Response to "The Sky is Gray"

This story was unexpectedly good. When I first started reading it I assumed it was going to be another bad southern story like "Tomorrow," but this one grabbed my attention when I realized it was a story within a story. The boy's character is adorable, especially when he tells the little girl on the bus that he doesn't love her and he was really looking past her the whole time. I liked being inside his head instead of his mom's because he had such a simple outlook on all of the things he and his mom went through just to get his tooth pulled. It was so sweet for him to think about his mother in the ways that he did, like how he didn't say the train wasn't coming because he knew his mom disliked obvious comments, how he always said he wasn't cold or hungry because he didn't want his mom to spend her money on him or baby him, how he wanted to get her a red coat, and especially how often he thought about how much he loved her. I thought it was interesting how the author used religion as a metaphor (i think) for race and how black people should question the conventions in society otherwise they will never move forward to freedom. Even though the use of Christianity in this story was really a way to bring up the issue of race, I found the end to be similar to the Christian ideology of being a good samaratin like Jesus when he stopped to help a poor man on the side of the road. To me, I felt like the old woman was feeding, clothing and helping this mother and child like the Bible encourages us to do for those who are in need. Since we didn't talk about that at all in class, I might be overanalyzing it or my religion is a bias. In any case, I liked this story because it actually makes you think when you read it instead of just passively reading it.