The Flight of Pony Baker

The Flight of Pony Baker is a novel for children, one of the many stories written by William Dean Howells.

It tells the story of a young boy named Pony Baker who, throughout the book, attempts to run away from his home where he lives with his mother, father, and five sisters.

The setting of the story is "fifty years ago" in the Boy's Town of Ohio, the state where Howells was born and raised.

Jim offers to find out if there are any Indians living nearer that the reservation that is about 100 miles away from the Boy's Town.

Jim Leonard lives with his mother on a rise of ground near the river in a log cabin while his stable sits on the flat by the water.

When Jim gets home, he is concerned with whether or not his mother will be awake to whip him for being gone all day and missing supper.

Jim wakes up to the daylight and realizes that the flood has torn the stable apart and left him floating on the roof in the water.

Fireman Blue Bob is able to grab the roof when it breaks apart and saves Jim Leonard, but the rat falls into the water.

On their trip through the river and the woods, Jim begins to hesitate and act as though he does not want to show the boys where the watermelon patch is.

The boys begin to praise Jim for leading them to the patch, but he does not participate in eating the melons and looks on while complaining of a toothache.

Pony then thinks he sees someone come out of Bunty Williams' house, which is half a mile away, with a dog and a hoe in their hand.

Pony decides to walk home and leaves the boys behind kindling a fire to dry their clothes, which are wet from the river.

Jim and Pony leave to buy some crackers and apples to eat and go down to a pump where they drink water until they are full.

When Pony gets home, his mother finds out what happened at the watermelon patch and that Jim Leonard put the boys up to it.

Pony does not like the idea of living so long among the Indians that he would not remember his father and mother when he would see them again, but does not tell Jim for fear of being made fun of.

The next morning at school the boys hear word that Pony is planning to run away on a canal-boat to see the Indians.

The man tells Pony to wait on his doorstep at one o'clock in the morning and the circus procession will pick him up.

His mother and father are very nice to him and this makes Pony's heart ache when he thinks about leaving them.

Frank eventually falls into a deep sleep and does not wake up till daytime the next day and finally reaches home.

He gives the money to the merchant's partner, he counts it, and Frank heads back home to see his father sitting on the front porch.

Pony finds Jim's constant changing of the plans to run off very odd, but does not say anything in fear of being called a cowardly-calf.

By the end of the book, he realizes that the things that made him want to run away are like nothing to him now and that if he had not been at home he would be miserable.

Indeed, Howells shows an intuitive knowledge not only of 'Oedipal' fears and desires, but of the psychological process by which a boy moves beyond them into the 'latency period.'

In a Freudian sense, the 'flight' of Pony Baker, who is nine years old, may be interpreted as an escape from the turmoil of early childhood psychosexuality.

Having repressed his boyish self, as figured in the "low down" Jim Leonard, Pony is ready to model himself on his manly namesake, cousin Frank Baker, who is 'one of those fellows that every mother would feel her boy was safe with.'

Five years later Howells steered Mark Twain toward the conception of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) as 'a book for boys, pure & simple.'"

Howells later contributed to the subgenre of realism with A Boy's Town (1890) and The Flight of Pony Baker (1902).

[1] "Jim Leonard, the mischievous friend of Howells' protagonist, has been correctly described as 'a cross between Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn'; and there is no mistaking the genesis of such chapters as 'How Jim Leonard Planned for Pony Baker to Run Off on a Raft.'

But Jim is an anti-hero—a coward and a bully whose escape plans always fail, who leaves Pony in a lurch, and who faces humiliation when he is spanked by his mother.

Jim's foil, the good Frank Baker, is presented as a role model (166), not as a figure of fun like Tom's brother Sid.