Scorpions

Mama and Sassy are Jamal’s primary family members. They all take care of each other. Mama is stern, hard-working, and devoutly Christian. She is also warm, fiercely loving, and supportive of her children, who clearly adore her. Sassy and Jamal don’t agree on much, but they both revere their mother and want to make her happy. Jamal thinks of his mother as poignantly vulnerable. He used to think that she “looked like the African women he had seen in magazines, strong and pretty” (6), but now he notices how life’s troubles have aged her. She has “heavy legs,” swollen feet, and patches of gray in her hair. Jamal always thinks of himself as “small,” and he notices that Mama, with “her shoes off […] wasn’t much taller than Jamal” (55). When she comes back from the hospital where Randy is recovering from being stabbed, Jamal even notices for the first time that her hair is thinning, creating an explicit link between her emotional tribulations and physical appearance.

Mama strives to support her children by working a poorly paid, contingent job for a rich man who takes advantage of her. From Jamal’s perspective, she has suffered greatly by the men in her life—first his dad, then Randy. Jamal, in striving to not let her down, ends up becoming another man likely to make her suffer. The sad lesson that she repeatedly faces is the following: “Lord, when am I going to learn that my problems don’t belong to nobody but me?” (181). Myers presents Mama as a woman who therefore suffers from The Pressures of Masculinity because of the male characters in the novel.

Sassy is eight years old and lives up to her name. She is “coffee colored like her father,” but she has “wide eyes like Mama and Jamal” (9). She cares about her appearance, believes herself to be cute, and knows more than Jamal gives her credit for, a trait that suggests the limits of the Jamal-centered narrative. Sassy and Jamal rarely get along and are constantly bickering with one another. However, they’re both united in their protective love of their mother, and Sassy also shows Jamal solidarity when it really counts—like when Randy is stabbed or Tito leaves. Though she’s only eight, she grows up a lot over the course of the novel, taking on more household chores like cooking and beginning to intuitively understand Jamal’s secret behavior. Mama never knows about the gun in the end, but Sassy finds it and ends up keeping it a secret from her. Through Sassy’s intuition at age eight, Myers represents adultified children in similarly underprivileged circumstances (adultification, or adultification bias, is the prejudiced tendency to view Black children as older and more mature than they are).

Tito is Jamal’s best friend and a faithful sidekick. At the beginning of the novel, they have an amazing rapport, full of joking and sincerity. Tito’s family comes from Puerto Rico. His grandmother refers to him as “Tito Gordito” (gordito is Spanish for “chubby”). Jamal observes that girls like Tito because he has dark hair and large dark eyes with long lashes, which makes Tito so self-conscious that he wants to cut them off, suggesting that he also experiences The Pressures of Masculinity. He avoids girls, but he has a crush on Sassy, who helps establish that he is Catholic by suggesting that he cannot therefore tell a lie about how cute she is. He is afflicted by asthma, which makes him vulnerable and prone to coughing fits, a condition that Jamal thinks is made worse by living in Harlem. His asthmatic episodes highlight the results of living in poverty.

Myers does not give the reader much information about Tito’s backstory, but his father lives in Puerto Rico and Tito lives with his Abuela on 123rd Street in Harlem. He has other family around because he mentions telling a cousin about Randy’s case, which upsets Jamal (35). Jamal especially doesn’t want Abuela to know that his brother is in jail, and Tito never confides anything to her that could reflect negatively on Jamal. Tito is an extremely loyal friend who always has Jamal’s back; he exemplifies the theme of Brotherhood, Loyalty, and Sacrifice. He thinks of Jamal as a “brother” and likes to share clothes with him because “[t]hat’s what brothers do” (28).

Tito accompanies Jamal even when he’s afraid or opposed to what they’re doing. When they go to a crack house to find Mack, Jamal notes that “Tito’s eyes were kind of wide, but he was there. That was the way Tito was. He got nervous sometimes, but he wouldn’t let you down” (37). Jamal is constantly able to read fear on his face when they’re in a dangerous situation. Even when Jamal feels fear, he is better able to hide it—except from Tito. Tito is very sensitive and cannot seem to conceal or bottle up his emotions like Jamal (and the other men in the story) tend to do. He looks away when Jamal says something that makes him feel disappointed, uncomfortable, or embarrassed. After he shoots someone to protect Jamal, he spends much of the rest of the book crying in anguish. Instead of getting “harder” like Jamal or Randy, he gets softer.

