Scorpions

“Dwayne made Jamal feel small inside. Even when the older boy turned away from him, Jamal could still feel his grin. Lots of things made him feel the same way, small inside, weak.”

This passage sets up the internal conflict of the novel: Jamal’s struggle against feeling weak and powerless. Being poor, small, young, and Black all make Jamal feel like a target or victim at various points. Dwayne, a big kid, has just picked on Jamal for having generic sneakers, a sign of his poverty. Several other people make Jamal feel that way, including his teachers and other people with authority.

“Jamal started drawing trees to see how he would do on them. He did okay. He liked the way his trees looked. One of them came out really good, and he wished he had used plain white paper instead of the paper with blue lines. He turned to the back of his notebook, where he kept his wish list, and put down ‘plain white paper’ right under ‘leather jacket.’”

After being disappointed by his teacher not asking him to paint the set for the school play, Jamal draws trees in the park. The trees growing in the deteriorating neighborhood are a symbol of hope and aspiration. Jamal wants to prove his teacher’s assumptions wrong. Early in the novel, he knows that he has potential, but the opportunities for realizing it are curtailed by poverty, reflected by his growing “wish list” to which he adds art supplies.

“Jamal was mad at Randy, real mad. Mostly because of Mama crying and everything. When she got home at night from the trial, she would just sit and rock, and sometimes cry. She prayed a lot too, but that didn’t help. Sometimes Jamal got mad at God, but Mama said he shouldn’t be.”

This quote demonstrates Jamal’s attitude toward Randy at the beginning of the novel. Seeing the effect Randy’s deeds has on Mama, he cannot sympathize with his brother. Jamal’s disappointment with the missing men in his family—like his older brother and father—extends to God, another male authority whom Jamal also sees as absent from the daily struggles of their family life.

“Jamal looked at Randy. He was looking cool. Jamal hated that. You weren’t supposed to be looking cool when you made your mother cry.”

Randy accepts his guilty verdict with indifference. His “cool” angers Jamal, but he is only following The Pressures of Masculinity and the rules of the street. Jamal interprets it as an authentic reaction rather than a pose, but the reader does not know what Randy’s internal thoughts are. Later, Jamal imagines that he might be scared inside. Later, Jamal himself will be forced to play “cool” as a defense quite a few times in the narrative.

“‘Suppose we got lucky and carried this real heavy package for a rich lady. Then she say, “Oh, here’s a hundred dollars for each of you.”’

‘No, suppose she say her husband a lawyer and he’ll do the appeal for us if we carry her groceries all the time.’

‘That could happen,’ Tito said.

‘Yeah, but you know where that got to happen? In one of them big white stores downtown.’”

Jamal and Tito are having a fantasy about how they could earn the money for Randy’s appeal working as delivery boys. Their fantasy establishes the racial politics explored in the novel: Opportunity is associated with whiteness represented by the “big white stores.”

“‘One day’—Mama’s eyes looked far away—‘I was walking downtown with Randy in my arms. I was waiting for a light to change when this white lady stopped and looked at him. I looked at her and she was smiling and I smiled back at her, and that was the best feeling in the whole world. You got a baby and you hope so much for it…’”

Mama learns that Randy’s appeal will cost $2,000 and feels hopeless about securing that amount of money. In her distress, she recalls a nostalgic moment from when Randy was a baby. The moment centers on him being approved of by a “white lady” downtown. Akin to the “big white stores,” this fleeting interaction represents Mama’s hope for a bright future and social mobility for Randy.

“There was a picture of George Washington over Mrs. Connell’s desk, and a picture of Martin Luther King over Mrs. Rose’s desk in the office. Jamal and Ozzie had been sitting in the principal’s office all morning with their hands folded in their laps. Jamal looked at the pictures and wondered why the one of George Washington wasn’t finished.”

George Washington is considered a founding father of the United States. The portrait that this poster is copied from is literally unfinished, but Jamal’s reflections are symbolic too, suggesting that Jamal is evidence that the work of George Washington to build a free and equal society in America is far from complete.

“Mama was shaking her hand. Then, when she saw that Sassy wasn’t going to be burned, she went over to the sink and ran some cold water over the burn.”

After Sassy drops some crayons under the ironing board, Mama accidentally burns herself on the iron she’s using to iron Jamal’s school shirt while trying to protect Sassy. This incident is symbolic of the sacrifices that Mama makes to try to protect her children. In the process, she ends up doing herself harm. The incident also makes her work more difficult, signifying the difficulty of both financially supporting her children and domestically taking care of them.

“‘So what you doing about it?’

‘Me?’

