The Sky Is Gray

“The Sky is Gray” refers to the literal winter scene in which the story takes place. It also refers to the complexity of the time in which James’s character lives—the mid- to late-1950s or early-1960s—and how previous values will no longer hold as the South shifts toward modernity.

James and his family are sharecroppers on a cotton plantation, which places them within the traditions of the Old South. Though slavery ended in 1863 throughout most of the South, planters continued to rely on cheap Black labor. Due to the de jure discrimination of Jim Crow, Black laborers had little recourse against their employers and could not fight back against unfair wages or overwork. Thus, James, Octavia, Ty, Auntie, and the others with whom they live and work find themselves within an endless cycle of poverty.

Race and poverty are the two conditions that determine life for James and his family—a fact that Gaines establishes within the story’s first pages. The social realities of race and White supremacy determine the poverty in which the main characters live and create the conflicts with which they must contend. James has a bad tooth because he eats syrup with his bread every morning for breakfast. He eats syrup every morning because his mother cannot afford to provide him with more nourishing food. Worse, the bad tooth must be pulled, which is even more expensive. Gaines illustrates the insidiousness of poverty by not only showing how James’s health and access to education are impacted, but also by depicting the instance in which his mother forced him to kill his pet redbirds for food. The sight of the “pool-doos” floating along the Mississippi River triggers this memory. The freedom of the “pool-doos” contrasts with the vulnerability of the redbirds, who were unsafe in the home of people who suffered from desperate hunger. The killing also underscored the absence of childhood pleasures from James’s life: He cannot even have a pet. This denial of childhood is reiterated when he views the children at a White school in Bayonne playing in a schoolyard. Having to work in the cotton fields, he has no time to play and later wonders how long it has been since he has been to school.

After passing by the schoolhouse, James observes the American flag hanging outside of the courthouse. The fact that it has far fewer stars than the flag that hangs outside of his schoolhouse is indicative of it being the early American revolutionary flag sewn by the upholsterer Betsy Ross. The 13-star flag—each star representing one of the 13 original colonies—has remained a popular symbol among White supremacist groups. The flag harks back to a time when the Constitution was limited to the original Bill of Rights, thus leaving out the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which helped to ensure the rights of formerly enslaved people, as well as the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted voting rights to all women.

Being in the White neighborhood of Bayonne heightens James’s awareness of his poverty. Gaines emphasizes this feeling over that of his sense of racial difference. James seems less interested in the people around him being White than he is in what they have access to as a result of being White—good food, nice schools, nice brown shoes, and warm coats. This reminds the reader that integration was never about the desire for proximity to Whiteness, or assimilation to the standards and values of White people. It was instead about giving people of color access to the same opportunities and resources.

In the meantime, Octavia instills within her son a determination to be resilient. Her admonitions not to stare at White children on playgrounds or at White patrons eating in cafés is intended both to avoid unnecessary confrontations (Black men and boys risked being lynched or assaulted for looking directly at White people in the South) and to prevent him from longing for that which he cannot have. She teaches him, too, that there can be dignity in poverty—an example that she sets when she refuses Helena’s attempt to give her extra salt pork. One could construe Octavia’s refusal of Helena’s obvious attempts at kindness as overly suspicious. However, this was a setting in which Black people had to be hypervigilant about the potential for being victims of trickery and violence, particularly when in White people’s homes. James echoes this sentiment when he avoids wiping his washed hands on Helena’s towels, worried that she could perceive such an act as disrespect or a sullying of her home.

Gaines’s depiction of Octavia arguably falls within the stereotype of the “strong, Black woman”—a female figure within the Black community, usually maternal, often raising children without a husband, who appears to be both determined and unafraid to do what is necessary to survive. Gaines reveals nothing about Octavia’s inner life because we are to see her through the eyes of James, who wavers between wanting to care for and protect his beautiful, selfless mother, and being in awe of her.