Big Boy Leaves Home

“Big Boy Leaves Home” is filled with allusions—or implicit references—to Southern folk culture, from gospel songs such as “This Train Is Bound for Glory” to folk heroes like Casey Jones. These allusions are filled with symbolism and foreshadowing. In the case of Casey Jones, Big Boy has a flashback while he’s hiding in the kiln to playing Casey Jones in a game. It’s a brief but telling mention; he looks up to this folk hero who was famous for speeding his train down the rails, a recklessness that ultimately leads to his death. Big Boy’s identification with Jones signals his willingness to take risks, even if they endanger his life. This also connects with the train motif and Big Boy’s desire to escape and steer his own train, regardless of the outcome.

Wright keeps the literary references to things that would have been familiar to his characters rather than gesturing toward “high culture.” In effect, he asks the reader to enter Big Boy’s cultural sphere and familiarize themselves with these references to understand the story’s full meaning. This approach does not pander to white Northern audiences. Wright intentionally refuses to seek validation for the community he is representing through analogies to outside sources of cultural authority.

Wright makes effective use of irony through the Epigraph that precedes “Big Boy Leaves Home.” It quotes several lines from a “Popular Song” that reinforces cultural myths about the American South: “Is it true what they say about Dixie? / Does the sun really shine all the time? / Do sweet magnolias blossom at everybody’s door? […] Do they laugh, do they love, like they say in ev’ry song? If it’s true, it’s where I belong” (16). This idealized outsider’s view of the South, or “Dixie,” is radically challenged by the ensuing story, which offers readers an inside, painfully realistic perspective of the southern United States. By the end, rhetorical questions like “Is it true what they say about Swannee? / Is a dream by that stream so sublime?” look not only naïve but even sinister (16).

“Big Boy Leaves Home” is filled with vernacular dialogue that attempts to capture the rhythms, diction, and pronunciations associated with the communities represented in the narrative. This approach puts their voices at the very center of the story. Wright chooses to represent the speech of his characters in “eye dialect,” using nonstandard spellings to reflect regional pronunciations. Whereas many authors will vary a word or two to give a sense of vernacular differences, Wright uses nonstandard spellings for the majority of dialogue in “Big Boy.” For instance, Big Boy says, “Whut t hell! Ahma git mah cloes,” for “What the hell! I’m going to get my clothes” (29). The risk in doing this is presenting the characters in a way that makes them seem other or uneducated. Indeed, the history of dialect writing in the US did see white authors ventriloquizing Black characters in offensive and caricaturing ways. Here, Wright is writing speech from within the community where he grew up, asking the reader to adjust registers. It helps establish the authenticity of his portrayal and indicates a refusal to pander to the assumptions of the reading public.