constantly to ask for details. My imagination blazed. The sensations the story aroused in me were never to leave me. When she was about to finish, when my interest was keenest, when I was lost to the world around me, Granny stepped briskly onto the porch.

Guided Reading Question 3
What story does Ella tell Wright?
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Guided Reading Question 4
What effect does the story have on Wright?
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“You stop that, you evil gal!” she shouted. “I want none of that Devil stuff in my house!”

Her voice jarred me so that I gasped. For a moment I did not know what was happening.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Wilson,” Ella stammered, rising. “But he asked me—”

“He’s just a foolish child and you know it!” Granny blazed.

Ella bowed her head and went into the house.

“But, Granny, she didn’t finish,” I protested, knowing that I should have kept quiet.

She bared her teeth and slapped me across my mouth with the back of her hand.

“You shut your mouth,” she hissed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“But I want to hear what happened!” I wailed, dodging another blow that I thought was coming.

“That’s the Devil’s work!” she shouted.

My grandmother was as nearly white as a Negro can get without being white, which means that she was white. The sagging flesh of her face quivered; her eyes, large, dark, deep-set, wide apart, glared at me. Her lips narrowed to a line. Her high forehead wrinkled. When she was angry her eyelids drooped halfway down over her pupils, giving her a baleful aspect.

“But I liked the story,” I told her.

“You’re going to burn in hell,” she said with such furious conviction that for a moment I believed her.

Guided Reading Question 5
How does Wright’s grandmother react to the storytelling?
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Not to know the end of the tale filled me with a sense of emptiness, loss. I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breath-taking, almost painful excitement that the story had given me, and I vowed that as soon as I was old enough I would buy all the novels there were and read them to feed that thirst for violence that was in me, for intrigue, for plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murders. So profoundly responsive a chord had the tale struck in me that the threats of my mother and grandmother had no effect whatsoever. They read my insistence as mere obstinacy, as foolishness, something that would quickly pass; and they had no notion how desperately serious the tale had made me. They could not have known that Ella’s whispered story of deception and murder had been the first experience in my life that had elicited from me a total emotional response. No words or punishment could have possibly made me doubt. I had tasted what to me was life, and I would have more of it, somehow someway. I realized that they could not understand what I was feeling and I kept quiet. But when no one was looking I would slip into Ella’s room and steal a book and take it back of the barn and try to read it. Usually I could not decipher enough words to make the story have meaning. I burned to learn to read novels and I tortured my mother into telling me the meaning of every strange word I saw, not because the word itself had any value, but because it was the gateway to a forbidden and enchanting land.

Guided Reading Question 6
What does Wright vow?
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Guided Reading Question 7
Why does Wright ask his mother the meaning of every strange word he sees?
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