Using Food to Symbolize Race in Maniac Magee

How Food is Employed as a Metaphor for Race

Apr 13, 2009

Jerry Spinelli's use of food in Maniac Magee goes beyond the survival of the protagonist, Jeffrey "Maniac" Magee. Spinelli employs the language of food to construct race.

Spinelli uses food as a metaphor for racial stereotypes and misconceptions. Oftentimes, those misconceptions begin with skin color. Maniac doesn’t describe people with the colors found in a box of basic Crayola crayons. He demonstrates the inaccuracy of labels by comparing the “people colors” of the East End to the colors he sees in food:

“ … he couldn’t figure why these East Enders called themselves black. He kept looking and looking, and the colors he found were gingersnap and light fudge and dark fudge and acorn and butter rum and cinnamon and burnt orange. But never licorice, which, to him, was real black” (Spinelli 51).

The Relationship Between Skin Color and Food

Manic also loved the “warm brown” of Mrs. Beale’s thumb and how it looked under the creamy white icing she allowed Maniac to lick while she was frosting his favorite cake (Spinelli 51-2). In the book The Essential Guide to Children’s Books and Their Creators (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), Spinelli explains how, as a child, he related people’s skin color with food. Spinelli describes a trip to see Dr. Winters – his mother’s dentist – when he was a few years old:

“His skin was Hershey Bar brown. I must have been acting jealous of the attention my mother was getting, because … (he) gave me my very own check-up. It’s one of the first moments I remember about my life: Dr. Winters’s brown fingers inside my mouth” (Silvey 620).

Nearly 50 years later, Spinelli’s memory of that experience landed in Maniac Magee.

The Significance of the Icing Ritual

The closeness Maniac shares with Mrs. Beale demonstrates he’s part of the family, and he identifies that “creamy white icing” and the “warm brown of Mrs. Beale’s thumb” with home and acceptance. When the old black man tells him to go home, Maniac notices the brown finger pointed at him with no icing on it, and he recognizes the difference between love and hate (Spinelli 60).

The icing ritual is a powerful reminder of home for Maniac. When he’s with Grayson, Maniac eats butterscotch icing and wishes he were licking it from Mrs. Beale’s finger and not his own. Maniac wants to love and be loved, and he associates Mrs. Beale’s love with her cooking and all its colors.

The icing is a metaphor for family and acceptance of Maniac, but it also demonstrates that life is more enjoyable when races and families work together, not separately. The dichotomy of color presented in the ritual Maniac shares with Mrs. Beale demonstrates how different they are on the outside, yet they can happily coexist as a family.

The Meaning Behind the Metaphors

In these examples, Spinelli uses food colors to convey that labels often misrepresent what they describe. Just as everyone needs food to survive, Spinelli shows the importance of recognizing everyone’s uniqueness and resisting stereotypes in order to coexist.

The copyright of the article Using Food to Symbolize Race in Maniac Magee in Children’s Books is owned by Tricia Masenthin. Permission to republish Using Food to Symbolize Race in Maniac Magee in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.