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Chapter 3
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Cay, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Protection, Self-Sufficiency, and Maturity
Sight and Insight
Racism and Shared Humanity
Education vs. Experience
Summary
Analysis
As darkness falls, Timothy disassembles the shelter and gives Phillip back his clammy and salty clothes. They sit close to each other in the center of the raft as the stars come out, and Phillip considers the strangeness of finding himself, a white boy from Virginia, with a Black man like Timothy. When they accidentally touch, he recoils, remembering how Black and white people live separately in Virginia. Even in Willemstad, the capital of Curaçao, he felt less comfortable around the Black sailors than Henrik.
Although racism isn’t just an American phenomenon, the book does associate Phillip’s racist views with his childhood in Virginia. This points towards the segregation that persisted in the southern United States from the end of the Civil War through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s—and, unfortunately, beyond. And it suggests that this separation itself contributes to racism. It’s easier to vilify people you don’t have to interact with.
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Themes
Phillip asks Timothy about himself. He learns that Timothy lives on St. Thomas. This makes him, Phillip realizes, a fellow American citizen, since the United States controls the Virgin Islands. Timothy laughs and says he’s never thought about it this way. Timothy reveals that he doesn’t remember his parents. And despite Phillip’s insistent questions, Timothy swears he didn’t come from Africa. But the fact that he doesn’t know his own age just increases Phillip’s certainty that Timothy must have. Phillip tells Timothy that he himself is nearly 12 years old.
Timothy primarily has experiential knowledge born from a life of hard work at sea. The young, sheltered Phillip has book learning but little real-life experience. Neither, the book suggests, is necessarily better than the other; ideally, they complement each other. But, in the absence of Timothy’s life history, Phillip does invent a backstory for the man—a backstory that draws on racialized assumptions, showing that Phillip still has a long way to go before he’ll be able to see the real Timothy instead of his own racist stereotypes and biases.
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Timothy tells Phillip to get some sleep before their upcoming busy day. Phillip asks what they have to do tomorrow, and Timothy says, “Stay alive.” The pain in his head and the cold air keep Phillip from sleeping well. When he starts to shiver, Timothy comes closer for warmth. He smells different than Phillip’s parents, but after a while, Phillip stops minding. He appreciates the warmth of Timothy’s back.
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In the morning, Phillip’s head still hurts, and he feels dizzy when he sits up. Timothy gives him half a cup of water, two biscuits, and a little chocolate for breakfast. He confidently predicts that a ship will find them soon. Slowly, Phillip realizes that his vision is cloudy. When he mentions it, Timothy blames it on the bright sunlight. Phillip hopes he’s right. As the pain in his head gets worse, he crawls into the shelter, and Timothy wets a cloth with seawater and drapes it over the boy’s eyes. He assures Timothy that a crack on the head like this takes some time to recover from, but he sounds worried.
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Themes
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Phillip sleeps, then wakes again in total darkness. But Timothy says it’s only about 10 in the morning. Starting to panic, Phillip waves his hand in front of his face. He can’t see it at all. He screams, “I’m blind, I’m blind.” He can hear panic rising in Timothy’s voice, too, as the old man grabs his face and turns it towards the sun. He can feel its heat but can see nothing. Eventually Timothy tries to assure Phillip that the blindness is temporary; he remembers something similar happening to a sailor he knew in Barbados, and that man’s sight came back after a few days. But he doesn’t sound very certain.
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After a minute, the full weight of the situation hits Phillip: he’s lost at sea, stuck on a raft with a stranger, and he’s blind. He starts to crawl blindly around the raft, screaming for his mother and his father. He feels so frightened that it becomes hard to breathe. Eventually, his fear turns to anger, and he begins hitting Timothy. Timothy only says, very gently, “If dat will make you bettah, go ’ead.” Eventually, exhausted, Phillip falls back onto the bottom of the raft.
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