Maniac Magee

“‘I’m from Bridgeport.’

‘Bridgeport? Over there? That Bridgeport?’

‘Yep.’

‘Well, why aren’t you there?’

‘It’s where I’m from, not where I am.’

‘Great. So where do you live?’

Jeffrey looked around. ‘I don’t know…maybe…here?’”

In his first conversation with Amanda, Maniac’s search for a home and family becomes clear in his refusal to tie his personal identity to his place of origin. Instead, he actively claims Two Mills as a home simply because that is where he currently is. His past is in Bridgeport—and he notably doesn’t even mention Hollidaysburg or his parents; thus, it is evident from the very beginning of the story that with his arrival in Two Mills, he is attempting to create a fresh start for himself and hoping that this town might offer him a good future.

“And that was it. Nobody (except Amanda Beale) had any other name for him, so pretty soon, when they wanted to talk about the new kid, that’s what they called him: Maniac.

The legend had a name.”

From the nicknames of people to the addresses of adoptive homes, names are powerful talismans throughout the novel. Perhaps the most potent example of this dynamic is the titular character himself, for before his arrival at Two Mills, “Maniac” Magee has gone by “Jeffrey” his whole life. Thus, his given name is a symbol of his brief life with his parents and his loveless existence with his aunt and uncle. The new name “Maniac” signals a fresh start for him; with every exploit that raises the name of “Maniac” to new heights of praise and incredulity, he is building his new life and memories in Two Mills. The name of Maniac therefore cements Jeffrey’s status as a local legend.

“Stones clanked off the steel rails. He darted left, skirted the dump, wove through the miniature mountain range of stone piles and into the trees…skiing on his heels down the steep bank into the creek, frogs plopping, no time to look for stepping rocks…yells behind him now, war whoops, stones pelting the water, stinging his back…ah, the other side, through the trees and picker bushes, past the armory jeeps and out to the park boulevard, past the Italian restaurant on the corner, the bakery, screeching tires, row houses, streets, alleys, cars, porches, windows, faces staring, faces, faces…the town whizzing past Maniac, a blur of faces, each face staring from its own window, each face in its own personal frame, its own house, its own address, someplace to be when there was no other place to be, how lucky to be a face staring out from a window.”

The setting and geographical descriptions add to the small-town atmosphere that pervades the novel. Many of these landmarks sound as though they could be located anywhere in America, thus boosting the novel’s universal appeal. In fact, the landmarks are designed to be reminiscent of Spinelli’s own hometown of Norristown. This scene also highlights Maniac’s trademark of running, both from his past and from new enemies who view him as an outsider. Despite this constant “outsider” status, however, all he wishes is to be an “insider” looking out the window, which foreshadows a future moment when he will finally be at home with the Beales.

“Before Maniac could go to sleep, however, there was something he had to do. He flipped off the covers and went downstairs. Before the puzzled faces of Mr. and Mrs. Beale, he opened the front door and looked at the three cast-iron digits nailed to the door frame: seven two eight. He kept staring at them, smiling. Then he closed the door, said a cheerful ‘Good-night,’ and went back to bed.

Maniac Magee finally had an address.”

Just as the epithet of “Maniac” provides Jeffrey with a new identity in Two Mills, the Beales’ address signifies a new home and family for the boy. Knowing the numbers is doubly important to him because having an address means that he finally has somewhere to belong. The address represents stability and connection, as opposed to the loneliness and disjointedness that Maniac has felt all his life.

“Maniac loved the colors of the East End, the people colors.

For the life of him, he couldn’t figure why these East Enders called themselves black. He kept looking and looking, and the colors he found were gingersnap and light fudge and dark fudge and acorn and butter rum and cinnamon and burnt orange. But never licorice, which, to him, was real black.”

This quote illustrates Maniac’s innocence and his blindness to the social inequalities of Two Mills when he first arrives. With a child’s straightforward pragmatism, he takes the term “black” literally because he is still unfamiliar with the unspoken reasons behind the de facto segregation of the town. Because he remains refreshingly innocent and free of prejudice, his open mindset allows him to appreciate the beauty in diversity, an appreciation not yet tainted by the reality of societal racism.

“He told [Mrs. Beale] what he told everyone. ‘I’m Jeffrey. You know me.’ Because he was afraid of losing his name, and with it the only thing he had left from his mother and father.

Mrs. Beale smiled. ‘Yeah, I know you all right. You’ll be nothing by Jeffrey in here. But—’ she nodded to the door—‘out there, I don’t know.’

