ipl-logo

Big Bill Boonzy's Song 'Starvation Blues'

1012 Words5 Pages

The Hard Life of Richard Wright
During the early twentieth century when Richard Wright was a child life for African- Americans was a life of hardships. They faced poverty, barely being able to pay for their homes that were old and run down. They faced starvation, barely eating anything once or twice a day. They also faced inequality from white people treating them as though they will always be meant to serve and threatening them if they didn’t obey. Big Bill Broonzy’s song “Starvation Blues” perfectly represents this time during Richard Wright’s childhood. The world of Richard Wright during his childhood could have produced both songs even though they are so different because Jimmie Rodgers had a different view than Big Billy Boonzy on how things happened in the early twentieth century, since he is white and Big Billy Boonzy is black. Jimmie Rodgers might have imagined that African- Americans were acquiescent and contented during this era because …show more content…

This was because they were scared they would be hurt or killed.
Big Billy Boonzy’s song “Starvation Blues” perfectly sums up the childhood of Richard Wright. He sings about poverty, starvation, and inequality which are some of the big factors in Richard’s childhood. During Richard’s childhood poverty is seen when he has to keep moving houses and living with family members because his mom doesn’t make enough money to keep living in houses. The houses they also move into are run down and in dirty areas. For example, when his family moved to West Helena with his aunt Maggie there was a “stagnant ditch carrying sewage” in front of their house and the neighborhood had “rats” (Wright, pg. 59). Starvation is also seen a lot throughout Richards childhood when he is always hungry and never eats enough. For example, after Richard leaves his Uncle’s and moves back in with his grandma he says, “Once again I knew hunger, biting hunger”, because of this he taught himself, “a method of drinking

Show More
Related
830 Words | 4 Pages

“We haven’t had anything to eat, but popcorn for three days”, “Mom that ham’s full of maggots. Don’t be so picky, just slice off the maggoty parts”. This can be likened to poverty in

Read More
426 Words | 2 Pages

Richard Wrights memoir Black Boy teaches it's readers about how living in the America was set up.most importantly it teaches how badly black people were treated. Wright was mistreated just because he was a young black boy living in the south. In the memoir Black Boy Richard was trying to tell his reader how bad racism was back when he was a kid. Back in the 1900's Wright also used pathos to show how his emotions were toward racism.

Read More
977 Words | 4 Pages

Wright struggles with hunger started within his family when he was just a young boy. His family was not physically capable of providing him with the necessities required, such as love, acceptance and a strong

Read More
1707 Words | 7 Pages

Many sharecroppers tried to escape from their place of work because they wanted a better life for themselves, while others felt content with getting short-changed by the white man. This notion of self-help and self-improvement began in James’ family with his great-great-uncle, Oscar Gaines, when he escaped his duties as a young laborer in Savannah, GA. Oscar managed to find a job chopping cotton for a white man who was not bothered by his skin color (McBride 45). The story of old Oscar Gaines would surface for generations to come in the Gaines/Brown family as a story of courage and self-improvement. While James Brown’s father Joe did his best to take care of his son, he could not raise him all alone.

Read More
569 Words | 3 Pages

Black Boy Essay The world has always endured hunger, but not always the conventional hunger that we are all familiar with. “Why could I not eat when I was hungry” (Wright pg.19) Although this statement regards his physical hungers, Wright also expresses his other hungers throughout his life. In “Black Boy” Richard Wright grows up in the Jim Crow South where he experiences a hunger for emotional expression and connection as well as the hunger for knowledge. Ever since Wright's childhood, he has longed for connection with others, to end this isolation.

Read More
234 Words | 1 Pages

In addition Richard proclaims “ hunger was with us always. sometimes the neighbors would feed us or a dollar would come in the mail from grandma”.(Wright 28) This demonstrates that Richard doesn't have an

Read More
1024 Words | 5 Pages

Richard has always felt the unjust of race, and has felt how segregation made it hard for him to have a future. But when he gets a chance to get revenge on the whites, he refuses when he thinks ”Who wanted to look them straight in the face, who wanted to walk and act like a man.(200)” Stealing went against his morals of the right way to succeed and would not help the community appearance to the whites. The community as a whole is very religous but Richard does not share these beliefs, even with the persistence of his friends and family he says ”Mama, I don't feel a thing.(155)” This caused his friends to beg him, but in face of rejection they leave him alone.

