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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in New Boy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism, Ignorance, and Power
Status
Jealousy
Adolescent Romance and Gender Relations
Ageism and the Complexity of Children
Summary
Analysis
Dee arrives at school a minute before the bell. She waits in her class line near her teacher Mr. Brabant and notices a formally dressed Black boy near the playground merry-go-round. Dee, having attended the school since kindergarten and about to graduate to junior high, abruptly sees it as “shabby” through the new boy’s eyes. As the boy walks to the class lines, she is struck by his physical grace. She overhears Mr. Brabant make a crack about “hear[ing] drums” to another teacher Miss Lode, who asks where the boy is from. Mr. Brabant says Africa, perhaps Nigeria.
Dee immediately notes the race of the new boy on the playground, which indicates that Black students are rare at her school. Her sudden reappraisal of the school as “shabby,” in response to the new boy’s imagined judgment, foreshadows that the new boy’s racial and experiential differences from Dee may lead her to broaden her narrow perspective. Her appreciation of his physical grace, meanwhile, hints that she is immediately romantically attracted to him. Finally, Mr. Brabant’s joke about “hear[ing] drums” when a new, Black student from Africa appears betrays his anti-Black and anti-African prejudices.
Active
Themes
Miss Lode deferentially asks Mr. Brabant whether they should make an announcement encouraging the other students to be kind to the new boy. Mr. Brabant says the boy “doesn’t need special treatment just because he’s bl— a new boy.” Then, noticing Dee, Mr. Brabant orders her to round up the other girls jumping rope. Dee goes and tells her friend Mimi, one of the girls swinging the rope, that they need to go. Mimi stops swinging. Dee gathers up the jump ropes. Another girl, Blanca, notices the new boy and dramatically asks who he is. Dee says he’s from Nigeria. When Blanca exclaims at the idea of having a Black classmate, an embarrassed Dee shushes her.
Miss Lode’s suggestion that the teachers could encourage the other children to be kind to the new, Black student and Blanca’s shock at having a Black classmate emphasize that the elementary school is overwhelmingly White. These details also indicate that anti-Black racism is a foreseeable problem at the school, such that the other students may mistreat him due to his racial difference.
Active
Themes
Dee joins the line for Mr. Brabant’s class behind the new boy. When Blanca loudly dares Dee to touch him, Dee angrily tells Blanca to be quiet. Staring at the back of the new boy’s head, Dee notices that he has a “beautifully shaped” skull. Though she lives in Washington D.C., her experience of Black people is limited to catching sight of them downtown or seeing them on TV at Mimi’s—not at her own house, where her mother would forbid it. When Mr. Brabant assigns Dee to show the new boy around, other students exchange racist whispers.
Active
Themes
When Dee spots a Black woman watching them, the new boy explains that his mother is worried about him starting a new school—though he’s attended four schools in the past six years. Dee, hoping to show that she’s in the know, asks the new boy whether he’s from Nigeria. Politely, the new boy says he’s from Ghana. Dee, embarrassed, tries again to show she knows things and asks whether his mother is wearing a dashiki. The new boy explains that men wear dashikis—his mother is wearing kente cloth.
Active
Themes
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The new boy offers to carry the jump ropes for Dee. Though at first she demurs, she hands them over. She asks his name, and he tells her it’s Osei. When at first Dee has trouble pronouncing it, Osei says she call just call him O. Dee refuses, sounding out his whole name. When he asks her name, she says it's Daniela but people call her Dee. Realizing that they both have letters for names, the two laugh together.
Active
Themes
Ian, the “most calculating” boy in school, spots Osei as soon as Osei steps onto the playground, which Ian considers “his territory.” Though Ian always tries to twist situations to benefit himself, he sometimes makes mistakes. In a flashback to several days prior, he convinces Miss Lode to let him bring the American flag inside before it gets caught in a storm, even though the girls in Mr. Brabant’s class usually take care of the flag. He asks Mimi to help him. After he lowers the flag, he’s folding it with Mimi when he uses it to yank her in and kiss her. Though at first she winces, she starts to kiss back, and Iain realized she has kissed before.
