“We are all sitting around the rail.” This is how our story begins. A story written by Walter Dean Myers.
We don’t get much information on our characters, but we have our narrator who through the story remains unknown. He is the one who narrates the story. My guesses would be that he is a black man in the middle of his twenties. He lives in the trouble end in Harlem where shootings probably are not uncommon. I would guess he is probably unemployed since he has the time to hang out on the rail outside Big Joe’s with his friends in the middle of the day.
In the story we also have Mary. Mary is a tenant in the building which gets shot at by the police. She is little bit better than all the others in Harlem because of her great job downtown. Mary’s dog gets shot by the police, because of the possibility of a psychopath in her apartment with an automatic weapon. She also gets a lot of damage in her place.
Other than those two, we have Pedro, Willie and Mr. Lynch, all friends with our narrator. We don’t get much information about them, other than Willie being a bit of a ‘know it all’ because of his age.
The setting of the story is off course Harlem, like I mentioned earlier. On 145th street, more specifically. It starts out just outside big Joe’s place, where the “gang” is hanging out talking. Probably a place they are used to hang out at. The area they live in, seems like a neighborhood where crime isn’t unusual. You can see that on page 2 where the narrator says: “I did just like everybody else leaning on that rail did, said a quick prayer and put on my innocent face”.
When the shooting has started the setting of the story takes place at a nearby restaurant where the “gang” seeks hiding while it all takes place. At the end of the story after the shooting has taken place, we move our setting to the nearby building the police shot at, now a crime scene, and the place of a child murder.
When it comes to what language and style our writer has chosen, it seems to me that there’s a lot of slang and this is really not to sound racial at all, but we also see a lot of African-American language, if you can call it that. The african-american language can we see on page 16 where Mr. Lynch says “What you young people talking about?”
The slang in the story makes it more intense and more relatable. It makes it more relatable because we get a better insight of what the narrator has experienced. It also makes us think, that he maybe could be a smalltime criminal, nothing big but just smalltime. At page 17 line 10 it says “Willie just stood there and I hoped he didn’t have anything on him illegal.”
That is small proof that I might be right in my accusation.
You can choose to cut the story up in 3 parts. Off course it starts out with the introduction. The introduction covers the part where the “gang” talks about who’s the best boxer, and I believe it stops at where the cops come squeaking. This is where it all starts, and where we have our “point of no return”. It all continues in to the shooting and our ending starts when they all move inside the other apartment where they find the little boy. This is where they realize what they have done, and that there never was any shooter.
There are many themes to the story here, but off course the main theme in it is “Gun control in the US” and “Racism”. The racism takes part multiple places in the story. The first time we see it is at the start where the police comes squeaking. They immediately start to interrogate the “gang”, just because the police got a message that a black guy went mental with an automatic weapon. The police also assume the dog in the apartment is a black man. This might be a thin accusation of racism because the apartment was way up, but it also might be a symbol of the racism from the officers. They can’t see the difference between a dog and a nigger?
The story here has many similarities to a Bruce Springsteen song called American skin (41 shots). The song here that Bruce Springsteen wrote is a story about how it is to live as an African-American in the US. How you as a black person always has to be extremely cautious because the police will almost always see you as either a gang member or a rapist. In the song, he sings “Is it a gun, is it a knife, is it a wallet, this is your life” This is a symbol of how the police can’t tell the difference of what is what and therefor assumes the worst. He also sings “You can get killed just for living in your American skin”. This here represents that you can get killed just for being black, which her refers to as American skin. This means that the blacks are just as much American as the white. If we have to compare it the other story, then the similarity here is that you can get killed just for living in your American skin.