The Rockpile

Roy is Elizabeth and Gabriel’s oldest son and clearly Gabriel’s favorite. He is foolhardy and uncontrollable. Unlike John, who does not need to be warned to avoid the rockpile, Roy must be explicitly told to stay away from it. Nevertheless, he is drawn to it and jumps at every opportunity to fight there. On the pile, he establishes short-lived dominance over the other boys before being injured, suggesting that he enjoyed his time breaking his parents’ orders.

At home, Roy fears Gabriel’s reaction but is treated with kindness, as John gets blamed until Elizabeth steps in to protect him. Thus, even though John is the good and obedient son, Roy is favored. Elizabeth compares Roy’s temperament to Gabriel’s, suggesting that Roy too will grow up to have fury inside him. He is also spoiled by Gabriel, suggesting that he will not learn from his behavior or face consequences, unlike John who lives in fear. The implication is that Roy will grow up to be like Gabriel and continue the cycle of abuse John and Roy know from their own life experience.

Elizabeth is the mother to four children, including John and Roy. She is Gabriel’s wife, but in his mind she has a past of sin, the result of which is her oldest son, John. Like John, she is said to have big eyes, and Gabriel sees those eyes as reminders of her sin. As Elizabeth proves to him that Roy wasn’t seriously wounded, he even suggests that Elizabeth might somehow love Roy less because he doesn’t have her eyes. In truth, Elizabeth is merely pragmatic in showing Gabriel that the event was not that big of a deal. Though she, like everyone else in the house, is afraid of Gabriel, she stands up for herself and for John, as Gabriel attempts to blame them for Roy’s own actions. The result of her act of defiance is that Gabriel looks at her with pure hatred for a moment before adjusting his eyes and seeing her again as the mother of his children.

The story alludes to Elizabeth’s past life without Gabriel in two ways. One, it is established that she had sex out of marriage, resulting in John. Two, it is suggested she came from a rural upbringing before moving to Harlem, as John’s visual fear reminds her of when she was “a girl down home” and saw “rabbits stand so paralyzed before the barking dog” (22). The time period of the story would suggest that she may have grown up in the South and fled to Harlem to escape the racism and poverty of the Jim Crow era, as was common for many in the Great Migration. Regardless, the life she knows in the city is also one of violence and fear, though she occasionally stands up for herself.