‘Yeah you,’ his father said. ‘He your brother, ain’t he?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, it’s about time you started acting like a man and started seeing what you can do about it.’”

Though Jamal does not speak back, Myers portrays the injustice of this father-son dialogue. Jevon is deferring parental responsibility onto Jamal. He berates his 12-year-old son for not being “man” enough to earn the money for Randy’s appeal when he himself cannot. Yet, Jamal still feels like he must live up to The Pressures of Masculinity that his dad is reinforcing.

“Jevon Hicks took the last potato. ‘They don’t want you around if you stand up for yourself. That’s what Jamal got to learn.’”

Myers identifies Jamal’s father by his full name here, even though he was introduced a chapter ago and everyone else in the novel is represented by their first name or nickname. Using his full name identifies Jevon as a patriarchal caricature who is less familiar than the rest of the family but still feels entitled to take the “last potato” at dinner. His fatherly advice to Jamal is to get ahead by being subservient, counsel that Jamal briefly adopts in his job at Mr. Gonzalez’s bodega. It suggests that the terms of employment for these underpaid workers often involves the sacrifice of self-respect.

“Mama said that sometimes when a man was broke up from his family it was hard for him to see them again because he felt he had failed them. Jamal could understand that. Sometimes when things were going bad for him and Mama and Sassy and he couldn’t do anything about it, he just felt like walking away too. He could understand how his father felt, but it didn’t help anything.”

At 12 years old, Jamal can already empathize with Jevon because he is already the “man of the house” (38), striving to fulfill the role of his absent dad. Myers’s phrasing “was broke up” suggests that Jevon is not the agent in this situation, implying that it is circumstances rather than decisions that have led to his failure.

“Things were just so messed up. He had gone out of the house in the morning and things hadn’t been so bad, and now they were. Had Randy thought the same thing? Had he stood outside the store and thought that it would be easy and that he would get the money? Then something happened and a man was dead, and his whole life was thrown away.”

This is an epiphany moment for Jamal. He has just pulled a gun on Dwayne and doesn’t know if the police are going to come for him for doing it. For the first time, he’s understanding the consequences of making one bad decision and empathizing with Randy for his screw-ups. While the reader never hears from Randy directly, his character develops through Jamal’s view of him.

“Two women walked out onto the finger pier and stopped at a boat. They were dressed alike. Both of them had on what looked like jogging suits. One of the women carried a large, white shopping bag. Jamal wished that he had a boat. He wished he knew the two women. If he knew them, everything in his life would be different.”

This scene takes place immediately after Jamal pulls the gun on Dwayne and thinks that his life is ruined. Jamal stares longingly out at a different lifestyle. Yet again, Jamal returns to a fantasy of mobility at a time when it feels like his life is increasingly out of control.

“It felt good having a job. When people came into the store, they asked him questions. Things like where the bread was, or how much a package of franks cost. He didn’t know all the answers, but he knew some of them, and it made him feel good to be the one people asked.”

Jamal’s job with Mr. Mendoza is a briefly realized alternative to the destructive sort of authority that he attempts to assume on the street to be a gang leader. Jobs frequently feature in Jamal’s daydreams, suggesting that they are both potential sources of confidence and pride but also relegated to the stuff of fantasies for Jamal.

“Jamal took the dime and started to leave.

‘And when I see Mr. Gonzalez, I’m going to tell him to fire you because you’re too weak.’

Jamal shook his head and shrugged. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Come on back here, boy,’ the woman said. She got the change jar again and shook out coins until she had reached a dollar, then gave it to Jamal.

‘Thank you.’ Jamal smiled.”

This scene is an example of Jamal putting his father’s advice into practice to not stand up for himself. However, Jamal is ultimately rewarded for enduring the customer’s slights by getting a good tip and winning her over with his polite perseverance. Myers juxtaposes this outcome with the outcomes of Jamal being violent, such as with Dwayne or the gang.

“‘What you want to see my mother for?’

‘I hope that maybe, just maybe, I can convince her to take you out of this school,’ Mr. Davidson said. ‘Maybe put you someplace for kids with serious problems, or someplace that you’re not going to contaminate everybody else. Now get down to the lunchroom right now!’”

Mr. Davidson uses Jamal failing a history quiz—on the French and Indian Wars—to try to get Jamal expelled. Myers makes this a sympathetic moment for Jamal because the reader knows the circumstances that are leading to Jamal’s difficulties keeping up with school. The principal’s language about contamination marks Jamal as a social other, implying that he is a disease infecting the student body.

