Black Boy #4 Naiveity and irony

         In black boy, there's a section where Richard finally gets out of his house and moves into the city. He expects it to be super civilized and advanced, with less racism and more opportunities for him to get a job. The first day there, however, he's taken up by this very religious mother and her daughter. Since he's not very religious himself, he feels very awkward around this family. It becomes worse when the mother shows great interest in him marrying her daughter, and so does the daughter. This completely bowls Richard over. In his hometown, he says, all of the girls were sharp and calculating. But this one is very simple and focused on marrying him, impressed by his ninth-grade education and showing no interest in anything but him. He rejects her advances.

       Later, he's walking to his job and thinking about how naive the family was, when he finds a jug of good alcohol. Some black guy comes up to him and asks if it's his, then says that they should sell it to someone for good money. They take the jug to a white guy, the guy questions them for a bit, then the two other guys say they're going to go sell it and give him the money later. Eventually Richard realizes that they played him, using him to get their alcohol safely away. He was just thinking about how naive people were there, when he was the naive one as well.
       I just admire how the author made those experiences into some really good irony, when they were probably not that neat in real life. That's some things that memoir and historical fiction writers have to do to have a good, coherent story. For example, in the play Hamilton, Aaron Burr wasn't really the second of Lee, Lin-Manuel Miranda just had to write it like that for the story to fit together properly and so there wouldn't be this random second at the duel.
        A lot of what we've been writing about in class has been about the twisting of stories and how, if you can't really remember something, you can fib a little to make it work. On the other hand, it might be a blessing, because real life is strange and twisted with no distinguishable story and if you wrote it all down exactly the way it is it wouldn't make any sense.
         I wish all memoir writers, including my future self, luck in their writing and quick fingers on their keyboard!