After Tupac and D Foster

“It’s like he sees stuff, you know? And he knows stuff. And he be thinking stuff that only somebody who knows that kinda living deep and true could know and think.”

D is amazed at Tupac’s wisdom and ability to channel his experiences into music that people connect with so strongly. Because she has been through a lot of challenging things, she knows that he is speaking authentically. The book therefore frames Tupac as a cultural icon with whom Black people like D—whose experiences are chronically underrepresented—can identify.

“And then it made sense to me—crazy-fast sense in a way it hadn’t before. D walked out of her own life each time she stepped into one of those other places. She got off the bus or walked up out of the subway and her life disappeared, got replaced by that new place, those new strangers—like big pink erasers.”

This is a moment where the narrator gets new insight into D and her life. She realizes that she loves to roam because it gives her the chance to forget her life and experience other people’s lives for a short time. This quote also shows that the narrator is perceptive and is trying hard to understand D.

“Some days I be feeling like I’m too free.”

Neeka is often complaining that her mom has her on “lockdown” and is jealous that D can go wherever she wants. In this quote, D shows a different, more mature perspective: She doesn’t feel like she should have as much freedom as she does, as a child, and sees Neeka’s lack of freedom as an indication that she has loving parents who give her security, boundaries, and rules.

“Mostly I was the quiet one in our group, the Brain. Mostly I watched and listened. But I could watch until I was ninety-nine and I’d never be able to see what D saw.”

Here, the narrator is defining her role within her friend group. We can see that she is not just book smart, but also wise, because she recognizes that D’s experiences have given her a different kind of knowledge that she’ll never have access to.

“Lately, I’d been feeling like I was standing outside watching everything and everybody. Wishing I could take the part of me that was over there and the part of me that was over here and push them together—make myself into one whole person like everybody else.”

This is the first time in the novel that the narrator describes the discomfort she has been feeling within herself. She feels like she is not whole and doesn’t know how to put the pieces of herself together. By depicting these common adolescent struggles, the text solidifies its coming-of-age storyline.

“D looked at me and smiled. And I saw it then—the little part inside of her that was just like me, that was walking through this world trying to find the other half of her. She roamed the streets. I roamed the books. I smiled back. For some reason, in that split second, I knew no matter what happened, we’d always be connected.”

In this moment, the narrator realizes that she and D have something in common: They are both constantly searching for the other half of themselves. They go about it in different ways, but it is something that they understand about each other. The narrator’s ability to see herself in D in spite of their differences underscores how racial differences often breed harmful prejudice due to a lack of mutual understanding.

“Mama wasn’t a big Tupac fan, but she was a big fan of justice.”

This quote shows how the narrator’s mother, a woman from a different generation, is not particularly impressed with Tupac as a rapper like younger people were, but she still believed he was treated unfairly in his trial, and she was angry that people were basing their belief about his guilt on his persona and appearance rather than the truth of what really happened.

“It’s because we black and we kids and he’s black and he’s just a kid—even though he’s twenty-three—and every single song he be singing is telling us a little bit more about what could happen to us and how the world don’t really care.”

The narrator says this about Tupac when she, Jayjones, Neeka, and D are talking about why he is so important. She doesn’t have a lot of specific experiences that connect her to him like Jayjones and D do, but she can see that he represents all of them and speaks for all of them.

“‘Neeka,’ I said as we headed into my house. ‘You think we the lucky ones?’ […] ‘If we so lucky, how come she’s the one that get to take the bus all over the city by herself and don’t have to worry about being home until nine o’clock?’”

For a while, both the narrator and Neeka believe that D is lucky because she is so independent and free and doesn’t have the annoyance of overbearing parents like they do. The narrator does eventually realize that they are lucky to have parents who care about where they go and who they spend time with, but Neeka, true to character, insists that D is luckier because she can do whatever she wants.

“Then it seemed like all over Queens, brothers were getting arrested and sent upstate. It felt crazy to turn on the television and see rappers talking about prison and doing these video scenes in prison and then to turn around and see your own people get sent away. It was all crazy real and feeling like some kind of strange dream at the same time—people we didn’t even know singing and rapping our stories.”

The narrator explains how surreal it was for the people around her to suddenly start getting sent to prison like Tupac while Tupac rapped about it as if he had seen firsthand everything happening in her own neighborhood.

“But I was still a few months away from twelve when I was first starting to understand. And I’d sit in my room watching the stars on my ceiling begin to fade up into a glow and I’d just try to it all out. Just a kid really without any of the words I needed to explain all the things my mind was just beginning to think about.”

