Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks

The final chapter begins by discussing the symbolism of the school bus motif featured throughout each of the novel’s vignettes. The chapter starts by declaring that “A school bus is many things” (173). What follows is a list of various places, events, and images related to school and adolescence. The list culminates in what a school bus represents for Canton Post, the son of the school’s crossing guard. To Canton, a school bus represents “a thing that almost destroyed him. Almost made him motherless” (175).

Canton admires his mother and, from a young age, believed that “crossing guards, especially his mother, seemed to have special powers. They were able to stop moving things. Able to slow traffic” (176). Canton’s belief in the heroic nature of crossing guards whose “whistles blew some kind of magic tone that forced drivers to hit brakes” changed one year ago after an incident involving Kenzi Thompson and his blue handball. Kenzi’s blue bouncing ball fell into the street and Kenzi began “charging across the crosswalk, a school bus heading right toward him” (176). Ms. Post jumped into the street to save Kenzi but sustained injuries to her shoulder and hip.