A comparison of Iggy and Smithy

I think a meaningful comparison can be drawn between Smithy and the books he reads. I plan to make a post about each of the books Smithy reads. .

The first book Smithy reads is Iggy. Smithy initially gets reading headaches after very short periods of reading. Smithy tells us the following about Iggy. Iggy never knew his father and he abandoned his mother when he was freed after the civil war. His mother was a "kind but powerful" woman named Esther Booklook. "She had gotten her last name from her father who got it from his father who got it from the nine year old daughter of a plantation owner because he liked to look at books." In 1878, Iggy changed his name to Hannibal, after the Carthaginian hero, because he liked it better than his mother's name, Booklook. After that he headed west. He was fourteen at the time. (page 131)

Beyond that, we don't hear much until the very end of the book, because Smithy interrupts his description of Iggy by announcing the onset of his "reading headache." It goes all the way until the end when Iggy is sitting under a Colorado cottonwood eating an apple. Smithy says "Everybody would think he was just another old black man, but all of us who had read the book knew that he was a giant. A great man at the end of his life. In was a tender kind of secret and I loved knowing it" (page 154).

Iggy's story is quite related to Smithy's. Iggy faced prejudice and discrimination, but was a great man inside; a giant. Smithy is just the same. People judged him throughout his journey, but he continued performing good deeds, humbly refusing to accept credit. There is no doubt that Smithy was a great man who looked just the opposite from the outside.