The narrator is remembering how confused she was during the period of the novel’s main events. Now, as an adult, she can see everything more clearly and gives herself grace for not knowing everything. She feels compassion for who she was back then.

“Brothers be hunted.”

Jayjones says this as young Black men are increasingly targeted by the police after Tupac goes to jail. The short but powerful sentence evokes the sense that they are being dehumanized and hunted like animals. After Jayjones makes this comment, the narrator reflects on how, in a different way, girls are being hunted, too: Now that she is becoming a teenager, she feels the weight of the male gaze and feels the discomfort of being “prey” for young men in her neighborhood.

“Something strange happened. With all that beautiful stone around me and the moon shining through the trees and down on us like that…and us three just standing there staring up…I felt whole—like my two selves had come together—finally meeting for the first time. I closed my eyes and hugged myself harder. I wanted to hold on to this feeling. For always.”

This is the moment when the narrator, along with Neeka and D, is outside at night exploring the amphitheater while it is snowing. It is such a special moment for her because she could feel that the two parts of herself that had always been separate finally came together. This is an indication of how the narrator has changed and matured over the course of the novel.

“D’s cool. She’s like from another planet. The Planet of the Free.”

Neeka’s comment about D shows how different D is from the other two friends and that they have learned a lot just from watching and listening to her. It is as if not only has she traveled all over the city but also into the world of adults and is reporting back to them.

“You can’t even find your Big Purpose up in this family. Can’t get your head on straight.”

Neeka tells the narrator that she feels frustrated by the noise and chaos in her house. She doesn’t have any space to herself and wants to think about her Big Purpose but can’t.

“Sometimes I think maybe I should just do something wrong—get sent to some juvie place where they lock you down alone in your room.”

Neeka says this to the narrator on their way to visit Tash in jail. It shows her frustration with her family but also her naivete about what prison is like. It is also ironic because she frequently complains that her mother has her on “lock down,” and her statement here shows that she does not understand how much freedom she has relative to those who are incarcerated.

“Remember this place good, y’all. We got a spot waiting for you.”

When the narrator visits Tash in jail, this is what she imagines the guards thinking about them. Visiting jail is a cautionary tale for what can happen if they are not careful. There is a menacing tone that conveys the anxiety of being sent to jail at any given moment for no reason.

“You know how many more rich Negroes there’d be if we wasn’t all the time trying to pay off some lawyer or bail a brother out. That’s one thing I’m guilty of—giving hard-earned money to the man. One person mess up, legal system got the whole family on lockdown.”

While his family visits him in jail, Tash points out that the mass incarceration of Black people has far-reaching consequences: Families cannot save money and accumulate wealth to support future generations because they are often struggling to pay legal fees or bail.

“‘Genius is crazy,’ Jayjones said. ‘That’s what everybody be saying. If you got any kind of genius in you, it’s like right on that line of being real brilliant and real crazy. I got genius in me when it comes to ball.’”

This comment from Jayjones connects with an earlier conversation where the narrator talks about Einstein. It also shows how he believes his Big Purpose is basketball because of both his skill and the amazing feeling he gets when he plays.

“Randall told me these hands was gonna save me […] And I ain’t gonna stop believing that they will one day.”

Tash believes that his talent for playing the piano is his Big Purpose, and Mr. Randall tells him that his hands will save him. When he returns home from jail, he plays the piano for a large group while Neeka and the narrator sing. This moment is the most joy many of the characters have felt in a long time, confirming that Tash’s hands are indeed special.

“I came on this street and y’all became my friends. That’s the D puzzle. I talked about roaming and y’all listened. I sat down and ate with your mamas and it felt like I was finally belonging somewhere. Us three’s the puzzle. It’s just a three-piece puzzle.”

After they meet her mother and learn her real name, the narrator and Neeka tell D that they didn’t really know her, that she was mysterious. D argues that there was no mystery—she wasn’t really her whole self until the three of them became friends.

“You never really told us who you were, girl. We was all the time trying to figure it out.”

Neeka and the narrator feel a little bit taken aback when they realize that they had never really known D’s full name or that her mother is white. They feel that this is important information, but D believes it doesn’t really matter—what matters is that they accepted her as a sister without really knowing much about her.

“‘I’m coming!’ D yelled, not turning away from us. ‘She better cool it or else I’ll be telling her to step. Be my turn to leave her.’”

In this quote, D relishes the idea of being exasperated with an overbearing mother just like Neeka always is. D had said that she wished she had a mother who would care about where she was, and now she finally has that.