An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room. A bed spring creaked. A woman's voice sang out impatiently:

"Bigger, shut that thing off!"

A surly grunt sounded above the tinny ring of metal. Naked feet swished dryly across the planks in the wooden floor and the clang ceased abruptly.

"Turn on the light, Bigger."

"Awright," came a sleepy mumble.

Light flooded the room and revealed a black boy standing in a narrow space between two iron beds, rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands. From a bed to his right the woman spoke again:

"Buddy, get up from there! I got a big washing on my hands today and I want you-all out of here."

Another black boy rolled from bed and stood up. The woman also rose and stood in her nightgown.

"Turn your heads so I can dress," she said.

The two boys averted their eyes and gazed into a far corner of the room. The woman rushed out of her nightgown and put on a par of step-ins. She turned to the bed from which he had risen and called:

"Vera! Get up from there!"

[...]

A brown-skinned girl in a cotton gown got up and stretched her arms above her head and yawned. Sleepily, she fumbled with her stockings. The two boys kept their faces averted while their mother and sister put on enough clothes to keep them from feeling ashamed; and the mother and sister did the same while the boys dressed.

This is an excerpt from the beginning of Richard Wright's novel Native Son. Bigger and his family waking up.

There are a lot of people crowded into one tiny room in the opening of this book. A mother and three children are all sleeping, living, eating, dressing in the same room. Wright's opening, in other words, takes us right into a world of poverty.

It's no coincidence that the family is African American. The book is set in 1930s Chicago, when a combination of segregation and racism meant that the vast majority of African Americans lived in extreme poverty.

Wright gives us a sense of the poverty of this family by showing us how they must undress in front of each other. There is so little space, and they are so poor, that there is literally nowhere that any of them can go for privacy. So the members of the family have to avert their eyes in order to let the other members undress.

In this way, we as readers understand something about poverty. It's not just about not having enough to eat, or enough to wear. When we're really poor we're reduced to not even having any privacy.