Summary
Slater begins Part 2, titled "Richard," with a series of descriptions, formatted like a free-verse poem, of pictures of Richard posted on Facebook. The descriptions are tender and intimate, and speak to youth, love, and loss. The following section, titled "First Day," is formatted in a similarly poetic manner with line breaks, resisting traditional prose structures. It is a collage of images associated with the first day of school. The descriptions begin in the realm of the literal and near the end of the page switch to more figurative images of scenes and even smells, like the smell "that is finding your way through halls and up stairs" (61).
Slater then returns to prose, describing Richard's reunion with an old friend from his childhood named Cherie. Richard and Cherie living in the same apartment complex and were inseparable when they were younger, though they have since grown apart. Now they are both juniors at Oakland High School. Slater describes Cherie as radiant, both in appearance and character. This brief section ends with Cherie describing Richard as loyal, goofy, and deeply important to her.
In the section, "OAKLAND HIGH SCHOOL," Slater describes "O High" as a middle-of-the-road school. Not "the best school in Oakland, but it wasn't the worst one either, not by a long shot" (64). Slater describes the school as highly diverse, with the city's demographics well represented there, except for white kids. "Few white families," she writes, "sent their kids there, but every other group did" (64). Slater continues to describe the standard drama of Oakland High, some it reflecting the serious problems that students there face—"students shouting, running, sobbing, rumors about who got shot and who hooked up, who was looking for whom and what they'd say when they found them" (65). But she also describes the opportunities available to students there—classes for college credit, mentorship programs, sports, and wellness centers. There are multiple paths a student can take, according to Slater, but sometimes life presents obstacles that make it harder to reach the finish line of graduation. For a third of the seniors at Oakland High, that is the unfortunate truth.
In the following section, Slater introduces Kaprice Wilson, Oakland High's attendance compliance officer. Richard meets Miss Kaprice when he ditches school in the middle of the day to meet one of his friends, also a student at O High, who was being sent home for fighting. Kaprice is escorting Richard's friend to the bus stop and insists upon Richard walking back to school with her. When Kaprice describes her job to Richard as the head of an intervention program for kids who miss a lot of school, Richard asks if he can join her program. Richard says of himself, "I’ve been to a lot of schools and I’ve been in trouble, but I’m really not a bad kid" (67). So, Kaprice tells him that he can join her program, as long as he remains goal-oriented and follows her rules.
Slater expands on Kaprice's life in the next section, describing Kaprice's upbringing in the East Oakland of the 1980s at the height of crack cocaine's popularity. Kaprice describes her long romance with Lil' Jerry; they met when they were just kids and stayed together for years, until they were both in their late teens and early twenties. Jerry had been involved in the 69vill gang since he was in grade school, ironing and banding cash from dice games, and over the years he became a major player, at which point he brings Kaprice along with him, and for a while she works in stash houses polishing weapons and holding down the fort. One day, Kaprice receives an acceptance letter from Clark Atlanta University; her brother had applied for her, in hopes that if she got in, she could leave. Kaprice resists, but Lil' Jerry insists that she go. When she tells him she wants to get pregnant, he stops having sex with her and says that if she gets pregnant, the kid will likely grow up without a father, because his position in the gang makes him extremely vulnerable. So Kaprice goes to school and majors in education. While she was home for a break, Lil' Jerry was shot down in the street at the age of 24 for scolding a group of drug dealers for trampling on an old lady's flower garden.
Slater returns to the present, describing Kaprice's role as a surrogate mother to many of the kids at Oakland High who lacked strong mother figures in their lives, including Richard's friend Cherie. Kaprice doesn't let Richard call her "mom" because he's already close to his mother, but she says she'll be his auntie, instead. In the section "HOPES AND PRAYERS," Slater describes Richard's mother Jasmine and her journey to motherhood. She describes Jasmine's naivety early in the process, thinking that because she enjoyed babysitting her nieces and nephews, she was more than prepared to raise a child of her own. But she adjusts quickly to motherhood, maintaining a strict and respectful household despite the fact that Richard's father is absent for most of his childhood. He and Jasmine split eleven months after Richard was born, and he was in and out of prison for drug-related charges. In 2006, one of Jasmine's sisters, Savannah, was killed in a shooting. Jasmine took Savannah's children in as her own, and Richard felt sidelined by all the new members of their household.
The following sections describe the "good old days" according to Cherie, when Richard, Cherie, and their play gang "the Heartbreak Kidz" used to skip school and roam around Oakland, chopping it up with other kids from other schools, going to the beach, hanging out on the street, and always having a good time. It's a typical one of these days in April 2012. Richard, Skeet, Hadari, Cherie, and their friend Ashley leave school to go to the beach. On the bus, there is another girl named Ashley, and she accuses Richard's friends of following her and her friends. The argument escalates to violence, and eventually the other kids leave. One of the girls leaves her insulin and needles behind. Then, the Heartbreak Kidz move on to a public park, where they get into another brawl with some skateboarder kids. They leave the brawl bloodied, but energized. They go on with their day, having a good time. But later that afternoon, the police catch up with them and arrest the whole group. They're held in Juvenile Hall for a while before the girls are eventually released with GPS monitors. All the boys—Skeet, Hadari, and Richard—are sent to group homes in other parts of California. Richard would stay in Redding, three hours away from his home, until the following summer.
