Kenny’s lazy eye—and the fact that it embarrasses him—symbolizes his struggle to develop self-confidence in the face of bullying and teasing. Many kids at school laugh at him because both his eyes don’t point in the same direction, making him extremely self-conscious about the way he looks. One day, though, Byron gives him some advice: if he stands sideways when he’s talking to people, they will only be able to see one of his eyes and, as a result, won’t know that his eyes don’t point in the same direction as each other. That Byron gives Kenny this advice suggests that he wants to help his brother feel better about himself, which is somewhat surprising, since Byron usually just makes fun of Kenny and pushes him around. In reality, though, he actually cares about his little brother, ultimately helping him devise a way to feel more confident about himself. When Kenny temporarily has a falling out with Rufus and Cody, he realizes that they’re the only people in school he feels comfortable looking at head-on—with everyone else, he stands sideways so they won’t see his lazy eye. In turn, his eye comes to represent the extent to which he’s comfortable being himself in front of others.
Kenny’s Lazy Eye Quotes in The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963
Finally Byron gave me some good advice. He noticed that when I talked to people I squinched my lazy eye kind of shut or that I’d put my hand on my face to cover it. I only did this ’cause it got hard to talk to someone when they were staring at your eye instead of listening to what you had to say.
“Look, man,” he told me, “if you don’t want people to look at your messed-up eye you just gotta do this.” Byron made me stand still and look straight ahead, then he stood on my side and told me to look at him. I turned my head to look. “Naw, man, keep your head straight and look at me sideways.”
Then he said something that made me get all funny and nervous inside, he said, “How come your eyes ain’t lookin’ in the same way?” I looked to see if maybe this was the start of some teasing but he looked like he really wanted to know. He wasn’t staring at me either, he was kind of looking down and kicking at the dirt with his raggedy shoes.
I couldn’t believe how sad I got. It’s funny how things could change so much and you wouldn’t notice. All of a sudden I started remembering how much I hated riding the bus, all of a sudden I started remembering how lunchtime under the swing set alone wasn’t very much fun, all of a sudden I started remembering that before Rufus came to Flint my only friend was the world’s biggest dinosaur thief, LJ Jones, all of a sudden I remembered that Rufus and Cody were the only two kids in the whole school (other than Byron and Joey) that I didn’t automatically look at sideways.
Kenny’s Lazy Eye Symbol Timeline in The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963
