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Intro
In Part One of the novel, Carson McCullers introduces five characters—all of whom live in an unnamed mill town in the Deep South, and each of whom is profoundly lonely in his or her own way. The year is 1938. John Singer, a deaf and mute man, has recently been separated from his companion of 10 years, Spiros Antonapoulos—who is also deaf and mute—after the irritable, quarrelsome Antonapoulos is placed in an insane asylum by his cousin Charlie Parker. Singer mourns being left alone in a town where no one truly understands him. He moves into a boarding house run by the Kelly family and begins frequenting the all-night establishment the New York Café. Biff Brannon, the proprietor of the café, is trapped in an unsatisfying marriage to a woman named Alice. Brannon has a soft spot for strangers, “freaks,” and misfits, and draws Alice’s ire when he lets a belligerent, drunken wanderer, Jake Blount, stay and drink at the café on credit for 12 days. Brannon is perturbed by Blount’s radical political views and violence when intoxicated, but together he and Singer conspire to feed, clothe, and shelter the clearly ailing stranger. Mick Kelly, a 13-year-old tomboy whose parents run the town boarding house, feels lonely and bored all the time. A middle child in a family of six children, Mick harbors dreams of being a famous composer and pianist and is constantly writing music in her head. Mick is fascinated with John Singer, and often visits him in his room upstairs. Meanwhile, Jake Blount eventually secures a job at an outdoor attraction, the Sunny Dixie Show, working as a carousel operator. Blount is a devoted socialist who longs to travel the South and expose the evils of capitalism to the workers he meets. Blount can hardly stay sober long enough, however, to get through the day—let alone to begin a revolution.
Doctor Benedict Mady Copeland, a black doctor who idolizes the writings of Baruch Spinoza and Karl Marx, is a lonely man who dreams of galvanizing his people toward revolution. When Copeland’s daughter, Portia, who works in the kitchen of the Kelly boarding house, pays him a visit, Copeland’s great struggle becomes clear. He wants to inspire his community to refuse jobs in which they must serve white people, to push back against the racism and injustice in their town, and to take pride in their identity and their struggle. Copeland sees Portia as complacent. Though she claims to genuinely love her job; her employers’ children; and life with her husband, Highboy, and her brother Willie, Copeland still wants better for Portia. Over the course of their conversation, it becomes clear that Portia is the sole link between Copeland and the rest of his estranged family, and yet he constantly tests her patience by inciting ideological quarrels with her. At the end of the night, after a brief reconciliation with Willie and Highboy after they come to collect Portia, Copeland is left alone with his books. He reflects privately on his recent meeting with the first decent white man he’s ever known, a deaf man who lit his cigarette for him in the rain one night.
As the weeks go by, Singer finds himself hosting Mick, Brannon, Blount, and Copeland in his room at the boarding house as they visit him individually. Singer is amused by their thoughts and words, moved by their struggles, and yet never fully able to connect with any of them since he cannot express himself in return. He visits Antonapoulos at the asylum, but finds his friend closed-off and changed.
In Part Two, as the seasons go by, each of the main characters’ lives, hopes, dreams, and traumas become intertwined. In the early fall, Mick hosts a prom party for her new high school classmates, reconnecting with her next-door neighbor Harry Minowitz, a Jewish boy whose passionate hatred of fascism intrigues Mick. Throughout the party Mick enjoys feeling fancy and grown-up—but at the end of the night, she puts on her old shorts and goes for a late-night walk through the neighborhood to listen for the sounds of other people’s radios. Biff’s wife, Alice, dies suddenly, leaving Biff in a stunned kind of grief with only his sister-in-law Lucile Wilson and his niece Baby Wilson to comfort him. Copeland’s son Willie is charged with assault after a brawl at a dance hall and sent to the state penitentiary. The shocking, emotional incident prompts Copeland to attend a family reunion held by his late wife’s father, whom his children call Grandpapa, and to reconnect with his estranged sons Karl Marx (who is ashamed of his name and goes by “Buddy”) and Hamilton. Blount wishes he could spread the message of socialism throughout the town, and gets an idea about how to do so when he meets a traveling evangelist, Simms, who scrawls Bible verses and religious messages on the walls of local buildings and businesses. Later, Mick’s younger brother Bubber gets their cash-strapped family into even deeper financial trouble after he accidentally shoots Baby Wilson with his friend Spareribs’s rifle. Lucile demands repayment from the family for Baby’s hospital bills, and though Bubber tries to run away to Atlanta, his family catches him and brings him home. After the incident, Bubber becomes sullen and withdrawn and insists upon going by his given name, George.
