Richard Wright’s Huntresses: A Transgenerational Experience

Richard Wright’s HuntressesA Transgenerational Experience Julia Wright (bio) On April 15, 1942, my mother, Ellen Wright, a daughter of Polish Jewish parents, went into postpartum depression because hardly had the administered chloroform worn off, when she overheard a white nurse on the Brooklyn hospital maternity ward say, “Who is the motherfucker who gave birth to a Black bastard?” In a state of shock, she could neither feed nor bond with me. My father, Richard Wright, literally pounced on me, would not let anybody come close, and rented a private room in the hospital. He placed two of his Black buddies at the door as security guards and proceeded to feed me my first baby bottle. While Ellen recovered, Richard was the one who mothered me. After my parents’ death, I stumbled on the story told by one of those my father had chosen to guard the private room’s door—but the experience fits with an unspoken, indelible image imprinted on my relationship with the world and others. The fact that so soon after my birth I was fiercely mothered by the Black man who was my father is woven into intergenerational threads I now pull through Richard’s own relationship with his mother and other women who were in caring relationships towards him during his formative years. Sometimes those threads knot up or break—they are never linear. Three Black matriarchal figures stand out: Ella, Richard’s biological mother; Aunt Maggie, who was Ella’s trusted sister and Richard’s favorite aunt; and the dominating matriarch, Grandma Wilson, who was both Ella and Maggie’s mother. When, on that April day of my birth, Richard held me up and away from the racism of the white nurses, he breathed into me the indomitable spirit of those three Black women he had internalized. [End Page 31] They stand out now: Ella, so demure, so fragile, who always quietly and unobtrusively encouraged Richard’s creativity while having to teach him the boundaries of death-bound Jim Crow and having to beat that survival lesson into him; Grandma Wilson, the iconic and towering figure of the recently published essay “Memories of my Grandmother,” who taught him how his own language sounded from the outside, its Black beat that he could translate into words;1 Aunt Maggie, who survived her lynched husband. These three heroines surfaced in varying aboveground and underground ways in Richard’s writings and in between his books. Ella, the schoolteacher, was so sensitive she reacted to both the brutal abuse and desertion of her sharecropper husband, Nathan, and to the impact of racial segregation in the Delta by experiencing crippling lifelong strokes that may well have been psychosomatic. But she was also in charge of corporal punishment, whipping, slapping, letting her sons know the boundaries of a segregationist world. She recognized her elder son’s gift, but she had to armor the tenderness Richard craved. He went hungry affectively as well as biologically, and his feelings towards Ella may have been deeply ambivalent as a result. Grandma Wilson demanded everything that Richard refused to give in to: religion, the shunning of all books and other “manifestations of the Devil,” owning up to non-existent sins.2 It was a tough tussle of wills between them—and in the end, a mutual but hidden admiration. She, too, would beat him if need be, and she often felt it to be needed. In both cases, there was affective sensory deprivation and corporal punishment by the women in the family, who would end up being his role models. However, he never lifted a hand on my sister or me—nor were we affectively deprived. On the contrary, he was overprotective to the end. Maggie, sinuous, sensual, the only one of the Wilson sisters who used makeup, was the rebel in the family, a feminine mirror of Richard’s need to be free of Seventh-Day Adventist strictures. Nor did she resort to beating. Eightyear old Richard looked up to the couple Maggie formed with her first husband, Silas Hoskins, whose entrepreneurial spirit had flourished in Elaine, Arkansas, where he owned a thriving saloon and had built houses that...