SHADES OF "BLACK"

Maniac Magee
by Jerry Spinelli (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1990)

Introduction

Jeffrey Magee was orphaned and left to the care of an aunt and uncle who no longer cared for each other and lived completely separate lives under the same roof. They refused to speak to each other and made Jeffrey the mouthpiece between the two. He hated being bounced between the adults and ran away from home.

He literally ran for months until one day he settled in a new city and made the local zoo his home. Jeffrey loved running, sports, and reading. And this is how he met the other children in this story. Important to this story is that Jeffrey is “white” and he makes a remarkable entry into a “black” neighborhood. While running, he borrowed a girl’s book; while running he caught an uncatchable football pass in a neighborhood game, scored a touchdown and kept running; in a neighborhood baseball game, he ran up to the plate, grabbed the bat slammed the ball out of the field and ran past home plate and just kept running. No one in this black neighborhood had seen this strange white boy before and the neighborhood children nicknamed him Maniac.

Besides being the best at just about everything, Maniac had another talent that was much more important. He could be friends with everyone, he was slow to take offense, and he saw people for who they really were, not for the color of their skin.

Excerpt from pages 51, 57-58

Maniac loved the colors of the East End, the people colors.

For the life of him, he couldn’t figure why these East Enders called themselves black. He kept looking and looking, and the colors he found were gingersnap and light fudge and dark fudge and acorn and butter rum and cinnamon and burnt orange. But never licorice, which, to him, was real black.

He especially loved the warm brown of Mrs. Beale’s thumb, as it appeared from under the creamy white icing that she allowed him to lick away when she was frosting his favorite cake.

He loved joining all the colors at the vacant lot and playing the summer days away.

. . .

Maniac Magee was blind. Sort of.

Oh, he could see objects, all right. He could see a flying football or a John McNab fastball better than anybody.

He could see Mars Bar’s foot sticking out, trying to trip him up as he circled the bases for a home run. He could see Mars Bar charging him from behind to tackle him, even when he didn’t have the football.

He could see these things, but he couldn’t see what they meant. He couldn’t see that Mars Bar disliked him, maybe even hated him.

When you think about it, it’s amazing all the stuff he didn’t see.

Such as, big kids don’t like little kids showing them up.

And big kids like it even less if another big kid (such as Hands Down) is laughing at them while the little kid is faking them out of their Fruit of the Looms.

And some kids don’t like a kid who is different.

Such as a kid who is allergic to pizza.

Or a kid who does dishes without being told.

Or a kid who never watches Saturday morning cartoons.

Or a kid who’s another color.

Maniac kept trying, but he still couldn’t see it, this color business. He didn’t figure he was white any more than the East Enders were black. He looked himself over pretty hard and came up with at least seven different shades and colors right on his own skin, not one of them being what he would call white (except for his eyeballs, which weren’t any whiter than the eyeballs of the kids in the East End).

Which was all a big relief to Maniac, finding out he wasn’t really white, because the way he figured, white was about the most boring color of all.

Questions and Discussion

Maniac doesn’t see black or white skin colors, but a beautiful collage of hues. If the world would see the wide variation in skin tones, perhaps grouping and labeling people would occur less often. It is easy to remember black and white and even yellow and red. But it would be more difficult to remember café au lait, chocolate, gingerbread, pumpernickel, ivory, coppyer, whole wheat flour, buff, beige, sand dune, etc. Not only would it be difficult to remember the endless skin tones, but it would also be difficult to agree on one’s skin tone from one season to the next, not to mention the difficulty of getting a small group of individuals to agree on the name to affix to someone’s skin tone.

Maniac is “color-blind” – is this a good or bad characteristic in our society?

What makes a person black, or white, or any other color or any label?

Can we live in a colorless society where skin tone makes no difference?