“Almos’ a Man”

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“Almos’ a Man”

THE LITERARY WORK

A short story set in a rural community in the South during the first half of the twentieth century; first published in 1940.

SYNOPSIS

A teenage black boy buys a gun to prove to the many adults who tease him that he is a man.

Events in History at the Time of the Short Story

The Short Story in Focus

For More Information

The son of a sharecropper and a school-teacher, Richard Wright was born in rural Mississippi on September 4, 1908. Wright’s family moved several times before his father left his wife and children in order to live with another woman in 1914. In 1927 Wright fled the South for Chicago, where he was later joined by his mother and brother. Among other jobs, he worked for the post office, sold insurance, and dug ditches before trying unsuccessfully in 1935 to sell his novel, Lawd Today! (which would be published only after his death). Wright first tasted success a few years later with his set of short stories Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), which won high acclaim. Then, in 1940, came the release of Native Son, the novel that brought him national and worldwide renown, followed by the publication of his coming-of-age short story “Almos’ a Man.”

Events in History at the Time of the Short Story

Lack of change in the rural South

The Union victory over the South in 1865 promised not only an end to the country’s bloody Civil War but also the abolition of slavery in the United States. The turn of events seemed a harbinger of a new dawn for the millions of freed men, women, and children who gained their freedom with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Ratified in December of 1865, the law abolished slavery throughout the nation, not just in rebel territory, as the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 had done. Within a couple of decades, however, federal authorities had retreated from the South and the troublesome issues of civil equality to focus on problems like the postwar economic depression, allowing white supremacist politicians in the South to seize control of local government. These politicians then passed Jim Crow or segregation laws that sanctioned discriminatory practices and perpetuated the sort of caste system established under slavery. The federal government supported these tactics. In the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson case, the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned the laws that prohibited blacks from entering many private businesses and from boarding white-only train cars or trams. The ruling condoned segregating the races in public facilities as long as the facilities were equal. Also, until well after the Second World War, federal authorities looked the other way when Southern lawmakers put into effect various ruses to deprive blacks of the vote, such as literacy tests and the grandfather clause, which allowed a citizen to vote only if an immediate ancestor had held voting rights in 1867.

Without political power to change the conditions behind their grievances, the majority of freed slaves settled on parcels of land that had once been parts of plantations, oftentimes working for their former masters, not as slaves but as sharecroppers. In return for the use of the land, tools, and some food and clothing from the owner, they surrendered a share—usually one-half—of the crop to him. Crop failures and the ravages of the boll weevil, a beetle that destroyed cotton crops, left many sharecroppers both destitute and bound by debt to the owner, from whose store they generally had been forced to purchase goods on credit.

To escape squalor and bigotry, waves of blacks fled the rural communities seeking freedom and economic opportunity in prospering cities. In 1900, some 90 percent of all blacks in the United States lived in the South and 80 percent lived in rural communities. By the 1960s, more than half of the black population of the United States lived in the North, and more than 80 percent lived in cities.

Families often split up when the fathers left their wives and children to seek better jobs, sometimes in the cities. Frequently, when family members went separate ways, the children were left with their grandparents. In such situations young boys had few male role models. However, there were many black families with two parents, and Wright’s short story features an intact family with two hard-working parents in a black rural society from which the youth ultimately flees.

Social struggles

Although the black population in the rural South might have seemed homogeneous to a foreign observer, subtle distinctions divided the community. Some of the few blacks who could afford to own land emulated middleclass whites. A number of these black landowners spent their money on frivolities such as antique furniture or even pianos that they couldn’t play. One woman who boasted a fine hand-woven oriental rug explained that she got a white man to pick it out for her.

Not only did some of these wealthier blacks struggle to mimic fashions popular among whites, they also spurned poorer blacks. One black woman who owned forty acres and a large house complained that when she had been born, “There wasn’t a nigger out here.... We was the first to build in this section. Well, it wasn’t no time ‘fore all the muck-a-mucks—I don‘t mean the white folks—I‘m talking about the niggers—come driving by to see what was going on” (Johnson, p. 88).

