Call Me Charley and Charley Starts from Scratch by Jesse Jackson

First published:Call Me Charley, 1945, illustrated; Charley Starts from Scratch, 1958.

Type of work: Domestic realism

Themes: Race and ethnicity, coming-of-age, and friendship

Time of work: The 1940’s

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: Arlington Heights, Ohio; Atlantic City, New Jersey

Principal Characters:

Call Me Charley

• Charley Moss, a twelve-year-old black student recently enrolled in Arlington Heights Junior High
• Mrs. Moss, his anxious mother, who wants him to stay out of trouble and get a good education
• Ed Moss, Charley’s bitter father, who believes that school is not appropriate for blacks
• Tom Hamilton, a white boy Charley’s age, who becomes his best friend
• George Reed, also white and Charley’s age, who resents Charley and becomes his rival
• Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton, Tom’s parents, open-minded, friendly, and understanding
• Miss King, the drama teacher, who reluctantly gives Charley a part in the school play

Charley Starts from Scratch

• Charley Moss, now eighteen, a high school graduate and Olympic track hopeful, eager to get a job and improve his time in the quarter-mile dash
• T. Y. Bailey, a black man Charley’s age, an aspiring artist, who befriends Charley in Atlantic City
• Specs, a white Mississippian who works with Charley and helps him train for the quarter-mile competition
• Mr. Sprigs, Charley’s boss at the ice-cream restaurant
• “Butch” O’Rourke, an arrogant white boy who costs Charley his job and nearly sabotages the Olympic trial
• Judy Ann, Charley’s girlfriend in Ohio, from whom Charley is anxious to hide his difficulties

The Story

The premise of Call Me Charley is a frequent one in adolescent literature: The new kid on the block or in the school must prove himself or herself in order to be accepted by peers. In this novel the premise is further complicated because the central character is black. Charley Moss is the first black student to enroll in an exclusively white neighborhood school. He discovers that there is no easy or simple way to be a racial pioneer. Yet the effort is not futile either. Charley Moss’s impact on Arlington Heights is subtle rather than dramatic. Arlington’s impact on Charley is just the opposite.

The opening scene epitomizes Charley’s situation. As he delivers newspapers for the first time in a white neighborhood, Charley meets Tom. Immediately admiring Charley for being responsible and independent enough to run a paper route, Tom is spontaneously friendly. Tom’s neighbor George reacts with bigotry, calling Charley “Sambo.” Charley insists on being called by his name; he is ready to fight the bully, though he immediately realizes that confrontation may endanger his job. The intervention of a sensible grown-up prevents a fight.

During the school year, Charley finds that his peers are easier to deal with than adults. Though some middle-school students treat him coolly with racial stereotypes, most are able to overcome their prejudices as Charley shows himself to be a “regular guy.” As soon as he has run an after-school gauntlet of paddlers, his peers decide he has proved himself, and he fits in without further ado. He also becomes a member of the neighborhood Tiger Club, sharing the boys’ activities, practical jokes, and silly rituals. For them, Charley’s black skin stops being an issue.

Some Arlington adults need more time to adjust to Charley. When he enters the school, the principal warns Charley that he must keep up his grades or face banishment to the inferior school in the Bottoms, the nearby ghetto. When Miss King casts the annual school play, she ignores Charley, who sits quietly but persistently through tryouts and rehearsals.

A design contest proves an unexpected but decisive turning point. Tom and Charley enter a scale model of the new municipal pool hoping to win a prize of free passes. When their entry wins, Tom gets a pass, but Charley is given ten dollars instead by the pool manager, who will not let a black boy swim. Tom and Charley go swimming in a quarry instead; when Charley pretends that he can swim and almost drowns, Tom rescues him. Tom is angry, however, that Charley does not speak up: about his fear of swimming, about the pool pass, about the school play. Stung by Tom’s accusations, Charley decides to work and forget school. He accepts his father’s view that only menial jobs lie in his future and rejects his mother’s hope that education is a path to opportunity. Charley stays home from school.

