Maniac’s story is largely that of an orphan finding home—but it isn’t a tidy, decisive event. For Maniac, it’s a gradual, painful process in which he’s constantly aware of the losses he’s experienced in the past, and he fears facing them all over again. Maniac lost his parents in an accident when he was a little boy, then ran away from his aunt and uncle’s loveless household. When he winds up in the town of Two Mills around age 11, he experiences several different kinds of homes, being taken in by the Beale family, later taking shelter with a lonely old man named Grayson, and briefly living with the troubled McNabs. Through Maniac’s journey through various homes and his struggles with grief and homelessness, Spinelli argues that, while loss and pain cannot be avoided, they are worth facing in order to find genuine love and a sense of home.
Early in the story, Maniac perceives home in terms of his fear of lack, and his understanding of home is fragile as a result. When Maniac starts living with the Beale family, he doesn’t want them to use his nickname—bestowed by the strangers of Two Mills—in their house: “He told [Mrs. Beale] what he told everyone. ‘I'm Jeffrey. You know me.’ Because he was afraid of losing his name, and with it the only thing he had left from his mother and father. Mrs. Beale smiled. ‘Yeah, I know you all right. You'll be nothing but Jeffrey in here. But—’ she nodded to the door—‘out there, I don’t know.’ She was right, of course. Inside his house, a kid gets one name, but on the other side of the door, it's whatever the rest of the world wants to call him.” In one way, Maniac’s real name, Jeffrey, is a connection to his dead parents. In another way, the use of his name establishes him as part of the Beale household—known here in a way that he isn’t known by people outside. It’s this sense of being known that he most fears losing, perceiving that the outside world could take it away from him.
While on his own, Maniac never attends school because it reminds him of his homeless status. When asked why he’s not in school, “Maniac felt why more than he knew why. It had to do with homes and families and schools, and how a school seems sort of like a big home, but only a day home, because then it empties out; and you can't stay there at night because it's not really a home, […] [a place where] where you walk right in the front door without knocking, where everybody talks to each other and uses the same toaster.” It’s not that Maniac objects to school on principle, but that he doesn’t want to face the reality of leaving school and having nowhere else to go. Other kids can take things for granted like not knocking and using the same toaster, but Maniac doesn’t have these things, and he intuits that going to school will only make that lack feel starker to him. In other words, he still defines home in terms of what he doesn’t have.
In the middle part of the story, Maniac begins to find security in a makeshift home founded on mutual love. After running away from the Beales (fearing he’s brought the town’s hostility on their home), Maniac finds himself making a home with Grayson, an elderly, lonely zoo employee, who becomes concerned about the orphaned kid and lets him sleep in an unused storage room. Before long, the old man’s concern transforms the shabby environment: “Maniac had a toaster oven now, compliments of his whiskered friend. In fact, little by little, Grayson had brought him a lot of things: a chest of drawers for his clothes, a space heater, a two-foot refrigerator, hundreds of paper dishes and plastic utensils, blankets, a mat to sleep on [...] In time the place was homier than [Grayson’s] own room at the Y.” But it isn’t the accumulation of possessions that makes the little room feel like home. Rather, it’s the fact that Grayson cares about Maniac and quietly goes out of his way to demonstrate it—giving Maniac a place to feel tangibly cared for, which he’s lacked for most of his life.
This is further illustrated when Maniac and Grayson celebrate Thanksgiving together in their makeshift home. After a generous feast and dancing to Grayson’s polka records, Maniac finds some paint and carefully marks the outside of the park shelter with a 101, naming their residence “101 Band Shell Boulevard.” It’s not a real address, but that doesn’t matter—by labeling their shelter, Maniac makes the symbolic point that he and Grayson, through shared affection, hospitality, and celebration, have now made a home together.
Having now experienced others’ love, Maniac comes to a more mature understanding of home, even amid loss. After Grayson dies of old age a few days after Christmas, Maniac, grieving and feeling orphaned anew, eventually finds his way back to Two Mills. He goes to live with the McNabs, an impoverished, dysfunctional household filled with trash, beer, and pests. Maniac realizes that he might have physical shelter here, but he doesn’t have a home: “Maniac lies between the two brothers, on the bed. […] Unable to sleep, asking himself: What am I doing here? Remembering: Hester and Lester [Beale] on his lap, Grayson's hug, corn muffin in the toaster oven. Thinking: ‘Who’s the orphan here, anyway?’” In other words, since getting a taste of a real home—a place where affection and simple comforts are shared—Maniac realizes that he, though an orphan, has had something that the neglected McNab kids still don’t have.
Later, Maniac leaves the McNabs and wanders back to the zoo where he first met Grayson, taking shelter in the buffalo enclosure. Discouraged and imagining that there’s nothing left for him in Two Mills, he’s awakened by a furious Amanda Beale, the first friend he made in town. Ranting at his stubbornness, Amanda talks sense into Maniac: “I don't care if you sleep on the floor or the windowsill or what—but you are going to sleep there and not here. And you are going to sleep there tonight and tomorrow night and the night after that and the night after that and every night […] This is not your home!” Amanda confirms what Maniac had perceived earlier—that home is where people care about him, a place where he can take for granted that he’s welcome.
