Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Maniac Magee, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Myth, Reality, and Heroism
Racism
Love, Loss, and Home
Human Dignity, Connection, and Community
Summary
Analysis
One hot August day, somebody opens the fire hydrant on a street corner, and soon the gushing water is filled with screaming, happy people. Maniac joyfully joins the crowd—until he starts noticing a single, thick voice calling a name over and over. The voice is saying “Whitey.” To Maniac’s surprise, he knows the voice is addressing him.
The scene of community happiness is harshly disrupted. The fact that it’s just one person shows how powerful a single discordant voice can be within a community. Though Maniac has seemed oblivious to racial dynamics, somehow he senses that he’s being singled out.
Themes
The voice tells Maniac, “You move on now, Whitey […] Time to go home now.” It’s an elderly man in slippers. When Maniac insists that he is home, the man says that Maniac needs to return to “his own kind,” and that white people just keep wanting more and more. Maniac figures that the man must be hard of hearing, and keeps loudly repeating that he lives at the Beales’ address. Hester and Lester yell at the man in Maniac’s defense. The old man keeps ranting to the crowd at large, until a woman drags him away.
The old man sees Maniac as a symbol of white people’s encroachments into black communities. Maniac can’t understand, because to him, the East End simply means home and community—hence repeating his address to the man.
Themes
Maniac stops sleeping well. He gets up even earlier and jogs around Two Mills. One day, at the end of a jog, Hester and Lester and Amanda run out and try to distract Maniac from approaching their house. When Maniac breaks away from them and looks at 728 Sycamore, he sees Mrs. Beale frantically scrubbing at graffiti which reads, “Fishbelly go home.”
The encounter with the old man is unsettling for Maniac, and he begins to sense that his adoptive community might not be permanent. The graffiti confirms this—and it rubs salt in the wound of his homeless past.
Themes
