The Jacket

As Phil looks for his little brother in their elementary school to give him the lunch money he forgot, he worries about being late for class and getting detention. He sees his brother’s jacket in the crowd and rushes toward it, only to find the person wearing it isn’t his brother—it’s a Black kid named Daniel. Phil is sure Daniel stole the jacket because “no one else in the whole city had a jacket like that one” (4), but Daniel says he got the jacket from his grandmother for his birthday, which Phil doesn’t believe until the principal calls Daniel’s house. Daniel’s grandmother cleans Phil’s house, and Phil’s mother gave her the jacket, who gave it to Daniel. Learning this, Daniel rips off the jacket and throws it at Daniel, yelling “my gramma and me don’t need nobody being kind to us!” (16).

For the rest of the morning, Phil thinks about the confrontation with Daniel. He suspects that his being white and Daniel being Black has something to do with what happened, but he struggles to reconcile this fact with how he’s always thought of himself as being “friends with everyone” (17).