63 pages • 2 hours read
Theodore TaylorThe Cay
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1969A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
Historical Context: The Caribbean in World War II
Curaçao is a small island located in the Caribbean Sea. During World War II, it was known as the Territory of Curaçao and was under Dutch control. Today, it is a mostly independent country that retains ties to the Netherlands. Curaçao was an important asset to the Allied powers during the war because it was home to petroleum refineries that produced airplane fuel. Other nearby islands like Aruba fulfilled a similar function. As a small island with limited resources to sustain its population, Curaçao depended on imports for some types of food and, crucially, fresh water.
Beginning in February 1942, German forces started attacking oil refineries and oil tankers in and around both Aruba and Curaçao; disrupting the Allies’ oil supply could have put the Axis powers in a highly advantageous position as the war moved forward. On February 16, a German U-boat torpedoed and sank the oil tanker Rafaela in the Willemstad harbor in Curaçao. The same night, U-boats bombed the petroleum refinery but did limited damage. These attacks did not have any casualties, but they did threaten the safety of Curaçao’s residents and put pressure on the Allied powers to secure their resources. Families and businesses were required to put up blackout curtains to reduce the odds that they would be targeted during an air attack. Further attacks took place in late April, again with no casualties.
Theodore Taylor took some artistic license with his depiction of the impact of the war on Curaçao. The Empire Tern, the ship that Phillip and his father watch explode in the Curaçao harbor, was a real ship, but it survived the war and was only scrapped in 1953. The Hato, the ship Phillip and his mother take to get to America, is fictional. While there was once a ship by that name, it was Japanese and was destroyed in an air raid in 1944. The name is relevant, however: Hato Airport is located near Willemstad. It was a major base for flights in the Caribbean during World War II. Phillip’s mother and father argue over just how dangerous it is to live in Curaçao. Their disagreement has a strong historical basis: While no civilians in Curaçao were killed during the bombardments, 1942 was a precarious time for many living on Caribbean islands.
Sociocultural Context: The Cay and Racism Controversy
Published in 1969, The Cay quickly became a classic work of children’s literature. Phillip’s coming-of-age story and the historical context of Curaçao during World War II made the text a popular choice for many school districts when they were designing their curricula. The most significant element of the book for many teachers was its anti-racist message. Taylor was open about his hope that The Cay would help young readers, particularly young white readers, understand that racism is wrong. He wrote the book in the 1960s, during the US civil rights movement, when ideas about race and racism were changing fast. However, some of the ideas in the book that were considered progressive at the time are outdated now.
Despite Taylor’s goals for the book, some critics pointed out that the book was not entirely successful at moving away from racist stereotypes. Several times in the book, Phillip describes Timothy as ugly and uses racist physical descriptors for him. Timothy refers to Phillip exclusively as “young bahss [boss]” until Phillip explicitly asked to be referred to by name. The way that Timothy addresses Phillip upholds racist power dynamics by creating a master-slave relationship. A 1992 Los Angeles Times article described Timothy’s characterization as “servile” and “self-effacing” (McLellan, Dennis. “Laguna Beach Writer Finishes Sequel to His Controversial ‘Cay.’” The Los Angeles Times, 3 Jul. 1992). Another point critics note is Timothy’s dialogue, which is written phonetically. While that writing choice does provide texture to the story and to Timothy’s characterization, it also has an “othering” effect that makes Timothy’s speech sound like a stereotype or parody of Black Caribbean vernacular speech. White writers reproducing Black characters’ dialects phonetically has long been a politically contentious choice. For these reasons and more, some critics argue that, far from being an anti-racist text, The Cay pays lip service to anti-racism while upholding racist ideas.
One of these ideas is racial colorblindness. Phillip essentially comes to see Timothy as “neither white nor black” (71). Today, this is called “colorblind” racism: It is the belief that race should be overlooked entirely rather than understood as an important part of a person’s identity, culture, history, and experiences. Racial colorblindness has been advocated for at various points in US history to support the belief that race no longer has meaning or that focusing on race is counterproductive. Symbolically, Phillip’s blindness allows him to understand Timothy beyond the confines of race, another narrative element that connects to colorblind racism. Because of these aspects of the story, some Black students noted that the experience of studying the book in class was very uncomfortable; the above Los Angeles Times article also makes note of this phenomenon.
Some critics were vocal about their objections to the portrayals of race in The Cay almost immediately after it was published. In 1970, The Cay was awarded the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award. Four years later, when the film adaptation was released, the Council on Interracial Books for Children pointed out the racism in both the film and the original novel. As a result, organizers of the Jane Addams award stated that they felt that The Cay should not have received the award in the first place. Taylor returned the award voluntarily but expressed his concern about the discussion that his book was generating. In both the 1990s and the 2020s, some schools elected to remove The Cay from their curricula (though not from their libraries) upon consideration of the controversy and the impact of the book on Black students. The Cay is still taught in schools across the country today.
Literary Context: Survival Story Genre
The Cay is a quintessential survival story. In a survival narrative, characters find themselves in an unusually challenging situation, where they are forced to use skill and ingenuity to fight for their lives. While Surviving Against the Odds has been a major theme in a great deal of world literature for centuries, the survival genre is often thought to have properly begun with Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, in which the eponymous protagonist spends 28 years stranded on a tropical island. While survival stories can take place in any geographic environment, tropical islands remain a common setting for these tales. The Cay inherits many tropes from Robinson Crusoe, its setting being one of them. Robinson Crusoe also features a white protagonist who befriends a Black Caribbean man, but Defoe’s text makes no gesture toward anti-racism. Several other famous texts follow a similar narrative pattern, including Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). In that book, a young white boy named Huck Finn travels down the Mississippi River with a formerly enslaved Black man named Jim. Like Phillip, Huck unlearns some of the racist ideas he grew up with.
Survival stories are common in children’s literature, partly because they provide an excellent backdrop for Coming of Age narratives. When children and adolescents face difficult survival situations, they often have to mature very quickly. By taking responsibility for their own lives, they grow and change to become more adult. Phillip’s journey in The Cay of learning to survive independently and learning to function while blind help him gain a clearer understanding of his place in the world.
Not all survival stories that feature children include positive growth narratives, however. British author William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) sees a group of boys resort to violence and fractured politics during their stay on a tropical island. This novel is a political allegory for the dangers of mob rule and paints a pessimistic picture of human nature as lawless and immoral.
In a survival story, protagonists usually begin in a comfortable, familiar location where their challenges are limited. They almost never expect to be put into a dangerous situation. Usually, characters end up stranded because of some kind of accident like a shipwreck or a plane crash. They then have to survive using only the resources available to them. While tropical islands have many natural resources, they also contain dangers like predatory animals and extreme weather. These advantages and disadvantages are effective sources of narrative tension. Characters usually have to resign themselves to life on the island until they can be rescued by ship or by plane. This pattern holds true for The Cay; Timothy and Phillip have ample access to food and water, but they also face dangerous storms.
In the Western literary canon, tropical islands are also sites of exoticism, representing the antithesis of Western civilization. Western authors associate tropical islands with emotion and irrationality rather than reason, chaos rather than order, and nature rather than technology. For this reason, the tools and mindset with which the white male protagonists arrive on the island are useless, and they must leave their comfort zones to adapt to their new environment. Such stories emphasize themes of man versus nature and man versus himself—with the gendered implications these themes imply. While strong female protagonists like Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games (2008) are popular in today’s young adult and middle grade survival literature, from the 18th century through most of the 20th, survival narratives were dominated by white male writers and protagonists.
