But Baldwin chooses to have his tensions mediated by the father’s recognition that his son’s ascendancy is inevitable and necessary. For another writer (Crane, for instance) these oppositions might collide to create a destructive, chaotic environment through which order may or may not settle out. This is necessary for Roy to assume an authoritative role.īaldwin creates tension in the story by setting up sets of opposing forces: Roy’s temptation versus his knowledge of the law he must not transgress the illegitimate son John versus the real sons the father of the family versus the ascending authority figure, anxious to prove himself the potential power and violent capacity of Gabriel versus Gabriel’s compassion and sense of justice. Roy has left the jungle and turned toward civilization. Instead of fighting (survival instinct), though, Roy calls for his mother (social imperative).
After getting his breath, Baldwin tells us that “the figure on the ground” “caught its breath” and “felt its own blood.” The impersonal pronoun suggests a wounded animal. Baldwin stops time, in a story sense and a real sense, a caesura, to indicate a key moment in Roy’s development. Baldwin gives us his description of the experience: “Then for a moment there was no movement at all, no sound, the sun, arrested, lay on the street and the sidewalk and the arrested boys.” The sun itself has stopped time has stopped. As Roy ascends to the top of the pile, he is struck on the head. Though Roy is forbidden to play on the rockpile- Baldwin makes reference to “the forbidden street below,” and the implication of what “below” means is clear-a key scene occurs as Roy disobeys his mother and joins the gang fight on the pile. When Roy is injured on the rockpile, Gabriel does not scold him (as does his mother) but consoles him and indeed embraces the children as all “his children”-even though John is not his, but as Baldwin tells us, a “nameless stranger from his mother’s life of sin.” John is the bastard, but still Gabriel addresses the children as “all his.” He is jealous, kind, powerful, and forgiving and carries the mantle of authority with the force to back it up. Gabriel is a minister and in this sense stands for a Holy Father, a kind of personification of the Christian God. The character most connected to Roy is Gabriel. However, the rockpile serves as a locus for violence and force. Roy’s fight on the rockpile is also a way of determining his ascendancy to his own position of authority, and Baldwin plays these scenes as though Roy takes power from the rockpile itself, both its centrality and its stability. Roy is the oldest, and it is clear that he will one day take the place of authority from his father, Gabriel. The family in Baldwin’s story is a reverent Christian family the children have biblical names- John, Paul, Delilah-except Roy, the story’s central character. As in the fight that opens Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (which this resembles), the battles are vicious and bloody. The rockpile is at the center of the earth, but it is also a kind of hell, where children-the bad kids-go to fight for their place on the pile. The consistent themes in Baldwin’s fiction, including personal identity, racial struggle, and the role of religion in daily life are present in “The Rockpile.” The story was first published in Baldwin’s 1965 collection Going to Meet the Man.īaldwin centers the story on the rockpile, which represents stability and fixture but also a great temptation to the young protagonist of the story, Roy.
Baldwin followed in the footsteps of his stepfather, a storefront preacher, and preached from age 14 to age 17 this experience and environment inform much of Baldwin’s work. The themes and elements of “The Rockpile” all share similarities with James Baldwin’s own experiences as a young man in Harlem.
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