“Gabriel, ain’t no sense in trying to blame Johnnie. For Gabriel, the presence of John is a constant reminder of the sinful person Elizabeth used to be. Unlike Roy, John is not Gabriel’s real son but rather a son from another man in Elizabeth’s past. Daddy ain’t going to hurt you, he just wants to see this bandage, see what they’ve done to this little man”(Baldwin). hold still, crooned his father, shaking, “hold still.
Indeed, Elizabeth, Roy and John's mother, defends John from his father's unfair punishments because John is only treated unfairly because he is not Gabriel’s blood son, and he reflects …show more content… Because Roy is Gabriel’s real son, Gabriel tenderly cares for Roy when he disobeyes the rules and gets hurt. “Gabriel.stood enormous, in the center of the room.John stood just before him.beneath his fist, his heavy shoe” (Baldwin). Gabriel, Roy’s blood father, comes home and immediately John is scared for what punishments lie ahead. Roy eventually comes home with a gash above his eye and John gets the blame for Roy’s injury. Although Roy knows better than to go down to the rockpile, he decides to go. In fact, each Saturday morning, Roy and John perch themselves on the fire escape and watch the violent actions below them at the rock pile. The short story opens with a brief description of the forbidden rock pile down the street.
In his essay "Papa's Baby: Impossible Paternity in Going to Meet the Man ," which draws heavily on Hortense Spiller's seminal essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Matt Brim notes that "The Rockpile," "The Man Child," and "Going to Meet the Man"-the three stories original to the collection-act as recursive and interlocking texts that urgently demand comparative analysis, bound together as they are by their cumulative power to defamiliarize, to make strange, whiteness.After reading the short story,“The RockPile”, by James Baldwin, it is found that a religious family lives in Harlem, and the father of the family enforces unfair penalties on his son John. The three stories Baldwin added to his rather scant oeuvre of short fiction for Going to Meet the Man beg to be read as more than an effort to lend heft to the volume due to both their content as well as their placement in the collection. Sylvander herself, though paying attention to each of the stories, does not deal with the interplay among them, and though there has been a great deal of admirable and important work about many of the stories, most scholars have missed the importance of the order in which the stories are presented. Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. eNotes plot summaries cover all the significant action of The Rockpile. This view of Baldwin's short stories, however, owes largely to the fact that most critics have not considered the collection as a whole. Complete summary of James Baldwins The Rockpile. Unfortunately, though, Sylvander is largely consistent with scholars who view Baldwin's short fiction as a less fully realized shadow, both in terms of cultural importance and artistic merit, of his novels and essays. The discussion Sylvander presents in "Charting Racism in America" is important because it is one of the only existing works that examines Going to Meet the Man in its entirety, as opposed to focusing upon its most canonized stories. She says that "the order allows us to explore character from youth to middle life, and offers a form of historical chart of racism in America from 1954 to 1965" (109). through James Baldwin's 1965 collection of short fiction, Going to Meet the Man.
In "Charting Racism in America," Carolyn Sylvander argues that we can chronologically track the changes in racism in the U.S. Further, some lesser-lauded works of that tradition's seminal authors also demand new readings. In light of this trend, it is important to rethink many of the seminal texts of the African American canon, with increased analytical emphasis on the gendered aspects of race at work within them. Since the publication of Wallace's book in 2002, more scholarly works intimately concerned with African American masculinity have emerged, among them bell hooks's We Real Cook Black Men and Masculinity, published in 2004. Citing such recent developments as the publication of Philip Brian Harper's Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African American Identity and the establishment of the Journal of African American Men, Maurice Wallace writes "hile institutional and publishing prejudices may never afford black or other diasporic masculinity studies the perceived ubiquity of white masculinity studies in the United States, the disciplinary evolution of black male matters may be, even at this early moment, irrevocable" (4-5).