A demanding writer

 Ernest Gaines’s “The Sky Is Gray” reminds me of a Tolstoy story.

You could say that it’s about a little boy going to the dentist or that it’s about a little boy growing to be a man. Maybe it’s a retelling of one of the parables found in the gospels.

With Gaines, as with Tolstoy, you can’t rush through the story and get to a point. You have to take your time, read slowly, go on a journey. Along the way, it’s necessary for you to feel cold and hunger. It won’t do to just note that cold and hunger are features of the world. You must take time to feel them.

Gaines is a demanding writer in that way.

There’s a story within a story about the little boy, James, who is 8, having to kill red birds so the family will have something to eat. His father is in the Army, and his mother is doing farm work, trying to feed the children.

James traps and kills game, but he can’t bring himself to kill the red birds. He cries and pleads. His mother beats him. In exasperation, she kills one of the red birds in the trap before making him kill the other. 

 

Suppose she had to go away? That’s why I had to do it. Suppose she had to go away like Daddy went away? Then who was go’n look after us? They had to be somebody to carry on. I didn’t know it then, but I know it now. Auntie and Monsieur Bayonne talked to me and made me see.

 

Relatives and neighbors socialize little boys in the hard lessons they must learn. You might wonder about some of the lessons that we, as a society, make some children learn. 

The story has many wonders.

I had never realized the spiritual significance of the word “Stop!”

It can be the first word spoken by someone who is paying attention to the plight of a poor woman and her son when everyone else is distracted or indifferent. It’s what you say when you want people to slow down enough to let you help. It can be a wonderful word.

• Source: Ernest Gaines’s “The Sky Is Gray” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 103-31. The quotation is on p. 109.