John Grimes

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

• Waking on his birthdayA Saturday in March 1935. He stares at a yellow stain on the ceiling above his head, which slowly turns into a woman's nakedness, while Roy sleeps beside him with a small whistling sound. The neighbours' radios are silent and nobody in the house is up. The silence is what frightens him.
• Looking for his own faceDusting the living-room mirror, he watches his face appear out of the cloud and is shocked that it has not changed. He can only see details — two great eyes, a broad low forehead, the triangle of his nose, an enormous mouth, the barely perceptible cleft in his chin — and cannot put them together into an answer to the thing he most wants to know, which is whether he is ugly.
• The Saturday workSweeping a carpet so faded it is all one swimming colour and so frayed it tangles with the broom, then furniture oil and a damp cloth over the mantelpiece: photographs, greeting cards, flowered mottoes, two silver candlesticks holding no candles, and a green metal serpent poised to strike. In the evening he opens the church at six and sweeps that too.
• The photograph he hatesThe family keeps baby pictures on the mantelpiece. In his, he lies naked on a white counterpane, and visitors laugh and call it cunning. Roy is in a gown, Sarah in a bonnet, Ruth in her mother's arms. He is sullen with anyone who laughs at it, and they decide he is a "funny" child.
• What his father says about white peopleThat they are wicked, that God will bring them low, that not one of them ever loved a Black man, and that John will find out soon enough how evil they can be. John has read enough to know some of it is true — men burned in the electric chair for things they had not done, beatings in riots, last hired and first fired — and he still cannot make it square with the teacher who once bought him a bottle of cod liver oil when he was sick.
• The hill in Central ParkPast the reservoir, where women in fur coats walk great dogs, a steep overgrown path leads to a clearing and his favourite hill. He runs up it like an engine, or a madman, willing to throw himself into the skyline in front of him, and at the top he stops, because he remembers that the people in that city did not look at him.
• Fifth AvenueHe comes out of the park among the horse-carriages, invents himself a farm and a horse called Rider and a beautiful wife making breakfast, then wonders what church any of these people go to. Outside a shop, watching a doorman in a brilliant uniform, he decides he does not dare go in, and hears his father's laugh: no, nor tomorrow neither.
• The library he has never enteredHe loves 42nd Street, though not for the stone lions outside the main library building. He is a member of the Harlem branch and entitled to take books from any library in the city. He has never gone into that one because the building is so big.
• The film he chooses insteadHe buys a ticket with his birthday money and does not look back at the street, in case one of the saints should see him. The film is about a blonde woman in London with tuberculosis, who drinks and smokes and is cruel to a student who loves her. His sympathy goes entirely to her. He wants to be like her, only more powerful and more thorough and more cruel, and he cannot find in himself any wish for her redemption.
• Wrestling in the back roomElisha lifts him off the floor and tries to squeeze the breath out of him. John, much the smaller, uses that to confound him, and holds the deadlock until Elisha's foot slips. Watching the veins rise on Elisha's forehead and neck, John is filled with a wild delight, and when it is over he asks Elisha to teach him wrestling one time.
• The birthday moneyHis mother says she never asked what he wanted, opens his palm and puts coins into it, warm and wet from her hand, and tells him to go and get himself something. He stares up at her face, wants to put his head against her and cry, and looks down at the coins instead.