Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Concrete Rose, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Masculinity and Fatherhood
Identity and Individuality
Loyalty, Gang Affiliation, and Family
Poverty
Summary
Analysis
Maverick runs through the neighborhood, tears in his eyes. His gun is in his waistband, and he threw away his bandana a while ago. Red is “[g]one.” He knocks on Lisa’s window and she opens it with a frown. Maverick crawls through, hauls himself upright, and hugs Lisa while sobbing. She leads him to her bed and begs Maverick to talk. She assures him that Tammy and Ms. Rosalie are at church.
Saying that Red is gone implies that Maverick killed him—so Maverick’s emotional state makes sense. Again, the simple fact that Maverick is so emotional right now suggests that he’s taking Mr. Wyatt’s advice to heart: he’s willing to show his emotions and be vulnerable.
Themes
Swallowing hard, Maverick says he found out that Red—Brenda’s boyfriend—killed Dre. Lisa’s eyes go wide. Maverick says that he walked up to Red in the park and put a gun to his head. But he couldn’t pull the trigger. Maverick thinks that now, he’s worse than Lisa ever thought. Folding her arms, Lisa asks why Maverick didn’t do it. Maverick says he thought of his Ma, his kids, and Lisa—he didn’t know what they’d do if he got killed or arrested. Maverick sobs that he’s a coward. Lisa says that Maverick is a man, not a coward, but Maverick points out that he let the guy who murdered Dre run away. That’s not justice.
In Maverick’s mind, he’s done something awful by not following through and avenging Dre’s death. But Lisa shows here that she defines manhood a bit differently. To her, being a man means being willing to show mercy and not take a life, even if killing someone might seem like the just thing to do. Making this choice, meanwhile, shows that Maverick is distancing himself from the gang its rules.
Themes
Lisa says that it wouldn’t have been just for Maverick to throw his life away to kill Red. Maverick wants to laugh and says he just didn’t want to put his babies through the pain of not having a father, but his life isn’t worth much anyway. Lisa asks if he’s saying his children deserve him, and Maverick says they deserve better. Lisa rubs her belly and says that she and the baby need Maverick to believe in himself. Maverick can’t believe it. She seems to see a totally different Maverick than who he thinks he is, and he wants to be the person Lisa sees.
Pops has been in prison since Maverick was eight years old, so Maverick has gone almost a decade without a father around. He knows how difficult it is to grow up without a father, and he doesn’t want to have to put his children through the same pain that he’s gone through. By making this choice, Maverick starts to become more like the person Lisa sees.
Themes
Maverick thinks that Mr. Wyatt is right: the apple can roll away from the tree with a push. Maverick puts his hands on Lisa’s belly and remembers Dre telling him that he cried the first time he held Adreanna. He cried because she was stuck with him for a father, and he wanted to be the father she deserved. Maverick gets it now. He has some things to deal with.
Thinking these thoughts while touching Lisa’s pregnant belly indicates that Maverick realizes he needs to clean up his act so that he can be the best father possible. In order to properly honor Dre, he needs to show his kids that he cares about them—and that means making choices that are right for both him and his family in the long term.
Themes
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Ma and Moe are fast asleep on the couch when Maverick gets home; he covers them in a blanket and then locks himself in the bathroom. There, he digs out his plastic bag of drugs. Maverick thinks that he might be nothing, but he doesn’t want to sell drugs anymore. As he stands with the bag, Ma knocks on the door. Startled, Maverick fumbles the bag—and it falls in the toilet. The drugs start to melt in the water, and the cannabis floats on top. Ma asks if Maverick is okay, and Maverick tells her he’s having stomach issues. He sticks his hand into the toilet to salvage what he can, dries the bag off, and sticks it in his pants.
Even though Maverick insists that he’s “nothing,” he shows that he wants to be more than that by getting out of dealing drugs. This suggests that Maverick is going to focus on making “clean money,” thereby honoring Dre. But when Maverick dumps some of the drugs in the toilet, it ominously foreshadows that getting out of dealing won’t be as easy as just giving the product back. Maverick will, of course, have to account for the drugs he wasted.
Themes
After flushing and spraying some air freshener, Maverick opens the door and smiles at Ma. He awkwardly steps out and stands, frozen, outside the bathroom door. He prays she doesn’t notice anything in the bathroom, but he’s still there when she comes back out. Maverick says he just wanted to say goodnight and assures her he’s fine. Tomorrow, he’s going to tell her that he can’t graduate.
