The Cay

“I guess my mother was homesick for Virginia, where no one talked Dutch, and there was no smell of gas or oil, and there weren’t as many black people around.”

Phillip has grown up in an environment where his mother’s racism goes unquestioned. He has internalized her beliefs about Black people despite having no genuine understanding of the history of race and racism in America and its colonies.

“Just as we were ready to go, there was an explosion and we looked toward the sea. The Empire Tern had vanished in a wall of red flames, and black smoke was beginning to boil into the sky.”

This is the first moment when the consequences of war become real for Phillip. The explosion of the Empire Tern foreshadows what will later happen to Phillip and his mother. Phillip’s previously carefree attitude to the war evaporates in this moment.

“We were torpedoed at about three o’clock in the morning on April 6, 1942, two days after leaving Panama. I was thrown from the top bunk and suddenly found myself on my hands and knees on the deck. We could hear the ship’s whistle blowing constantly, and there were sounds of metal wrenching and much shouting. The whole ship was shuddering.”

The narrative action begins in earnest when Phillip and his mother’s ship is torpedoed. This is the last time that Phillip provides a date that includes the year until the day he is rescued. From this point, Phillip is removed from the comfortable world in which he grew up.

“I looked all around us. There was nothing but blue sea with occasional patches of orange-brown seaweed. No sight of the Hato, or other rafts, or boats. Just the sea and a few birds that wheeled over it. That lonely sea, and the sharp pains in my head, and the knowledge that I was here alone with a black man instead of my mother made me break into tears.”

Phillip struggles with the reality of being stranded at sea; the emptiness of the ocean indicates the total absence of any recognizable cultural landmarks. The vast, blank sea represents Phillip’s need to empty himself of his preconceptions as he enters the unknown.

“My father had always taught me to address anyone I took to be an adult as ‘mister,’ but Timothy didn’t seem to be a mister. Besides, he was black.”

Phillip struggles to understand the power dynamic and relationship between Timothy and himself. Rather than treating Timothy as he would a white adult, Phillip falls back on his own whiteness to establish a greater degree of power for himself. While he uses Timothy’s first name, Timothy does not call him “Phillip” until Phillip explicitly asks him to later in the story.

“Then I knew he was bending over me. I felt his breath in my face. He said, ‘Young bahss, you cannot be blin’.’ He pulled me roughly from the shelter.

‘Look at d’sun,’ he ordered. His hands pointed my face. I felt the strong warmth against it, but everything was black.”

Phillip goes blind because of a blow to the head though he and Timothy initially suspect that the blindness was caused by the sun’s glare. In this scene, Timothy demonstrates his commitment to doing what he can to take care of Phillip. Phillip’s blindness in part shapes the narrative that follows.

“Once, ovah ’round Barbados, a mahn ’ad an outrageous crack on d’ead when a sailin’ boom shift. Dis mahn was blin’ too. Tree whole day ’e saw d’night. Den it true went away.”

Timothy tells Phillip this story to calm him down. Later in the book, he repeats the same story but says that the man’s sight did not return for months. Timothy often uses half-truths and selective information to try to keep Phillip’s spirits up during their long ordeal, a practice which Phillip both appreciates and resents. The passage also exemplifies Theodore Taylor’s use of phonetic spelling to render Timothy’s speech.

“I went back under the shelter, spending a long time rubbing Stew Cat. He purred and pushed himself along my body. I was glad that I had seen him and had seen Timothy before going blind. I thought how awful it would have been to awaken on the raft and not know what they looked like.”

Phillip makes a lot of assumptions about Timothy based on his looks. Although he initially thinks that it would be terrible to spend time with Timothy and Stew Cat without having seen them, he gradually gets used to his blindness. Later in the book, he does not feel as afraid of what he cannot see, and he makes fewer snap judgments.

“In the early morning (I knew it was early because the air was still cool and there was dampness on the boards of the raft), I heard Timothy shout, ‘I see an islan’, true.’”

After losing his sight, Phillip finds other ways to compensate, like making note of the temperature to tell the time. The discovery of the island marks a major shift in the novel: Phillip and Timothy’s world expands beyond their raft, and Phillip enters a new stage of his personal growth journey.

“I said, ‘I don’t want to go on that island.’

I don’t think there was anyone on earth as stubborn as old Timothy. There was steel in his voice when he answered, ‘We be goin’ on dat islan’, young bahss. Dat be true.’”

Phillip tries to remain connected to the raft, his last link to home, instead of heading to the island. Timothy is often accommodating toward Phillip, but not when their survival is at stake: Though he calls Phillip “young boss,” he does not let Phillip dictate their behavior. Timothy understands that the island has more resources than the raft does and makes Phillip defer to his leadership.

“I kept feeling that Timothy was holding something back from me. It was the tone of his voice.”

Phillip can tell when Timothy is lying, but he cannot always make him tell the truth. Timothy, for his part, is trying to protect Phillip and keep him from reacting with fear to their dangerous situation. Over time, as the two build more trust, Timothy becomes more honest with Phillip.

