"Master Harold" … and the Boys Summary & Analysis

The play opens with the two black servants, Sam and Willie, at ease. They have a rare opportunity to speak freely at work because the rain has kept away the customers and they are alone. Is it a coincidence that the two men can enjoy such freedom only when their white bosses or white customers aren’t around? Dance is presented, from the very beginning, as means of escaping life as it is.

It is important to note that, just because the play condemns racism, it does not portray its black characters unrealistically: they have flaws just like the whites in the play. Willie recreates racism’s oppressive power dynamic when he beats his dancing partner.

Sam is not just a great dancer in the literal sense that he can move well on the dance floor—he is a great dancer in the symbolic sense that dance takes throughout the play as well. He knows how to move gracefully in complex and often trying social situations, and is doing his part to try to make a world without collisions.

Hally’s unhappiness at his father’s potential return creates a sense of mystery and foreboding—why is their relationship so strained? What is Hally dreading? This begins to set up the play’s main conflict.

Already Hally’s latent and, at least partially, unconscious racism begins to show. Does Hally not trust Sam because Sam only overheard his mother on the phone, because he doesn’t want what Sam has told him to be true, or because Sam is black? This ambiguity (all the options are possible, and not mutually exclusive) also begins to build tension among the characters.

Sam quickly demonstrates his thirst for learning and education, while Hally’s caricature of his teacher shows that Hally has taken his learning for granted. The beatings described are grossly unequal. Hally’s attempt to censor Sam’s description of the very real racist oppression happening in South Africa clues us in to his moral blindness. Hally, it’s clear, is morally lazy.

Hally, though lazy, is not unintelligent. But he is vain. Despite his poor performance in school he wants to imagine himself as a great man. Does he take it for granted that he is or will be great in part because he is white? Hally seems to think that societal problems can only be solved by solitary great figures. He doesn’t consider the possibility that mutual cooperation and smaller efforts by ordinary people might be what’s required.

Hally’s refusing to acknowledge Napoleon as a “man of magnitude” because the section on him in his history book is a couple pages long is rather comical. It provides some shading to Hally’s arrogance. Meanwhile, we see Sam continue to pursue his education in his own, subtle way.

From the way Sam poses questions to Hally, it seems that Sam is taking upon himself the role of Hally’s teacher. Hally’s ignorance, entitlement, and arrogance in telling a black man which white abolitionist—Lincoln or Wilberforce— he should prefer are so deftly woven into the story that it would be easy for the first time reader to miss their full weight. Its interesting that Sam doesn't believe in Darwin's theories as some have used those theories, under the name Social Darwinism, to argue that white economic and political power is a product of white racial superiority.

Hally is so cocksure, so blind to history, he thinks that the poetry of Shakespeare could and should be improved with a contemporary rendering. Hally’s atheism is pronounced, and it’s clear he is intolerant of other religious or spiritual beliefs. It seems odd, that of all the men the two mention, they agree on the greatness of Alexander Fleming. Perhaps there is an underlying statement being made about pragmatism. Penicillin, after all, has done direct good for millions of people since its discovery. Yet its notable that Hally sees their agreement as a product of him having educated Sam.

The precedent and history of the education and exchange between Hally and Sam is established in this section. Sam, in his late 30s in the time of the memory, knew nothing of his country’s basic geography. This is one of the many things his country has withheld from him by virtue of the color of his skin, and is a powerful metaphor for the way white men have separated black men from their own land in South Africa. As a child, apparently, Hally didn’t draw the racial distinctions he has come more and more to embrace through his adolescence.

This, and the other plays within the play, is a nod to the works of Shakespeare, whose genius Hally earlier questioned. Shakespeare’s plays frequently employed this play-within-a-play device. The checkers games establishes Hally and Sam as equally smart, and the moral tension of the story is therefore between the two of them.

One of the play’s main symbols, the kite, is introduced. Here we get the first half of the kite story, Hally’s version of the story, the half of the story that he could see from his vantage as a white person. Even as a child, when Sam and Willie were his main companions, Hally was keenly aware that the two men were of a different race and class than his own.

The kite takes over as a metaphor for transcending racial differences. After experiencing the elation of flight, Hally forgets his embarrassment and wants Sam to remain with him. Sam’s quietness (explicitly written in the stage directions) foreshadows that there is more to the story about the kite.

Hally is unable to explain why a white boy flying a kite with a black man is “strange”—instead, he complains that he has been dealt a poor hand in life. Of course, Hally doesn’t see that he has it better than both his crippled father and , in his society, any black man, just as he doesn’t see the true drama of the story of the kite.

In this section, Hally reveals the extent of his anxiety over seeing his father. He seems at once to be terrified of his father, too lazy to help with his care, embarrassed for him, and afraid of him. Once angry, Hally immediately lashes out at Sam and Willie, making himself feel better by asserting his mastery over them, barking orders and commands when before the three had been getting along like friends.

Sam, displaying his experience and wisdom, tries to get Hally to see the good aspects of what Hally sees as a terrible situation. Won’t Hally be able to positively influence his father, to help his father get better? Rather than recognize the truth in Sam’s words, Hally dismisses Sam, at least in part because Sam is black.

Among his many roles, Sam takes on the part of father figure or parent to Hally, trying both to get his mind off the “bad” news and to coax him through his schoolwork.

Sam dances as if to keep himself afloat above Hally’s rising temper. Having failed with Hally, he tries to spread his positivity to Willie, but Willie, also, persists with his bad attitude. Finally, Sam starts to get frustrated with his companions’ childish behavior. The idea that it’s Sam’s fault that Hilda left Willie is simply absurd, and yet the absurdity of Willie blaming Sam makes it clear that Hally blaming Sam is just as absurd.

