Big Boy Leaves Home

In his first published work, “Big Boy Leaves Home,” Wright paves the way for a new African American literary movement by invoking and subverting two powerful American literary traditions—the coming-of-age story and protest literature. His departures from the tropes and techniques associated with these traditions establish a political aesthetic that offers a more authentic representation of Black people and a more ethical means of protesting their oppression.

The title “Big Boy Leaves Home” gives the impression that one is about to read a classic coming-of-age story about the protagonist’s transition into adulthood. In many ways, that’s true. The story is told primarily through the adolescent Big Boy’s point of view, and it does depict him leaving home to go out into the wider world. However, Wright offers a shocking twist on this trope with the extremely abrupt, forced, and violent nature of Big Boy’s transition. As the story unfolds, a halcyon afternoon soon turns into a shockingly brutal ordeal, and the title is revealed to be a radical understatement. That is, Wright’s straightforward, unembellished diction in the title downplays the horror of what is to come, disrupting readers’ expectations to make a point. Readers can probably identify with the teenage behaviors that open the story, but they might not understand that for the Big Boys of this world, engaging in normal forms of teenage risk-taking can have lethal consequences. This surprisingly horrific coming-of-age tale exposes the unjust social conditions under which Black boys grew up in the Jim Crow South.

There are signs from the outset, via Uncle Tom’s Children’s Epigraph, that Wright is aiming his stories at outsiders who don’t understand the experience of African Americans in the South. He prefaces the collection with verses from a tune only identified as a “Popular Song.” The lines—such as “Is it true what they say about Dixie? / Does the sun really shine all the time? / Do sweet magnolias blossom at everybody’s door?”—present an idealized version of the South, or “Dixie” (16). They are drawn from “Is It True What They Say About Dixie?,” which was written by a team of three white Northerners and charted as a #1 hit for band leader Jimmy Dorsey in 1936, the same year “Big Boy” was published. Presumably, Wright’s contemporary readers would have recognized the lyrics. Wright introduces this quaint, Northern perspective in order to systematically dismantle it and reveal The Dehumanizing Effects of Racism in the Jim Crow South.

Indeed, the opening section does seem to be filled with sunshine and natural beauty, but even nature conspires to undermine a pastoral vision of the South by the end of the story. The swimming hole is no “sublime Swanee” but a muddy, icy creek behind barbed wire. By the end of the scene, a corpse floats in the water. Dogs and crickets join in with the lynching mob’s song, and a venomous snake nearly kills Big Boy as he is trying to escape from his human hunters.

Similarly, the opening section of the story seems charming and playful, filled with colorful Southern folk references to spirituals and “buttermilk [and] hot peach cobbler swimmin in juice” (22), but in retrospect, the reader can see that each of the boys’ games are less than sweet. Instead, they are all tinged with a sense of their social, economic, and physical subjugation. They imagine escaping north on trains, long to feel full and eat good food, and go a bit too far in their frequent, friendly wrestling, described as “beatings.” The story’s characters significantly depart from the gracious inhabitants of Dixie pictured in the Epigraph (“Do they laugh, do they love, like they say in ev’ry song?” [16]). The white characters hatefully yell and jeer as they snuff out the lives of the boys who began the story “laughing easily” (17).

On the other hand, Wright offers a realistic representation of Big Boy, Bobo, Lester, and Buck as kids who are creative, spirited, and reflective, but also aggressive, rude, and cruel. Their unvarnished, rounded characters mark a crucial difference between Wright and previous protest literature that sought to debunk idyllic myths about Southern life and race relations. Abolitionist authors, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, may not have held rosy views of the South, but their depictions of it were still written largely the perspective of Northern audiences. Wright offers a different angle as an insider writing from the perspective of the oppressed and refusing to pander to Northern or white audiences. His characters are pointedly not like Stowe’s Uncle Tom, a pious, self-sacrificing Black man who is above reproach, a sentimental depiction designed to garner the sympathy of white audiences.

Wright, by contrast, refuses to argue for the humanity of his characters. The boys in “Big Boy” are not virtuous—they make rude jokes, show aggression toward each other, break rules, and turn out to be skipping school. They even fart and make crude jokes. The relationship between the boys is fun and intimate, but it is also characterized by male bonding through violence and misogyny, as seen in their games that involve insulting each other’s mothers. The plot of the story, with Big Boy’s dramatic transition into adulthood, likewise marks him as different from past “sympathetic” representations of African American characters through his determination to fight back instead of laying down his life in the face of his white oppressors. Not only does he act in self-defense, but he also engages in repeated fantasies of violent retribution—“TRAPPED N----- SLAYS TWENTY BEFO KILLED!” (50)—that show his willingness to resist with force.

As if to dramatize the distinction from past modes of representation, Wright makes his audience feel like outsiders through the story’s formal structure. He does not provide exposition to orient the reader, instead placing them amid an undifferentiated “quartet” of voices who speak in what is likely an unfamiliar vernacular to the audience. While Wright does provide narration in standard written English, much of the story is told through this vernacular dialogue and Big Boy’s internal monologue, implying Wright’s commitment to letting these characters speak for themselves. The audience, like Big Boy, will go through an “initiation” that forces them into a sort of coming of age or reckoning—one that asks them to assume a more realistic perspective of Southern life and the abuse African Americans experienced.

“Big Boy Leaves Home” initiates many of the signature tropes and techniques that Wright would use throughout his literary career. His protagonists, like Big Boy, face social prejudice and legal discrimination, often rebelling against violent subjugation and becoming conscious of the dehumanizing effects of racism. The authentic, insider’s perspective and psychological realism that he pioneers in “Big Boy” gave rise to a powerful new phase of protest literature that went hand-in-hand with the civil rights movement.