In “The Secret Integration”, the boys create an imaginary friend who allows them to express their secret knowledge and worries about the racism in their community. Carl is a comforting friend, consisting of characteristics of one black person they meet and their own characteristics. Carl’s existence is an act of rebellion against the adults in the community, a secret integration occurring in one imaginary person and in the friendship of the black boy and the white boys. Carl is created to serve a specific purpose, and serves that purpose up until he is no longer needed by the boys to cope with their difficult situation. The boys mature by dealing with the racism head-on in a confrontation with the black family, and therefore no longer need Carl to help them face what their lack of understanding causes them to fear.

The story takes place in a small town in 1960s Massachusetts. The first images of the town on a rainy fall day, a town that only sees traffic when New Yorkers travel through to watch the changing leaves, are those of an idyllic community, a nice place to raise children. Then the dark underbelly of the town is revealed to the reader. The Barrington family, the first black family to live in town, is being threatened by members of the community. Tim overhears a threatening phone call his mother secretly makes to the Barringtons, warning them to move back to Pittsfield.

The boys are aware of the secrets their parents have tried to keep fromm them, and the prejudices that they do not share with their parents confuse them. They see the black family as friends despite their limited knowledge of black culture. They have met only one black person in their lives, Carl McAfee. To cope with their perturbation at their parents’ hatred for the Barringtons, the boys create an imaginary friend named Carl, who is the son of the black family. Carl brings the issue of the “prank” phone calls to the table during the meeting the boys hold to discuss their plans for revolt. Carl speaks of what the other boys do not want to come to terms with. Even the highly intelligent Grover will not divulge his knowledge of what the community is doing to the Barringtons. However, “Carl shrugged and sat watching hem, as if he knew what, knew everything, secrets none of them had even guessed at” (159). Carl acts as the subconscious of all the boys. They understand that their parents are wrong and know that the phone calls are an effort to drive the Barringtons out of their home. Carl is the medium for the boys’ thoughts, since they cannot deal with the complexity of the matter on their own.

In this scene the reader also gains insight into the hopes that the boys have of learning from their black friend. Carl will tell them the secrets of his race- the “Heart-in-hiding, some crypt to Northumberland estates that had so far managed to elude the rest of them” (159). Here we see that the boys are eager to learn about the unknown, unlike their parents, who instead of learning about black culture, become enraged by what they don’t know or understand.

This is why the boys plan on striking out against the adults in the community. Yet the motivation for striking out against the adults is identical to the reason the adults are terrorizing the new black family. The boys don’t understand the adults, just as the adults don’t understand the black family. Instead of working together with those they do not understand, both the children and the adults plan to harm them in hopes of teaching them a lesson. The difference between the boys and the adults is that the adults carry through with their cruel plans, whereas the boys are too kindhearted to harm anyone.

The scene shows that the boys don’t expect to gain understanding of the black community without earning it first. They hope that the knowledge will be given to them “as a reward for their having been more ingenious in their scheming, or braver in facing up to their parents, or smarter in school, or maybe better in some way they hadn’t yet considered” (159). The boys are willing to work to understand the new situation in their community and again Carl will be a mere medium for their knowledge. What they are really gaining through experience and insight will be easier to accept if it is presented through their childhood companion. Realizing that their parents are acting cruelly will be difficult for the boys to accept, unless it is through the gentle humor and casual conversation of their imaginary friend Carl.

The language in this passage provides images of secrecy and corruption in the reference to the “crypt” (159) in the community where the Barringtons live. The crypt image is a figurative storage area for the hatred that the adults have for the black family. However, this is not just any place to store secrets, it is a place for decaying bodies, just as the prejudices held by the adults are decaying their bodies, minds, hearts, and even the community itself.

The last scene in the story is after the boys’ confrontation with reality. After finding that their parents have trashed the Barrington’s lawn,t hey are confronted by Mrs. Barrington, who says that she is thankful she does not have a son. This forces the boys to silently admit that Carl does not exist, except for in their collective imagination. Instead of becoming upset, unstable, or even acknowledging carl as imaginary, the boys say goodbye to their friend as if he is a real person.

They are not forced to end Carl’s existence, only send him away. Their delusion is shattered, but now the boys no longer need Carl. They are faced with an adult situation and handle it on their own. Then after Carl leaves, the boys revert to childlike roughhousing. With the final confrontation of the real and the imaginary, the boys are relieved from their former mature worries. They are no longer desperately seeking to understand the conflict in their environment because they finally witness and then experience it first-hand. Now their minds may attend to the more appropriate worries for a child such as being sure that they have the last laugh in their battle with water, mud, wrestling or whatever child’s play they engage in.

In this final scene, the narration is different from the rest of the story. Instead of using subtle hints in plot, the narrator states that Carl is an “imaginary playmate” (192). A list of all the reasons the children create an imaginary friend follows. The boys took their many characteristics such as speech, facial expressions, even “the way he shot baskets” (192) to form a friend that would be a familiar comfort to them, a medium through which to confront the problems of prejudice in their community. Not only is Carl made form their current qualities, he is made up of the qualities they someday hope to have “an amplification or grace they expected to grow into presently” (192). Besides using Carl to deal with their troubles, they use him to adjust to the new complexities brought forth in the process of growing up.

Carl is also an act of rebellion against the adults, the only act that the children commit. He is everything that the parents “could or did not want to live with” (192), just like the trash in the junkyard and the trash they put on the Barrington’s lawn. As if he were a computer to be programmed, the boys have made every aspect of Carl’s personality and existence into what they need to cope with the problems they are faced with. Carl is described as “their friend and robot” (192) because although he is comforting like a good friend, he is created to serve a specific purpose with precision, like a robot. Now just as quickly as the boys created him, he is “banished’ (192).

The boys form Carl Barrington from the experiences they have with Carl McAfee and various characteristics of the children. By combining the qualities of the two worlds, black and white, in Carl Barrington, the boys integrate themselves. Grover says about the adults, “They don’t know it, but we’re integrated” (188). In the creation of an imaginary friend, the boys have created a safe person to express their fears and secret understanding of the adult world. Carl provides a transition from childhood into adulthood by providing the boys with a voice to speak through when they are too afraid to say the truth about the racism in their communities and families. Carl’s creation is the only act of rebellion the boys have against their parents which wounds them even deeper than any large scale attack on the school or town with vandalism.

In both stories “The Secret Integration” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the characters create an imaginary being to express emotions or needs that they otherwise have no way to express. The invalid in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is dealing with marital problems and possibly postpartum depression. She is stuck in this room that is torturous for her to look at because she sees a woman locked behind the pattern in the wallpaper. This jailed woman takes more and more presence in the character’s life each day, until she decides she must help the woman in the wallpaper to escape. This represents her own need to escape, whether it be the room, her marriage, or just her crazed state of mind. The woman in the wallpaper is present to express the imprisonment that the character feels in her own life.

When the woman in the wallpaper escapes, it is as though the character is finally confronted with reality and reacts with apparent madness. This story was written in the first decade of the twentieth century when mental illnesses were still largely misunderstood. In this story, creating an imaginary person from the need to express something does not help the character, but leads to her complete derangement. In “The Secret Integration” creating an imaginary person for this same reason does not result in insanity on the part of the creators, but is a positive force on the boys’ coping with their problems. This shows the different roles of psychology in literature from the early to the late nineteen hundreds. The delusions of a woman in 1910 are deemed mentally unstable, while the delusions of young boys in the 1960s are categorized as healthy coping mechanisms.