David Kippen is a doctoral candidate in world literature with an emphasis on the literature of southern Africa. In the following essay, Kippen explores the implications of a moral reading of Gaines's "The Sky is Gray."

Though Gaines's works invite a wide number of readings, almost all current criticism can be divided into one of two broad categories: race-centered criticism, concerned primarily with the story's instructive value about such things as prejudice and injustice, and structural criticism, which describes the parts of the story and their relation to the whole in formal, rather than thematic, terms. Not surprisingly, the lion's share of critiques fall into the first camp, and even the structural readings include didactic (instructive) digressions in almost every case. Such readings all share a serious, albeit unintentional, flaw; they suggest that one must understand all actions and most events as direct or indirect consequences of...