Paperboy

Paperboy by American author Vince Vawter explores themes of The Acceleration of the Civil Rights Movement, The Treatment of People With Speech Disorders, and Independence in Childhood through its singular voice. Published in 2013, Paperboy was a Newbery Medal Honor Book in 2014. Vawter, who worked for more than 40 years in the newspaper business, wrote Paperboy as a lightly fictionalized version of his own childhood, which contributes to the text’s authenticity.

This guide references the Kindle edition of the book.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss racism, violence, alcoholism, and self-harm.

Plot Summary

In 1959 Memphis, Victor Vollmer is an 11-year-old boy with a stutter. Victor has few friends due to his difficulty communicating, and the two people he is closest to are a boy nicknamed Rat, who is a teammate of Victor’s, and his nanny, Miss Nellie Avant, whom Victor calls Mam. Victor is white, and Mam is Black; a significant portion of the novel concerns Victor’s growing understanding of the oppression Black Americans faced in the 1950s. On the final day of sixth grade, Victor throws a baseball that hits Rat in the mouth and injures him. In order to recover, Rat goes to visit his cousins in the country, and Victor, out of guilt, decides to take over Rat’s paper route for the summer. Victor is nervous about the job due to his stutter, but he decides to commit to it because of Mam’s encouragement.

On his first day on the route, Victor encounters Mrs. Worthington, a woman who fascinates him. Due to his stutter, Mrs. Worthington mishears Victor and believes that he called her a slur. Later that night, Victor writes and delivers a letter of apology to Mrs. Worthington since he feels guilty over the mistake. Victor also gives a local junkman named Ara T. his yellow-handled knife to sharpen.

The next day, Victor meets another person on his paper route: a middle-aged man named Mr. Spiro. Victor immediately likes Mr. Spiro since he is one of the only adults who doesn’t treat Victor differently due to his speech impediment. Victor, trying to pronounce a difficult word, collapses due to a lack of oxygen. After he recovers, Mr. Spiro sends him home, giving him a piece of a dollar bill with the word “student” written on it.

Victor is lectured by Mam about talking to Ara T., whom she despises and does not trust. Victor, who still wants his knife back, approaches Ara T. later that day; however, Ara T. refuses to give it back to him unless he can say the word “knife” without stuttering. Unable to do so, Victor is forced to sever the ties holding the bundles of newspapers together with the edge of a rusty can. That day, Victor runs into a mysterious man named Charles, who answers Mrs. Worthington’s door. Victor is suspicious of Charles, who claims to be Mrs. Worthington’s cousin. Later, Victor overhears Mrs. Worthington crying from within the house.

A week later, Victor runs into Mr. Spiro. The two of them talk about the differences between fiction and nonfiction, as well as Victor’s stutter and how he might learn to overcome it. When Victor leaves, Mr. Spiro hands him another dollar piece, this time with the word “servant” written on it. Victor heads to Mrs. Worthington’s house and hears an argument from inside. He knocks on the door, but the door is answered by Mr. Worthington instead of Mrs. Worthington or Charles. Mr. Worthington tells Victor to leave without paying him. Victor overhears the sound of smashing glass as he flees. At home that night, Victor admits to Mam that Ara T. has stolen his knife. To Victor’s surprise, Mam doesn’t get mad at him but rather tells him not to worry about the knife.

The next week, Victor approaches Mrs. Worthington’s house to get the money she owes him, but he tells her to wait until Friday because she seems sad. That night, Victor and his parents go to an Italian restaurant with some family friends. All night, Victor feels excluded because of his stutter. Feeling embarrassed, Victor forces himself to eat and vomits on the table. The family leaves the restaurant, and that night, Victor overhears his mother discussing his stutter, saying that it was a surprise since no one in her family has one. Victor is surprised that his father doesn’t say anything about his own family. The next day, Victor goes through his mother’s closet and finds his birth certificate, which lists his father as “unknown.”

When Victor next sees Mr. Spiro, he’s invited inside his home, and even though it’s against newspaper regulations, he decides to go inside. He finds a home stacked from floor to ceiling with books. After a long discussion about a variety of intellectual topics, Victor admits that he’s written a poem before. He types it out for Mr. Spiro, and the two of them recite the poem together, which helps Victor with his stutter. Mr. Spiro gives him the third dollar piece, which reads “seller.”

