What Brings Joy?
Within the context of the title, this theme might specifically be phrased as what brings black boys joy, but the whole point of the exercise is to excise such limitations. The things that bring the black boys joy in this collection of short stories by multiple authors have no natural limitations upon them. They could just as easily be transferred over to a book title “White Girl Joy” or “Asian Boy Joy” or “Kid Joy” or any of the variables one can create. What brings joy to these black boys? Cooking, fantasizing about superhero powers, soccer, skateboarding and above else joy arrives in the act of learning and excelling at something.
Father Figures
The collection as a whole pushes back against the conventional misassumption that being young, black and male is synonymous with growing up without a father figure or positive male role model. Not all the father figures in the stories are necessarily fathers, but doubtlessly there will be many people who never even care to pick up the book who would be shocked at the number of biological fathers represented. The joy of having an established bond with a dad—whether biological giver or life or non-biological stand-in—ironically is pushed to the fore as a theme precisely because such relationships are not presented as unique or out of the ordinary. Again, one could take thematic meat of these stories and tweak the details of the lives lived so that could be repurposed to fit a collection about the joys of boy representing the cultural grouping of your choice.
Folks are Folks
At its core, the stories in this books about black boys and the things that bring them joy becomes an affirmation of Scout’s observation in To Kill a Mockingbird that folks are just folks. Black boys look to the very same things that boys of any other color look toward to bring them happiness. The conditions of existence that determines society’s view of any specific ethnic grouping are external to the inherent humanity connecting us all. A black boy in an inner city ghetto environment may be face substantially different circumstances than a white boy in an affluent Southern California suburb, but the joy of pushing themselves to the limitation of physics on a skateboard is absolutely interchangeable. There is no difference in the actual playing out of the activities which result in the onset of joy here regardless of the living conditions and social milieu surrounding them. Folks are folks and judgment based on the pigment of skin is can never change that fundamental truth of humanity.
