Text & Photo: Julie Schwietert Collazo
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Years ago, I read Richard Wright’s Native Son.
To be candid, it didn’t remain in my memory–not like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, or Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God– and I suspect that’s because I didn’t know much, if anything, about Wright. Most likely, Native Son was an assigned read in an African American Literature course that was never contextualized within the framework of Wright’s own background or biography.

Francisco mentioned Wright last night, talking about another of his novels, Black Boy, and the reference sent us searching for some background about Wright. Among the most interesting details: he lived in self-imposed exile in France, wrote more than 4,000 haiku in the final years of his life, and though he’s best known and remembered for his fiction, he was a fine travel writer as well.

As I read his daughter’s introduction to Wright’s Haiku: This Other World, a collection of just over 800 of his tiny poems, I felt sadness at not having known more about him earlier, and excitement at having rediscovered him:

“Holding too much rain,
The tulip stoops and spills it,
Then straightens again.” -Richard Wright