a decision Squeaky will not be just looking after Raymond but truly "minding" him:he will be considered, in her mind, no longer merely running alongside "and shame on [him] if he can't keep up" (25). That is, without making it the obvious center of concern, indeed without even fully focusing on it, the story charts Squeaky's acceptance of Raymond.

This in itself constitutes a closer, more intimate and charged issue than might initially seem the case. In a detail which could be taken primarily as an admission of vulnerability on Squeaky's part, a rounding out, so to speak, of her character, she confides that her father is even faster than she is: "He can beat me to Amsterdam Avenue with me having a two fire-hydrant headstart and him running with his hands in his pockets and whistling. But that's private information" (24). Later, in Squeaky's description of Raymond's running, he has "his arms down to his side and the palms tucked up behind him" in "his very own style" (31); this is a style which contrasts with Squeaky's running, arms pumping up and down" (30), and is very much Raymond's "own," but it is also subtly reminiscent of the "private" image of Mr. Parker's relaxed arm racing prowess. Squeaky has always accepted her duty to mind Raymond, she has monitored him and even fought for him, but at the end of the story she ventures a step further: rather than simply knowing him as her brother, she accepts and acknowledges him as such—a child, like her, of the same father. She renders this explicitly when she declares him "my brother Raymond, a great runner in the family tradition" (32).

When Squeaky outlines her idea to make Raymond "her champion" she adds,

After all, with a little more study I can beat Cynthia and her phony self at the spelling bee. And if I bugged my mother, I could get piano lessons and become a star. And I have a big rep as the baddest thing around. And I've got a roomful of ribbons and medals and awards. But what has Raymond got to call his own? (32)

This constitutes both full consciousness of Raymond and a catalogue of the relativities of their relationship. There is a sense in which the whole tale works similarly: while in her own unmistakable voice it undoubtedly and overtly tells the reader much of Squeaky's life, including her insistence on her own identity and authenticity (especially in comparison, say, with Cynthia's "phony self), it is also, as its title indicates, the story of Raymond's run, Raymond's life.

Running, in fact, has an attested pedigree as a metaphor for life's passage, as in such semi-folk sayings as "life's race well run, life's work well done." Interestingly, this usage often includes an injunction to live the good life; thus Isaiah's prophesy that "they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength: they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary."³ Saint Paul, as might be expected, was fiercer: "let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us"⁴—a sentiment that the famous Victorian hymn "Fight the good fight" rendered into cliché: "run the straight race through God's good grace."

The May Day fifty-yard dash signals the childrens' situations precisely: as Squeaky zooms towards the tape, "flying past the other runners" (30), Raymond runs alongside, level with her, but literally "on the other side of the fence" (31). Just before Squeaky resolves to "retire as a runner and begin a whole new career as a coach with Raymond as [her] champion" (32). Raymond is imaged as "rattling the fence like a gorilla in a cage like in them gorilla movies" (31), and the reader intuits that Squeaky's determination is complex: she wants to bring him over the fence and into the race of life; she hopes to lay aside his impediments and grant him the good life; she also seeks to free him from his anthropoid but King-Kong-like status and enter him into the human race. Hence, too, the subliminal logic in the deft inclusion of the detail of the means by which Raphael Perez "always wins" the thirty-yard dash. "He wins before he even begins by psyching the other runners," Squeaky discloses, "telling them they're going to trip on their shoelaces, etc." (29). Raymond merely imitates his sister's performance—before the race, for instance, he bends down "with his fingers on the ground just like he knew what he was doing"—because, until the hope at the very end of the story, he has been "psyched," psyched out of his own authentic identity and out of the race altogether. This narrative of Raymond's "first run" and his climbing of the fence "nice and easy but very fast" (31) towards Squeaky is the story of a humanizing love; its double focus takes in both of its two protagonists.

Yet just as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—which, with its mischievous young narrator, is structured similarly—ends ambiguously, so "Raymond's Run" has its further ironies. When on the last page of the book Mark Twain's youthful protagonist tells the reader that he is going to "light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,"⁵ the reader knows that Huck's perspective, however fresh and truthful, is limited: even if he gets there "ahead," civilization, with all that it entails, will catch up with him. Bambara's young speaker's aspirations must be seen as likewise shot through with doubts—perhaps more so. It may be, for example, that "with a little more study" Squeaky could "beat Cynthia" at the spelling bee, but even after the hoped for piano lessons it would be a very chancy business for her to become, in line with her stated ambition, "a star." One of the most telling effects of present tense first person narratives is the creation of such ironies: the reader must always question the teller's version of things. Seen in this light, Squeaky's ambitions may all be wishful thinking. The reader knows, too, that Squeaky's blackness will also be made to militate against her in the world beyond Amsterdam Avenue. Thus, for her, this year's May Day fifty-yard dash could well prove not the initiation but the apex of her achievements, the climax of her life's run. And, of course, if this is so, Raymond will never be coached to become a champion. The present tense—which by definition precludes a known future—is relentless: the story tells of his "first run"—and it is his first and only run.