Not surprisingly, the wealthier blacks sometimes became the object of resentment among poorer blacks. One boy complained that fellow blacks generally didn’t like his father because he rented land while a lot of them couldn’t afford to and had to work as hired hands. So they told the white landowner his father was an unsavory sort of man who would steal things. Another black man complained that his family didn’t get visitors just because he could afford to hire his neighbors to pick peas. Blacks, like whites, could be treacherous to one another when wealth was involved.

Wealth was not the only divisive factor among blacks. It was not uncommon for lighter-skinned blacks to look down on very dark-skinned blacks. One lighter-skinned boy asserted that “black niggers are just mean.... People used to tell me black was evil.... Isure believe it” (Johnson, p. 22). The comment of another young person, a female, reflects a similar mindset. “Irather go [around] with dark-skin girls, then when they get mad at you they don’t call you black” (Matsuoka, p. 28).

Youth in the rural South

Children in the small rural communities remained relatively isolated from the waves of change that swept the rest of the country. Whereas youths growing up in the South’s budding metropolitan centers—such as Atlanta, Georgia, or Memphis, Tennessee—might hope to enjoy the benefits of industrialization through a well-financed public education, most of the children in the rural communities were doomed to toil in the fields alongside their parents. “That a novelist rather than a criminal emerged from the racial prejudice, poverty, family disorganization, and inadequate education,” one critic wrote of Richard Wright, “is a phenomenon not easy to explain” (Butler, p. xxv).

Struggling to eke out a subsistence living, many adults had little choice but to rely on the help of their children. While most young black boys worked in the fields to supplement the families’ income, girls often stayed home to care for their younger siblings. Although many of the children learned vocational skills as a result of their work, they could not afford to attend school and therefore never got any formal education. One thirteen-year-old boy living in rural Mississippi explained “I works jes like a man and lives like a man....I ain’t never got no time” (Matsuoka, p. 89).

Some black children were discouraged by the preconception that they did not belong in school. Shrewd whites, eager to swindle blacks out of the education they were guaranteed by law, convinced black children that school was a waste of time. Occasionally, to lure them from the classroom, white landowners would hire black children to work in the fields. When this didn’t work, they would sometimes terrorize black children on their way to school. One boy remarked, “They don’t like any smart ‘nigger’ around here” (Matsuoka, p. 50).

FANTASIES OF ESCAPE

Youngsters in the rural South who could not or dared not flee their homes often entertained vivid fantasies of flight to the North. One boy from a rural town in Mississippi told researchers he wanted to migrate north “where [I w]on’t have to say ‘Yes, suh’ and ‘No, suh’ to every white man” (Johnson, p. 4). Another informed interviewers that he had been to New York. “Yes, sir,” he said, “I went to New York in an automobile. No, it war’nt; it was an airplane I went to New York in. I saw the president, but he didn’t see me. Yes, sir, he knows me. . . . I been to his house....I didn’t shake hands with him ‘cause he was busy....I just walked around, and saw things and come back last night....I come back ‘bout two o’clock and took my airplane home” (Johnson, p. 18).

Those few children who did attend school usually managed to do so only because of the selfless efforts of their parents. Few black adults living in the rural South had been given the opportunity to attend more than a few years of grade school by the 1940s, yet most realized that a good education was perhaps the only chance their children might have of securing anything other than menial jobs. Such parents consequently toiled long hours so that their children could spare their days for school. There were large families whose members endured trying privations so that one of the many children could attend school. One man proudly declared, “Me and [my wife] can’t neither one of us read and write but we done seen to it that all our children gets a chance to learn. We got thirteen living children and all of them can read and write” (Matsuoka, p. 16). The man recounted how his own father had been defrauded by white businessmen who lied to him about the deed on his land. His father had lost his property because he could not read the deed to his own land.

Violence

Violence against blacks in the South was epidemic. The most common crime was lynching. Angry vigilantes, who contended that they were executing a criminal, would hang black men without any sort of fair trial. Police, although sworn to defend the victim’s right to a fair trial, often joined the vigilantes.

Knowing that they might be beaten or killed with little or no provocation, most blacks hoped only to avoid drawing attention to themselves. Indeed, a black man might be lynched either because he was poor and dressed in rags, or conversely because he could afford decent clothing. One boy recalled riots in his hometown of Atlanta in 1906. As a bloodthirsty mob neared his house, someone cried out “Let’s burn [that house] down! It’s too nice for a nigger to live in” (Shapiro, p. 102).

