“Tyrone might convince everybody else that he’s all through with dreaming, but I know he wants to be a big hip-hop star. He’s just afraid he won’t live long enough to do it.”

Wesley describes his friend Tyrone’s internal doubt Tyrone and the realities and pressures they all contend with. This provides some external context about Tyrone separate from his first-person narrations, adding a layer of understanding to his musings about others. While Tyrone often uses humor to soften serious topics, this exposition reveals more about his feelings and fears. The reference to a short life alludes to inner-city social issues like gun violence.

“We spent a month reading poetry from the Harlem Renaissance in our English class. Then Mr. Ward—that’s our teacher—asked us to write an essay about it. Make sense to you? Me neither. I mean what’s the point of studying poetry and then writing essays?”

Wesley questions Mr. Ward’s essay assignment because he doesn’t understand why they would respond to poetry with essays. This sets the stage for the book’s questions about educational norms and practices—the students’ poems end up being an effective educational tool. Hypothetical questions are used in rhetoric to emphasize a point or encourage a reader to think about the topic; here, they reinforce the importance of challenging these norms.

“You dipped into

the muddy waters

of the Harlem River

and shouted ‘taste and see’

that we Black folk be good

at fanning hope

and stoking fires

of dreams deferred.”

This is an excerpt from Wesley’s poem, an ode to Langston Hughes that highlights the way the Harlem Renaissance made the world see the value in Black art. The line “dreams deferred” is a quote from Hughes’s famous poem “Harlem,” which is about the desire for racial equality and the nurturing of hope through oppression.