Myers uses Tito as the conscience of the book. He often voices the moral choices in any given situation even though Jamal sometimes feels compelled to do otherwise. From the start, Tito is opposed to Jamal joining the Scorpions and is the primary opponent to Jamal having the gun. When they both join the gang, Tito naively thinks that they “can get them to do some good things too” (78) by being a part of it. His optimism is forever dashed when he shoots Angel and Indian, a deed that makes him feel emotionally distraught and physically ill. In the halcyon final day that Jamal and Tito spend together before the shooting, Tito opens up about his father and says that his dad worries about him spending too much time with Abuela, which relates to a fear about Tito not being “man” enough. When Jamal sees Tito for the first time after he turns himself in for the shooting, Tito is crying, and Jamal notices that his eyes “suddenly looked like Abuela’s” (213). This detail suggests that Tito is aligned with the long-suffering women of the novel, the caretakers who offer an alternative to The Pressures of Masculinity threatening to consume Jamal. Because Tito is the novel’s conscience, he can clearly not survive on the street like Jamal can. His moral stance means that he must literally leave Harlem.

Although Angel is the one who dies in the end, Tito and his friendship with Jamal are the major symbolic casualties of the narrative. Without Tito, Jamal loses the remaining innocence and optimism that Tito embodies in the novel, as he walks home from their parting “colder” and “harder.”

Jamal finds both of the men in his family—his brother, Randy, and his father, Jevon—disappointing. As his most immediate masculine role models, they are both pointedly absent: “Jamal felt the same about his father as he did about Randy. They were both gone, and each of them had taken a little piece of Mama with them that they couldn’t bring back” (88). Randy and Jevon highlight The Pressures of Masculinity with which Jamal struggles.

Randy is the absent center of the story. He remains at the unseen periphery of the main action of the story, in prison and out of view, yet he is still the primary motivation for the plot. Randy Hicks is Jamal’s older brother. At only 18 years old, he is serving 15-20 years in an “upstate prison” after being found guilty of shooting the owner of a deli that he and an accomplice were supposedly trying to rob. There is a lot of ambiguity about whose idea the stickup was, as well as whether or not Randy actually committed the murder. Jamal thinks that he did, but there are many conflicting accounts of the crime that make the truth of what happened intentionally ambiguous. Myers indexes Randy’s incarceration to his circumstances rather than simply his alleged crimes.

The reader very rarely hears Randy’s voice (and when they do, it’s always mediated by a messenger or Jamal’s memory) or get insight into his perspective directly. This narrative strategy means that it’s not Randy’s character that’s represented as dynamic. Rather, it is Jamal’s (and therefore the reader’s) perspective on Randy that changes. Just as the exact truth of what Randy has done is always uncertain, the reader is invited to make those judgments only based on what happens to Jamal. This sidelines Randy’s individual case in favor of the circumstances that led to him committing crime and being imprisoned. While Randy appears as an unsympathetic character at first, he’s represented more empathetically as a product of his environment by the end through Jamal’s narrative.

Jevon Hicks is Jamal’s father, but he’s not introduced until Chapter 8, emphasizing that he’s only rarely in the picture. He has been off the scene since Mama left him due to abuse. His domestic violence is connected to his alcoholism, which worsened after he lost a job. Mama sympathetically explains that his poor behavior is connected with him feeling bad for not being able to provide for his family: “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” (96). Jamal’s narrative increasingly parallels Jevon’s in this sense: Jamal actually understands this already because “[s]ometimes when things were going badly for him and Mama and Sassy, and he couldn’t do anything about it, he just felt like walking away too” (97). Jamal’s empathy shows that Jevon’s failings derive from his feeling of powerlessness. When Jevon does appear, he is still trying (unsuccessfully) to be the provider. He is full of big promises—from chipping in for Randy’s appeal to taking them all to Coney Island—that he does not or cannot really follow through on.

While Jevon models The Pressures of Masculinity to his son, Jamal experiences his dad as a negative presence. Jamal always feels bad when he shows up, in part because Jevon is critical of Jamal. Jevon doesn’t think that Jamal should be doing art and is always ironically telling Jamal that he must be the “man of the house” (38). Jevon makes no more than a cameo in the book. He’s notably absent in crisis moments, such as when Randy is stabbed. Mama faithfully visits her son every night while Jamal and Sassy do their best to look after themselves and the house. While Jamal is angry with both his brother and his dad, he nearly follows in their footstep by leaving Mama symbolically wounded and alone.