23 pages • 46 minutes read
James BaldwinThe Rockpile
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Rockpile
The titular rockpile is a space of great power in the story. John and Roy have both heard from their aunt that the rockpile is there to prevent subway cars from falling off their tracks, and John once saw funeral procession disappear into the house adjacent to the rockpile. Thus, he sees the rocks as a source of protection for the living and a spot that absorbs the dead. It also serves as a liminal space, then, where transformations occur. A way station between life and the afterlife, but it is also a place where boys transform into violent fighters trying to kill each other. For Roy, it very well could have been a place that didn’t merely slightly disfigure his forehead but that, instead, transported him to the afterlife.
Both boys are intrigued by the rockpile for different reasons. John is afraid of it but cannot stop staring at it on Saturdays, while Roy is drawn to it. For both boys, the power and threat of the rockpile is similar to Gabriel’s power, which explains their different feelings about the pile. While Roy is not punished by Gabriel all that harshly, John is the target of his abuse; thus, Roy does not perceive the threat of the rockpile in the same way as John does, for Roy sees power as something other than hostile and cruel.
Finally, the rockpile serves as a metaphor for American society at large. It is a space of cruelty in which Black boys fight for supremacy with hindered potential to advance themselves or alter the landscape. The rockpile is, thus, like the racist society that prevents Black people from achieving better lives and having the same freedoms as Whites while also pitting Black people against each other.
Gabriel’s Shoe
The threat of Gabriel’s violence hovers over John and the rest of the Grimes family throughout the story, and Gabriel’s shoe symbolizes that threat. The narrator makes this overt when he describes Elizabeth’s sight of Gabriel towering over John, writing, “John stood just before him, it seemed to her astonished vision just below him, beneath his fist, his heavy shoe” (22). John is the child who receives the brunt of Gabriel’s abuse, so when Elizabeth sees John right in the path of the shoe, she is reminded of both Gabriel’s power and the likely outcome of that day’s events. Though Elizabeth is able to prevent Gabriel from hurting John, John is still left reaffirming his subservience to Gabriel. At the end of the story, his face is right next to Gabriel’s shoe as he picks up the lunchbox.
It should be noted that Gabriel’s shoe is the only thing to touch the wickedness of the streets besides Roy that day. As the streets are a place of sin in John’s mind, the shoes also carry with them the sin of the streets. The streets are also full of violence, so Gabriel’s shoes are doubly symbolic of the sin and violence John hopes to avoid but has thrust upon him in spite of his best efforts.
Eyes and Seeing
Eyes are brought up throughout “The Rockpile.” For one, Gabriel refers to John and Elizabeth as both having “big eyes” (24). These eyes are the defining characteristic that separates them from everyone else in the Grimes household, and they are what Gabriel focuses on to remind himself that John is not his son and that Elizabeth lived a sinful life before she married him. Their large eyes, thus, represent sin itself. They stand in contrast to the smaller eyes Roy has. This is significant because Roy’s wound is so close to his eye that had his eyes been larger or the tin can aimed a little lower, he could have lost an eye. To Gabriel, this would be especially serious, as Roy’s eyes are what separate him from John and Elizabeth; it is Roy’s eyes that make him Gabriel’s son and, therefore, pure. To lose the eye would be to lose that purity.
Beyond the physical, eyes also play another role in the text. So much of the story is about seeing. From the safety of the fire escape, which is itself an escape from the realities seen in the Grimes household, John and Roy watch the wicked streets below and feel as though they are sinning just in witnessing the streets. John also voyeuristically watches the funeral procession for the boy who drowned and watches for Gabriel to come home on Saturdays, the signal that his fun is over. And from that same fire escape, John watches, transfixed, as Roy nearly loses an eye. What John sees becomes the story itself, as the reader is not told of Roy’s experiences on the rockpile but simply what John sees Roy doing, making the reader a voyeur too.
Sight also plays a role for Elizabeth. Her eyes play a trick on her to make it look like Gabriel’s shoe was right above John’s head. Later, Elizabeth worries about the look of pure hatred Gabriel gives her after she defies him and stands up for John. The look changes, and Elizabeth’s eyes are described as “clouded” (25). This implies that her only coping mechanism is to simply stop looking at the horrors of the family’s life and the threat of Gabriel. John is unable to do this, though, as he is forced to keep his eyes open and clean up after Gabriel, just as he cannot look away from the rockpile each weekend. He will continue to see violence or the threat of violence day in and day out and is even forced to lean in to get a closer look at the shoe that threatens him.
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By James Baldwin
