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Richard Wright, from Black History Now |
He starts by writing, "Each event spoke with a cryptic tongue. And the moments of living slowly revealed their coded meanings. There was the wonder I felt when I first saw a brace of mountainlike, spotted, black-and-white horses clopping down a dusty road through clouds of powdered clay.
"There was the delight I caught in seeing long straight rows of red and green vegetables stretching away in the sun to the bright horizon.
"There was the fain, cool kiss of sensuality when dew came on to my cheeks and shins as I ran down the wet green garden paths in the early morning.
"There was the vague sense of the infinite as I looked down upon the yellow, dreaming waters of the Mississippi River from the verdant bluffs of Natchez.
"There were the echoes of nostalgia I heard in the crying strings of wild geese winging south against a bleak, autumn sky" (Wright 8).
And it goes on for like two and a half pages, just these beautiful sensory descriptions that start with the phrase "There was/were."
This literary device, of starting a sentence with the same repeated phrase, is called anaphora, and it's something that I feel like is much more common in poetry. But Wright's writing is so poetic. And, actually, the guy was a poet. In fact, the super popular memoir-like book Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates takes its title from a Richard Wright poem in which the author describes his encounter with the scene of a lynching.
Here's the beginning of that poem:
"Between the World and Me"
And one morning while in the woods I stumbled
suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly
oaks and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting
themselves between the world and me....
There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly
upon a cushion of ashes.
There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt
finger accusingly at the sky.
There were torn tree limbs, tiny veins of burnt leaves, and
a scorched coil of greasy hemp . . ."
And guess what? That poem totally uses the same anaphora as the beginning of Black Boy. I feel like his use of anaphora in this section, this listing of senses almost has the effect of putting us in the place of the child Richard.
As children, and even in memories from other times in our life, we remember things in flashes. We have a taste, a smell, the sunlight on the carpet, crayons melted in the backseat, drawing watermelons on construction paper.
Look how the poet Joe Brainard uses the same repetition technique in his book-length poem I Remember (here's a few excerpts):
I think making a list of memories would be a powerful way to brainstorm for a memoir, or even write one. What do you think? I'd challenge everyone reading this post to do your own 5-6 sentence response to this prompt in the comments:“I remember daydreams of dying and how unhappy everybody would be.” / “I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.” / “I remember the sound of the ice cream man coming.” / “I remember once losing my nickel in the grass before he made it to my house.” / “I remember ringworms. And name tags.”
Describe your earliest sense memories, good or bad, starting with the phrase "There was/There were" or "I remember."
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