Gabriel is a minister and in this sense stands for a Holy Father, a kind of personification of the Christian God. The character most connected to Roy is Gabriel.
However, the rockpile serves as a locus for violence and force. Roy’s fight on the rockpile is also a way of determining his ascendancy to his own position of authority, and Baldwin plays these scenes as though Roy takes power from the rockpile itself, both its centrality and its stability.
Roy is the oldest, and it is clear that he will one day take the place of authority from his father, Gabriel. The family in Baldwin’s story is a reverent Christian family the children have biblical names- John, Paul, Delilah-except Roy, the story’s central character. As in the fight that opens Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (which this resembles), the battles are vicious and bloody. The rockpile is at the center of the earth, but it is also a kind of hell, where children-the bad kids-go to fight for their place on the pile. The consistent themes in Baldwin’s fiction, including personal identity, racial struggle, and the role of religion in daily life are present in “The Rockpile.” The story was first published in Baldwin’s 1965 collection Going to Meet the Man.īaldwin centers the story on the rockpile, which represents stability and fixture but also a great temptation to the young protagonist of the story, Roy. Baldwin followed in the footsteps of his stepfather, a storefront preacher, and preached from age 14 to age 17 this experience and environment inform much of Baldwin’s work.
The themes and elements of “The Rockpile” all share similarities with James Baldwin’s own experiences as a young man in Harlem.
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