Little Man

Little Man is the pet name Cleo Sherwood gave her eldest son, Lionel Sherwood, a boy who carries the weight of his mother's absence and the fury of her loss. He is defined by a single, explosive act: hurling a metal Tonka truck at Maddie Schwartz's shins, shredding her stockings and drawing blood, when the journalist's questions reduce his grandmother to tears. That moment, rendered in his own voice, transforms him from a background figure into a force of resistance, a child who believes he has the power to make people go away—and who blames himself for the fact that his mother is gone forever.

Identity and Family

Little Man lives with his grandmother, whom he calls both "Granny" and "Mama," in a crowded apartment shared with his aunt Alice, his younger brother Theodore, and his mother's parents. He and Theodore sleep in a single bed in a room with Aunt Alice, a cramped arrangement that breeds petty resentments: Theodore moves a lot in his sleep and sometimes falls out of bed, though Little Man admits that sometimes he pushes him out, needing space the way his mother used to say she did. He has a father somewhere in Detroit, a man who was called and asked if he wanted Little Man to come live with him, but who was "real busy" and reasoned that the boy would miss his brother. Little Man is left to wonder whether he would have fit into a fancy house, especially since Theodore is "pretty like her" and belongs in a place where there is fur everywhere.

His mother named him Little Man, and the name carried a promise. She would ask him to zip up her dress before she went out, telling him, "Give me a hand, Little Man, you're the only man I'll ever need." When he asked about Theodore, she would answer, "He's a sweetheart, but you're my first, baby, and nothing can ever change that. You're the one I count on, Little Man. You're going to steer this family's ship." He took the instruction literally, concluding that he was meant to join the navy, since the family knew nobody with a boat. His mother taught him to swim at the big pool at Druid Hill, near the zoo, getting her hair wet just for him, even though she disliked swimming because of her hair. She was strong and fast in the water, and those trips were theirs alone.

The Attack on Maddie Schwartz

When Maddie Schwartz comes to the Sherwood home asking questions about Cleo, the visit ends in violence. The grandmother begins to cry under the pressure of the interrogation, and Mr. Sherwood, whose face seems permanently set in a stern expression, makes it clear he blames his daughter for her own fate, calling her foolish and spoiled and accusing his wife, Merva, of always making excuses for her. Little Man, watching the white woman with her notebook and her schoolteacher voice reduce his granny to tears, picks up the last thing his mother ever gave him—a metal truck—and hits Maddie as hard as he can in the legs. He shouts at her to get out, to stop talking about his mother, while his younger brother Theodore keeps pushing a red truck across the carpet as if nothing has happened. The grandmother is appalled and tells Little Man he will have to find a way to pay for the lady's torn stockings, but the boy knows he will not have to. Even Granny, he observes, was secretly happy that he made the woman go away.

Guilt and the Power to Make People Go Away

Little Man carries a private theory of his own power: "I make people go away. That's what I do." He believes he made his mother go away, and now she is gone forever. He used to worry that she would come back and take only Teddy with her, because Teddy is pretty like her and belongs in a place where there is fur everywhere. He remembers a time when it was just Mama and him, before Theodore arrived, when he was special and they had things that were just for them. His mother's departure was explained to him as a job where she had to sleep on the premises, working so that one day they would have a new house in Baltimore with a new daddy, and enough room that he would not have to share a bedroom with Theodore anymore. She came back almost every week at first, then stopped. In his telling, the attack on Maddie Schwartz is not merely an outburst but a continuation of his life's work: making unwanted people disappear.

The Fury of the Dead

Little Man's voice is not the only one that speaks for him. In the narrative that frames the story, Cleo Sherwood herself—speaking from beyond the grave, or from the hospital bed where she faked her death—endorses her son's violence with chilling approval. "You deserved every bit of it, Maddie Schwartz," she says. "I wish Little Man had hit you harder. I wish he had bashed your head in with that truck." She sees the attack as the beginning of a chain of intrusions: it was not enough to make her mother cry and incite her sweet, gentle Lionel to lash out; Maddie had to touch the fur of the ermine stole, as Madame Claire had done, and discover where it came from and who gave it to her, picking and prodding without ever considering what she was kicking up. In this reading, Little Man is not a violent child but a guardian, the only one in the family who acts on the rage the adults suppress. His mother's posthumous blessing transforms his tantrum into a kind of justice, and his guilt into a form of loyalty.

Narrative Role and Significance

Little Man functions as the emotional core of the Sherwood family's grief, the point where the cost of Cleo's secret life becomes visible. His attack on Maddie Schwartz is the event that confirms her hunch that Cleo had a lover who could afford expensive gifts but could not afford to be known in the world at large—if the man who picked Cleo up for a date on New Year's Eve was someone no one had ever seen before or again, then someone else must have given her the clothes she wore. The torn stockings and the bleeding shins are, in Maddie's calculation, worth the information they purchase. But for Little Man, the encounter is pure violation, an intrusion by a white woman with a notebook into a family's private sorrow. His story, told in his own words, stands against Maddie's narrative of investigation and truth-seeking, insisting that some questions should not be asked and some doors should stay closed. He is the boy who loved his mother enough to believe he could steer her ship, and who grew up believing he sank it instead.