Scorpions

Behind Jamal’s building, there is a small garden:

[It] used to be filled with garbage that people had thrown from the windows. But when the old Chinese man who was the super of the building next door built a garden, people got together to keep the yard nice. They offered the old man money to help him with it, but he didn’t take it. He just spent all of his time […] working in the garden, making it nice (88-89).

The landlord’s small gesture to unselfishly improve and beautify the neighborhood is symbol of an alternative to type of community represented by the gangs. Though the Scorpions form a brotherhood of sorts, the community that they have comes at the cost of others in the neighborhood, leading to a downward spiral of crime, drug use, and poverty. Instead, the garden initiates a cycle of growth and inspiration—it’s literally fodder for Jamal’s art. This garden is one of Jamal’s favorite things to draw; he’s sketched it “at least thirty times, each time making it look a little better than he had the time before” (89). As soon as the super worked to make the space nice, locals begin working together to keep it that way. The transformed yard, then, is a small, hopeful symbol in the novel of a community self-organizing to counter the deterioration of their neighborhood.

The gun, introduced by Mack in Chapter 5, is central to the plot and psychological turmoil of the protagonist. It is a negative symbol of power, the kind of power Jamal always longs to have when so many things—his family’s poverty, his teachers’ assumptions about him, losing fights to bigger kids—seem to be entirely out of his hands. It’s only when he’s holding the gun that he doesn’t feel “small and weak” (146). As Jamal contemplates bringing the gun to school, he thinks, “Indian was tough, but he had shut up when he saw the gun in Jamal’s belt. Dwayne was going to shut up too” (100). Even after he almost shoots Dwayne, he cannot bring himself to dispose of it, suggesting how seductive power is, especially for someone who feels powerless.

From the very start, the gun feels “heavy in his belt” and even alters Jamal’s gait as he walks (80). He notices that it’s a “Sterling .380 D/A” and has no idea what that means, signaling how little equipped he is to carry it or enter this world of violence. It begins to feel “heavier” after it causes conflict—first when Jamal pulls it on Dwayne in a fight and then when Abuela discovers it after Tito agrees to hide the weapon for Jamal (133). Tito repeatedly asks Jamal to get rid of it, and Jamal repeatedly vows to get rid of it, yet he doesn’t ditch it in a dumpster until it’s been used to commit a murder. Angel is dead, and Tito is devastated, but Jamal still considers going back to dig the gun out of the trash: “Maybe, he thought, you got messed up easily when you had a gun, but at least you weren’t scared” (204). Jamal’s sense of conflict over the gun is never resolved. While he does determine that he is not prepared to “carry” Randy’s gang, he cannot completely extinguish the constant anxiety created by living under the threat of violence, the anxiety that makes him long for the power represented by the gun.