FLIGHT FROM THE NORTH

In 1946, nearly twenty years after he himself had fled the South for the North, Wright left the United States altogether to live in France. He returned briefly to the United States in 1947, but then, in part because he felt so angered by its pervasive racism, he became a permanent expatriate, returning to France with his wife and daughter. After traveling to various continents of the world, Wright died of a heart attack in France in 1960.

The constant threat of violence and the repeated examples of it were perhaps more detrimental to the children’s development than problems such as squalor and inadequate schools. With little opportunity for recognition through education, money, or status, and little hope of escaping what seemed an endless cycle of oppression and exploitation, many black youths perceived violence as an acceptable outlet for their frustrations. Ever present in the minds of many blacks, however, was the possibility of mass white retaliation if they actually did fight. As one young black boy indicated, he dared not fight with the white children who taunted him, although he surely would like to beat up some white people if he could get away with it (Johnson, p. 85).

The Short Story in Focus

The plot

“Them niggers can’t understan nothing,” Dave thought as he left the fields and headed for home. “One of these days he was going to get a gun and practice shooting, then they can’t talk to him as though he were a little boy” (Wright, “Almos’ a Man,” p. 91). He returns home, where his mother, holding a steaming dish of black-eyed peas, demands to know where he has been.

He knows better, she admonishes him, than to keep supper waiting.

Dave is a seventeen-year-old boy who can’t stand the way adults seem to belittle him. While he spends his summer days tilling the fields of a local farmer so he will be able to afford nice clothes when school begins in the fall, the older workers tease him. All that will change, Dave thinks, if he can just get a gun. The local store owner has a Sears catalog that encourages his dream but the owner has an even better offer. He has an old gun he will sell for just $2.

Dave is not surprised when his mother refuses to allow him to buy a gun. “Nigger, is yuh gone plumb crazy?” she yells at him. “Don yuh talk t me bout no gun!” (“Almos’ a Man,” pp. 94, 95). Dave pesters her, however, until she yields and allows him to purchase one from the local store, insisting that he bring the gun home immediately and leave it with his father.

Rather than return home with the gun, Dave lingers in the fields and aims at imaginary targets. Not quite sure how to shoot the gun, Dave simply runs his fingers along the cold smooth barrel, marveling at its weight. To avoid relinquishing his treasure to his parents, he waits until nightfall before returning home. When his mother tiptoes to his bed and asks him for the gun, he lies, saying he has hidden it outdoors but will bring it to her the next day.

Dave leaps out of bed before the sun is up and heads for the fields where he will spend his day. Eager to try shooting his new gun, he harnesses a mule to a plow and starts for the far side of the field where no one will see him. At the edge of the woods he draws the pistol, wraps his index finger over the trigger, shuts his eyes, and squeezes.

The deafening boom seems to tear Dave’s hand from his arm. He tumbles backwards into the dirt while Jenny, the mule, whinnies and gallops away. Biting his hand in pain, Dave stumbles across the field after Jenny. She is heaving and blood is trickling down her flank. “Lawd have mercy!” Dave thinks. “Wondah did Ah shoot this mule?” (“Almos’ a Man,” p. 98).

Terrified and powerless, Dave watches as Jenny bleeds to death. When the other workers arrive, Dave claims that the mule impaled herself on the point of the plow, but no one believes him. When Dave’s parents arrive Dave is compelled to admit that he accidentally shot Jenny. “Well,” exclaimed Dave’s boss, “looks like you have bought a dead mule!” (“Almos’ a Man,” p. 101).

Lying awake the night after the accident Dave reflects on his misfortune. Not only does he have to pay $50 for a dead mule, but also his father insists that he go back to the store and exchange the gun for his $2. Still longing to toy with the gun, he sneaks from his bed into the field, where he has buried it beside a tree.

Clutching the cold handle, he resolves to try shooting the gun again. Without turning his head or shutting his eyes he fires until the gun is empty. “Lawd, ef Ah had jus one mo bullet,” he thinks, “Ahd taka shot at tha house [of Dave’s boss, Jim Hawkins]. Ahd like t scare ol man Hawkins.... Jussa enuf t let im know Dave Sanders is a man” (“Almos’ a Man,” p. 102).