“Jamal left the store. He had the twenty-one dollars in his hand when he left the store, and then pushed them into his pocket. It was the first time he had ever been paid for a job, and now the job was gone. Indian and Angel just came in and took his job. Threw it away. They were bigger than he was, and tougher. He knew it and they knew it. Everybody in the whole world knew it. Even the dominoes players in the store knew it. If Mr. Gonzalez hadn’t wanted to give him the money, he wouldn’t have had to. Jamal stopped and punched the wall with his fist until he couldn’t stand it anymore.”

This scene marks the end of Jamal’s short-lived hopes that he could earn the money for Randy’s appeal through legitimate means. The way that he lost his job reinforces his feelings of weakness and vulnerability. Myers communicates Jamal’s feelings by representing his thoughts and actions, which contain emphatic repetition to show his frustration.

“Jamal put the television on. He didn’t want to think about Randy being stabbed. He didn’t want to think about anything happening to the family. It seemed like they never made things happen to anybody else, or even for themselves. Things happened to his family, the same way things happened to him.

He was feeling small, the way he sometimes did. Small and weak. […] Anybody could say anything to him or do anything to him. He didn’t even think it mattered that he wasn’t a man yet. Most of the men he knew weren’t doing that good either—they just talked tougher.”

Jamal reflects on his and his family’s lack of agency. He realizes that being an adult will not necessarily grant him the power that he desires because his lack of agency is connected to his lack of privilege. His thoughts here begin to dissolve what he has been taught about The Pressures of Masculinity since he questions what being “a man” actually leads to.

“‘They look like they thrown-away people,’ Tito said. ‘That makes me scared, because I don’t want to be no thrown-away guy.’

‘That’s why we got to be like this’—Jamal held up two fingers close together—‘so we don’t let nobody throw us away.’”

Tito and Jamal are discussing the people who lay around in the park all day. Tito calls them “thrown-away people,” which implies that their situation is something that happened to them rather than choices they made. That phrasing also connects them with inanimate garbage.

“They were at Grant’s Tomb. It was the only official place that kids could hang out in. Jamal liked how big and solid the place looked, and how quiet it was. He could sit on the low wall around the tomb and look down into Harlem, or he could look the other way into Riverside Park. Sometimes he would look down at where the tombs that held Grant and his wife were, but mostly he didn’t.”

Jamal and Tito spend their last happy day together at Grant’s Tomb. They don’t know that it will be their last day, so the mausoleum is foreboding. Setting this scene at Grant’s memorial indicates that the abolitionist work of equal rights and a harmonious union are far from achieved, yet the site bridges the Upper West Side with Harlem, offering a refuge for the kids to express themselves through Jamal’s drawing and their intimate conversation.

“‘You remember that time I got into a fight with that guy who had that white dog?’

‘You didn’t get into a fight with him. He just beat you up,’ Jamal said.

‘Yeah, okay. But when that happened, I prayed real hard to God to make him die or something. Then he beat me up again, and I felt real bad again, but he didn’t die and I didn’t die so everything was okay. If I had a gun, maybe I would have shot him or something.’”

Tito tries to convey a life lesson to Jamal: that participating in violence only leads to greater violence. By allowing himself to be beat up and not retaliating, he refuses to perpetuate the cycle of violence. However, Tito’s logic here is tested when Jamal’s life is threatened by trying to follow Tito’s example, suggesting that his current conditions make escaping the cycle extremely difficult.

“Jamal looked up. The sky was clear, and way above the television antennas and rooftops a sprinkle of stars filled the night sky. It was funny, but he hardly ever looked at the stars at night. He was always looking straight ahead, or around him.”

This moment, which takes place just before Jamal is attacked by Indian and Angel, suggests an alternative to the all-consuming “mess” of the streets. Seeing the stars is symbolically connected with dreaming, aspiration, and wonder. The passage implies that Jamal normally doesn’t have the luxury of looking up to dream and aspire, and it’s significant that he does so in this moment, when his attention is about to be brutally coerced back to the very earthly threats in front of him.

“Jamal thought about Randy being scared up in the prison and him being scared down here in Harlem. For a while he hadn’t been scared. When he had had the gun in the storeroom, he hadn’t been scared. Even when they had gone to the crack house looking for Mack, he hadn’t been scared. Maybe, he thought, you got messed up easily when you had a gun, but at least you weren’t scared.”

Jamal identifies with his brother. For the first time, he fully understands why Randy would want a gun. Even though the gun has ruined the lives of many around him, Jamal still feels a compulsion to wield it, trading the moral high ground for power. Jamal’s revelation culminates in the final development of Randy’s character into a more sympathetic figure.