Black Boy: Imagery 5 key examples

Granny, with her strict religious rules, prevents Richard from finishing Bluebeard, a book he had started reading with Ella. Granny thinks that the book is "the devil's work" and is the source of Richard's foul language. Using imagery, Richard describes in Chapter 2 how disappointed he is that he doesn't get to finish the book:

Not to know the end of the tale filled me with a sense of emptiness, loss. I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breathtaking, 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.

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Living in West Helena, Arkansas, with his Aunt Maggie, Richard goes back to school. The teacher asks him to write his name on the board and introduce himself to the class. Richard, overcome with fear, cannot bring himself to write his name. He describes the feeling, in Chapter 2, using physical imagery:

Again I turned to the blackboard and lifted my hand to write, then I was blank and void within. I tried frantically to collect my senses, but I could remember nothing. A sense of the girls and boys behind me filled me to the exclusion of everything. I realized how utterly I was failing and I grew weak and leaned my hot forehead against the cold blackboard. The room burst into a loud and prolonged laugh and my muscles froze.

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In Chapter 5, Richard, living with his Granny and in the sixth grade, gets a job selling papers, ostensibly to make spare change. In reality, he took the job because he enjoys reading the literary supplement at the back of the newspapers, desperate as always for any kind of reading material. But thinking that the news doesn't apply to him as a young Black man, he never reads the news, only the silly stories in the back. As such he is appalled when an old Black man, to whom Richard tried to sell a paper, informs him that in fact the paper is distributed by the Ku Klux Klan. It contains virulently racist content and caricatures of Black men, such as this one that Richard describes with detailed imagery:

I looked at the picture of a huge black man with a greasy, sweaty face, thick lips, flat nose, golden teeth, sitting at a polished, wide-topped desk in a swivel chair. The man had on a pair of gleaming yellow shoes and his feet were propped on the desk. His thick lips nursed a big, black cigar that held white ashes an inch long. In the man's red-dotted tie was a dazzling horseshoe stickpin, glaring conspicuously. [...] A chain of gold girded his belly and from the fob of his watch a rabbit's foot dangled.

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In Chapter 6, in the summer after seventh grade, Uncle Tom moves in with Richard, Granny, and Addie. One day, Tom wakes up Richard and asks him the time. Richard tells him it is "eighteen past five"—rather early in the morning—and then adds that he knows his watch to be accurate, and "if it's a little slow or fast, it's not far wrong." This apparently entirely innocuous statement sends Tom into a blind rage at Richard's sass, one of the many moments in the novel in which Richard does basically nothing and is abused horribly for it. Richard arms himself with razors and faces Tom in the backyard, refusing to be beaten by someone who isn't a family member. The confrontation ends with imagery that describes both men facing off:

"And you've just been baptized," he said heavily.

"The hell with that," I said.

We stood in the early morning light and a touch of sun broke on the horizon. Roosters were crowing. A bird chirped near-by somewhere. Perhaps the neighbors were listening. Finally Uncle Tom's face began to twitch. Tears rolled down his cheeks. His lips trembled.

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In Chapter 11, Richard moves to Memphis and moves in with the Moss family. Mrs. Moss is confusingly nice to Richard, taking him in with little payment and immediate affection. In a terribly sad moment related through imagery, Richard refuses to eat dinner with the family and instead wants to eat beans and bacon alone in his room. Richard's heart fills with shame at the thought of someone, at last, taking care of him. Mrs. Moss asks, "Why would you want to eat out of a can when you can set at the table with us?" Richard responds, turning away, "I don't want to be a burden to anybody." Mrs. Moss assumes that Richard is an orphan or at least seriously neglected:

"You just ain't never had no home life," she said. "I'm sorry for you."

I stiffened. I did not like that. She was reaching into my inner life, where it was sore, and I did not want anyone there. 

"I'm all right," I mumbled.

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