THE SKY IS GRAY
by Ernest J. Gaines, 1968

Ernest J. Gaines is best known for his third novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), which recounts her latter-day observations of living in a racially torn Louisiana through the century between the War between the States and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. That work, like the five stories constituting Bloodline (1968) before it, including "The Sky Is Gray," is an unflinching and powerful study of what it means to grow up black in the American South. Much of Gaines's writing draws directly on his own heritage and experience. He was born on a plantation near Baton Rouge, and by the time he was nine years of age, he was working the cotton fields. He learned firsthand about the caste system of the South by which both whites and Creoles were superior to and dominated the black race. Because his parents soon separated, he was raised by his aunt, Augusteen Jefferson, who unable to walk, managed to run her household alone by crawling on the floor to perform her duties. Her stubborn and indomitable spirit and her enduring fortitude under daily pain and duress inspired not only the portrait of Miss Jane Pittman but the portrait of Mama (and of Auntie) in "The Sky Is Gray" as well.

The story is told in first person by James, an eight-year-old boy who could well be Gaines himself. The opening observation is commonplace enough and possibly happy: "Go'n be coming in a few minutes. Coming round that bend down there full speed. And I'm go'n get out my handkerchief and wave it down, and we go'n get on it and go." The excitement of flagging down the bus to go to the city of Bayonne ("a little bitty town. Baton Rouge is a hundred times bigger than Bayonne") for a short period dispels the pain of James's toothache, one he has repressed from his mother for months lest she call him a crybaby. He had tried to wish and will it away, his Auntie had suggested aspirin to no avail, and Monsieur Bayonnne (whose relationship is unidentified, but who is clearly the Creole who oversees the plantation) has prayed with him, scolding the boy because he prays Baptist rather than Roman Catholic. Nothing helps, and one day Mama decides to take him to town. The cost is heavy.

This morning when I woke up, her and Auntie was standing 'fore the fireplace. She say: "Enough to get there and get back. Dollar and a half to have it pulled. Twenty-five for me to go, twenty-five for him. Twenty-five for me to come back, twenty-five for him. Fifty cents left. Guess I get little piece of salt meat with that." "Sure can use it," Auntie say. "White beans and no salt meat ain't white beans."

After a breakfast of hard bread and syrup, which his younger brother Ty complains will lead to diabetes, James and his mother stand waiting interminably to catch the bus. James's mind wanders again to their poverty, for the cost of the trip weighs heavily on him. He recalls when his mother made him kill two harmless redbirds so that they might have some meat, just as he had been forced to eat blackbirds and owls. At first he cannot bear to kill the harmless creatures, but his mother whips him and forces him: "Then we all ate them. Ain't had but a little bitty piece each, but we all had a little bitty piece, and everybody just looked at me 'cause they was so proud." One of James's chief aims in life is to please his struggling mother, and throughout the story he keeps averting his mind to the time when he will earn enough in the field to buy her a warm red coat.

It is winter and cold out. When the bus comes, he dutifully walks to the back, marked "Colored," and gives up the only seat to Mama. In Bayonne, they are let out in the white section of town: he walks past warm restaurants and cafes and fine shops for whites only and past a school dominated by a noisy playground and a Confederate flag. One of those waiting in the dentist's waiting room, a large man James thinks must be a preacher, is resigned to his fate and those of the others of his race there. James learns that the dentist is not a good one, and his patients cry out in pain, but the good dentist, Dr. Robillard, will only treat white patients. One young black man, immersed in a book, is angered by the chastened behavior of those present and tells "the preacher" that their job is to speak out. "'Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything."' He tells the older man, when questioned, that his father is dead and his mother ill with pneumonia in Charity Hospital—"'Half killed herself, working for nothing."' The two come to blows, and the older man abruptly leaves.