She was right, of course. Inside his house, a kid gets one name, but on the other side of the door, it’s whatever the rest of the world wants to call him.”

This section reinforces the novel’s ongoing preoccupation with the power of names. To Mrs. Beale, Maniac is simply a young boy named Jeffrey who is in need of love and family; to her, he is not the legendary, mysterious “Maniac” as the other kids know him. Her determination to call him only “Jeffrey” reminds him of his original identity before his arrival in Two Mills. With this exchange, it becomes clear that he now has two separate identities: one for inside the home and another for the wider world. For Jeffrey, such a concept is in and of itself significant, for he finally has a home and is able to create this distinction.

“And sometimes Maniac just sat at the front window, being on the inside.

Maniac loved almost everything about his new life.

But everything did not love him back.”

The ominous tone of this quote foreshadows the name-calling and prejudice that he will experience soon after moving in with the Beales. This moment is also significant because it comes right after the narration expresses Maniac’s desire to be inside a house looking out: his desire to belong in a home. He has gotten his wish and is now on the inside looking out, but unfortunately, his contentment will not last very long.

“And some kids don’t like a kid who is different.

Such as a kid who is allergic to pizza.

Or a kid who does dishes without being told.

Or a kid who never watches Saturday morning cartoons.

Or a kid who’s another color.

Maniac kept trying, but he still couldn’t see it, this color business. He didn’t figure he was white any more than the East Enders were black. He looked himself over pretty hard and came up with at least seven different shades and colors right on his own skin, not one of them being what he would call white (except for his eyeballs, which weren’t any whiter than the eyeballs of the kids in the East End).

Which was all a big relief to Maniac, finding out he wasn’t really white, because the way he figured, white was about the most boring color of all.

But there it was, piling up around him: dislike. Not from everybody. But enough. And Maniac couldn’t see it.

And then all of a sudden he could.”

With its grim undertones and contemplations of the presence of racism in Two Mills, this scene contrasts sharply with Maniac’s appreciation of the myriad shades and varieties of dark skin. Initially, he finds his own skin color boring compared with the many skin tones that surround him, until suddenly, others’ prejudice against him force a new and unpleasant understanding of his racial identity upon him, rendering him once again the “other” and the outsider in a place that he desperately wishes to call home.

“More than anything, Maniac wanted to hug Amanda and tell her it was okay. He wanted to go inside, be with his family, in his house, his room, behind his window. But that wasn’t the right thing. The right thing was to make sure the Beales didn’t get hurt anymore. He couldn’t keep letting them pay such a price for him.”

Maniac feels possessive of his place at the Beales’, and his possessive attitude toward their home is emphasized through the repetition of the word “his.” However, when he realizes that incidents like the destruction of Amanda’s book occur due to the dislike and tension surrounding his presence in the East End, he also comes to believe that his presence only brings the Beales pain and trouble. Maniac’s impeccable sense of morality and his maturity become clear when he selflessly decides to give up his new home in order to spare his new family the social difficulties, hatreds, and pain that they have experienced from others. Thus, he feels responsible for the prejudiced actions of others’ and seeks to mitigate the situation in the only way he can think of: running away yet again.

“Maniac felt why more than he knew why. It had to do with homes and families and schools, and how a school seems sort of like a big home, but only a day home, because then it empties out; and you can’t stay there at night because it’s not really a home, and you could never use it as your address, because an address is where you stay at night, where you walk right in the front door without knocking, where everybody talks to each other and uses the same toaster. So all the other kids would be heading for their homes, their night homes, each of them, hundreds, flocking from school like birds from a tree, scattering across town, each breaking off to his or her own place, each knowing exactly where to land. School. Home. No, he was not going to have one without the other.”

The separation between school and home is a common childhood experience, but Maniac has never had this separation because he has never truly had a stable home. School becomes another reminder of this difference between himself and other children, and this dynamic is highlighted in the very beginning of the story, for he first runs away from Hollidaysburg during a school function. As the novel progresses it is clear that he enjoys learning, but he sees the world as a large classroom and learns and teaches life lessons wherever he happens to be.

“‘Grayson—the Minors. Man, you must have been good. What position did you play?’

Grayson said, ‘Pitcher.’ This word, unlike the others, was not worn at all, but fresh and robust. It startled Maniac. It declared: I am not what you see. I am not a line-laying, pickup-driving, live-at-the-Y, bean-brained parkhand. I am not rickety, whiskered worm chow. I am a pitcher.”

Here Spinelli demonstrates that just one word can tell a whole story. On many occasions prior to this scene, Maniac has begged Grayson for stories about his past, but Grayson is at first reluctant to share much. His reticence and taciturn nature cause Maniac to pull meaning from the few things he does say, inferring an entire history from the tone of a single, proudly uttered word.