Hally passes along the aggression he was subjected to at school by striking Willie. He resorts to violence to give himself a sense of control and make himself feel better, at the expense of his less powerful black friends. Then Hally comes up with the excuse that a customer might have seen the men dancing to justify and explain away his aggression. He eats ice cream and drinks a cool drink, oblivious to how doing so only displays his own hypocrisy.

As if he’s angry that Sam and Willie don’t share his dejection, Hally begins to begrudge them their one small pleasure, dance. Why should they be allowed to dance while he is miserable? Again, Hally reveals his own glib ignorance when he calls Sam ignorant for thinking that dance can be beautiful.

It is mind boggling that Hally can’t see that dance gives form to the motions of a body in space. To Sam, what is beautiful—what moves you as a person—is more important than what is art, which is a somewhat artificial designation made by society (and as the apartheid in South Arica shows, society’s dictates aren’t always good or just).

Sam is such a great story teller, so accomplished at creating environment and scene, that he soon has Hally hanging on his every word. Hally, meanwhile, doesn’t recognize that dance, despite the fact that none is going on before his eyes, has already entranced him. He is blind to the backhanded insults he is dealing Sam and Willie by refusing to acknowledge their art as art or their culture as culture.

Hally is more interested in arguing and showing off than the truth. He decides to write about the dance competition not because it perfectly fits the assignment or because he likes it, but because writing about black people will upset his teacher. Perhaps he even agrees with his English teacher’s racist views.

Sam continues to spread positivity and to empower his friends by giving Willie an opportunity to imagine himself in the final round. It is a rare moment of equality between the three characters, here, when Hally, because of his youth, and Sam and Willie, because of the way their exploited because of the color, don’t have the money even for a song on the jukebox.

One reason Hally might discourage Sam and Willie from dancing is simply that he knows less about it than they do. Hally dismisses, consciously or not, anything he knows less about than a black man as something not worth knowing. Sam articulates a metaphor about dance as the idealized expression of an ideal world.

For Sam, dreaming isn’t just an impractical kind of goofing off, it’s the first practical step toward making the world a better place to live. He is so convincing that Hally forgets his father and allows himself to get lost in the dream.

Just when Hally is beginning to see things from Sam’s perspective, he is interrupted. Hally still thinks dreaming is an impractical all or nothing activity, rather than part of a process. His conversation reveals some of the burdens involved with caring for his father, who demands, at least to Hally, a tremendous amount of physical and psychological care.

Hally’s abrupt shift in register when talking to his father reveals another side of him—perhaps he is more than just a spoiled brat, maybe he can overcome the prejudices he has been consciously and unconsciously adopting and grow up to be a decent man.

Sam tries to show Hally that to be a decent man, he will have to stop seeing the world as all or nothing, black and white. Yes, reality comes knocking on the door, but does this mean he should rip any bit of progress to shreds? Hally’s destructiveness continues when he smashes the brandy bottle. He is both channeling his own frustration and, perhaps futilely, trying to keep his father away from his harmful addiction. Now Hally has no empathy for cripples and hates broken things.

Hally’s arrogance—his refusal to see himself as wrong—probably more than any of his other traits, bleeds into racism. Hally relies on being “the boss” whenever Sam tells him something he doesn’t want to admit is true. Now Hally’s hypocrisy—and the full extent of his racism—begin to show in full force.

It is fine for Hally to insult and speak ill of his own father, but it is not OK with him if Sam speaks the truth. Hally sees the truth as an insult. Unable to tolerate the idea of being wrong, he submerges himself in a racism that holds that a black man can’t be right.

Rather than acknowledge Sam’s wisdom and gentle lesson in humility, Hally rushes to the defense of the father he had just been insulting. Not only is Hally’s father’s joke exceptionally racist—it hinges on an irrelevant, trivial pun. Hally and his father laugh, not because the joke is funny, but to revel in their sense of superiority. Sam, though humble, also knows when to take a stand.

Sam bears his oppression with so much dignity that, whenever he calls Hally Master Harold, it sounds like an insult rather than a term of respect. Willie sees the injustice of the situation clearly. He believes Hally should be hit, but also knows that the beating Sam would end up getting would be ten times worse.

Sam reminds Hally of who his father is and how he has been blind to the privileges he gets just for being white. Sam feels like a failure because he has been striving to educate Hally, to be a role model for him, and Hally has not even seen it. He has forgotten the most crucial elements of all of his most important lessons.

Hally’s racism started as something unconscious; if he wants to counteract it, Sam suggests, he will have to consciously work to undo it. Hally’s response could suggest either that he has taken a deaf ear to Sam’s lesson or, possibly, that he sees some of the truth in what Sam is saying and needs time to process, reflect, and grow.

Sam recognizes that he hasn’t been perfect as a role model, and takes the first step toward un-writing his own (albeit slight) hypocrisy by acknowledging that it exists. Sam wants to lead by example, not with words. As usual, he sees the events of the day as an opportunity to learn. Where Hally sees knowledge as something he is inherently entitled to, for Sam, learning is difficult, but good and necessary, work.

Willie’s resolution not to beat Hilda (and thereby not to pass along the oppression he’s subject to at the hands of white bosses) is an indication that small steps can be made in the right direction if we are willing to learn from what we see. Sam and Willie’s dance is a stunning instance of the beauty that results when the real comes together with the ideal, when dance and dream give form to the formless.