Just started listening to this podcast and am moving through chronologically while reading the stories. Thus far, I have to say I enjoyed this short story the least, however the podcast gave me a much deeper appreciation for it. Really digging Brandon's take on Morris and his family being African-American. I too, took the description of the assailants as being described as black, latino and white men, and I think that was Wolfe's intention on a surface level reading, grammatically I think it still holds up as the white/brown/black description being their uniforms and is an excellent reading of it.
You guys are doing a tremendous job with this, thanks for sharing this project with us and creating a forum for discussion.
Also, a potential Gene Wolfe tattoo idea was posited in an earlier episode, anyone ever come up with some good ones?
I really liked this episode too. The story's ending fell flat for me until I heard you two unpack it. In any case, I wanted to put in my two cents on the family's identity (even if I am a few years too late).
I assumed the family was black on my first read: the brown head, the attitude toward the police. The text is ambiguous. But I really can't see them as Jewish. The major reason: the son is named Paul! And Jews have good reasons to not name their children Paul.
This is a bit of conjecture about Morris (but worth mentioning given Wolfe's fondness for saints' names): St. Morris is often portrayed as being of African descent, and he is venerated in the Coptic church. We know from "Relays and Roses" (published a year later) that Wolfe was thinking about the Coptic church, even writing about an African-American man with a deep interest in it.
So is the family black? There's a reasonable case. Is the family Jewish? Unless Wolfe is playing with the Saul/Paul conversion (which to be honest would make me uncomfortable in the context of this story), then I doubt it.