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Boy on a Train
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Black Ball, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race, Nation, and Belonging
Racial Violence and Injustice
Politics and Solidarity
Childhood and Innocence
Summary
Analysis
This story’s narrator, a young Black man, explains that he and his friends are spending their days as bums, jumping freight trains and “drifting” around the country, looking for work. But it’s the Great Depression, so they can’t find any. They just left Chicago, where railroad bulls (security guards) beat them up with loaded sticks (wooden sticks filled with lead). But they got off easy, with just minor head injuries. More often, the bulls bash in bums’ skulls, crush their hands under steel boots, or push them off moving trains. They don’t hesitate to kill Black bums in cold blood, and when they can’t, they always try to inflict as much pain as possible.
This story is based on the brief period during which Ralph Ellison jumped freight trains to travel from his home in Oklahoma City to his college in Alabama. It directly portrays the racist violence that only lurked in the background of “Boy on a Train,” as a vague threat. Yet its setting is the same: the railroad, which gave Americans the opportunity to migrate and pursue freedom in the first half of 20th century (just as the highway system has done since the 1960s). The narrator highlights how railroad bulls use far more violence than is necessary to just protect the trains—rather, they seem to enjoy hurting people as much as possible, especially when their victims are Black. Needless to say, this is a metaphor for American society as a whole, which Ellison views as largely built on the sadistic principle of inflicting as much pain and suffering on Black people as possible.
Themes
But sometimes, bums beat up the railroad bulls first. The bulls usually blame Black bums and retaliate against the nearest ones they can find. But white bums attack bulls, too—in fact, this story is about one: a white bum from Brooklyn named Hymie.
While riding atop a train one day, Hymie got sick to his stomach from his lunch—a makeshift stew he cooked in an old pot—and started vomiting. The narrator, who was riding inside the train, tried to get Hymie to come down. But Hymie refused.
Hymie’s unfortunate lunch foreshadows the brutality, gore, and suffering to come later in the story. At the same time, his friendship with the narrator shows how it’s entirely possible for Black and white people to build equal friendships. This is doubly true at the margins of ordinary social life—like on the freight trains, where everyone who rides is technically a criminal.
Themes
A few hours later, the narrator climbed up top to watch the sunset. He stood on the car next to Hymie, feeling the wind rush past him as the train rode into the setting sun and a flock of birds flew all around him. He and Hymie waved at each other, but it was too loud for them to talk. The narrator felt bad for Hymie and wished he could get some water. But his thoughts soon turned to his mother, whom he and his brother left two months ago to look for work.
In this scene, like when James looks out the window in “Boy on a Train,” the train’s motion and the surrounding scenery represent the narrator’s quest for freedom and a better future. Indeed, just like James, the narrator of this story has left home in search of economic opportunities and found himself responsible for his mother. (Readers might even speculate that this narrator is James, a decade or more later.)
Themes
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As night fell, the ride got bumpier and bumpier. Then, the narrator noticed a railroad bull crawling toward Hymie, who was asleep on his car. The narrator tried to scream, but it was too loud. The bull got to Hymie and started beating him with his loaded stick. Hymie jolted awake. The bull tried to throw Hymie off the train, then he climbed on his chest and started choking him. But Hymie pulled a knife out of his pocket, slashed the bull’s wrists, stabbed him in the throat, and pushed him off the train. The narrator felt warm blood spray him in the face.
The narrator becomes a spectator to senseless violence: he is powerless to stop Hymie’s confrontation with the bull, even as he watches every moment of it. Yet he describes this gruesome confrontation in a matter-of-fact tone that suggests that violence and death are normal, everyday occurrences on the railroad. Rather than just protecting the rails, the bull clearly makes a point of trying to harm Hymie as much as possible—and Hymie responds by killing the bull in self-defense. This is why, even though Hymie is white, his story still speaks volumes about the Jim Crow system: it shows how brutality is built into the law in the U.S., primarily as a way to maintain social hierarchies.
Themes
Hymie calmly tied his shirt to the side of the railcar like a rope and climbed down it. He dangled from it for a while, then he jumped off the train at the nearest town. The narrator wondered whether he would ever see Hymie again. Someone found the bull’s body by the tracks, and when the train arrived in Montgomery the next day, the narrator and his buddies “got the scare of [their] lives.” When the bums jumped off the train right before the railyard, two gun-wielding bulls caught them and made them line up. The narrator realized that “some black boy had to go.” But then, another train pulled out of the yard, and the bums jumped on it and rode far, far away.
Hymie’s deadly confrontation with the bull contrasts with his totally casual, nonchalant escape into the night. Like the narrator’s matter-of-fact tone, this contrast only demonstrates that brutal violence is totally normal to people who ride the rails. And the story’s conclusion, in which the other bulls insist on lynching a Black bum to avenge Hymie’s actions, once again shows how the brunt of this violence falls on Black people. This is the deeper message in “Hymie’s Bull”: under Jim Crow, Black people inevitably suffer the worst of society’s cruelty simply because they are at the bottom of the racial hierarchy.
Themes