Such tension distracts James, as does his need as the oldest man in the family—his father was drafted into the war and did not return—to clothe his mother against the outside weather. "I look up at Mama. I love my mama. I love my mama. And when cotton come I'm go'n get her a new coat. And I ain't go'n get a black one, either. I think I'm go'n get her a red one." Then the nurse interrupts them all to say the dentist is closing the office for lunch and will not return for more than an hour. Mama protests. "'Nurse, I have to go back in the field this evening,"' but it does them no good. They are shut out into the bitter cold air where, soon, it will begin to sleet heavily. James's handkerchief grows stiff, and his hands freeze.

Now begins James's longest and most terrible odyssey.

We go up the street. Walking real slow. I can tell Mama don't know where she's going. When we come to a store, we stand there and look at the dummies. I look at a little boy wearing a brown overcoat. He's got on brown shoes, too. I look at my old shoes and look at his'n again. You wait till summer, I say.

Me and Mama walk away. We come up to another store and we stop and look at them dummies, too. Then we go on again. We pass a cafe where the white people in there are eating. Mama tells me keep my eyes in front where they belong, but I can't help from seeing them people eat. My stomach starts growling 'cause I'm hungry. When I see people eating, I get hungry; when I see a coat, I get cold.

But this is a sideways view of the truth: he has not eaten much all the long day (he could not take a stick of gum offered him because if he opened his mouth, the cold air would start his tooth throbbing) and his thin coat, despite the shirt and sweater beneath it, is no match for the weather. "The sleet's coming down plenty now. They hit the pave and bounce like rice. Oh, Lord; oh, Lord, I pray. Don't let me die, don't let me die, don't let me die, Lord." They continue their aimless walk until they reach the edge of town, then cross the street and turn back. At the center of town again, Mama walks James into the black district to keep him warm, if wet. They enter a small bar where Mama parts with twenty-five cents to buy rolls and milk for her son, coffee for herself, hoping to save the other twenty-five cents for salt pork fat. But a pimp accosts her, and she pulls a knife on him. They leave and wander back toward the dentist's office.

Then there is another sharp turn of events.

Soon's we turn the corner, I see a little old white lady up in front of us. She's the only lady on the street. She's all in black and she's got a long black rag over her head."Stop," she says. Me and Mama stop and look at her. She must be crazy to be out in all this bad weather. Ain't got but a few other people out there, and all of them's men."Y'all done ate?" she says.
"Just finish," Mama says.
"Y'all must be cold then?" she says.
"We headed for the dentist," Mama says. "We'll warm up when we get there.
""What dentist?" the old lady says. "Mr. Bassett?
" "
Yes, ma'am," Mama says.
"Come on in," the old lady says. "I'll telephone him and tell him y'all coming."

What follows is a contest of love and self-respect on both sides of the racial chasm. Mama will not allow her son and herself to be objects of charity; the unnamed white woman will not let them continue in the sleet, shaking with cold and soaking wet. She offers to feed them in return for James taking out her pails of garbage, and Mama agrees, although James learns when he picks up the pails that they are empty. On her way out, fed and warm, Mama stops to buy twenty-five cents' worth of pork fat and the white woman gives her a double portion. Mama notes the discrepancy. The white woman takes it back and returns half of it to her. Mama speaks:

"Your kindness will never be forgotten," she says. "James," she says to me.

We go out, and the old lady comes to the door to look at us. After we go a little piece I look back, and she's still watching us.

The sleet's coming down heavy, heavy now, and I turn up my coat collar to keep my neck warm. My mama tells me turn it right back down.

"You're not a bum," she says. "You a man."

If so, James grew up that day. Here the story ends, without commentary, just as Gaines provided none throughout the story. Racism in Gaines's South is both obvious and subtle, and any attempts to cross the racial divide from either side are at best temporary. The deepest convictions and the most profound responses to life's hardships remain, throughout, unvoiced. The power of Ernest Gaines's writing is not so much in his ruthless honesty but in his understanding that in a racially torn society, in which class and clan dominate, there is little room for relief and no time or space for lasting amelioration.

—Arthur F. Kinney