On January 7, 2013, weeks after Skeet ran away from the group home he was sent to, he was shot to death while driving a car through Oakland. The news tears Richard up inside. He felt powerless to even mourn his friend, unable to attend the funeral from his group home three hours away. Cherie laments the widespread violence in Oakland, saying she's afraid to go outside because you never know when you'll end up in the wrong place at the wrong time and get shot. Slater outlines the violence that plagues Richard's life—several friends, and two aunts, murdered—illustrating an upbringing in which violence is unavoidable.
After Richard returns from the group home, he enters a job training program under the supervision of a man named Josue Guzman. Guzman describes Richard as an outstanding worker, always willing to go the extra mile and pick up the slack of other workers. Richard enjoys earning a paycheck and being able to help out with bills and contribute to his family's wellbeing. Jasmine notes that after Richard gets a job, he's years more mature than before he entered the group home.
In October of Richard's junior year, he is robbed at gunpoint outside of a liquor store on his way to hang out with some friends. The kids who rob him take his shoes, clothes, phone, and wallet. Afterward, Richard is shaken. He skips school for a few days. But despite his friend Gerald's desire to retaliate, Richard desists. He's just glad to be alive. When he returns to school, he tells Kaprice about what happened. He gives Kaprice his mom's number and says he thinks they could be good friends. He wants Kaprice to keep him honest and tell his mom exactly what he's up to, because he's determined to stay focused and graduate from high school.
Analysis:
In Part 2, "RICHARD," Slater tells the story of another Oakland childhood that looks very different Sasha's in Part 1. Structurally, Slater follows a previously set pattern, starting out with text adapted from a primary source, from the perspective or personal archive of her subject. In this case, Slater begins Part 2 with a series of textual adaptations of Richard's Facebook photos. Like the section titled "TUMBLING" from Part 1, "BOOK OF FACES" resembles a free-verse poem with line breaks and fragments, highly impressionistic. Most of the sections in Part 2 after the first two depart from the free verse structure and return to the reporterly prose that makes up most of the book, and then, like in Part 1, Slater slips into a lyrical style towards the end of the section. The framing of these sections by poetical language and language that is closer to and in some cases originates from her subjects enables Slater to give her subjects the "final word," in a way.
While the struggles Sasha faces throughout their childhood for the most part have to do with issues of identity, grappling with their mind, which due to Asperger's is wired differently from most of their peers, and finding peace within themselves, Richard's struggles are described as much more external, having to do with his environment and the people around him. Not to say that the adversity Sasha faces doesn't appear in the external world, because it very much does, especially after they begin to present as gender nonconforming. In fact, the impetus of this entire text springs from the adversity Sasha faces because they look different. But there is no question that Sasha and Richard face very different types of challenges.
Slater sums up Richard's proximity to violence in a harrowing passage at the end of a section titled "MURDER." She writes:
"Richard had lost two aunts to murder—his mother’s sister Savannah and his father’s sister, Tish, who was killed by her boyfriend in 2008. Now he’d lost two of his friends. Violence was like the fog that swept in from San Francisco Bay on summer afternoons to cloak the city in damp shadow. Even in the bright sunshine, you knew it could roll in at any minute and chill you to the bone" (95).
In addition to the specter of murder, more casual violence was an even more constant presence in the lives of Richard and his friends. Fights break out on a daily basis at Oakland High, and Richard and his friends are not infrequently sent home for fighting. When they aren't fighting at school, there's often a fight waiting around the corner in a public park or at a bus stop. Fighting is a form of social interaction and at times, like after the fight that sends Richard to the group home in Redding, it appears to be invigorating.
In Richard's world, even the role models have a history and intimate knowledge of growing up around violence and participating in gang activity. In the section titled "PRINCESS OF EAST OAKLAND," Slater describes the upbringing and teenage years of Kaprice Wilson, the attendance compliance officer at Oakland High who takes Richard under her wing and counsels him to get him on track toward graduation. Kaprice recounts coming up in the '80s when crack was introduced to the streets. Her partner for many years, a man who went by Lil' Jerry, started out as a little kid doing odd jobs and ironing bills for the 69vill gang and grew up to be a major player. But he encouraged Kaprice to go to college and use her education to distance herself from the gang life. After Lil' Jerry was shot to death at the age of twenty-four, Kaprice never considered going back to that life, and devoted herself to helping the kids who needed her most, turning them around before they encountered the same fate as Lil' Jerry. But the point is that Kandice understands the temptation of the life because she experienced it herself. By including Kaprice's background, Slater demonstrates how radically people change when their environment changes. Kaprice left Oakland and the 69vill gang for college in Atlanta and returned an educator and advocate for young people in her community, a far cry from polishing handguns in a stash house.
The section ends on a note of hope, but it is a bitter hope, because at this point in the book, we already know that despite Richard's aspirations to graduate from high school and make his mother proud, despite the changes he's already implemented, the hard work of which he's demonstrated himself capable, there will come that fateful day on the 57 bus. He will make that horrible mistake and set fire to the hem of Sasha's skirt. It's already happened, and there's nothing that can stop it. But the more we learn about Richard and Sasha, the further this story gets from a simple tale of protagonist/antagonist. It's the story of two whole human beings, one of whom made a terrible, senseless mistake. Whether it was motivated by pure juvenile malice or identity-based hate is yet to be seen.