Now that Maverick has made the choice to stop selling drugs, the thought of Ma finding out is suddenly even more anxiety-inducing. He knows he’s already disappointed Ma and has more disappointment coming for her tomorrow, and he doesn’t want to make the situation any worse.
Themes
Maverick goes to his bedroom and finds Seven standing up in his crib. When Seven bounces and reaches for Maverick, tears spring into Maverick’s eyes. He picks Seven up and thinks that he’s still terrified every time he holds him. Seven deserves everything—and even though Maverick is only “a gangbanging, high school flunk-out who only seventeen,” he’s going to do everything he can for his son. He tells Seven that Seven saved him tonight, and he promises not to let his son down. Then he settles Seven back into his crib, stashes his drugs and his gun in a shoebox, and lies down. He has to tell King what happened to the drugs.
Here, Maverick articulates his new goal: to do everything he can for Seven and Lisa’s baby, no matter how much he’s already messed up. For him, family is what really matters, and so it’s important to him to be present and support his children. With this, the novel proposes that people always have the ability to choose something different and more fulfilling, even if they’ve already made mistakes.
Themes
The sun is barely up when King pulls up outside. Maverick asked him to meet first thing, and he knows King is going to be angry about the drugs. It was several thousand dollars’ worth of product, and King will probably beat him for that. If King and Maverick weren’t best friends, Maverick might die for this. Maverick has no idea how he’s going to pay King back, but he nervously slides into King’s passenger seat and thanks him for coming. He puts the gun in the cupholder and says that Red didn’t do it.
Maverick knows he has a bit of leeway with King because they’re close friends, but he still knows he could face consequences for flushing the drugs. The fact that Maverick is still afraid of a beating suggests that his friendship with King is only going to help him so much. At some point, this financial blow is going to outweigh the strength of their relationship.
Themes
King says he needed to talk to Maverick anyway: he wants the two of them to take over the gang’s drug operations, since P-Nut has no idea what he’s doing. King says he has a baby on the way and needs to make a lot of money—but he dares any of the other “big homies” to come after “us.” Maverick fixates on the “us” and says he’s out, but King says they can be like their daddies. But Maverick thinks that King’s parents are dead, and Pops is in prison. He says that he’s done selling drugs for good.
King shows here that he and Maverick share many of the same concerns: King wants to keep dealing drug because he, too, has a baby on the way. But as Maverick thinks over King’s proposal, he knows it’s not something he can live with. Pops’s imprisonment, and the fact that King’s parents are dead, show Maverick that he can’t trust dealing to get him where he wants to go in life.
Themes
King laughs, reminds Maverick he has a second baby on the way, and asks if he really expects to make it work with just his job at Mr. Wyatt’s. He says this isn’t the Maverick he knows and asks if Ma or Mr. Wyatt found out about the drugs. He suggests that Lisa, “that ho,” found out. Maverick is enraged, but King just laughs and says that Maverick is “whipped.” King throws his hands up and says he’ll take Maverick’s stash for now, but he knows Maverick will want back in soon.
On the night Dre died, Maverick jokingly said that Dre was “whipped.” Now, Maverick doesn’t find the term funny at all. He recognizes that the behavior King sees as something shameful is, in his understanding, really just being there for a girl he loves and for his future child. On the other hand, this shows that King prioritizes dealing over his relationships.
Themes
Maverick passes King his half-full baggie and explains that he accidentally flushed half of it. King is so angry that he pokes the gun at Maverick’s chest. Maverick growls at him to stop, so King cocks the gun and points it to the side. King says that Red probably did kill Dre, and Maverick just couldn’t shoot Red. Maverick again tells King to stop pointing the gun at him, so King laughs, puts the gun down, and says that he’s just messing with Maverick.
Though King says he’s joking and laughs here, pointing the gun at Maverick is still extremely threatening. It makes it clear to Maverick that he and King aren’t friends anymore—at least not unconditional friends. If Maverick wants to be King’s friend, he has to play along with what King wants.
Themes
But Maverick doesn’t think the person staring at him is his best friend. Their friendship has been strained since the DNA test, and it feels like Maverick is losing another brother. He promises to get King the money for the drugs, but King says tells him not to worry about it—Maverick will pay him back some other way. Maverick doesn’t like the look in King’s eye; he gets out of the car.
Even if Maverick recognizes on some level that it’s better and healthier for him to not be around King anymore, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to realize that his friendship with King has fundamentally shifted. He knows he can’t trust his best friend anymore, and this compounds the grief Maverick is already feeling for Dre.
Themes
