Uncle Tom's Children is a collection of novellas and the first book published by African-American author Richard Wright, who went on to write Native Son (1940), Black Boy (1945), and The Outsider (1953). When it was first published in 1938, Uncle Tom's Children included only four novellas: "Big Boy Leaves Home," "Down by the Riverside," "Long Black Song," and "Fire and Cloud." "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" and "Bright and Morning Star," which are now the first and final pieces, respectively, were added when the book was republished in 1940. The book's title is derived from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, an anti-slavery novel published in 1852. Plot The Ethics of Living Jim Crow "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" follows Richard Wright's own experiences growing up in the Jim Crow era. The essay begins with Wright's first encounter with racism as a child, when his attempt to play a war game with white children turns violent, and ends with a scolding from his mother, blaming him for the incident. The rest of the essay follows his experiences as a Black man in the South through his adolescence and adulthood. He describes his experiences with racism at his first job, at an optical company where his white coworkers increasingly bully and threaten him as punishment for wanting to learn skills that could allow him to advance, ultimately forcing him out. Wright describes the continuation of his "Jim Crow education" as he moves from place to place, witnessing violence against a Black woman that police officers punish her for, facing attacks on his own body from white youths, and working as a bell-boy in a hotel where white men have exploitative sex with Black maids, but where sex with a white prostitute means castration or death for a Black man. Wright's essay ends with a discussion of the complicated world view Black people must adopt in order to survive during Jim Crow, and asking the question "How do Negroes feel about the way they have to live?" Big Boy Leaves Home "Big Boy Leaves Home" is the story of Big Boy, a young black whose youthful excursion goes horribly wrong. Big Boy and his friends, Bobo, Lester, and Buck decide to go to the local swimming hole, which is owned by a white man who does not allow black people to swim there. Despite their initial reservations, they strip