Between the World and Me

Content Warning: This section of the guide features references to rape and racially-motivated violence and murder, specifically lynching.

By the time Wright wrote “Between the World and Me” at the age of 27 in 1935, he had plenty of experience with the violence that Black people in the South faced at the hands of whites. In 1916, when he was nine years old and living with his aunt Maggie Hoskins and his great-uncle Silas Hoskins, he experienced race hatred firsthand. Hoskins owned a saloon that Black workers frequented. He was shot and killed by white men who wanted to take over his prosperous liquor business. Wright recalled in his memoir, Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth, that the Black man who brought the news of Hoskins’s death reported that the white men had said they would kill all Hoskins’s family if they made any protest. The family was forced to flee. The killer may have been the local deputy sheriff but no one was charged with the crime. Wright recalled that some white people told Maggie that she should never say anything about the murder, and he described in Black Boy the immediate aftermath of his great-uncle’s death:

There was no funeral. […] There were only silence, quiet weeping, whispers and fear. […] Uncle Hoskins had simply been plucked from our midst and we, figuratively, had fallen on our faces to avoid looking into that white-hot face of terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us. This was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled (Wright, Richard. Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth. United Kingdom, HarperPerennial, 1993, pp 54-55).

The tragic incident also worked its way into Wright’s fiction. In “Long Black Song,” a story in his collection Uncle Tom’s Children, a Black man named Silas—the same first name as Silas Hoskins—is shot by a white mob. In Black Boy, Wright writes that he wondered why the family had not fought back after the killing of his great-uncle, and he makes up for that passivity in the short story, because the fictional Silas fights hard. After he discovers that a white man who visited the house as a salesman raped his wife, he shoots the salesman when the man returns the next morning. Later, a white mob approaches Silas’s house. Silas kills two white men before being burnt to death after the mob sets fire to his house.

There was another real-life incident that deeply affected the young Wright. Around 1925, a group of white people killed the older brother of one of his friends. They accused him of seeing a white sex worker, drove him to a country road, dragged him out of the car, and killed him. In Black Boy, Wright describes his feelings at the time: “Bob had been caught by the white death, the threat of which hung over every male black in the South” (Wright, Richard. Black Boy). Wright also wrote about how the incident frightened him: “[T]he penalty of death awaited me if I made a false move” (Wright, Richard. Black Boy).

Another story in Uncle Tom’s Children has relevance to “Between the World and Me.” In “Big Boy Leaves Home,” a Black boy named Bobo suffers the same fate as the lynch victim in the poem. He, his friend Big Boy, and two others are at a swimming hole on a property owned by a white man. The son of the property owner shoots two of them, and in a struggle, Big Boy grabs the man’s rifle and kills him. Big Boy runs home, fearing he will be lynched. His family plans to smuggle him out of town the next morning on a delivery truck; during the evening he hides in a clay pit on the hillside. At dusk he sees some white men approaching; they are armed and carrying ropes. They capture Bobo, tar and feather him, and set him on fire. Big Boy watches in horror from his hiding place. He hears Bobo’s screams and feels the agony of his friend, just like the speaker feels the pain of the dead man in “Between the World and Me.”

In terms of literary heritage, “Between the World and Me” shows a debt to Walt Whitman, an acknowledged influence on Wright’s poetry. (Langston Hughes was another poetic influence.) Wright would surely have known Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself,” published under that title in the second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856), in which Whitman’s speaker, with his capacious soul, becomes one with a wide range of people, such as sea captain, fireman, soldier—and an enslaved man. Whitman writes:

I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,

Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,

I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn'd with the ooze of my skin,

I fall on the weeds and stones,

The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,

Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments,

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the     wounded person (Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” Poets.org, 1855,

Lines 838-45).

As in Wright’s poem, the speaker identifies literally with a suffering Black man who is being attacked by white people.