"Down by the Riverside" is a story in Richard Wright's anthology Uncle Tom's Children. Wright explains that the term "Uncle Tom" means a black person who is subservient to white people. The Uncle Tom is a person who knows his place and never oversteps racial boundaries. The majority of African American slaves were subservient because they knew it was useless to try to assert their rights. When slavery ended, new boundaries were set in the South with Jim Crow laws. In "Down by the Riverside" Wright shows how an African American family can be destroyed if contemporary racial boundaries are overstepped.
This story is about a black family in the rural South during a flood. The patriarch of the family is Mann. His wife Lulu is deathly sick in childbirth. Other members of this extended family are PeeWee (Mann's son), Grannie, Bob (Mann's brother), and Sister Jeff (Bob's wife). A white family, the Heartfields, is an important element in this plot. With the flood waters only twelve feet from his house, Mann sends Bob into town to sell their mule and buy a boat so the family can evacuate. Bob returns from town and describes the chaos: "Everwhere Ah looked wuznt nothin but white men wid guns. They wuz a-waiting fer the soljers when Ah lef, n yh know whut tha means . . . (60). Bob's only recourse was to steal the boat belonging to Mr. Heartfield, the postmaster.
Mann reluctantly takes the boat, hoping to get Lulu to the Red Cross hospital then return the boat to Heartfield. On his way to the hospital Heartfield encounters Mann and his family in the boat, accuses Mann of theft and shoots at him. Mann shoots back, killing Heartfield. By the time Mann gets Lulu to the hospital she is dead. Soldiers conscript Mann and other black men to help evacuate white families stranded by the flood. Mann is sent to rescue the Heartfields. Alone in the house with the family, Mann has an opportunity to kill them but rescues them inst...