When Ian and Mimi finish kissing, he accuses her of having kissed several boys and tells her that if they start dating, she won’t be allowed to look at those boys. After she agrees to date him, he insists that she allow him to kiss her with tongue. Then he shows her how to use the flag rope to swing freely through the air. When swinging through the air clearly fills her with joy, Ian smiles at her and kisses her again. By the time they get back to class, the flag has gotten wet. Ian tries to convince Miss Lode to give him more permanent responsibility for the flag, but she insists on another student taking the flag to Mr. Brabant’s class.
Back on the morning of Osei’s arrival, Ian extorts a Hot Wheels car from another boy and stomps it to pieces when the other boy insults him in protest. Then he walks up to Osei and tells him where to line up. When Osei thanks him confidently and walks to the line, Ian becomes deeply angry. After Osei leaves, Ian’s minion Rod creeps up and says the school has become a “shithole.” Rod swears a lot, but Ian never does, because his father used to hit him with a belt for cursing. Rod calls Ian his friend, but Ian thinks of Rod as a “tool.” When Rod complains that Osei is talking to Dee, whom Rod wants to date, Ian sees Osei and Dee laughing together, decides he doesn’t like it, and plans to do something about it.
Active
Themes
That same morning, Mimi is swinging the jump rope for girls playing Double Dutch while watching the playground. She sees Ian bullying fourth graders near the merry-go-round and wonders whether she actually wants to date him, though she liked swinging on the flagpole rope. And she sees Osei standing still while other children stare at him. When Dee comes over to tell Mimi and the other girls to stop jumping rope and line up, Mimi—who has premonitions—already knows that Dee will end up entranced by Osei. From her own class line, she watches Dee and Osei talk. When Osei and Dee laugh together, Mimi notices Ian’s furious grimace, decides she definitely can’t date him anymore, and wonders how she can break up with him with minimum conflict.
Active
Themes
That same morning before school, Osei surveys the playground for a potential “ally,” ideally another Black child, but anyone who isn’t White will do. However, he sees only White kids—and remembers how, in any case, other non-White students at his previous schools would sometimes avoid him to keep from spending what little social capital they had on him. Osei, in transitioning from school to school, has learned to hide his feelings and act in politic ways, just like his diplomat father—though he keeps this comparison to himself, since his father doesn’t ask about Osei’s time at school. Yet when he first sees Dee in line, she feels different and new: she is “beautiful,” with brown rather than blue eyes, and her braids smell wonderful, like Herbal Essence shampoo.
It also seems to Osei that Dee, who has been kind and generous with him, has “soul.” As they walk to the classroom, Osei realizes he is willing to ask for her help with a minor practical matter. He asks whether she has a pencil case. When she is confused, he shows her the ostentatiously girly pink strawberry pencil case that his mother insisted he take to school when he couldn’t find his. He explains that the strawberry pencil case used to belong to his sister Sisi, who is now in high school and no longer uses the case.
Active
Themes
To himself, Osei thinks about how Sisi used to help him handle the racial bullying they both experienced in elementary school, but once she graduated into junior high, she stopped showing interest in him. Then, after she entered high school while they were living in New York, she got even stranger. First, she dumped her White school friends and began hanging out with and speaking like Black American kids. Then she dropped the American accent, played up her Ghanaian accent, started wearing kente cloth, and grew an Afro. She also started deceiving their parents about where she went. Once, Osei trailed her to Central Park and found her hanging out with other Black teenagers dressed in kente cloth or dashikis, greeting and parting from one another with Black Power salutes.
Active
Themes
Dee and Osei enter Mr. Brabant’s class and sit down at adjacent desks. When Mr. Brabant aggressively asks Osei whether he has the right school supplies, Dee sneakily slides Osei her own Snoopy pencil case. Osei shows Mr. Brabant the case. Across the room, Blanca gasps ostentatiously, clearly having recognized the case as Dee’s. Mr. Brabant, who does not recognize Dee’s pencil case, begins roll call. Meanwhile, Osei gives Dee the strawberry pencil case. Dee suggests they trade, the strawberry case for her Snoopy case. When Osei says that’s not necessary, Dee says she wants to. They trade cases, and though Osei feels sad to give away something that belonged to Sisi, he likes how Dee carefully touches the case and smiles at him.
