The first chapter is rich with symbolic imagery. Ragged, skinny children play with empty beer cans. Police sirens fill the night and remind Alfred of Harlem's despair and the conflict with authority. Yet there are lovers in the park, music, and dreams.
The setting is crucial to the novel. In this opening chapter, Lipsyte provides his first descriptions of Alfred's Harlem. As Lipsyte presents it, the atmosphere of Harlem is repressive. The sun, often a literary symbol of hope and promise, melts into the hopelessness of "the dirty gray Harlem sky." Even the air is rancid and foul; Lipsyte describes it as "sour air." Men drag card tables out onto the sidewalks, and we can imagine the shrill sound of table legs scraping across concrete. Lipsyte's description recalls the sound of cars crunching through garbage and broken glass. These sounds underscore the overall feeling of the backdrop that Lipsyte is painting. He wants us to hear those sounds; he wants us to see the gray sky; he wants us to smell the sour air. Lipsyte wants us to feel the grit of the neighborhood and to recreate this atmosphere in our imaginations.
Two dominating images introduced in this chapter are the clubhouse and the cave. The clubhouse is a shabby basement room with a naked light bulb. Major dominates it with his mocking pessimism. It is a home for lost souls who are going nowhere, and Alfred regrets that James chooses to spend his time there. When the two were younger, they shared their fantasies and ambitions in the secret cave. James enthusiastically collected rocks, planning to exhibit them at school in the fall. However, when he took them home from the cave, his drunken father dumped them down the air shaft. In fact, most of James' dreams have been destroyed in a similar way, symbolically.
In this chapter, Lipsyte effectively combines dramatic action with exposition. He introduces the reader to major themes of the novel, key characters, and images that will recur and come to symbolize important contrasts in Alfred's life.
