Basketball
An illustration of the protagonist playing basketball with friends accompanies text of a verse directly implicating what makes him happy. In fact, the verse includes the words “joy,” “happiness,” and “delight” which strongly links the playing of basketball with the emotions it engenders, making it even more clear that the game is a symbolic representation of everything that brings emotional contentment.
The News
A breathtaking illustration shows everyone inside a barber shop catering to a black clientele riveted to a flat screen TV positioned high above. On the screen is nothing more than a white male anchor and, in a picture within the picture, a small photograph of black child. There is nothing explicit to reveal what the story is about except for the reactions of the patrons and the accompanying text. The verse is about sorrow and sadness and all it takes is a few weeks’ worth of experience with American TV journalism to know whatever the story being covered on the news is about, it is not good. Because rarely do white news anchors deliver good news about black children in America. The panel reveals that for black society, television journalism is more than just a symbol of bad news.
Skateboarding
It is his skateboard that gives the narrator kinetic energy. In most of the other illustrations—even on the basketball court—the imagery is static. The characters appear frozen in time, forced to confront what they have come face-to-face with in the moment. When he is on the skateboard, however, everything about the energy changes. Whether it is through multiple images of the skateboarder set against static back which indicates actual movement or a static image of the narrator from a perspective showing him at an impossible angle, the skateboarding illustrates suggest a kinetic energy that symbolizes freedom and escape from the static repetition of darkness.
Black Heroes
Almost overwhelming the realistic portrait of the narrator in a classroom as he speaks of feeling pride without shame is the brilliantly colored and vivid display of the heads of famous black role models. Louis Armstrong seems to be blowing his trumpet at the head of Malcolm X. Martin Luther King almost seems to be enjoying the spectacle of Jackie Robinson preparing to swing his bat. The panoply of black heroes symbolizes the pride being spoken about in the accompanying verse as the narrator pointedly wears a Black Lives Matter T-shirt.
Sparrows
A glorious image which brilliantly utilizes the illustrative tool perspective features a large crowd of humans presented as seen from a height and distance which relieves them of specificity. They have no distinctive facial characteristics nor, for that matter, no cultural or ethnic differentiation. With one singular exception of two figures in black silhouette, the ret are all drawn in indistinct shades and hues of non-representative coloring. The only figures in the entire massive portrait that are given distinctive characteristics are the sparrows flying closer the viewer. Accompany this illustration is a verse about the narrator loving people and trees and sunlight and the rain and, notably, sparrows. The sharpness of the birds combined with the hazy focus of everything else suggests that it is the sparrows which most strongly symbolize that love pouring forth from the narrator.
