63 pages • 2 hours read
Theodore TaylorThe Cay
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1969A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 8-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary
Timothy makes a hut out of driftwood and palm fronds while Phillip wonders what happened to his mother. Timothy then heads to the reef to catch langosta. Phillip, afraid of being left alone, asks to come with him, but Timothy refuses. Phillip takes this refusal as a sign that Timothy does not like him and is not to be trusted. When Timothy returns with three langosta, Phillip refuses to talk to him. Timothy reminds Phillip that on the island, “I’m all you got” (61). That night, Timothy seems to be very tired and in pain. When Phillip asks him his age again, he says he is over 70.
In the morning, Timothy builds a signal fire that can be lit at any time if an aircraft should pass overhead. The two of them also write “HELP” on the sand using rocks. Phillip has to write the letters in the sand so that Timothy can create the message. Phillip is shocked to realize that Timothy cannot read or write, and this knowledge makes Phillip feel superior to Timothy.
Chapter 9 Summary
That afternoon, Phillip and Timothy make ropes out of strong vines on the island. The ropes connect important areas of the camp, including the hut and the signal fire, so that Phillip can get around the cay independently. Timothy asks Phillip to help out more with the work of surviving on the island, but Phillip answers, “Timothy, I’m blind. I can’t see to work” (66). Timothy asks him to weave sleeping mats, which can be done relatively easily by feel. Again, Phillip refuses and tells Timothy to do the work instead. When Phillip lashes out in anger and insults him, Timothy slaps him in the face.
After a moment, Phillip realizes his mistake. He understands how much Timothy has done for him, including making the vine ropes so that he can get around. He starts to sense a change in himself though he cannot yet articulate it. Although there is no formal apology, Phillip does start weaving the sleeping mats and tells Timothy that he would like to be friends. He also asks Timothy to start using his first name instead of calling him “young bahss [boss].”
Chapter 10 Summary
After a week on the cay, there is heavy rainfall during the night, and Timothy and Phillip are able to refill their 10-gallon water keg. When the rain stops, Timothy and Phillip have their most open and least confrontational conversation so far. Phillip tells Timothy about his parents and his life in Scharloo. Timothy, in turn, tells Phillip about his childhood: He was working on fishing boats before he was even as old as Phillip. The two of them discuss racism, and Timothy tells Phillip that “beneath d’skin is all d’same” (71).
The next morning, as they are eating fried fish for breakfast, Timothy gently suggests to Phillip that he should try climbing a palm tree to dislodge some coconuts. Phillip is too afraid to try. Worried about his blindness, Phillip asks Timothy again about his friend who briefly went blind. Changing his story, Timothy responds that the man’s sight returned after “many mont’, I do recall” (73) when he previously said just three days.
Chapter 11 Summary
Timothy makes a cane for Phillip so that he can move around more easily without risk of falling. Phillip manages to walk around the entire cay. He notices that Timothy is teaching him the skills he needs to survive alone, but he tries not to “think about the possibility of Timothy dying and leaving me alone on the cay” (76). After so many days without hearing an aircraft, Timothy starts to believe that the island may be haunted by a jumbi, and that Stew Cat may be bad luck. Phillip disagrees.
The next morning, Phillip awakes to find both Timothy and Stew Cat absent. He worries that Timothy might have killed Stew Cat. When he finds Timothy, they have a tense conversation. Timothy seems to be hiding something, possibly about Stew Cat’s whereabouts. He is also carving a piece of wood, even though there is plenty of firewood already prepared. Phillip grows increasingly worried, wondering if he was wrong to trust Timothy at all. Thinking that it might be best to escape the island, Phillip heads to the raft but finds that it has been cut loose. In the afternoon, Timothy nails something to the roof of the hut. Feeling around, Phillip realizes that it is a wooden effigy of a cat with nails sticking out of it. Timothy explains that he put Stew Cat on the raft and let it drift in the shallow waters nearby until he could kill the jumbi, but now all is well.
Chapters 8-11 Analysis
The relationship between Phillip and Timothy undergoes significant shifts during this section of the book. Although he starts out feeling superior to Timothy because he can read and write, Phillip soon changes his mind, which is key to his character journeys of Coming of Age and Overcoming Racism. He starts to understand how much Timothy is doing for him and gains new respect for him. A lot of this character development happens all at once when Timothy asks Phillip to help out more with the work and Phillip refuses. Rather than actually discussing it, Phillip has an angry outburst and Timothy slaps him in the face. Contemporary readers might find this part of the book questionable: Phillip’s outburst is inappropriate and racist, and Timothy’s use of physical violence is unexpected. Instead of this violence pushing Phillip to distrust Timothy more, it actually pushes him to reconsider his perspective. However, the characters never discuss why what Phillip said was wrong, and Phillip does not question Timothy for slapping him. From the modern perspective, which discourages corporal punishment and encourages more nuanced methods for dismantling racist ideas, the scene may seem crude or improbable. However, given the historical period about which Theodore Taylor was writing, the characters’ interactions make sense in context. Most importantly, the scene is a pivotal moment in changing Phillip’s attitudes about race.
The conversation that Phillip and Timothy have about racism marks a new level of understanding between them. Although he has grown up seeing his mother’s racism, Phillip has never actually understood why some white people dislike Black people. Timothy’s response, that disliking some white people is fine but disliking all of them would be ridiculous, seems to help Phillip gain some perspective. However, there is no discussion of the structural nature of racism, the history of slavery and racism in North America, or the impact of racism on Black people’s lives. These discussions are much more prevalent today than they were in the 1960s, but in Taylor’s fictional 1942, neither Phillip nor Timothy has the breadth of knowledge to carry on that conversation. Taylor’s approach is to humanize Timothy for Phillip; once Phillip sees Timothy as a full human being like himself, his racism will naturally fall away.
When Phillip learns what Timothy’s childhood was like, he finds it easier to see that although their experiences have been different, he is not better than Timothy, and Timothy is not stupid just because he has not had a formal education. This is one of the first moments in the novel when Phillip manages to empathize with another person’s perspective. This expansion of Phillip’s capacity for compassion is a major step in his Coming of Age and his development as a dynamic character.
The new understanding between Phillip and Timothy is briefly shaken by the incident with Stew Cat. Phillip worries that his trust in Timothy is misplaced and that he is actually in potentially imminent danger. Part of his concern comes from the fact that Timothy’s beliefs differ from his own. He does not understand what a jumbi is or what Timothy is trying to accomplish. Ultimately, Phillip learns that his fears were misplaced. Timothy has never posed a threat to either Phillip or Stew Cat, and things return to normal. Taylor does little to unpack Vodou (voodoo) religious and cultural practices, dismissing them as silly. Without this discussion, Timothy’s actions remain somewhat unexplained. His behavior toward Stew Cat serves mostly to create narrative tension, rather than being part of a more fully realized cultural framework.
