Grant's unwillingness to cope with the repression of his black community by considering running away leads him away from being the man that they want him to be. When Grant returns years later after leaving to gain an education, he had become a secular, educated man, now distanced from his oppressed, yet religious black community. He discovered that he was still a "nigger" in the eyes of the white people. Such is made evident when he must still enter through the "back door" at Mr. Henri's. He also learned to limit his perspective and hide his new vocabulary while in the presence of Sam Guidry, the Sheriff when he said that, "I was supposed to have said 'don't.' I was being too smart." (48) For Grant to lower his intellect in the presence of a white man, shows that the society that he lives in is clearly browbeaten, at least for the African-Americans. Black's seemed to have stayed in a vicious cycle that could never be broken. Grant was supposedly the man that was to break that circle. Instead, Grant adapted to fit peacefully into society and learned to be wary of unqualified optimism or idealism. His internal struggle was shown when he didn't know whether to, "act like the teacher that [he] was, or the nigger that he was suppose to be." To still be a "nigger" in the eyes of the white people show the severity in which Grant sees himself as an individual. Instead of coming back to Bayonne educated and worldly, he conformed himself to the same routine that society had set for him. The solution that Grant proposes many times in the novel is that of "running away." If one is a man, then running away would not be a solution. A real man would have stayed and made a difference, but Grant chooses to evade the struggle that an educator must go through in order to see change. Grant became more than what his society expects out of any individual by becoming an educated bla...