Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Saturdays, I will be reviewing The American Short Story, which ran semi-regularly on PBS in 1974 to 1981.  The entire show can be purchased on Prime and found on YouTube and Tubi.

This week, we have an adaptation of a Richard Wright short story.

Episode #4 “Almos’ A Man”

(Dir by Stan Lathan, originally aired in 1976)

David (LeVar Burton) is a black fifteen year-old living in the Deep South in the 1930s.  He works on his family’s farm and takes care of a mule named Jenny.  He considers himself to be almost a man.  His mother (Madge Sinclair) and his father (Robert DoQui) disagree.

David knows the one thing that he need to make himself a man.  He needs a gun and, this being the 1930s, he finds one that he can order from a Sears & Roebuck catalogue.  His mother says that there’s no way she’s letting him get a gun.  His father is a bit more open to it.  David secretly sends away for the gun and, as you can probably guess, tragedy ensues.

This was a downbeat adaptation of a similarly downbeat Richard Wright short story.  David obsession with being a man makes sense when you consider that he lives in a world where everyone — from his parents to the menacing white people who show up towards end — calls him a “boy.”  The white people even call his father “boy” and it’s a reminder of how that term was used to dehumanize and degrade black men, even someone like David’s father who has raised a family, takes care of his farm, and who is, in every way imaginable, a man.

Nicely done, this one, with good performance from Burton, Sinclair, and Doqui.  As for Richard Wright, he had been dead for 16 years by the time this premiered.  He died in Paris, having left the United States in 1946.  He’s remembered for his novel Native Son and his memoir, Black Boy.  Personally, I would add that he should also be remembered for his essay that appeared in the anti-Communist collection, The God That Failed.  This adaptation of Almos‘ A Man does a good job paying tribute to Wright’s voice and legacy.