The story ends with Maniac quietly walking home with Amanda, finding her sisterly outburst comforting. “He was quite content to let Amanda do the talking, for he knew that behind her grumbling was all that he had ever wanted.” To discover home in this way, Maniac has had to face his worst fears—rejection, loneliness, and effectively being orphaned all over again. Ultimately, he comes to believe that while loss cannot be outrun, real love is worth the risk.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Love, Loss, and Home ThemeTracker
Love, Loss, and Home Quotes in Maniac Magee
“Where are you from? West End?”
“No.”
She stared at him, at the flap-soled sneakers. Back in those days the town was pretty much divided. The East End was blacks, the West End was whites. “I know you’re not from the East End. […] So where do you live?”
Jeffrey looked around. “I don’t know … maybe … here?”
[O]ne day […] Mrs. Beale said it: "You that Maniac?"
He told her what he told everyone. "I'm Jeffrey. You know me." Because he was afraid of losing his name, and with it the only thing he had left from his mother and father.
Mrs. Beale smiled. "Yeah, I know you all right. You'll be nothing but Jeffrey in here. But—” she nodded to the door —"out there, I don't know."
She was right, of course. Inside his house, a kid gets one name, but on the other side of the door, it's whatever the rest of the world wants to call him.
So he turned and started walking north on Hector, right down the middle of the street, right down the invisible chalk line that divided East End from West End. Cars beeped at him, drivers hollered, but he never flinched. The Cobras kept right along with him on their side of the street. So did a bunch of East Enders on their side. […] And then they were calling at each other, then yelling, then cursing. But nobody stepped off a curb, everybody kept moving north, an ugly, snarling black-and-white escort for the kid in the middle. And that's how it went. Between the curbs, smackdab down the center, Maniac Magee walked – not ran – right on out of town.
Maniac felt why more than he knew why. It had to do with homes and families and schools, and how a school seems sort of like a big home, but only a day home, because then it empties out; and you can't stay there at night because it's not really a home, and you could never use it as your address, because an address is where you stay at night, where you walk right in the front door without knocking, where everybody talks to each other and uses the same toaster. So all the other kids would be heading for their homes, their night homes, each of them, hundreds, flocking from school like birds from a tree, scattering across town, each breaking off to his or her own place, each knowing exactly where to land. School. Home. No, he was not going to have one without the other.
The old man gave himself up willingly to his exhaustion and drifted off like a lazy, sky-high fly ball. Something deep in his heart, unmeasured by his own consciousness, soared unburdened for the first time in thirty-seven years, since the time he had so disgraced himself before the Mud Hens' scout and named himself thereafter a failure. The blanket was there, but it was the boy's embrace that covered and warmed him.
Maniac drifted from hour to hour, day to day, alone with his memories, a stunned and solitary wanderer. He ate only to keep from starving, warmed his body only enough to keep it from freezing to death, ran only because there was no reason to stop. […]
He returned [to the band shell] only long enough to pick up a few things: a blanket, some nonperishable food, the glove, and as many books as he could squeeze into the old black satchel that had hauled Grayson's belongings around the Minor Leagues. Before he left for good, he got some paint and angrily brushed over the 101 on the door.
Dreams pursued memories, courted and danced and coupled with them and they became one, and the gaunt, beseeching phantoms that called to him had the rag-wrapped feet of Washington's regulars and the faces of his mother and father and Aunt Dot and Uncle Dan and the Beales and Earl Grayson. In that bedeviled army there would be no more recruits. No one else would orphan him.
Maniac lies between the two brothers, on the bed. Do cockroaches climb bedposts? Unable to sleep, asking himself: What am I doing here? Remembering: Hester and Lester on his lap, Grayson's hug, corn muffin in the toaster oven. Thinking: Who’s the orphan here, anyway?
It was a maddening, chaotic time for Maniac. Running in the mornings and reading in the afternoons gave him just enough stability to endure the zany nights at the McNabs'. When he asked himself why he didn't just drop it, drop them, the answer was never clear. […] In some vague way, to abandon the McNab boys would be to abandon something in himself. He couldn't shake the suspicion that deep inside Russell and Piper McNab, in the prayer-dark seed of their kidhoods, they were identical to Hester and Lester Beale. But they were spoiling, rotting from the outside in, like a pair of peaches in the sun. Soon, unless he, unless somebody did something, the rot would reach the pit.
"They didn't wanna go home. They stayed all day. My mother babyin' 'em, feedin' 'em. I tell her not to, she swats me away. Sometimes my mom ain't got no sense. She makes me play games with them. […] They're getting out the car, and know what they say to me – I’m in the car too - " He wagged his head. "They ask me to come in and play that game a theirs. Rebels. They, like, beg me. They say, 'Come on – pleeeeese – if you play with us, we'll let you be white.' You believe that?"
Maniac said nothing. He was quite content to let Amanda do the talking, for he knew that behind her grumbling was all that he had ever wanted. He knew that finally, truly, at long last, someone was calling him home.
