Henry Lois Gates’ short story, About Men: A Giant Step chronicles both the psychological and physical challenges that face a young, black man maturing through a racial landscape. The narrative, told in the first person, parlays a sense of disorientation and alienation brought about by the weight of a pair of shoes.
The shoes, early on confused as bricks, signify the added weight and pressure that minorities face in their day to day lives. The different lengths of his legs can be read as a mirror that reflects the uneven balance he feels thanks to his ‘disability.’ When the narrator seemingly passes the doctor’s impromptu medical exam, the doctor, astonished, relapses to a sense of patriarchy and snobbishness when he tells the mother that the child suffers from ‘overachieving.’ The sense of black people being upwardly mobile in racial America was a crutch upon which many white people leaned on in order to counteract their own shortcomings.
By the time the narrator undergoes his surgery at the end, ‘talking throughout’ and never noticing the operation, the physical and mental landscape have undergone a profound, if limited, change – the time had come for both his actual and his perceived self-doubts to undergo a reconstruction.
