Slave on the Block

The Boy on the Block is Anne Carraway’s “slave picture,” which she intends to capture “in full the soul and sorrow” (Paragraph 30) of Black people and for which Luther serves as a model. Her painting symbolizes the Carraways’ insistence on seeing Black people and culture as primitive.

Anne’s insistence on painting Luther in the nude (despite his discomfort) shows that she sees Black people as objects that serve as material for her artistic practice. Anne fetishizes Luther’s dark skin and physical traits, meaning that she treats him as an object for her own enjoyment rather than as a full person with his own desires and personality.

Anne has ready access both to a modern Black man—in Luther—and to modern Black culture—in the Harlem club she frequents—but chooses instead to set the painting in a New Orleans slave market, far distant in time and place from New York during the midst of the Harlem Renaissance. Keeping Black people and their culture firmly in the past is a strategy that allows her to preserve her sense of cultural superiority. At the end of the story, the painting is unfinished, symbolizing that her patronizing attitude toward Luther and Black culture are immovable roadblocks to full interracial understanding.