Between the World and Me

“Between the World and Me” is a poem by 20th-century African American novelist and poet Richard Wright. It was published in the July/August 1935 issue of Partisan Review. Although Wright is better known as a novelist and nonfiction writer than a poet, between 1935 and 1940 he published a number of poems in left-wing political magazines. In these poems, he explores themes such as the plight of poor people and the violence faced by Black people in the United States. The latter is the theme of “Between the World and Me.”

On a walk in the woods, Wright’s speaker discovers the site of a recent lynching, with its tell-tale remains of bones, a skull, and debris left by the lynch mob. This proves to be a frightening experience for the speaker; he identifies so strongly with the victim that he seems to actually merge with him in his suffering. The title of the poem became famous in 2015, when it was used as the title of a best-selling, award-winning book by Ta-Nahisi Coates about the experience of being Black in the United States today. Coates quoted the first three lines of the poem as an epigraph for his book. The edition of the poem used in this study guide is from Richard Wright Reader, edited by Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre (Harper & Row, 1978, pp. 246-47).

Content Warning: The source poem and this guide feature references to rape and racially-motivated violence and murder, specifically lynching.

Poet Biography

Novelist, essayist, and poet Richard Wright was born on September 4, 1908, in Roxie, Mississippi. His grandparents were enslaved, and his father was a sharecropper. The family moved to Memphis when he was three years old. His father left the family home when Richard was five years old, and the boy was raised largely by his mother. He began school in 1915, at the age of seven. After his mother developed health problems, he spent some time living with his maternal grandparents in Jackson, Mississippi, and also for a while with an aunt in Elaine, Arkansas. His schooling, mostly in Jackson, was therefore interrupted, but he did manage to complete the ninth grade in 1925. By that time, he had become an avid reader and also showed promise as a writer. When he was 16, he had a short story published in the Southern Register, an African American newspaper in Jackson.

In 1927, Wright moved to Chicago, where he worked in the post office and also as a streetsweeper. He joined the Communist Party in 1934, during the Great Depression. He also joined the Federal Writers Project, a Depression-era federal government program to create jobs for writers. During this period, he published poetry in magazines (such as Left Front and New Masses) that were linked to Marxist and Communist organizations. In 1937, he moved to New York City, believing that would improve his prospects of establishing himself as a writer. He soon found success. His short story “Fire and Cloud” won a prize in a Story magazine contest, and the following year, his collection of four short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, was published. In 1939, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1940, his novel Native Son, about a young African American man named Bigger Thomas, became a bestseller. It was also a selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club, the first by an African American. The novel was adapted for the stage and was also made into a film in Argentina, with Wright himself playing the main character.

Wright became disillusioned with the Communist Party in the early 1940s and broke with it publicly in his essay, “I Tried to Be a Communist” (1944). Unwilling to continue living in the United States, where African Americans continued to face racial segregation and other discrimination, Wright lived mostly in Mexico from 1940 to 1946. In 1945, he published Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth, a memoir of his childhood and youth in the South, which described the racial violence faced by Black people during that time.

In 1947, he moved to Paris, France, where he lived for the remainder of his life. He wrote two more novels, The Outsider (1953), and The Long Dream (1958). He also wrote nonfiction works, including Black Power (1954), about the independence movement in the Gold Coast (later Ghana), and the collection of essays, White Man, Listen! (1957).

Wright married Dhimah Rose Meidman in 1939, but the marriage lasted only a year. In 1941, he married Ellen Poplar, and they had two daughters. Wright died of a heart attack in Paris on November 28, 1960, at the age of 52. Several of his works were published posthumously. These included a collection of Wright’s poems in the Japanese poetic form haiku, Haiku: This Other World (1998), as well as Eight Men (1961), Lawd Today! (1963), American Hunger (1977), and Rite of Passage (1994).

Poem Text

Wright, Richard. “Between the World and Me.” Richard Wright Reader, Harper & Row, 1978.

Summary

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

A male speaker is walking in the woods when he comes upon the horrifying sight of bleached white bones and a pile of ashes. He also sees broken tree limbs and burnt leaves, then items of clothing—a tie, torn shirt, a hat, and trousers stained with blood. On the grass nearby are the remains of matches, cigars, and cigarettes, an empty gin flask, and lipstick, as well as traces of tar, many feathers, and a slight smell of gasoline. There is also a skull. Fear grips the speaker, accompanied by a pity for the man who was lynched. He finds himself reliving the awful scene. In his mind, the sun fades and night comes, and he hears the barking dogs and the cries of the mob. The entire scene from the past comes so vividly alive for him that the bones of the dead man rise up and enter into his own bones. The ashes enter him also, becoming flesh and merging with his own flesh. He becomes aware of the large mob who are his death. He is stripped, punched in the mouth, and tied to a sapling. Then he is tarred and feathered, and the mob pours gasoline on him. The gasoline catches fire and he is in agony, knowing he is about to die. Finally, after dying, he becomes the bones and skull of the lynched man.