Realizing that if he pays the $2 that he earns in a month to his boss, it will still take him two years to pay off the $50 debt, Dave feels angry and frustrated. The rumble of a train not far in the distance invigorates him. “Ahm riding yuh ternight,” he resolves (“Almos’ a Man,” p. 103). He checks his pocket to make sure he still has the gun, and, when the train nears the crossroads where he waits, Dave leaps aboard.

Manhood

As Dave sits mulling over the sleek guns pictured in the catalog, his father chides, “Yuh oughta keep yo mind on whut yuh doin” (“Almos’ a Man,” p. 94). But the dreary prospect of laboring in the field depresses Dave.

Dave’s vague notions of manhood are confused with power. Forced to toil in the fields like his father, he has little command over his own life. Purchasing a gun is the only solution the impressionable boy can devise to challenge the authority of his elders. He imagines that a person could kill a man with a gun. A person could kill anybody, black or white. And if he were holding a gun in his hand, nobody could dismiss or ignore him; they would have to respect him.

In the end, the gun, or the accident involving it, does free Dave from the drudgery of his life. Before the accident he had not dared consider fleeing his home. Not until he faces the prospect of toiling for two years only to purchase a dead mule does he realize how hopeless his circumstances are. His resolution to flee is the sign of his budding manhood. He boards the train, hoping to flee “somewhere where he could be a man” (“Almos’ a Man,” p. 103). At least for him, the story intimates, reaching manhood demanded that he leave the rural South.

Sources

Wright once claimed that none of his fiction was autobiographical. He added, however, that all writers base their fiction on their own experiences. In the novel Black Boy (which many regard as Wright’s autobiography) the main character often mentions instances when he feels driven to flee his home. As a young boy he accidentally lights his house on fire. He realizes, “I had done something wrong, something which I could not hide or deny,” and he resolves to “run away and never come back” (Wright, Black Boy, p. 11). The character is later consigned to an orphanage after his father abandons his mother. He flees, aware, however, that he is running “away from rather than running toward something” (Wright, Black Boy, p. 39). The scholar Richard Yarborough helps delineate what Wright and his character Dave Sanders in “Almos’ a Man” were fleeing by leaving the South:

[I]t is clear . . . that his youth in the South was scarred by constant, brutal repression. In particular Wright viewed the attempt by whites to break the spirits of Southern blacks, to make them complicitous in their own oppression, as perhaps the key racist imperative, and he resisted as doggedly as he could.
(Yarborough, p. xi)

RURAL POVERTY IN THE 1940S

Blacks in the rural South suffered a poverty perhaps more extreme than anywhere else in the nation. In 1940 a survey of eight rural counties in the South revealed that only 5.3 percent of the black families had running water inside their houses and only 7 percent had toilets; just 13.1 percent had electricity and 1.9 percent had telephones. Half of the families lived in shacks that were over twenty-five years old. An average family of six people shared a house with only three rooms.

Wright drew not only on his own experience in the South, but he was also influenced by reading nineteenth-century Horatio Alger rags-to-riches tales, early twentieth-century naturalist novels by Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris among others, and literature by black writers such as Langston Hughes. A particular influence from the black writers who preceded him was the use of a familiar or recurring folk element, such as the appearance of a train in stories like “Almos’ a Man.”

Reception

The critical praise received by “Almos’ a Man” upon its original publication resulted in its being selected to appear in the O. Henry Award Prize Stories of 1940. After Wright’s death in 1960 “Almos’ a Man” reappeared in Eight Men, a posthumous collection of his short stories, in which it was retitled “The Man Who Was Almost a Man.” The collection, which appeared in 1961, had been proofread by Wright before his death. Reviewing it, David Littlejohn singled out the stories he viewed as the most praiseworthy. The collection, he argued, “was an attempt to recapture the simple intensities” of Wright’s early set of short stories found in Uncle Tom’s Children. “[I]n a few instances—The Man Who Saw the Flood,’ ‘The Man Who Was Almost a Man,’ ‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow’—it succeeds” (Littlejohn in Fitzgerald, p. 366). Seven years later, the acclaimed black writer of fiction and nonfiction Langston Hughes would select “Almos’ a Man” to appear in The Best Short Stories by Black Writers.