By: Shawn Cox
Submitted: 2010-05-19 08:16:49 | Word Count: 484
The story “The Sky is Gray” by Ernest J. Gaines describes life grievances and hardship faced by a low income African-American family. Gaines invites the audience to share some private moments about what it feels like to be a black boy, about the importance of "hometown," about pain and about poverty. The events take place during the 1940s in Bayonne, Louisiana. The main character of the story, James, suffers from a terrible tooth pain but keeps silence because his family is poor enough to visit a dentist. Gaines portrays events and situations through the eyes of the small black boy and his sufferings caused by poverty and lack of money.
The main theme of the story is personal identity and civil rights (racism and discrimination) of black men. Still, the author portrays these themes through vivid images of poverty and hardship experienced by the black community. Gaines reveals his compassion for working-class individuals living on the fringes of society. He is well aware that poor people do things differently from whites and demonstrates in his poem in both subtle and more obvious ways a host of cultural distinctions. Another important theme is adulthood described through minor themes of pain and sufferings. This theme is dramatized by stylistic devices and language means which help the author to unveil feelings of James and his family.
The main character, James, is only 8-years old but he is portrayed as real man and a hero. The pain transforms his character into the person who can endure sufferings and hardship. The mother tells James: “You not a bum You a man" (Gaines 13). The story establishes a premise with which presumably the audience agrees, and then attempts to transmit the force of that agreement to a conclusion with which, presumably, the audience would not have agreed initially. The minor characters of the story are James's mother, Auntie, Alnest and Helena (white characters), Monsieur Bayonne (a prayer), a nurse at the dentist office, etc. Each of these characters has an impact on James life and self-development. Using these characters, Gaines portrays the idea of ethics and morally which dominates in the story and forces readers to think and interpret unique life experiences and events depicted by the author. It entails the presumption that logic should overrule the emotional and intuitive nature. The proms lay aside the critical poem’s assumption of logical superiority.
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lly selected settings and symbols help Gaines to increase emotional tension and appeal to feelings of readers. The main settings of the story are a small town outside Bayonne, the long road and the dentist office. Gaines constructs a world of poor, drawing from as many aspects of the culture as possible: customs and beliefs, work, language, clothing, and so on. “I ain’t just hungry, but I am cold, too. I am so hungry and cold I want to cry” (Gaines 17).
