Black Boy

3 Pages 630 Words

This novel is set in Harlem in New York City. The Grimes migrate
to the North in search of new opportunities. Elizabeth bids
goodbye to her aunt in Maryland and leaves with Richard. She
arrives in New York with great expectations but she is sorely
disappointed. "Here, in this great city where no one cared, where
people might live in the same building for years and never speak to
one another, she found herself, when Richard took her in his arms,
on the edge of a steep place and down she rushed, on the descent
uncaring, into the dreadful sea." New York is a big and bustling
city but it is heartless. The only way Elizabeth and Richard make
their existence meaningful is by visiting places of interest in the
city on weekends. They go to the Central Park or the Museum of
Natural history to take their mind off from the daily drudgery.

John Grimes does the same when he has to escape out of his dingy
quarters at Harlem. He climbs a hill nearby to view New York in
all its majesty and imagines himself to be an influential figure in
the city. From there he walks over to mid-town Manhattan and
Central Park to get a feel of the city. John experiences a sense of
freedom in all the places outside his home at Harlem. His house
was "narrow and dirty; nothing could alter its dimensions, no
labour could ever make it clean. Dirt was in the walls and the
floorboards, and triumphed beneath the sink where roaches
spawned; was in the fine ridges of the pots and pans, scoured daily,
burnt black on the bottom, hanging above the store; was in the wall
against which they hung, and revealed itself where the paint had
cracked and leaned outward in stiff squares and fragments, the
paper-thin underside webbed with black." In similar quarters live
Florence and other Negroes like her. If they look out of their
window, they can see "scraps of paper and frosty dust, and --- the
hanging signs of stores and storefro...