Read More
1804 Words | 8 Pages

When he was delivering a pair of eyeglasses to a white man he was questioned about if he was hungry because the man wanted to give him money for food, however, he refused it and denied his hunger. Even when Wright went to live with his Aunt for a short time, he was not used to the amount of food that was on the table every night, so he continued to hide food in his pockets just incase he needed it for another day. Wright makes it a point to bring up his hunger in most of the chapters, which means there is a deeper meaning. He was not only physically hungry for food, he was hungry for acceptance and an education. He was struggling with being able to fill this hunger in his life because he was not able to figure out how to be accepted by his family and friends.

Read More
795 Words | 4 Pages

Black Boy, a memoir written by Richard Wright is composed of some of his most important memories from his childhood. From the start, it is evident that Wright struggled through a difficult childhood. He dealt with a great amount with racial discrimination and prejudice because he grew up in the Jim Crow South, yet he also dealt with extreme poverty. When his father left, his mother could barely get food on the table and bounced from job to job. Many times throughout the memoir, Richard’s physical hunger was brought to the attention of the audience, but so was his emotional hunger.

Read More
3767 Words | 16 Pages

Since they do not earn a decent wage, they don’t have the minimum amount of luxury in their lives. They are deprived of homes, food and other essential necessities. The effect of racial discrimination discloses on Wright in the guise of starvation. As a child, Richard could not grasp the concept of racism. But when he grows up, he acknowledges why he and his sibling need to feast upon the leftover sustenance of the white individuals.

Read More
299 Words | 2 Pages

1. You can’t prove that there aren’t Martians living in caves under the surface of Mars, so it is reasonable for me to believe there are.” This can be seen as the arguer’ lack of knowledge on the subject and is only ignorant. 2. “Well, Isaac Newton believed in Alchemy, do you think you know more than Isaac Newton?”

Read More
515 Words | 3 Pages

Racial segregation affected many lives in a negative way during the 1900s. Black children had it especially hard because growing up was difficult to adapting to whites and the way they want them to act. In Black Boy, Richard Wright shows his struggles with his own identity because discrimination strips him of being the man he wants to be. Richard undergoes many changes as an individual because of the experience he has growing up in the south and learning how to act around whites.

Read More
364 Words | 2 Pages

In the autobiography “Black Boy” by Richard Wright, Richard learns that racism is prevalent not only in his Southern community, and he now becomes “unsure of the entire world” when he realizes he “had been unwittingly an agent for pro-Ku Klux Klan literature” by delivering a Klan newspaper. He is now aware of the fact that even though “Negroes were fleeing by the thousands” to Chicago and the rest of the North, life there was no better and African Americans were not treated as equals to whites. This incident is meaningful both in the context of his own life story and in the context of broader African American culture as well. At the most basic level, it reveals Richard’s naïveté in his belief that racism could never flourish in the North. When

Read More
671 Words | 3 Pages

The story represents the culmination of Wright’s passionate desire to observe and reflect upon the racist world around him. Racism is so insidious that it prevents Richard from interacting normally, even with the whites who do treat him with a semblance of respect or with fellow blacks. For Richard, the true problem of racism is not simply that it exists, but that its roots in American culture are so deep it is doubtful whether these roots can be destroyed without destroying the culture itself. “It might have been that my tardiness in learning to sense white people as "white" people came from the fact that many of my relatives were "white"-looking people. My grandmother, who was white as any "white" person, had never looked "white" to me” (Wright 23).

Read More
650 Words | 3 Pages

The reality of being Black and living in the American South during the era of Jim Crow was terrible. Richard Wright was able to convey this powerful message through his autobiographical essay. Jim Crow forced Blacks to adhere to impossibly high standards around whites and victimized many women. There was little to no help for African-Americans at this time because even the police were targeting them. No matter how closely Blacks followed the Jim Crow

Read More

More about Big Bill Boonzy's Song 'Starvation Blues'

Related Topics

Open Document