Concrete Rose

From the start, Mav is invested in being seen as manly, but Thomas quickly makes it clear that Mav doesn’t know exactly what his own definition of manhood is. He has spent most of his life being raised by just his mother, so he doesn’t have a clear masculine role model. It follows that his idea of manhood is cobbled together from a series of masculine stereotypes: men should provide for their families, men shouldn’t cry, men shouldn’t ask for help. Mav constantly worries about being seen as “weak” in comparison to his former gang leader of a father. To compensate, he acts outwardly stoic and refuses help even when he needs it. One example of this behavior is his determination to find a way to take care of his son on his own, like “a man should” (41), even though there are plenty of people in the neighborhood who would be happy to help him.

Dre and Mr. Wyatt act as foils to Mav’s toxic perception of masculinity. Dre’s measure of a real man is someone who “own[s] up to their shit” (35) and tries to be the best version of themselves for their loved ones. Dre sees no problem with expressing emotions, even telling Mav that he cried the first time he held Andreanna. After Dre’s death, Mr. Wyatt fills his role as a positive masculine role model. As Mav tries everything to suppress his grief over Dre, Mr. Wyatt tells him that the perception that Black men cannot feel strong emotions is a racist myth designed to dehumanize them, eliciting Mav’s first tears over Dre. He continues to encourage Mav to honor his feelings and advises him against the stereotypically masculine pursuits of gang involvement and violence.

As Mav settles into fatherhood, his idea of what makes a man slowly begins to change. When he’s with Seven, he feels strong emotions that are impossible to repress, ranging from despair to overwhelming love. His desire to be a great parent to Seven leads him to reevaluate his perception of his own father when he realizes that Pops’s choices resulted in him essentially abandoning his family. Pops’s defense of his actions is that he was just fulfilling his duties as a man by taking care of his family, suggesting that he, too, has suffered under a toxic perception of masculinity. His imprisonment provides a warning against unthinkingly adhering to a one-dimensional idea of masculinity.

Mav’s desire to be manly plays a huge role in his plan to kill Red, Dre’s murderer. He feels helpless and hurt since losing Dre. Following the street rule of taking out Dre’s killer presents a way to regain a sense of control and reaffirm his masculinity and street cred. After he fails to kill Red, however, Mav runs to Lisa with tears streaming down his face and sobs in front of her. This open display of emotion indicates that he has internalized Mr. Wyatt’s assertion that its’s okay for him to show emotion.

Even Pops, the person Mav has modeled his masculinity on, is proud of him in the end for choosing empathy over revenge. As Pops says, being a man is not about adhering to street rules or proving oneself through violence; it’s about thinking independently and making good individual choices. Finally free from the need to conform to a stereotype, Mav realizes that, to him, being a man means being there for his family and actively working on improving his life.

Throughout the novel, Thomas uses the lives of Mav and his fellow Garden Heights residents to illustrate that being born into adverse circumstances makes it incredibly difficult to escape those same circumstances. The Garden, as residents call it, is an impoverished inner-city neighborhood plagued by violence, addiction, and gang activity. Those born into this environment often don’t see a potential future outside of these pursuits and find themselves caught up in a repeating pattern of harmful behaviors.

Mav provides an example of someone who is born into this vicious cycle but manages to escape it. While the financial status of the Carters during Pops’s reign as crown of the King Lords is unknown, Ma works two jobs and struggles to pay their bills after his incarceration. Pops landed in prison because of his involvement in dealing and stashing drugs, but, nine years on, the poverty that his incarceration inflicted on his family forces Mav to repeat his father’s dangerous behaviors while caring for a child of his own. In the Garden, many of Mav’s friends have similar stories. They have had to give up their childhood dreams and turn to activities like dealing just to survive. The cycle of poverty is extremely hard to escape because poverty limits personal autonomy and narrows peoples’ focus down to merely surviving rather than thriving.

The trauma of violence creates a similar cycle in the novel. When Dre is killed, Mav is full of despair and anger. These feelings, along with the street rule that mandates vengeance for a family member’s death, push him to consider killing Red, Dre’s murderer. Even though Mav knows firsthand the devastation that losing a loved one can cause, he comes very close to killing Red, which would have left Red’s newborn son (and possibly Seven, if Mav was caught) without a father. His decision to spare Red stops the trauma of Dre’s murder from being compounded and spread to other families.

By the end of the book, it seems likely that Mav and his family will make it out of poverty in the future, but Thomas takes care to show that breaking the cycle may not be equally possible for all residents of the Garden. Mav’s former best friend King is a counterexample to the idea that hard work is all it takes to escape poverty. King, whose parents are both dead and who’s been expelled from high school, has even fewer advantages than Mav. He is an extremely talented football player, but never gets a chance to capitalize on that talent because of his expulsion. By the time the reader meets King, he is so deep into the King Lords that a life outside of the gang doesn’t seem like an option for him.

With no support from family or institutions, King relies on the money brought in by dealing, and cannot understand Mav’s decision to distance himself from the drug game. By the end of the novel, he is expecting a child with Iesha and plans to support his family by rising through the ranks of the King Lords. Both King and Mav want to be the best fathers they can be, but their plans to accomplish this shared goal look very different. By contrasting the stories of King and Mav, Thomas makes the point that breaking the cycles of poverty and trauma is an extremely difficult feat, and there is no universally effective way to cope with life in the Garden.