“I tried again, but it didn’t work. I stood up, threw the palm fibers at him, and screamed, ‘You ugly black man! I won’t do it! You’re stupid, you can’t even spell.’”

This is the moment of greatest racial tension in the book. Phillip leverages his racist beliefs against Timothy in a moment of frustration. In return, Timothy slaps him in the face, ultimately helping Phillip realize that he was wrong. Notably, Taylor does not make Phillip use the n-word to insult Timothy, as this would have been a controversial narrative choice when the book was written.

“Something happened to me that day on the cay. I’m not quite sure what it was even now, but I had begun to change.”

After Phillip’s outburst, he has a moment of self-reflection. From this point on, he treats Timothy with greater respect and works to deconstruct his own biases. The two characters start to find more common ground and become less frustrated with each other.

“I was starting to be less dependent on the vine rope, and sometimes it seemed to me that Timothy was trying hard to make me independent of him. I thought I knew why, but I did not talk to him about it. I did not want to think about the possibility of Timothy dying and leaving me alone on the cay.”

This passage directly foreshadows Timothy’s death at the end of the novel. Timothy is aware of his age, his failing strength, and the dangerous situation on the island. At this point, however, Phillip is not yet prepared to survive on his own.

“I cried out when the palm of my hand touched something sharp. Then with my fingers, I slowly felt around the object. It had a head, I discovered, four feet, and a tail. Timothy had spent all that time carving a cat, a Stew Cat. The nails in it were supposed to kill the evil jumbi.”

Phillip worries that Timothy is going to kill Stew Cat because of Timothy’s belief that the cat is bad luck. Phillip ultimately realizes that Timothy has symbolically killed a wooden carving of a cat instead of killing the real Stew Cat. This is the final moment that tests Phillip’s trust in Timothy; after this, the two are better aligned.

“I helped him to his feet, and we went up the hill together, Timothy leaning on me for support for the first time. He never really regained his strength.”

Initially, Phillip is almost wholly dependent on Timothy for his survival. After Timothy’s illness, the dynamic shifts, with Phillip taking on more responsibility and independence. This shift in responsibility indicates Phillip’s coming of age.

“I was alone on the reef but somehow I always felt he was sitting on the beach nearby. I could sense his presence, yet he was always at the hut when I got back there.”

It is unclear whether Timothy is actually sitting nearby to keep an eye on Phillip or whether Phillip’s imagination leads him to feel Timothy’s presence even when he is not really there. Either way, Timothy works hard to protect Phillip, teaching him the skills he needs to thrive. That Phillip feels Timothy’s presence in this scene speaks both to Timothy’s care for him and to Phillip’s increasing trust in and love for Timothy.

“Then he told me how to reach the coconuts. It took a long time to pull, tug, and twist two of them loose. But they finally fell. I stayed in the palm another few minutes to rest, then slid down. I had won.”

Phillip’s success in climbing the palm tree and retrieving coconuts is the final big step in his journey toward independence. Even Timothy, with all his skill and strength, is no longer able to climb the trees. When Phillip succeeds at this task, he becomes narratively ready to survive on the island alone.

“Old Timothy, of Charlotte Amalie, was dead.

I stayed there beside him for a long time, very tired, thinking that he should have taken me with him wherever he had gone. I did not cry then. There are times when you are beyond tears.”

Timothy dies, having protected Phillip from the worst of the storm with his own body. Earlier in the narrative, Phillip might not have mourned this loss so profoundly. Now, he grieves Timothy but is also prepared to survive on the island without him.

“They were fighting for survival, after the storm, just as I was. I left Stew Cat to his unexpected meal and made my way slowly back to camp.”

When birds attack Phillip, he is able to respond to them with compassion that he learned from his time with Timothy. Instead of feeling angry with the birds for hurting him, he is able to consider them as individual creatures with their own needs that parallel his own.

“I woke up at dawn on the morning of August 20, 1942, to hear thunder and wondered when the first drops of rain would spatter on the roof of the shelter. I heard Stew Cat, down near my feet, let off a low growl.”

After surviving for several months on the island, Phillip is finally rescued when a plane sees his signal fire. He once again uses a date that includes the year, foreshadowing his return to the life he once knew. He is now a very different person than he was when the torpedo struck the Hato.

“After I had climbed aboard, I remembered Timothy’s knife stuck in the palm tree. It was the only thing I wanted off the cay.”

At the end of his journey, Phillip feels that his connection to Timothy is among the most important elements of his time on the cay. He is unable to keep much to commemorate that time, but he does get to keep Timothy’s knife. It is a symbol of Timothy’s skill, wisdom, and strength.

“We talked for a long time, Stew Cat on my bed, and I tried to tell them all about Timothy and the cay. But it was very difficult. They listened, of course, but I had the feeling that neither of them really understood what had happened on our cay.”

Phillip struggles to articulate his experiences for his parents. The magnitude of the change that he has undergone sets him apart from his family and from the culture he grew up in. For Phillip, the extremity of his experience pushed him to change his views, which is something he has difficulty communicating.