March 10

“(It was not until I had left the delicatessen job that I saw how grossly I had misread the motices and attitudes of Mr. Hoffman and his wife. I had not yet learned anything that would have helped me to threat my way through these perplexing racial relations. Accepting my environment at its face value, trapped by my own emotions, I kept asking myself what had black people done to bring this crazy world upon them?” (265)

 

My initial thought when reading this paragraph was that Wright was going to go on to say how badly Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman had treated him at the deli. It took me reading farther in the chapter to realize that they didn’t treat him badly; they just treated him differently than any other white person had ever treated him. It was interesting how he had for so long wanted whites to treat him differently, but when they finally did he didn’t know how to act and ended up secluding himself even more than before. Had someone treated him like this in the south, he would have been even more wary of him or her than he was of the Hoffman’s. He posed a good question at the end of the paragraph by asking what the black people did to deserve everything. He never goes on to answer the question because he doesn’t know the answer, but it got me thinking.