Race changes how people perceive both themselves and others around them. In “The Black Ball” this is apparent in several different points by people encountered by the narrator at different points of the story. Reading through the tale it is apparent that the setting is years ago while segregation still thrived in the world to keep it separated by the color of people’s skin.

The narrator is a single black father with a son, and the beginning of the story begins with the boy asking his father a question. “Daddy, am I black?” The boy is curious, and young still, but curious all of the same, and he is assured that he is not black, but instead he is brown. From this alone we know that the father son duo are African American, and through a few more details in that given portion of the passage is enough to tell us that it was when segregation was practiced by most if not everyone at that time.

Time passes by between the man and his boy’s time together, and while the boy is expected to entertain himself while his father goes to work we meet another time which helps us to define our thoughts in racial prejudice. For the moment, the narrator- the father’s- job is to polish the door handles of the apartment he aids in keeping clean and orderly. A man comes by with questions about the narrator’s work, how much work he had and if it was his job alone to work. The father is apprehensive about answering said questions, and instead lied so as not to give out any information of his he was not willing to share.

After their brief uncomfortable bit of conversing between them, the man who’d approached the narrator finally shared that he had affiliations with a union and wanted to know if the man was interested to join. The father wanted no such thing, plainly coming out to say unions were against segregation. “What you really mean is that you’ll get in here and bounce me out. Unions don’t want Negro members.”

Through the details and a story from the man we find out that the man really did have good intentions by his offer. “Well, I got them scars in Macon County, alabama, for saying a colored friend of mine was somewhere else on a day he was supposed to have raped a woman.” Showing his hands, the man has puckered and scarred skin from his punishment for defending his friend despite the truthfulness to his statement. Again, we can see in this story that it is not only African Americans and other minorities who are discriminated against, but even white citizens who try to defend and help are exiled just as much.

The man reminds our narrator that he will be welcome, as well as any of his friends- having been implied as other African Americans- are welcome at the Union meeting that night at eight o’ clock. The father finishes his work so he can return to his son and prepare his lunch. We find our narrator thinking about the man with the ‘fried’ hands as he thought of them. We never get to find out if he attends the meeting because the father has more chores to finish, and his son asks if he can play ball outside. “All right now,” the man tells his son, “You stay in the back out of everybody’s way, and you mustn’t ask anyone a lot of questions.” From this alone we can make the inference that the boy is curious, and through literary devices such as foreshadowing we can only guess something will be made of it.

As he is supposed to the boy leaves the apartment and we are left with our narrator before he has to do his next chore of watering the grass. Peering out the window he finds his son gone, neither in the backyard or the front. In his concerned parent attitude he flees from the apartment only to find the young boy crying in the alley beside the house. “My ball, my ball. Daddy, my ball...” We find that an older white boy took his ball and threw it up into one of the tenet’s windows before fleeing the scene, and upon hearing the crying we find the angry owner yelling out of the window. “Well, if i ever see him around here again, you’re going to find yourself behind the black ball.”

The narrator does as he is told despite the anger running through him at the man’s impertinent attitude. It is only when the man and his son get to the backyard that the boy speaks to his father without tears. “Daddy, that white man can’t see very good, can he, Daddy?” Questioningly, the father looks to his boy. “Daddy, anyone can see my ball is white.”

It is here that we can see the blatant difference in how people viewed the boy’s ball, and through the literary analysis of reading between the lines of prejudice and segregation the ball is the same as people.There is no in between races at this time, and through the story of the man with the fried hands we can also see that sometimes the color of your skin is not the only thing at that time which determined how you were treated in society in the era of which the story “The Black Ball” was written.