“The old man gave himself up willingly to his exhaustion and drifted off like a lazy, sky-high fly ball. Something deep in his heart, unmeasured by his own consciousness, soared unburdened for the first time in thirty-seven years, since the time he had so disgraced himself before the Mud Hens’ scout and named himself thereafter a failure. The blanket was there, but it was the boy’s embrace that covered and warmed him. When somebody does something you really like. ‘A-men,’ the old man whispered into the cornmeal- and baseball-scented darkness.”

This moment shows that Maniac is not the only one to benefit from his new connection with Grayson. Just as Maniac finds safety, acceptance, and healing in Grayson’s presence, the old man also heals the wounded parts of his younger self as he bonds with Maniac. In addition to learning to read, he is learning to forgive himself for the mistakes of his past, accept love from another, and not resign himself to loneliness.

“Maniac stepped back, admiring his work. ‘One oh one,’ he proclaimed. ‘One oh one Band Shell Boulevard.’”

Just like the scene in which Maniac cherishes the Beales’ address, here he creates a new address in order to show his appreciation for his new home with Grayson. This time, he declares his own address and paints the numbers himself, intensifying the accompanying sense of ownership. Thus, this moment signifies Maniac’s growing control over his own destiny as he gains a greater sense of agency in the world and lays claim to this corner of the world, declaring it to be unequivocally his.

“As in all the happy Christmas homes, the gifts were under the tree. Maniac gave Grayson a pair of gloves and a woolen cap and a book. The book did not appear to be as sturdy as the others lying around. The cover was blue construction paper, and the spine, instead of being bound, was stapled. The text was hand-lettered, and the pictures were stick figures. The title was The Man Who Struck Out Willie Mays. The author’s name, which Grayson read aloud with some difficulty, was Jeffrey L. Magee.”

This happy holiday moment makes Grayson’s death in the next chapter even more tragic and traumatic for the boy. In this scene, Maniac honors two things: one of the highlights of Grayson’s life and the old man’s newfound ability to read. With the makeshift novel, he tells the old man’s story in a tangible form, making it permanent and enduring. Although it is Grayson’s tale, Maniac has inserted a bit of himself in the retelling of it, showing how both stories and authors can evolve. Whereas others (including the narrator) have been telling stories about the legendary Maniac Magee, now Maniac finally gets to tell a story himself.

“Dreams pursued memories, became one, and the gaunt, beseeching phantoms that called to him had the rag-wrapped feet of Washington’s regulars and the faces of his mother and father and Aunt Dot and Uncle Dan and the Beales and Earl Grayson. In that bedeviled army there would be no more recruits. No one else would orphan him.

The second evening came and went. Maniac never stirred. Knowing it would not be fast or easy, and wanting, deserving nothing less, grimly, patiently, he waited for death.”

After discovering Grayson’s death, Maniac waits to die himself because he never wishes to feel the pain of abandonment, grief, or disappointment again. All the people who have left him or whom he has left haunt his thoughts, and he believes he doesn’t deserve anything better than death for the pain he believes he has caused other people. This scene represents Maniac’s lowest moment and sets the stage for the more serious tone that dominates the final part of the novel.

“‘The enemy,’ says Russell.

‘Who’s that?’ says Maniac.

Russell stops firing long enough to send Maniac a where-have-you-been? look. ‘Who do ya think?’ he sneers. He points the red barrel of the submachine gun toward the bedroom door. Toward the east. The East End.”

In this scene, the youngest McNab children unthinkingly embody the dangers of impending violence that are the result of generations of ignorance and inherited racism. They have been raised by their racist, neglectful father to believe that Black people are the enemy. Their father has taught them to respond to all Black people with aggression and hostility, to the point that the children believe it is perfectly natural to “play” at this violence. To them, such unreasoning hatred is a natural way of life, but Maniac can see just how alarming their behavior really is.

“He knew he should be feeling afraid of these East Enders, these so-called black people. But he wasn’t. It was himself he was afraid of, afraid of any trouble he might cause just by being there.”

Maniac believes he is cursed and that he only hurts those who get close to him; he has resigned himself to being alone. Although he now knows how truly divided the East and West End are, he still does not understand why these “uncursed” people with the privilege of having a family refuse to come together as one. With his unique position as an outsider no matter what part of town he is in, Maniac can more easily see the ignorance of racism for the dangerously foolish idea it is.