Then again, perhaps such a fraught perspective does not grant enough credence to Squeaky herself, especially to her voice. The first words of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, given to Benjy, include repeated references to fences: "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. . . . I went along the fence. . . . They [the golfers] went on, and I went along the fence . . . and we went along the fence . . . and I looked through the fence. . . . 'Here, caddie.' He hit . . . I held to the fence and watched them going away."⁶ Benjy, the idiot Compson brother, clings to the fence, moaning and weeping for his lost sister, Caddie, whose image has been invoked by the golfer's call for his caddie. That sister had truly "minded" Benjy, had been his monitor, refuge and source of warmth. Caddie, indeed, was the representation of love for each of her three brothers. But, in that she was granted no narration of her own, she was also, as at least one critic has put it, the "absent center" of the novel.⁷ In "Raymond's Run" by contrast, Squeaky is not only very much present for her brother, but possesses a powerful voice of her own. Squeaky's voice—as is so often the case with Bambara's protagonists—is notable for its vibrancy and verve. The idiosyncrasy and sheer insistence of Squeaky's voice impinges on, even hustles, the reader in a triumphant exhibition of will. Interestingly, that will is expressed most explicitly in Squeaky's description of her usual pre-race "dream":

Every time, just before I take off in a race, I always feel like I'm in a dream, the kind of dream you have when you're sick with fever and feel all hot and weightless. I dream I'm flying over a sandy beach in the early morning sun, kissing the leaves of the trees as I fly by. And there's always the smell of apples, just like in the country when I was little and used to think I was a choo-choo train, running through the fields of corn and chugging up the hill to the orchard. And all the time I'm dreaming this, I get lighter and lighter until I'm flying over the beach again, getting blown through the sky like a feather that weights nothing at all. But once I spread my fingers in the dirt and crouch over the Get on Your Mark, the dream goes and I am solid again and am telling myself, Squeaky you must win, you must win, you are the fastest thing in the world, you can even beat your father up Amsterdam if you really try. And then I feel my weight coming back just behind my knees then down to my feet then into the earth and the pistol shot explodes in my blood and I am off and weightless again, flying past the other runners. (30)

This fleeting vision takes in much. In terms of space, the evocation here of beach and country gently reminds the reader of Squeaky's actual situation, one in which she may lie on her back, "looking up at the sky," but can only try "to pretend" she is "in the country." Because, as she sees, "even grass in the city feels hard as sidewalk, as there's just no pretending you are anywhere but in a 'concrete jungle'" (29). (The notion of the "concrete jungle," which she has heard her grandfather use, further energizes the image of Raymond's entrapment in terms of "them gorilla movies.") Also, young as Squeaky is, the dream is reminiscent of a more innocent time (perhaps primordially so, with its edenic apples) of "choo-choo" trains and cornfields—before, that is, she took over the particularly heavy responsibility for Raymond from an older brother and before, in general, she became conscious of the burdens of humanity. And here, as it is in the verse of Isaiah quoted earlier ("they shall mount up with wings as eagles"), flying is an exalted form of running in which, as Saint Paul phrased it, "every weight" is laid aside. Indeed, she can "kiss the leaves of the trees" as she soars by. But if flying constitutes a glorified version of running, running itself serves Squeaky, "a little girl with skinny arms and a squeaky voice"—and may well serve damaged Raymond—as the most practical form of exaltation. And, when celebrated, tongued—embodied—in that thrusting, vital voice of Squeaky's, running becomes its own exultation.

Notes

¹ Toni Cade Bambara, "Raymond's Run," from Gorilla, My Love (London, 1984); (a photoprinting of the first American edition, New York, 1972) 23-32. Subsequent page references appear parenthetically in the text.

² See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961); Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, 1978); and Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Oxford, 1980).

³ Isaiah, XL, 31.

⁴ Epistle to the Hebrews, XII, 1.

⁵ Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884; Harmondsworth, 1966) 369.

⁶ William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929; Harmondsworth, 1964) 11.

⁷ See Carey Wall, "The Sound and the Fury: The Emotional Center," Midwest Quarterly 11 (1970):371-87.