At home, Victor encounters Mam, who has injuries on her face. Mam won’t explain what happened, but Victor suspects Ara T. That night is Victor’s collection run. Mrs. Worthington invites Victor in to give him the money, and unlike in Mr. Spiro’s house, Victor feels uncomfortable inside Mrs. Worthington’s home. She asks him a number of personal questions and then, after getting increasingly drunk, falls asleep on the couch. Victor ends up paying for Mrs. Worthington’s newspaper subscription out of his own saved money.

The next day, Victor sees Ara T. in an alley, which means that his shack is unguarded. However, Victor is unable to find his knife, and he runs into Ara T. on his way out. In the morning, Victor decides that he should just purchase a new knife instead of continuing to try to deal with Ara T. He also realizes that he left his newspaper bags in the alley near Ara T.’s shack. However, when he goes to get them, the bags are gone. Victor decides that he needs to get new bags from Rat’s mother. Later, Victor accompanies Mam on the bus, and he asks why Mam can ride in the front when she’s with him but has to ride in the back when she’s alone. Mam explains that she just follows the rules, but Victor becomes angry thinking about how she’s treated differently due to her skin color.

Victor and Mam decide to go to the zoo together since Mam can’t go on her own due to Jim Crow laws. At the zoo, a boy calls Mam a racial slur, which upsets Victor, but Mam tells him that the word doesn’t mean anything to her. Victor wants to get a photo with Mam, but the rules say that Black caretakers cannot take photos with white children. Victor tells a sob story to the photographer and plays up his stutter, and the man decides to take their picture. Heading home, Victor is proud of his cleverness.

On Thursday, Victor goes to retrieve his newspaper bundle, but an older boy named Willie has stolen it. Willie pushes Victor over and bikes off, and Victor replaces the papers that Willie stole with newspapers purchased from a dispenser. Finishing his route, Victor decides that he won’t let Willie bully him anymore. The following day is the final day before Victor hands the paper route back to Rat. At the delivery truck, Victor confronts Willie, but Willie doesn’t fight back, and Victor is proud of how much his confidence has improved over the summer. When he gets to Mr. Spiro’s house, he finds out that Mr. Spiro is leaving for a long trip. Victor decides to return to Mr. Spiro’s house later to ask about his birth certificate. Later, he finds Mrs. Worthington’s house empty and $5 taped to the front door, along with a note asking to cancel the newspaper.

Arriving home that night, Victor discovers that his room has been ransacked and all of his money stolen. Mam suspects that Ara T. climbed up a ladder leaning against the side of the house and entered through the window. She leaves to confront him, telling Victor to stay at Rat’s house until she’s done. Victor disobeys her and follows her to Ara T.’s shack. However, the shack is empty, and the two of them take a bus to a section of town where Mam thinks Ara T. might be.

Finding Ara T.’s cart outside a bar, Mam tells Victor to hide inside of it, and she goes inside the bar. Victor is unable to breathe in the cart, and he leaves it and follows Mam inside the bar, where he discovers his stolen things on a table and Ara T. holding Mam to the wall by her neck. Ara T. threatens Mam by telling her that he’ll kill her just like he killed her brother. Victor hurls a bottle at Ara T., who drops Mam and comes after him. Mam stabs Ara T. in the arm to defend Victor. Mam and Victor gather his stolen things and head home.

The next morning, Mam tells Victor how she knows Ara T. They had all grown up together in Mississippi. One day, Mam’s brother was found deceased between Ara T.’s and Mam’s houses, and ever since, her family has suspected Ara T. of killing him. However, they were never able to get justice for him because her people “[don’t] depend on white people and their police” (200). Mam also admits that Ara T. was the person who injured her face. Victor becomes upset, but Mam tells him that he did a good job saving her by throwing the bottle.

That morning, before Victor wakes up, Mr. Spiro stops by the house and drops off an envelope. Opening it, Victor finds the fourth and final dollar piece, which has the word “seeker” written on it. Mr. Spiro has also left a note promising to visit Victor following his vacation. Victor accompanies the recently returned Rat on his paper route. Rat asks to toss a ball around with Victor, but Victor says no and heads home. At home, he realizes that it doesn’t matter who his birth father is; all that matters is that this is the man who raised him, which makes him his father.

Victor enters the seventh grade. He still hangs out with Rat but also with another kid that he met on his route. Rat’s mother comes over to Victor’s house and has a discussion with Victor’s mother about integration, which both ladies are against. Rat’s mother says that she might pull Rat out of school so that he can attend a white-only school if integration happens, and Victor wonders why anyone would want that. On the first day of class, Victor stutters while introducing himself to the class, but compared to before the summer, he feels no embarrassment. Victor reflects on why he writes down his thoughts and what he’s learned about life from the paper route.