Scorpions

Jamal’s tragic story is representative of many Black boys and Harlem residents in the 1980s. Myers tells this individual narrative to illustrate the structural issues that limit the opportunities of people of marginalized demographics. He explores race and class discrimination, unemployment and low-paying jobs, and failing public services. In the novel, these systemic issues have led to a culture of violence and drug abuse that’s near impossible to escape, even for a kid who’s trying to stay “straight” like Jamal.

Myers creates a realistic but highly sympathetic protagonist in Jamal to suggest that it doesn’t matter how good your intentions or how bold your aspiration are if you live in a cycle of poverty and crime that perpetuates social inequality and limits opportunities for social mobility. At the beginning of the novel, Randy has already fallen victim to this cycle, affecting his whole family. The string of slights and adverse circumstances that lead Jamal to following in Randy’s footsteps illustrates the multiple pressures—economic, social, and psychological—that contribute to limiting children’s opportunities to escape, let alone thrive.

The novel establishes Jamal as a child with aspirations: He wants to succeed and get his “big boat”; he wants to be recognized as a good artist; he wants to be able to afford commodities (such as a VCR, a leather jacket, or a used car) and to take care of his family financially. However, Myers shows the many odds stacked against Jamal achieving those dreams, big and small.

Besides the poverty of his family (the whole premise of the novel is motivated by their lack of resources), Jamal experiences school as a repressive institution that reinforces the limits of his opportunities. Myers presents the school system as stifling rather than enabling aspiration for working-class children like Jamal. From the very first pages, Jamal feels resentful of how educators make negative assumptions about him and focus on his weaknesses rather than strengths: “The only thing he did was to sit in the classrooms and listen to the teachers tell him what he couldn’t do. He didn’t even have to show up for school to know what they were going to say” (17). Similarly, we never see a police officer protecting Jamal, only harassing him, while the streets are filled with people selling drugs and people with addictions. Abandoned public buildings are now crack houses and gang hangouts. These details represent the failure of other public institutions. The gangs have moved in to fill the vacuum of power. Through Jamal, Myers suggests that it’s difficult for any individual to overcome these structural barriers.

Jamal often feels stuck and powerless. He understands his environment as a determining factor in his life that curtails his ability to succeed: “If you were a part of the life they were living, Jamal thought, then after a while you did something and the police came and got you” (117). This unspecific “something” reflects the pervasiveness, and not uniqueness, of this cycle. Jamal identifies the “raggedy store” at which he temporarily works as part of “the life they were living” in this passage, identifying a link between crime and poverty. Myers also implicitly presents Jamal’s race as a limiting factor in a discriminatory society in which Black people are disproportionately working-class. White people appear in the novel mainly as the rich yacht owners connected with Jamal’s dreams of privilege and mobility or as wealthy lawyers who nonchalantly decide the fate of Randy’s case.

When Myers does give Jamal choices, they are always hard ones that rarely offer a clear positive outcome. Instead, Jamal continually weighs up which is the least bad option. For instance, if he cannot get the money for Randy’s appeal, he knows that his mother—who is already plagued by stress and health issues—will have to toil at a poorly paid job to get it. Jamal also realizes that leading the Scorpions is, ironically, the best protection his family can get against gang violence. By presenting these decisions, Myers juxtaposes morality or legality with basic survival. For example, the conflict surrounding getting the money for Randy’s appeal intensifies when Randy is almost killed in prison. Furthermore, when Jamal tries to take a beating from Angel and Indian instead of participating in the violence, his life ends up being threatened. Myers presents the legal choices as a luxury for the privileged, not someone like Jamal who is constantly wondering if there’ll “ever be a time in his life when he didn’t have to worry about somebody beating him up, or being in a fight with somebody” (185).

Thus, in Scorpions, Myers presents a reality in which opportunity is severely constricted by social context. Jamal’s ongoing dilemma represents Myers’s wider reading of Harlem in the 1980s: Harlem children and adults have limited opportunities to rise above their circumstances—to get by, they must choose between participating in crime, facing unemployment, or taking poorly paid, exploitative jobs.