Even though they are getting payed to work in the ward they shovel some of their janitorial jobs on to Bromden. "Stick a mop in my hand and motion to the spot they aim for me to clean today, and I go. One swats the backs of my legs with a broom handle to hurry me past." (3) They order Bromden, a seemingly blind and deaf Indian, to do their work for them. To make it worse, they refer to him as Cheif Broom, which is completely disrespectful to his culture, in my opinion.
When Kesey was describing the black boys individually, we learn that the shortest one watched as his mother was raped and his father was tortured. "He wanted to carry a sock full of birdshot when he first came on the job, to work the patients into shape." (30) When he first arrived at the ward, he expected to 'work the patients into shape' with a sock full of exploding pellets used to kill birds. Kesey hints, fairly frequently, that the black boys do more than take the patients temperatures.
The Big Nurse has kept the black boys in the ward because she knows that they have enough hate in them to blindly do horrible things to the patients. The ward is run like a machine of hate; each member is full of hate and they no longer need instructions on how to implement it. Kesey describes this, "They are in contact on a high-voltage wave length of hate, and the black boys are out there preforming her bidding before she even thinks it." (31) The black boys know exactly what she needs or wants just by the look she gives them.
The black boys treat all the patients poorly, some just mentally but some physically as well. When Taber began questioning the medicine he was asked to take the nurse sent the black boys in to get him ready for his lobotomy. "The two black boys catch Taber in the Latrobe and drag him to the mattress room. He gets one a good kick in the shins. He's yelling bloody murder. I'm surprised how helpless he looks when they hold him, like he was wrapped with bands of black iron." (36)
The way the black boys treat the patients is very disrespectful. Their presence in a chapter makes the reader uneasy and a little irritated. They each have their reasons to hate and act the way they do (with their back stories it makes some sense) but in no way does that make what they are doing okay. I don't like reading their parts in the book because you just want Bromden or the other patients to beat them up the way they have beaten the patients down, mentally and physically, for years.
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