Black Boy Rhetorical Analysis

I grew up in a circumstance that everything should be obeyed without a single question. I used to shout, cry, do everything I can to get rid of that feeling of my will being controlled by someone else. It turned out that physical rebellion would not do anything good, since adults were much bigger and stronger than me; but I found out quickly that oral arguments did give me some chances to win. When I earned my first battle from my parents in middle school—through an argument about the latest bedtime—I, for the first time, felt the strength of words as weapons and got excited for it. So when I started to read Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy and reached the part where he describes his experience of being baptized, I was excited again; Wright
Wright brings us to the last night of the revival, the time when the final ridiculous “saving soul” (154) business comes out. Wright uses a lot words that are against each other to describe the same thing, which makes the description sarcastic and critical; also, the tone he uses implies that beyond the kind faces of church people there is something else: the kindness is a “sugar-coated bullet”. At the beginning of the final revival, the preacher isolates people who profess no religion by calling upon everyone else to stand; but although they are the “sinners”, Wright describes them as “scattered sheepishly about the pews”(152). According to convention, sinners, the evil ones, should be strong but injustice—the bully; however, here in the church it seems like it is actually the good people taking advantages on the “evil” people. Furthermore, when the believers start to sing the hymns, the description Wright has is also pretty strange: those people sing the hymns in “sweet, frightening tones that if we did not join the church then and there we might die in our sleep that very night and go straight to hell”(153, emphasis added). He is implying that the believers all sound sweet and nice; however, the message they are sending is actually pretty scary: they are cursing that those non-believers will eventually go to hell. The church is very good at using these sugar-coated bullets: the same thing happens when the preacher begs the sinners “a personal favor” but uses phrases “so cold, so hard, so lost”(152) to describe people who want to say no to that favor; and it comes to a peak when the preacher brings the mothers up and begs the sinners to join the community. As Richard says in the novel, “this business of saving souls had no ethics; every human relationship was shamelessly exploited”(154). The church, which should be a symbol of morality, uses the morality existed between human relationship as tools to force