Yet he is missed. He is now one of the gang to his peers; rumors even fly that he must be dead. Tom’s parents discover Charley’s predicament and decide to intervene. When they raise the issue of Charley’s exclusion to the school board, Miss King is forced to back down. On short notice, Charley handles a small part with aplomb. As the novel ends, he renews his determination to insist upon respect—as he did with George Reed—and fight institutional prejudice.

As Charley Starts from Scratch opens, the protagonist is six years older and facing the first summer after high school graduation. Still determined to be educated, Charley wants work to earn money for college. Believing he has a job on a boat from Philadelphia, he leaves Arlington Heights. What he discovers is that he faces anew in the adult world similar but more intense opposition than confronted him when he entered junior high.

The title skillfully condenses three issues that dominate the novel. One reference of “scratch” is to the line where runners await the starter’s pistol. Charley became a track star in high school and now has ambitions of trying out for the Olympic team in August. To be ready, Charley must keep his body in shape and his status as an amateur. Neither is easy: He is without a coach or a track on which to practice, and a carnival owner tempts Charley with a regular income if he will race against a horse.

A second meaning of the title refers to the colloquial term for money. Though Charley leaves home with some pocket money, he loses his wallet and ticket on the train. The conductors throw him off penniless, and he must hitchhike eastward. Eventually he arrives in Philadelphia—like Ben Franklin—with only a few coins from odd jobs on which to live. Even in tourist-filled Atlantic City, Charley struggles to scratch out a living.

Finally the title refers to starting without the support of family or friends. He leaves home against his parents’ wishes. He leaves behind Tom and other friends. He departs with a letter of recommendation in hand, but it concerns a job that is nonexistent when he arrives. He must start from scratch with new friends. Fortunately he finds two, one white, one black. Spec helps him keep in running shape for the Olympic trials, and T. Y. Bailey helps him learn the tricks of steady employment in Atlantic City. Inevitably, a black man in a predominantly white world stirs somebody’s animosity: Butch O’Rourke takes a disliking to Charley, gets him fired from a restaurant job, and threatens to sabotage his running in the Olympic trials. Unlike George Reed in the previous book, Bailey is consciously antagonistic. Charley, though, has come too far and has grown too self-disciplined to give up.

Though he starts from scratch, Charley makes it to the finish line. In the last chapter Charley wins his qualifying race despite rain and mud. He returns to work at the job from which he was unfairly fired in time to earn enough money for school, and he works cheerfully alongside the friends he has won and the foe he has conquered.

Context

Call Me Charley and Charley Starts from Scratch are the first and third novels in a trilogy. The middle book is Anchor Man (1947), which tells the story of Charley Moss’s senior year in high school. The novel interweaves three plots. One concerns the efforts of Charley, Tom, and two other friends to resurrect and keep running an old jalopy called Chugalug. The second concerns the half-mile relay team on which Charley runs the anchor leg. The third concerns the integration of Arlington High School, when the black school in nearby—but worlds apart—Blackberry Patch burns down. As the plots intersect, Charley faces for the first time the classic dilemma of multiracial America: to choose his friends on the basis of skin color or to choose them on the basis of character. When Charley meets the alienated Duke, he instinctively understands his peer’s anger with white society. Yet Duke’s seemingly self-destructive response of confrontation offends Charley’s sense that interracial friendship is possible and interracial cooperation ultimately more successful in creating change.

Jackson later wrote two novels about a young black woman growing up in the racially divided city in the 1960’s: Tessie (1968) and Tessie Keeps Her Cool (1970). He quickly followed them with a novel about a young black adolescent named Stonewall Jackson, whose adventures are chronicled in The Sickest Don’t Always Die the Quickest (1971) and The Fourteenth Cadillac (1972). These four novels differ significantly from the Charley Moss trilogy in style. There, Jackson has his characters speak with more attention to the rhythms, vocabulary, and accent of black English. The prose is denser than the standard written English of the Charley Moss books and reads more slowly, but it is much richer, in both sound effects and shades of meaning.