Mama’s Boy

This novel, 'Mama’s Boy,' is about a pathologically shy, pigeon-toed boy, Peter Macaulay, who everybody, including his parents, considers mentally retarded and incredibly awkward physically. He has no friends and relates only to his mother, Elizabeth, even though when drunk she abuses him verbally and often slaps him. On the eve of high school, a gifted teacher and tutor, Ellen Marie Gaffney, is brought into Peter’s life by his father, Jack, who is embarrassed by his son known at school as 'The Geek.' Jack hopes Miss Gaffney can prepare Peter academically for high school. The father also bribes the school principal with a $10,000 check to have Peter placed on the all-black basketball team. Two blacks, Fred 'Sweetie' Davis and James 'Big Daddy' Winkfield, take Peter under their wings, although other blacks bully him physically and verbally, often threatening his life. The female protagonist of the novel, 21-year-old Nora Quindt, a senior at the University of California at Berkeley, becomes Peter’s second tutor, and through her growing emotional attachment to this 16-year-old 'child' becomes part of the black basketball world of Castlemont High School in Oakland, California. The overall theme of this novel revolves around black-white relations in America. The author, Peter Clark, went to Castlemont, an inner-city school that was 60 percent black in 1958-1961, and was personal friends with Fred Davis and James Winkfield.