Abstract:
The primary settings of the story are the New York City’s ghetto, and a rural Virginia town, home to his grandparents who live a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle for African Americans of the Depression era. Lucas chronicles the desperate poverty his family finds themselves facing while living in urban America after leaving the abundance of the family farm in Virginia. These opposite worlds offer the writer a diverse picture of life offering. They open the door to Lucas’ discovery of how to “go within” to discover freedom consciousness. As a child, Lucas exorcised himself through the strategy of “going within” to sustain abuse from his father and the state hospital that experimented on him with electrical shock treatments.