"The pain was a color—white"
Rashad describes the force the police officer uses to throw him to the ground. Authors Kiely and Reynolds use imagery to make the reader feel viscerally the pain Rashad is experiencing:
Hurt so bad the pain was a color—white, a crunching sound in my ear as bones in my nose cracked. After he slapped the cuffs on me, the metal cutting into my wrists, he yanked at my shirt and pants, searching me. I let out a wail, a sound that came from somewhere deep inside.
Through the vivid descriptions, the reader can feel Rashad's pain, hear the sound of his bones breaking, and the cry that rips from him.
"You can still see their silhouettes"
Rashad is describing the work of Aaron Douglas, an artist from the Harlem Renaissance who inspires him. He talks about his work in the following way:
Imagine The Lion King. But all the lions are people. Black people…Now, imagine that you’re looking at them through the thickest fog ever. So thick that you can’t make out any actually feature on their bodies, but you can still see their silhouettes. So it could be any king. Or any prince. But you can still tell they’re black.
Rashad uses imagery to make Douglas’s paintings come alive for the reader. Douglas’s work depicts black life; but instead of focusing on individuals, he opts for silhouettes to convey a collective idea of the black experience. Rashad finds himself mimicking Douglas’s style to try and make sense of his own experience through art.
"Like the connected parts of one heavy-breathing animal"
The basketball team at Springfield is diverse, with players of different races. As racial and political divisions are being drawn at school, their coach calls for unity and the need to play as a team. Quinn observes how at practice,
[We] began the weave together, passing and running, passing and running, five balls whipping through the air between all this, dodging in and away from each other, fifteen guys moving like connected parts of one heavy-breathing animal.
The description of the team practicing together paints the image of fifteen individuals moving together as a coordinated whole. The language has a rhythmic feel and describes the teammates' movements as almost choreographed and dancelike.
"The kaleidoscopic reflection"
At the protest, when they reach the police station and start the die-in, Quinn looks up at the evening sky. Instead of seeing the darkening sky he sees
the haze of flashing police lights, streetlamps, giant spotlights, the headlights of cars, the kaleidoscopic reflection off the cold concrete and glass of Police Plaza 1, all obscured the sky. There were no stars. The moon was hidden somewhere behind the blinding glare, and it felt like the city itself was collapsing, pressing in, taking only the shallowest of breaths in the squeeze of lost space.
In this example of imagery, the authors convey the chaos of the moment. The flashing lights from multiple sources are so strong they obscure the evening sky. Without the expansiveness of the sky, Quinn imagines the city pressing in. It’s almost as if the city is holding its breath, waiting to see what will happen moving forward.
