Richard Wright

"Fred Daniels, a Black man, is picked up by the police after a brutal double murder and tortured until he confesses to a crime he did not commit. After signing a confession, he escapes from custody and flees into the city's sewer system."--

When fifteen-year-old Johnny Gibbs is told that he is really a foster child, he runs off into the streets of Harlem and meets up with a gang that wants him to participate in a mugging. Includes criticism of Wright's fiction.

Officially an undertaker, Tyree has his hand in the brothels, the dancehalls, the tenements of the ten thousand Clontonville blacks. When the trap closes in, Tyree's double personality, one for the whites and another for his own people, splits wide open.

In "Long black song," a hard-working farmer invests what little he has in a gift for his wife, while back home, she falls for the advances of a traveling salesman. A small-town principal risks his career to defend a young boy's image of a black Christ painted for a state-wide competition in "The boy who painted Christ black." A jazz-joint piano player in "The Reunion" comes to terms with prejudices that have haunted her since childhood, when she is...

Selections from Prize stories.