The Sky Is Gray

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1963

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Themes

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Themes

Life During Jim Crow

Without ever mentioning the year in which the story takes place, or using the terms “segregation” or “Jim Crow,” Gaines illustrates that his story is set during that era. However, James, a character nearing adolescence, is also living in a region that is on the precipice of change.

To get to Dr. Bassett’s office, James and his mother must get on a segregated bus. Gaines notes this fact when James passes “the little sign” that reads “White” and “Colored” (90). The sign is unremarkable because it is a common feature of life in the South. Black and White people did not sit near each other on buses. Black passengers were always relegated to the rear of the bus, and they were refused the option to sit in any empty seat in the White section when seats in the Black section were full. Gaines, however, doesn’t highlight any moments of outrage or indignity around this mundane fact. Instead, by presenting the teasing exchange between James and the little girl in the red overcoat, Gaines reveals how life was as normal in Black communities as in any other, despite their living with the indignities of segregation.

Similarly, life in the family cabin is not especially grim, despite the family’s poverty and their existence under the sharecropping system. Ty, for instance, grumbles about having the same breakfast every morning and resents having to get up early. James also describes his brother as his buddy and confides in him about his bad tooth. Though the conditions of their lives might be different, these are family scenes to which any reader could relate.

Ty’s exasperation with eating syrup every morning is one facet of the family’s crushing poverty. Syrup is the only sustenance they can afford. The addition of bacon, which isn’t much healthier, would require more work in the field. Gaines focuses less on how Jim Crow enforced racial distinctions, an obvious fact, and illustrates how it created severe economic disparities between Black people and White people. James knows that his mother cannot afford to take him to the dentist, so he hides his pain from her. He also knows that she has no time, as she must work in the planter’s field in the afternoon. Dr. Bassett is a bad dentist, but he is the only one whom the Black residents in Bayonne can afford. Good healthcare, nourishing food, education, and better living conditions are the necessities that Black people were deprived of under Jim Crow. The injustice was not in being separated from White people, but in being forced to live substandard lives.

Expressions of Masculinity

James is only a teenager but feels compelled to assert his role as the head of the family because he is the eldest. He is protective of his mother and promises himself that he will repay her for the extra money that she spends in the café for heat. He looks at her tattered coat and thinks that he will find a way to buy her a new one. With his father gone and unlikely to return, James sees himself as a surrogate husband—he must provide for his mother and protect her in the ways that his father had before.

James’s insistences on never appearing scared or revealing when he is in pain are manifestations of his ideas about what it means to be a man. He assumes an air of stoicism that is temporarily spoiled when he sees the girl in the red overcoat on the bus. Not yet comfortable with his burgeoning interest in girls, he feigns indifference. James’s suppression of both his tenderness and his pain exemplifies the problematic ideas that society continues to communicate to boys and men about how to perform their gender roles. Being a man, they learn, requires them to deny the thoughts and feelings that make them human. On the other hand, Octavia is raising a Black man whom she knows society will not treat kindly. If James can withstand her beatings and reproaches, he will be better prepared for the abuse he will inevitably face from a racist society.

James’s most notable lesson in learning to be a man comes when he is eight. When Octavia demands that he kill his pet redbirds, and beats him when he initially refuses, he learns, without his mother explaining to him, why he had to do it. Though Auntie implores Octavia to explain it to James, Octavia never does, but James still learns the lesson. He had to sacrifice something he loved for the preservation of his family, as his mother often did. Though circumstances, which remain unclear to the reader, have deprived James, Octavia, and Ty of a traditional nuclear family, the closeness between them and Auntie reiterates the fact that families can take many forms and that Black people, so long denied the right to form family units, had to be creative in forming filial ties.

Faith Versus Action

The debate over the value of faith over action during periods of crisis arises during James’s and Octavia’s visit to Dr. Bassett’s office. While sitting in the waiting room, they overhear little John Lee Williams screaming in pain while being attended to by the dentist. Another patient asks why God would allow a child to suffer so, prompting a preacher sitting nearby to claim that it isn’t for them to question God’s will. The preacher, who represents the elder generation within the Black community is, in turn, questioned by a young man sitting nearby and reading a book. The young man refuses to have blind faith in God and privileges rational thought over feeling, much to the preacher’s initial chagrin and, soon thereafter, to his outrage.

This debate over the value of faith when confronting racist oppression was a popular one during the Civil Rights era (1955-64). Some activists, notably Malcolm X and, later, Stokely Carmichael, resented what they viewed as the accommodationist politics of members of the NAACP. The preacher and the boy represent extremes in thought. Many civil rights leaders of the era, notably Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, used their respective faiths as sources of inspiration and motivation for bringing their social and political visions to fruition. By using the boy and the preacher as tropes, however, Gaines prods the reader into questioning both traditional values and the activist methods of contemporary leaders. The “all or nothing” approach, in both circumstances, denies human beings the complexity of their experience. Nevertheless, James sees within the boy what he believes he wants to be—educated, strong, unafraid, and eager to be a part of the world. Unlike the preacher and his mother, who dissuade engagement with the conditions of the world, James, like the boy, wants to see and think about things for himself.