John Coffey, and the use of Intellectual Disabilities to Challenge the ‘Black Buck’ Stereotype in The Green Mile Summer Jade Dolan College

In Stephen King’s The Green Mile, King’s characterization of death row inmate John Coffey as someone living with an intellectual disability, which oftentimes throughout the novel has the effect of infantilizing Coffey, works to challenge readers’ introduction to Coffey. This introduction presents Coffey in a way which epitomizes the ‘black buck’ racial trope of a strong and sexually violent black man.

In The Green Mile, the first piece of information readers are given about John Coffey relates to the largeness of his stature. Paul Edgecombe, the novel’s retrospective narrator, describes his office space, recalling of the small door used to enter it ‘I had to duck my head when I went through, and John Coffey actually had to sit and scoot’.(1) This sentence marks the beginning of a continued emphasis placed on Coffey’s physicality throughout Green Mile, and when Edgecombe states ‘1932 was the year of John Coffey’ a few paragraphs later, it reads not only as a comment on the year that Coffey entered the fictional Cold Mountain Penitentiary, in the ‘deep south’ state of Louisiana, but as a commentary on a man whose physicality is so big it could encompass a whole year.(2) Shortly after, a longer, more vivid description of Coffey,...