Richard Nathaniel Wright came from a family of slaves still living at Rucker's Plantation in Roxie, Mississippi. His father, Nathan Wright, was a sharecropper and his mother, Ella Wilson, had left the teaching profession to farm with him. Richard was born on September 4, 1908, the first of two boys. Three years later, the family moved to Ella's parents' house in Natchez.

The family moved to the city of Memphis, Tennessee, in 1913 but were soon deserted by Richard's father. For the next few years, Ella did her best to feed and clothe the boys, but her first of a series of paralytic strokes ended their independence. They moved a number of times. First, Ella and her boys went to the prosperous home of her sister Maggie and brother-in-law Silas Hoskins in Elaine, Arkansas. Unfortunately, Hoskins was murdered by a white mob, and Maggie, Ella, and the boys fled...