On Christmas Day, Copeland hosts a party at his home and announces a young man named Lancy Davis as the winner of an essay contest on the subject of “How [to] Better the Position of the Negro Race in Society.” At the party, Copeland gives a rousing speech to his many guests, trying to inspire them to embody the generous, community-oriented values of Marxism and to rebel against the laborious jobs which keep them in servitude to their white oppressors. The speech is met with raucous cheers, but Copeland is still uncertain of whether he’s truly gotten through to his people. Meanwhile, Singer visits Antonapoulos at the asylum and finds that his friend has been moved to the infirmary after a bout of nephritis. Singer brings Antonapoulos gifts and food, but Antonapoulos is as disinterested and cold as ever. Brannon continues mourning his wife, so distracted by his grief that he barely notices the café steadily losing money. He longs to give his love to someone and to parent a child, and soon develops a kind of obsession with Mick Kelly and, to a lesser extent, the ailing Baby. As Mick and Harry grow closer, her fascination with Singer deepens, too, and she struggles to transcribe the constant symphonies playing in her head onto paper.
One cold February morning, in the midst of a pneumonia outbreak which worsens Copeland’s dormant tuberculosis, Portia brings Copeland terrible news: a young man named Buster Johnson has just been released from the penitentiary and has brought with him the horrible story of his treatment there. Buster and Willie were tortured for months by white guards at the prison—as a result, Buster has lost one leg, and Willie has lost both of his feet. Copeland, incensed, goes to the courthouse to demand to speak with the local judge, but a group of white policemen beat him and lock him up for the night.
As the cold breaks and the warm March temperatures descend, Mick and Harry go on a picnic to distract themselves from their grief and anxiety over rumors of Willie Copeland’s torture and news of the Nazis’ increasing control over Europe. While at a creek in a quiet forest, the two have sex. Harry asks Mick to marry him, but she tells him she plans to never marry. Harry then runs away from home, instructing Mick to respond to a letter he’ll send her in two months’ time letting him know she’s “all right.” Mick realizes that she is an adult now, whether she wants to be or not. Jake Blount hears that Willie has returned from prison and goes over to Copeland’s house to visit with the boy and ask him to tell his story throughout town in hopes of galvanizing people against the racist, capitalist status quo. During a discussion with Copeland, however, the drunken and agitated Blount is unable to agree with the doctor’s belief that it is racism, not capitalism, that is the greater evil. The two men insult each other, the sickly Copeland has a fit, and Jake runs away in fear.
Over the summer, Mick’s sister Hazel tells her about a job opening at Woolworth’s department store. Mick’s parents initially discourage her from taking the job and urge her to stay in school, but after Mick hears how much the job pays, she decides to go in for an interview, knowing the money will help her family. On the morning of the interview, Mick rushes to Singer’s room and asks him if taking the job is the right thing to do. Singer, bewildered, nods in response. Mick goes to Woolworth’s, where she is hired on the spot. Weeks later, Singer, perturbed by his recent strange inability to understand what people are saying to him—including Mick on the morning she frantically asked him about the job at Woolworth’s—decides to go visit Antonapoulos once again. When he arrives at the asylum, however, after a 12-hour train ride, he is informed that Antonapoulos is dead. Singer wanders through the town where the asylum is located and meets a trio of deaf and mute men, but he is in such pain over Antonapoulos’s death that he’s unable to connect with them. Singer takes the train back to the mill town, where he retrieves a gun from the jewelry store where he works, takes it up to his room at the boarding house, and commits suicide.
Part Three of the novel takes place over the course of a single day some weeks after Singer’s death: August 21st, 1939. McCullers shows where each of the four main characters—all devastated by the loss of Singer—have wound up. Copeland is being moved against his will out to Grandpapa’s farm so that he can recuperate from his illness. Blount narrowly escapes a violent race riot at Sunny Dixie—in which Lancy Davis is murdered, and which the papers report was inspired by “labor agitation.” Knowing he will soon be a wanted man for his involvement in the riot, Blount skips town, unsure of where he’s going but determined to remain in the South. Mick finds herself constantly physically and mentally exhausted due to the dull but emotionally demanding nature of her work at Woolworth’s. As she eats a sundae and drinks a beer at the New York Café, she regrets taking the job, and wonders if she’ll ever be able to get back into the “inside room” of solitude in her own mind and compose her music again—or whether all her years of dreaming have been for nothing. At the end of a long, empty night at the café, Brannon stands alone at the cash register and wonders what possessed Singer to kill himself. He stews in his loneliness and longs for someone to be able to give his love to. For a moment, Brannon believes he can comprehend the nature of human loneliness, struggle, and valor—but the moment of clarity is gone as quickly as it came, and Biff is left alone to wait for dawn.
