The Cay

Timothy (no surname given) comes from Charlotte Amalie, a city on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, and has spent his life in the Caribbean. Phillip eventually learns that Timothy had “never gone to school, and was working on a fishing boat by the time he was ten” (70). He is around 70 years old and working on the SS Hato when he meets Phillip.

After the torpedo hits, Timothy is focused solely on keeping Phillip and himself alive, first on the raft and later on the island. Timothy has excellent survival skills without which Phillip would almost certainly have died. Timothy knows his own limitations and that his age is catching up with him, which is why he puts so much effort into making Phillip independent.

At the beginning of their time together, Timothy deliberately keeps some information from Phillip. He does not want to discuss the gravity of their situation, so he tells Phillip quite confidently that his sight will soon return and that they will be rescued imminently. Phillip can tell when Timothy is keeping information from him, and it increases his distrust of Timothy. As the two of them learn to trust each other, Timothy becomes more honest with Phillip. He starts to see Phillip’s Coming of Age journey and treats him in a more adult way as a result.

Though Phillip starts out entitled and prone to complaining, Timothy works hard to get along with him. He is kind and deferential, even when Phillip is making things more difficult for him. Eventually, Timothy’s patience reaches its limit when Phillip directs a racial insult at him. Though slapping Phillip in the face is a questionable action by today’s standards, it shows Phillip that Timothy has the dignity and agency not to submit in the face of Phillip’s racism. Timothy is patient with Phillip’s questions about his background and about race in general: When Phillip asks Timothy why some white people dislike Black people, Timothy answers, “I don’ like some white people my own self, but ’twould be outrageous if I didn’ like any o’ dem” (71).

Timothy is a mentor figure to Phillip and represents the “magical negro” trope, as his major roles in the narrative are to aid Phillip in his personal journey and humanize Black individuals for Theodore Taylor’s young readers. Timothy dies trying to save Phillip and himself from the hurricane, and this act places him in a long line of Black helpers of white protagonists in the survival fiction genre.

Grace Enright is Phillip’s mother, and she is protective of her only son. Phillip feels that she is “always afraid I’d fall off the sea wall, or tumble out of a tree, or cut myself with a pocketknife” (14). She asks him not to go near the water when the submarines attack and responds with anger and relief when he returns home safe. Grace is terrified of flying, but she is desperate to get herself and her son out of Curaçao when the fighting gets worse. Ironically, her intention to keep herself and Phillip safe by taking a boat rather than a plane leads to them getting separated when the Hato is torpedoed.

Grace, whose family comes from Virginia, is open about her racism. She does not like or trust Black people, and she does not want her son to speak to them. When the Enright family first moved to Curaçao, Grace was reluctant partly because she did not want to live near Black people. Phillip does not know why she feels this way, but he makes racist assumptions about Timothy because of his mother’s views: On the raft, Phillip finds himself “beginning to believe that my mother was right. She didn’t like [Black people]” (34). Grace never reforms in her views regarding race, but the narrative focus is on Phillip. In the middle grade and young adult genres, adults are often static characters whose main roles are to help or hinder the young protagonist. Since Phillip’s journey is about letting go of his racism, Grace is a hindrance to Phillip because it is her racist views he must unlearn.

Phillip Enright Sr. is Phillip’s father, and he works at a refinery on Curaçao where he produces aircraft fuel to help the war effort. Phillip Sr. is a patriotic man who has a clear sense of duty toward his family: He moved his wife and son from Virginia to Curaçao when the war began because he knew that he could be useful there. He is working around the clock at the refinery when the attack on Curaçao begins.

Phillip Sr. is more prepared to discuss challenging issues with his son than his wife is. Grace asks Phillip not to ask his father too many questions when he gets home from the refinery, but Phillip Sr. says, “He has a right to know. He’s involved here, Grace” (16). Phillip Sr. values honesty and transparency. Phillip later notes that when he was very young, his father used to keep difficult information a secret, but “[n]ow [his] father [is] always honest with [him] […] because he [says] that in the end that [is] better” (56).

Notably absent from the book is any discussion of Phillip Sr.’s views on race. His wife certainly holds racist views, and his son has internalized them. If he shares his wife’s views, he does not voice them. If he does not share them, the tension between his own thoughts and his wife’s is not explored. At the end of the story, when Phillip tells his parents about his experiences, he does not feel that either of them have really understood him. While Phillip has worked on Overcoming Racism, the middle grade genre dictates that his parents have no reason to undergo a similar change.