You also get a thrilling tale of survival against the odds. That, I think, is the lesson that Theodore Taylor would like us to learn from his book. I asked, 'Timothy, are you still black?' His laughter filled the hut. But now, in my memory, it did not seem ugly at all.
I had now been with him every moment of the day and night for two months, but I had not seen him. Not even enough to drip through the palm frond roof.
When Phillip finally realizes the truth of this statement, I was very moved: It rained that night a very soft rain. Phillip's blindness is a key point in the story because not only does it highlight his complete dependence on old Timothy, but it also directs our attention to the real issue, which is that we are all the same under the skin. After all, Phillip is only twelve, he's just been torpedoed, lost his mother, possibly she has drowned, he's cast adrift on an open raft, and after forty-eight hours he goes completely blind as a result of the blow to his head. Equipped with his mother's views, Phillip's relationship with old Timothy gets off to a poor start - though it isn't particularly surprising that he chews Timothy's head off a bit. But he does know that his mother doesn't like black people. Now, Phillip doesn't particularly have views about black people himself. On the raft with him is the biggest, oldest, ugliest black man he has ever seen, and the ship's cat, Stew. He recovers consciousness to find himself alone on an open raft in the middle of an empty sea, with a dully aching head. But the ship is torpedoed and during the evacuation process Phillip receives a crashing blow on the head. As the war worsens, Phillip's mother wants to take him back to America where he will be safer, so they board a small Dutch freighter, the SS Hato. It is 1942, Phillip is twelve years old and lives with his parents on the island of Curacao, off Venezuela, though he is in fact American. He takes the plain statement that we are all the same under the skin and illustrates it with a devastatingly simple story. We think we know the issues which surround racial prejudice so well, that it is difficult to be persuaded to think afresh.
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