Richard Wright's Natchez

Richard Wright was born near Natchez in 1908. *Black Boy* opens with a scene set here — Wright as a four-year-old setting fire to his grandparents' house. His Natchez childhood of poverty and racial terror became the material for some of the most important American literature. The city that shaped him was named for the Natchez people, who had inhabited the area from the 8th century through the French colonial period. By Wright's time, Natchez sat on the Mississippi River across from Vidalia, Louisiana, a former center of cotton planters and Mississippi River trade. In the decades before the Civil War, it had been the most prevalent slave trading city in Mississippi and second in the United States only to New Orleans. The leading slave markets were located at the Forks of the Road. Unlike other slave sellers of the day, traders there sold people individually. Wright left Mississippi as a teenager, part of the Great Migration north. No single building survives as a museum dedicated to his memory. His Natchez is the city itself — the geography of *Black Boy* maps directly to modern Natchez. Read the book before you visit. The streets Wright walked are still there.