The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

One day in October, Biff’s wife, Alice, cries out in pain, and they go to the hospital. The doctors remove a large tumor, but Alice passes away. Biff plans her funeral and mourns her loss. Then, he visits Mick’s dad so he can fix his watch and meets with John to talk about his life. Biff meets Alice’s sister, Lucile, who has a young daughter, Baby, whom she wants to turn into a model: She doesn’t want her daughter to end up like the other kids in the neighborhood, whom Lucile thinks are common and crude. Lucile has been in an on-again-off-again relationship with Baby’s father, Leroy, whom Lucile has married and divorced twice. Biff admits that he and Leroy once got in a fight when Leroy drunkenly threatened to beat up Lucile. Lucile tries to think not of the past but of Baby’s future and encourages Biff to not live in the past.

After Alice’s funeral, Biff returns to work. John and Jake have been hanging out in the café-bar, and now Mick comes around often to play the radio and sit with John. The radio plays a song Biff used to dance to with Alice. He wonders what John is thinking.

Biff feels that something is wrong.

Dr. Copeland is busy caring for the Black community during a bout of influenza. Meanwhile, Willie is arrested for stabbing a man during a bar fight and is sentenced to nine months of hard labor in a prison far away from the town.

Dr. Copeland spends more time with John, to whom he talks about biology, the chemistry of conception, and race. Portia invites her father to a family reunion, which her grandfather and Dr. Copeland’s two other sons will attend. At the family reunion, Dr. Copeland and his sons are awkward with one another after not having spoken in a few years. Portia’s grandfather tells them that his biblical studies have led him to believe that when Jesus returns, he will turn all the suffering Black people into white people. This angers Dr. Copeland, but he keeps his thoughts to himself.

Dr. Copeland feels better after he spends time with John, but then a white man carrying a heavy sack runs into Dr. Copeland, and he falls to the ground. Dr. Copeland recognizes the white man and doesn’t engage with him.

The white man who ran into Dr. Copeland was Jake. Jake asks John who the tall Black man was who just left because he had given Jake a dirty look.

Jake tells John the story of his childhood: Jake has been working since he was a child, and at age 10, he left home without saying goodbye to his family. Back then, he dreamed about becoming a preacher. He moved around a lot and eventually ended up working for a woman named Miss Clara, who talked to him about many things. Miss Clara helped Jake develop his current beliefs about the evils of capitalism. Now, he tries to preach about the truth of society.

Jake has grown accustomed to the town, which is like most places he’s been. He’s horribly lonely and tries not to spend much time alone. He drinks a lot and gets into fights with men who laugh at him.

Jake tried to get involved in organizations that championed anti-capitalist philosophies, but his fellow organizers robbed from their shared treasury. Jake is bitter about this and no longer believes that it’s possible to change society. He gets so angry talking about the unnatural way society oppresses individuals that John grows concerned for him. Jake sees a slogan painted on the wall of a building, so he writes a note in response asking the writer to meet with him. Though Jake waits and waits, the writer never appears.

Mick stays after school to practice learning to play the school’s piano. She figures out some chords from the music in her memory, and even creates some of her own tunes. A classmate named Delores who has had formal piano lessons teaches Mick some basic chords in exchange for Mick’s lunch money.

Mick admires Harry from afar because he seems so grown up to her, but when she makes a Hitler joke, she hurts Harry’s feelings (Harry is Jewish). Afterward, Mick and Bubber debate misconceptions about Catholicism and Judaism.

Mick admires Baby as she walks down the street all dressed up, but Baby refuses to speak to Mick and the other neighborhood kids. While Bubber is playing with a shotgun, he accidentally shoots Baby, hitting her in the head. A frantic scene ensues in which Mick’s father helps get the doctor, and Lucile breaks down in the street. Baby survives the shooting, but her skull is fractured. Bubber is missing, but Mick knows where to find him: She wants to punish him, so she tells him that Baby is dead, and Bubber needs to hide from the police, who will send him to Sing Sing prison.

Lucile returns to the hospital with Biff at her side. Lucile doesn’t want to sue the Kellys but wants them to pay for Baby’s medical expenses. Once Mick is certain that Bubber won’t be arrested, she returns to his hiding spot, only to find that he’s run away. They search for him and find him trying to hitchhike. Mick’s father forces Bubber into the car, and Mick explains that she made up the story about Sing Sing. Back at home, Bubber screams and says he hates everyone. His anger is uncharacteristic of his usually peaceful and empathetic seven-year-old personality. That night, he cries himself to sleep and doesn’t let Mick comfort him. Feeling guilty and full of love for her brother, Mick holds him while he sleeps. After the incident, Bubber is never the same again. He starts going by his real name, George, and stops talking or playing with the other kids. Instead, he spends his time sitting alone.

Portia is worried about Willie, who didn’t write her his weekly letter from prison. The last Portia heard from him, he’d been transferred out of prison and onto a chain gang.

Dr. Copeland is in charge of picking a winning high school student whose essay on how to move the Black race forward gets a five-dollar prize. The one essay that is good enough for the prize is problematic because the student writer expresses ambitions to avenge the Black race against white people, whom he says he hates. He recognizes the writer of this essay as Lancy, whom Dr. Copeland attended to when Lancy was younger and tried “self-emasculation” in an instance of paranoia.

Dr. Copeland and Portia plan a party for the Black community in which they’ll pass out donated gifts to the children. John is the only white man who contributed to the gift drive, so they invite him to the party. At the party, Dr. Copeland makes a grand and powerful speech about Karl Marx, who is someone he admires because of his philosophies on work and dignity. Afterward, Dr. Copeland announces that the winner of the essay contest is Lancy. Dr. Copeland hopes that his words made an impression on the community he loves, despite his perceptions of their shortcomings.

The winter is unusually cold and harsh, and it has a negative effect on the townspeople. The town has been stressed by the recent murder of a foreman by one of the employees at the factory, and a Black man was beaten for moving into a home too close to white people. The general feeling is of poverty and depression.

Now when John walks around town, many people stop him to chat. The more he gets recognized, the more rumors swirl about him: People gossip that he’s Jewish or Turkish, or from a wealthy family. John often thinks of Spiros and how their friendship was not without its challenges. Once, they befriended another man who is deaf named Carl, whom Spiros drove out while Spiros was drunk, believing that Carl had drunk all his gin. Another time, Spiros stole their rent money and lost it in slot machines. Various bad memories about Spiros cloud John’s mind, but he tries to dwell instead on all the things he loves about Spiros. Spiros is the only person in whom John has confided, and now that it’s been a year since he has been at the psychiatric hospital, John misses him more than ever. His new friends are not a replacement for Spiros, and in fact, they confuse John with their repetitive stories and ideas. He hasn’t spoken to anyone in a long time, and his hands shake as he signs at night without anyone to listen.

His friends usually visit him one at a time, but one day, they end up all visiting at the same time. It is an awkwardly silent visit, and John didn’t understand why they don’t speak to one another. He writes Spiros a letter even though Spiros can’t read. In the letter, John writes about an upcoming gathering of people who are deaf. He would like to attend but can’t without Spiros. He writes about his odd new friends who are mired down by their obsessions. John decides to take time off work and visit Spiros again. This time, he leaves a note for his visitors.

When John arrives, he discovers that Spiros is in the infirmary. John eagerly uses sign language to tell Spiros about everything he’s missed, but Spiros seems uninterested. Still, the visit does John good. When he returns to town, the rumors about him intensify, and John becomes a figure onto whom people can project their own stories.