Paperboy

Paperboy takes place in 1959 in Memphis, Tennessee. This was a contentious time and place to live in politically, positioned in the Southern United States at the inception of the civil rights movement. The enforced racial segregation of Jim Crow laws was still in place at this time, which the novel deals with explicitly in the scenes with Mam and Victor, particularly when they ride the bus. Within the novel, Victor assumes the role of reader-surrogate, questioning and interrogating the “fairness” of Jim Crow laws. As Victor says, regarding the Jim Crow laws about bussing, “I know a kid is supposed to respect grown-ups who make the rules and also respect God who knows how everything is supposed to work but I couldn’t get over the feeling that neither one of them was doing a very good job” (140). Victor empathizes with the civil rights movement not just because of Mam but also because of his own identity as someone with a speech disorder. He is subjugated because of how his speech disorder positions him due to prevalent social hierarchies, so he recognizes that Black people also struggle to be recognized by white people. Victor understands what it feels like to be rejected due to something outside of your own control, and part of his arc throughout the novel is realizing the differences in treatment between white people and Black people in his part of the South—which, at the end, includes his repulsion at his mother’s anti-integration ideology.