The Wish Book
In one panel, the young John Lewis is pictured flipping through the Sears-Roebuck Catalog. This was a huge volume that used to be mailed out every year containing descriptions alongside photos of the many products which could be ordered by mail from what was for much of the 20th century the biggest consumer retail company in the USA. As he flips through the catalog, a narration bubble reads “we called that catalog our wish book.” In fact, the annual Christmas catalog from Sears was actually called The Wish Book. The metaphor in this case is particularly poignant because the panel shows the young boy sitting on a bare wooden floor with two rolls of toilet paper nearby within the context of his just having built a homemade incubator for the eggs laid by the family’s chickens. For kids like Lewis, the catalog was a wish book not just metaphorically like with many kids, but literally as well.
Chicken Naming
The only aspect of his family’s farm that John is really drawn to are the chickens. He develops a close bond with them as his care for the hens and their eggs is gradually infused with a sense of pride, accomplishment, and ownership. Over a complex series of images and text, he informs the reader that nobody else on the farm could tell one chicken from another and that he knew each individual chicken by appearance and personality. The moment he admits to giving some of the chickens names is the point at which it becomes almost impossible not to interpret this extended section as metaphorical allegory. In this allegory, his father is the plantation owners, the chickens are slaves, and John is the overseer. Only in this fantasy re-enactment of the relations of production using slave labor, the overseer is benevolent to the point of treating his property with the dignity of seeing them as individuals and knowing them by name, appearance, and personality.
Chicken Preaching
In the aftermath of the specific part of the chicken story about developing a special bond with them comes a completely different section in which they still play a part. This second part explaining his special relationship to chickens focuses on his determination to become a minister. The chickens serve as his only congregation, and he practices delivering a powerful sermon to them. That the chickens are stand-ins for the future human congregations he wants to preach to lends another level of allegory supporting them as a metaphor for humanity.
Chicken Funerals
The placement of the chickens within the evolution of John’s childhood dream to become a minister takes on added dimension when they become dead chickens. While admitting that many of the birds were destined to wind up on dinner plates, others actually survive long enough to die of natural causes. These chickens are deemed worthy by John of the same respect at their death as human beings. And so he would not only conduct an elaborately ritualized funeral ceremony but also preside over the ceremony by delivering a eulogy. With this imagery, the message behind this allegorical construction of chickens as metaphorical creatures representing humanity becomes clearer. That message being that if chickens are worthy of dignity and respect for the qualities they bring to our lives, then surely every single human is deserving of the same.
Country Boy in the City
Another extended section of the book details the first time John ever travels outside of the rural South where he grew up. It is the summer of 1951, and he is accompanying his Uncle Otis who is revealed to be experienced and knowing in the delicate craft of being a Black man crossing state borders between the North and the South. Finally, after seventeen hours of driving in a car packed with food because there were no restaurants that would serve them throughout the southern states, they arrive in the hustling and bustling metropolis of Buffalo, NY, already home to more than a half a million people. His metaphorical description says it all: “Buffalo…was an otherworldly experience.” It seems a very appropriate metaphor for describing the amazement produced upon learning that his relatives have white neighbors not just to their immediate right, but also to their immediate left. Buffalo truly seems like a completely different planet to the young boy who takes his first ride on an escalator, has his first experience with a counter inside a store selling nothing but candy, and goes to a store to buy the chicken they would eat for dinner rather than raising it himself.
