Halloween Night Like a Train Jus Can't Stop (Metaphor)
“When they get to Manny's car and Blake pulls on the hood and raises his arm in the Nazi salute, Justyce knows the train he just hopped on is headed downhill in a major way. It occurs to him that the moment he said he was cool with the whole thing, he cut the brake line and completely surrendered his power to stop it" (42).
This extended metaphor appears in the middle of Chapter 5, after Jus and Manny have gone along with Jared's idea of dressing up as stereotypes for Halloween. Jus is wary of Jared's plan, but he goes along with it in an effort to live by Dr. King's teachings. However, his intuition tells him everything is about to quickly go wrong after Blake gets too into his Klansman costume and does a Nazi salute. This metaphor is effective because it demonstrates how little of the circumstances are out of Jus's control, as if he were riding on a train that had its brake lines cut, surely headed toward disaster.
White People's Table (Metaphor)
"'You'll be back, smart guy. Once you see them white folks don't want yo black ass at they table. They not down with you bein' their equal, dawg. We'll see you soon'" (65).
Trey says these words in response to the news that Jus has been accepted to Yale. In this cutting remark, Trey deploys a metaphor: he compares the idea of equality to having a seat at white people's table. "A seat at the table" is a widely used idiom that means being granted a position of equality. It brings to mind a business table, or perhaps the table at Jesus's Last Supper, where all participants are treated as equals and important contributors of ideas. In Trey's point of view, Jus will never be granted a true seat at the table at a primarily white institution such as Yale. This causes Jus great distress. Even worse, Jared's comments about affirmative action from the previous chapter, Chapter 7, suggest that Trey is right. However, Jus is not deterred, and he eventually does attend Yale at the end of the novel.
The path of Jus's life (Metaphor)
"'Jus, if Melo and SJ are diverging paths on the road of life, you're headed for a dead end, my friend'" (71).
Manny says the words above in a conversation with Jus about Jus's love life in Chapter 8. Jus has just told Manny that he feels conflicted about his feelings for SJ, but that it doesn't matter anyway, because he and Melo are getting back together. As a reminder, Melo appears in Chapter 1, when Jus is almost arrested after he tries to take care of her when she is extremely drunk. Manny is not a fan of Melo's, and he judges her for hiding in her car while Officer Castillo mistreated Jus. In this passage, Manny deploys a metaphor that compares Jus's romantic choices to a diverging road. On one side of the road stands SJ, and on the other stands Melo. If Jus continues down the road that leads to Melo, Manny warns, he is "headed for a dead end."
SJ "broken" (Metaphor)
"Seeing her there—even as a friend—broken the way she is makes Justyce feel as helpless as he did the night he got arrested" (85).
In this line, Jus uses the word "broken" as a metaphor to describe the way SJ seems when he encounters her in Doc's classroom. SJ is not literally broken, but she is "crying her eyes out" (85), another figure of speech. This metaphor is relatively common in literature—so much so that it might not jump off the page as a metaphor for readers. Seeing SJ like this causes Jus to feel "helpless," as he is faced with a situation that he does not understand and cannot control, just "as he did the night he got arrested." The word "broken" heightens the emotion in this statement: he does not want to see SJ like this, and it heightens his confusion.
Mr. Julian's "bomb" (Simile)
"Last night, Manny's dad came down to the basement. In almost four years of hanging out at the Riverses' house, I've never seen Mr. Julian in Manny's 'sacred space,' as he calls it, so when he dropped down between us on the sofa, it felt like a bomb was about to go off" (111).
In this simile, Jus compares the tension in the room after Mr. Julian entering Manny's basement to the feeling right before a bomb going off. This simile is effective in two ways: first, the image of a dropping bomb mirrors the way Mr. Julian's body "drop[s]" down between the boys on the sofa. Second, it prepares the readers for what Mr. Julian is going to say to the boys, which, once revealed, is shocking news: he had been called a racial slur by one of his white subordinates at work earlier that day. The entire conversation is one that Mr. Julian admits to having avoided in the past with his son, but now that Manny and Jared have had their falling out, he believes that it is time to be forthright about racial struggles.
