"I wish I were invisible. Wearing Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak or Frodo Baggins’s Elvish ring. Whether shrouded in fabric or slipping on gold, it wouldn’t matter to me. I’d be gone. Disappeared."
The opening paragraph of the novel has 12-year-old Donte sitting in school at Middlefield Prep and fantasizing about becoming invisible. As he stares at his hands, he declares them to be black as the night. Shortly thereafter, he informs the reader that he is a student in a school with an overwhelmingly white student body. His ambition toward invisibility is at once understandable and ironic. Ironic because black society has for so long in American history suffered as a result of being unseen by white society. Understandable because no matter where he goes in his school, he is sure to stick out and make his presence known whether he wants to or not, For the most part, he does not want to stick out because that results in expressions of prejudice, bullying, or even outright racism.
"Funny, how with two words, Alan made it easier for kids to exclude me. If I sat in the cafeteria, students moved. No one invited me to a study group. Or offered to be friends. No one even wanted to talk with me."
The two words to which Donte refers comprise the title. “Black brother, black brother” is notably lame as a mean-spirited nickname. That is because the bully who coined it also chose a notably lame nickname for himself, “King Alan.” As a school jock, Alan’s claim to fame is also comparatively lame: captain not of the football team or even the basketball team, but the school’s fencing team. That the school even has such a team suggests the private and privileged nature of this academic institution. The point of the genuinely lame quality of Alan as the bully capable of wielding such power among his classmates that a phrase like “black brother, black brother” can instantly turn into a sing-sing anthem when Alan is within earshot of other students once he starts slinging the lame insult toward Donte is that racism doesn’t have to be creatively vicious to do harm.
“The Count of Monte Cristo. Another great Dumas book. An innocent man is betrayed, accused of treason, imprisoned, and after many long years, escapes. Napoleon, jealous of General Dumas, sent him to jail. A powerful white man jailed an innocent black man. Dumas was disappeared.”
Arden Jones was once a member of the Olympic fencing team. He now insists upon being addressed as Coach Jones. Coach Jones has taken on the task of training Donte in the art of fencing because Donte has set him ambitions toward the goal of besting “King Alan” in the very court in which he reigns supreme. Coach Jones is also African American and takes great in the contribution of black society to fencing. It is through Jones that Donte learns the author of The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas, was a black man basing his white heroes in large upon the historical legacy of his own father. The reference to invisible is once again raised with Coach’s summary of The Count of Monte Cristo and Napoleon’s treatment of Alexandre’s father. Donte is moving closer to the moment that he very much does not want to be invisible, but to be noticed by everyone in the school.
