Big Boy Leaves Home

Bobo, Buck, and Lester are Big Boy’s friends. They are all introduced laughing together “easily” in the opening pages and seem to have a similar background and social status to Big Boy. They also serve as foils for him. Specifically, Bobo exhibits different reactions and attitudes to Big Boy and suffers a different fate dying at the hands of the lynch mob while Big Boy escapes. Tellingly, Big Boy is willing to sacrifice Bobo to save his own neck during the game in which Bobo, Lester, and Buck all attack him. Big Boy, Buck, and Lester think he is smart for using this tactic, but Bobo points out, “But yuh almos broke mah neck, man” (25). This incident foreshadows Bobo’s death later in the story.

Bobo offers a contrasting voice at other times, too. When they arrive at the swimming hole, he is reluctant to go in, but Big Boy pressures him into doing so. When they see Bertha, Big Boy insists on getting their clothes before they run away. Bobo follows him at first but then cautions him to leave the clothes because Bertha is standing near them. Big Boy does not, which exacerbates the situation, causing Bertha to scream and Jim to show up with a gun. Bobo saves Big Boy’s life by jumping on Jim’s back, but Big Boy doesn’t listen when Bobo tells him to run. Instead, he has a showdown with Jim that ends in Jim’s death.

After the encounter with Bertha and Jim, Bobo is sobbing and has to be led around by Big Boy, who never cries. Bobo wants to stay with him, but Big Boy sends him away, implicitly to his death. Bobo’s function as a foil is not necessarily to blame Big Boy for what happens but to show that there were alternative choices that might have led to different outcomes. Moreover, he highlights instances in which Big Boy could have opted for solidarity over self-interest or for nonviolence and nonconfrontation instead of violence and conflict. On the other hand, Big Boy does not instigate violence; he fights Jim in self-defense after Jim killed his two friends in cold blood. While Bobo embodies the possibilities of nonviolent resistance, the story does not imply that these tactics always work.

Buck and Lester round out the friend group. They sometimes side with Big Boy and sometimes side with Bobo, suggesting that they are surrogates for the Black community that could go either way. Both of them caution Big Boy against doing anything that might frighten Bertha, but Big Boy’s decision to ignore them leads to their deaths. When they are shot dead, one falls into the swimming hole and the other on Bertha’s toes, marking the two lethal infractions the boys have supposedly made—trespassing on a white man’s property and offending a white woman.

Old Man Harvey, Bertha, and Jim are the only named white characters in the story. Old Man Harvey never makes a physical appearance in the text, but his presence casts a shadow over the opening section. A white man who owns the land where the boys are swimming (which also has woods and a wide barbed wire perimeter), he presumably is well-off. When Big Boy’s father’s friends later hear the story, they recognize Jim and Bertha as Harvey’s son and soon-to-be daughter-in-law from reading about them in the newspaper, indicating that Harvey is a man of social standing.

Bertha is a flat character. Her chance appearance near the swimming hole in Section II catalyzes the carnage, but readers only see what the boys do: a wide-eyed woman with a hand clasped over her mouth. As with the boys, her specific physical features are not detailed. Instead, she is identified first and foremost as a “white woman” (29), suggesting it’s the only relevant detail in this situation. The reader later finds out that she is engaged to the landowner Harvey’s son. She is frightened when she sees the boys, which is understandable when she is alone and vulnerable in the woods with naked men approaching her. However, she seems unable to hear Big Boy when he tries to explain that they are just trying to get their clothes, and she neglects to say anything that might save the two surviving boys when Jim asks if she is alright. Her prejudices inform her responses to what might have been an innocent encounter, creating a threat where there was none.

Jim is Harvey’s son and is engaged to Bertha. He shoots Lester and Buck before the reader even sees him emerge out of the woods. His willingness to kill two kids without knowing the situation illustrates the white mentality that Black people are dangerous and less than human. Elder Peters later reveals that Jim is in the army, accounting for his sharpshooting skill. His being home is a matter of chance, like so many other circumstances in the story—he is on vacation from his regimen. Jim aims to protect Bertha from her imagined predators but is overpowered by Big Boy and Bobo fighting together. Jim appears “bewildered” to meet this resistance, eventually lunging at Big Boy, who has taken up Jim’s gun in self-defense.