“And so as Maniac moved through the East End, he felt the presence of not one but two populations, both occupying the same territory, yet each unmindful of the other—one yelping and playing and chasing and laughing, the other lost and silent and dying by the millions…”

Within the literal context of this particular passage, the two “populations” mentioned here refer to the townspeople and the worms on the ground. However, this passage could just as easily refer to the unhealthy dynamic between the white people and the Black people of Two Mills. Both groups occupy the same town, with the same landmarks and surroundings, but both have different points of view that shape how they see the other, and the more privileged white townspeople of the West End willfully ignore the lives and troubles of those in the East End, having been conditioned to ignore and fear them for so long.

“That had been weeks before, and now the pillbox was under way, no longer an idea in the backyard but a reality in the dining room. Now there was no room that Maniac could stand in the middle of and feel clean. Now there was something else in that house, and it smelled worse than garbage and turds.”

The McNabs have made their racist beliefs tangible by building a blockhouse. The McNab boys’ father believes that he is preparing for a race war, and his children have learned this behavior from him without questioning the truth of his beliefs. Maniac feels pressure not only to stop the violence but to reform the children’s beliefs so they will not grow up to be as bigoted as their father. The foreboding danger of the McNab’s ingrained hatred and racism becomes something physical residing in their home, staining it and robbing it of its very status as a true home.

“It was a maddening, chaotic time for Maniac. Running in the mornings and reading in the afternoons gave him just enough stability to endure the zany nights at the McNabs’. When he asked himself why he didn’t just drop it, drop them, the answer was never clear. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to stay as that he couldn’t go. In some vague way, to abandon the McNab boys would be to abandon something in himself. He couldn’t shake the suspicion that deep inside Russell and Piper McNab, in the prayer-dark seed of their kidhoods, they were identical to Hester and Lester Beale. But they were spoiling, rotting from the outside in, like a pair of peaches in the sun. Soon, unless he, unless somebody did something, the rot would reach the pit.

And yet he held back. Oh, he prodded and persuaded and inspired and bribed the boys to do right, but he never forced them, never commanded, never shouted. Because to do so would be parental, and he was not yet ready for that. How could he act as a father to these boys when he himself ached to be somebody’s son?”

Like Grayson did for him, Maniac has assumed a mentorship role for the younger McNab that also heals something within himself. Despite his own troubles, he refuses to abandon Russell and Piper to the misguided beliefs of their family. Given the dysfunction that rules the McNab household, this scene demonstrates that sometimes having a house and a family is not the same thing as having a true home. Maniac wants to be a comforting and guiding presence in the boys’ lives even as he searches for someone to do the same for him.

“Remembering how little Grayson had known about black people and black homes. Thinking of the McNabs’ wrong-headed notions. Thinking of Mars Bar’s knee-jerk reaction to anyone wearing a white skin. And thinking: Naturally. What else would you expect? Whites never go inside blacks’ homes. Much less inside their thoughts and feelings. And blacks are just as ignorant of whites. What white kid could hate blacks after spending five minutes in the Beales’ house? And what black kid could hate whites after answering Mrs. Pickwell’s dinner whistle? But the East Enders stayed in the east and the West Enders stayed in the west, and the less they knew about each other, the more they invented.”

In this quote, Maniac clearly outlines the dangers of ignorance and lack of empathy. Not only do these elements prevent both sides from communicating, but they also cause each group to generate their own false ideas about the other. Maniac understands that one way to correct this dynamic is to get both populations to see the truth about what the other side is like, as he has experienced for himself.

“East End and West End, black and white would begin only when the alarm clocks rang. For now, before sunrise, there were no divisions, no barriers. There were only the people, the families, the town. His town. As much his own as anyone’s.”

Throughout the novel, the town has become a character in its own right, springing to life as Maniac freely roams its streets and gets to know all its quirks. In this scene, however, the geography of the town is used to highlight the negative aspects of human nature. The town, with its buildings and landmarks, is itself free of prejudice, for prejudice is a human invention that is made real only by the residents who choose not to cross Hector Street.

“The next time [Mars Bar and Maniac] dovetailed, they stayed that way for two blocks, then three blocks, and so on. No words, no looks, just the rhythmic slapping of their sneaker soles upon the sidewalk and the pulsing duet of their breathings. Stride for stride, shoulder to shoulder, breath for breath, till they were matching on all points, a harnessed pair, two runners become one.”

When Maniac and Mars run silently all over town, their roles as foils for each other become clear. Although they begin the story as rivals and enemies, they are finally on their way to becoming friends as they share their love of running. They are both doing their best to find their place in a world that tries to diminish them.