Jaimie Character Analysis

Jaimie is one of Elwood’s peers at Nickel Academy. A boy of Mexican descent, Jaimie looks light-skinned in most contexts but dark-skinned when he has been working outside. For this reason, the staff at Nickel has a hard time deciding whether he should live in the school’s white dorms or its black dorms. Superintendent Spencer, for his part, wants Jaimie to live with the black boys, but Director Hardee moves him to live with the white boys whenever he sees him on the black campus. When Desmond finds a strange bottle of what seems to be horse medicine, he, Jaimie, Elwood, and Turner fantasize about slipping it into the drink of various staff members at the annual Christmas banquet. And though the other boys aren’t particularly serious about this plan, Jaimie fixates on the idea of giving the medicine to Earl, though he won’t say why, exactly, he has such a vendetta against the man. Nonetheless, he hatches a plan to put the medicine in Earl’s drink at the staff’s holiday luncheon—which is exactly what he ends up doing, though he never admits it to his friends. In a strange way, this earns him Turner’s respect, since Turner admires people who are willing to stick to their lies even when those lies are obvious. Although Earl gets very sick, Jaimie doesn’t get caught or punished for the incident.