“The Sky is Gray” is the story of a young Negro boy living in Louisiana in the 1930’s. He faces severe oppression and injustice in his everyday life, even being forbidden from sitting at the front of a bus or entering a restaurant for no reason but the color of his skin. This story is a perfect application for a New Historical reading because I believe that the history of the story is critical to understanding the true meaning behind it, rather than a reader response theory, which would provide an understanding of the growth of our culture’s acceptance towards others and morals as a community instead of how things used to be. Learning from our past mistakes is the only way that we can move forward, so rather than delve into our nation’s future, I would like to look back at its past.
Ernest Gaines was born on a plantation in Louisiana in 1933, the firstborn of 12 siblings. As a small boy, his father left his mother, forcing her to travel to New Orleans to find work. Ernest was left in the care of his great aunt. His intense feeling of paternal abandonment would later provide the base for his written works.
At the age of 15 in 1948, Gaines traveled to live with his mother and stepfather in Vallejo, California, because there were no black high schools where he lived. His stepfather was incredibly strict about what kind of friends Ernest was allowed to have, believing the local children were “trouble,” and as a result, Gaines found his entertainment in the local library, which was forbidden to him in his hometown because of the color of his skin. He became interested in reading, and wrote his first novel the next year, though destroyed his only copy of his manuscript when it was rejected.
After graduating from high school, he attended classes at Vallejo Junior College, did a stint in the Army, and then returned to get his degree at San Francisco State College. While his collection of works is not extensive, they have been well-received because of their depictions of the experiences that he and many other people of color have been through, including inequality, oppression, poverty, and post-slavery uncertainty.
Although “The Sky is Gray” did not take place in what is commonly known as the Civil Rights era, it is impossible to read the story without realizing that the author is writing at the moment when the Civil Rights movement became nationwide, and given this context, the story somehow manages to describe but not exaggerate the prejudice and inequality that the protagonists suffer. The prejudice that James and his mother feel is very real and clear, but his mother’s response to it embodies “the essence of Martin Luther King’s message that salvation begins in the person of the oppressed, not the oppressor. (Gale, 1997)”
It would have been a much better day for James and his mother if they had had the money necessary to ride the bus to town and back, to have lunch on the way, and possibly even visit Dr. Robillard instead of Dr. Bassett, but in order to do that, they would not only need to be financially comfortable, but also white.
The black people in this time were free of slavery, but were not yet treated like actual human beings. The white people were afraid of them, and since they had the most power societally and financially, it was easy to mark their territory, and force blacks to live, work, and even walk in different buildings and streets. Blacks were forced to walk in alleyways, where it could be dangerous, in the back ends of town, while the front end of town was left for white people. Gaines’ work has shed light on the experiences of the black people who have been oppressed and forced his readers to accept the injustice that he himself suffered through during his life, from his youth into his adulthood.
The white people of the time, being the dominant class, refused to accept that there was a problem in their society. They pushed the blacks into corners, and hid them in shadow to forget, but it is impossible to read Gaines’ work without acknowledging that there is inequality present at this time, no matter how badly the white people hiding from the bitter cold in their warm cafes would like to sweep that fact under the rug.
Despite the inequality they faced, James’ mother refuses to accept any charity, or beg. For example, in Ernest Gaines, Valerie Babb writes:
“Unable to buy food because of their poverty, and forbidden to enter the warm shelters in the area of the dentist’s office because of their color, they become rambling outcasts in a society in which the whim of any white is empowered to affect their destiny. While they wait for the dentist to reopen his office, Octavia must devise ways in which she can keep James from the cold and at the same time carefully adhere to strict rules of racial separation. Observing his mother manipulate their environment moves James closer to what will be his particular entry into manhood, the psychic freedom that comes from emotional self-mastery. In one instance Octavia enters a white-owned hardware store and pretends to inspect ax handles for purchase while James heats himself at the wood stove. Her dissembling enables her to warm him without compromising her dignity by begging the proprietor to allow her son use of the stove. Here, hiding her true feelings and motives, she makes use of the technique of “masking” and teaches her son a valuable lesson in pride and survival.”
In the time of this story, blacks were regarded as second-class citizens by whites, and were not given any of the same rights. They were poor, hungry, and had to work for everything they had. As such, the only thing they really had to their name was their pride. It was for this reason that James’ mother refuses to accept charity. She takes to the street after a fight in the black-owned diner, refuses to eat without paying in coin or labor, and will not accept more salt meat than she can pay for from the elderly white woman. In addition, she later refuses to allow her son to turn his coat collar up to protect his neck, which is a form of face-saving for her, because she believes that “external appearance is essential because James’s person will always be identified and understood first by his external blackness, then, perhaps, if he is lucky, by his innate character by the world in which he lives… (Gale, 1997)”
“The Sky is Gray” is essentially a coming-of-age story, and though the reader only sees bits and pieces of this process, the parts we see form a base for the foundation of James’ manhood- his sense of dignity, pride, worth, courage, and silence in difficulty. Gaines creates these ideas through the experiences of James’ youth, his observations from his mother, and even seeing the boy argue with the preacher in the dentist’s office, leaving James with a desire to obtain an education. Gaines not only gives the reader the opportunity to see into James’ past, but also allows us to anticipate his future.
Critics have been kind to Gaines work, but his reputation has not been improved as swiftly as some of the other black writers of his time. In the introduction to Ernest Gaines, Valerie Babb’s biography of Gaines through the lens of his work, Babb writes, “taken as a whole, Gaines’s canon represents a blending of Louisiana, African-American, and universal human experience. His writings reproduce the communal nature of storytelling in his rural parish while accenting the historicity that joins members of the African-American diaspora to larger American society. By recording and preserving his people’s culture in his literature, Gaines creates both an ongoing memorial to a vanishing way of life and an enduring testament to human concerns.”
While Gaines may not have had as much recognition as other African-American writers of his time, there is a critical consensus that he is a good writer, an important writer, and an undervalued writer that will continue to gain recognition, especially for his works about the masculine search for identity, particularly for African-American men.
“The Sky is Gray” is an important coming-of-age story that makes clear the inequality that black people faced in the 1930’s. The admirable quality of being impoverished and yet maintaining a sense of dignity and pride is present throughout the story, and despite the harsh culture that seems to be against them, James and his mother make-do, survive, and prosper in an environment meant to stifle them. The fight for identity in manhood that James must go through is the same one that is present in so many of Gaines’ novels, and the same one that he himself had to go through to develop his character. It is for the genuine experiences that Gaines depicts that his works will be remembered and valued for many years to come.