Concrete Rose follows 17-year-old Maverick Carter, a gangster who loves his friends and sees his affiliation with the King Lords gang as a necessity. But Maverick’s life repeatedly turns upside down: first, a DNA test reveals that Maverick’s one-night stand with a girl named Iesha resulted in a son. Soon after, Maverick’s beloved older cousin, Dre, is shot and killed. And finally, Maverick discovers that his ex-girlfriend Lisa is pregnant with his baby. As Maverick becomes a full-time parent to his and Iesha’s son, Seven, he vows to take Dre’s advice to heart and “man up.” However, it’s never entirely clear—either to Maverick or to the reader—exactly what it means to “man up.” This is further complicated by the fact that everyone in Maverick’s life gives him different advice about how to be a man and how best to support his family. But as Maverick matures and learns how to care for Seven, it becomes clear that being a father has a profound effect on how he comes to think of masculinity. Concrete Rose suggests that manhood shouldn’t be defined by stoicism and violence, as many men in the King Lords believe is the case. Rather, being a man means being willing to sacrifice one’s own desires, to be emotional, and to care for one’s family and friends.
Initially, Maverick associates masculinity with stoicism and a lack of emotion. Maverick’s belief in stoicism becomes clear after he becomes a full-time dad to three-month-old Seven. Maverick has no experience taking care of a baby, but only two days after bringing Seven home, Ma goes to work and leaves Maverick home alone with his son. Though Ma reminds Maverick that he has people to call for help if he needs it, Maverick responds with “what a man should” say: that he won’t need help and can handle it on his own. Later, in the weeks after Dre is shot and killed, Maverick expresses the same sentiment. As he prepares for the funeral, he reminds himself that he can’t cry—he has to be strong for Ma, for his Aunt ‘Nita (Dre’s mother), and for the rest of the female family members. Even talking about his feelings, Maverick believes, will take away from his ability to care for his family. The only way Maverick believes he should deal with his emotions is by actively choosing to not acknowledge them, and instead to throw himself into supporting his other family members.
But as time goes on, it becomes increasingly difficult for Maverick to ignore his emotions. From the moment he picks up baby Seven, Maverick feels an almost frightening feeling of love and responsibility for his son. This feeling ebbs and flows as Seven grows, but it’s impossible for Maverick to ignore that having Seven in his life is making him a more emotional, passionate person. But while it’s possible to see Seven as opening Maverick up and making him more comfortable with his emotions, Dre’s death has a profoundly negative effect on Maverick. When it comes to his grief, Maverick knows that there’s only one appropriate way to deal with it: to follow the unwritten “rules” of the street and kill Dre’s killer, thereby avenging Dre’s death. Importantly, Maverick interprets this unwritten rule as meaning that this is the only proper, effective way to deal with his grief—which in turn shuts Maverick off processing his grief in more productive ways.
Eventually, Maverick comes to realize that being a good man and father means caring for his family—and that this sometimes mean expressing uncomfortable emotions rather than repressing them. In the months after Dre’s death, Maverick comes to realize that Dre had begun to realize the value of prioritizing family and emotion above all else. In life, Dre spoke often about the depth of his love for his daughter Adreanna, and how profound it was to hold her for the first time. Her birth, he implies, made him want to change and become a different kind of man, one who’s emotionally and physically present for his family—suggesting that expressing emotion isn’t such a bad thing. At the time, Maverick had scoffed but now that he’s a father himself, Dre’s advice starts to make more sense. After Dre’s death, Mr. Wyatt steps into the role of Maverick’s mentor. One afternoon when Maverick can’t control his tears and cries about Dre’s death, Mr. Wyatt sadly says that “one of the biggest lies ever told is that Black men don’t feel emotions.” He encourages Maverick to express any emotions he feels in healthy ways, such as through crying and talking with others about his grief and his fears. Through this, Mr. Wyatt is able to flesh out some of the ideas that Dre was only barely able to introduce to Maverick: that being a good man and a father means not being afraid of his emotions and instead, accepting that they exist and not letting them dictate his actions.
Though Maverick eventually identifies Dre’s killer as the hustler Red and even goes so far as to put a gun to Red’s head, Maverick ultimately chooses to let Red live. He does this for several reasons, including that Red also has an infant son, and that Maverick fears that he’d ultimately go to prison or be killed in retaliation for killing Red. But although Maverick initially sees his failure to kill Red as failure to be a man (since he couldn’t carry out the “rules”), Lisa impresses on Maverick that choosing to let Red live was actually the mature, compassionate thing to do. It means, most importantly, that Maverick will be able to go on being a present father figure to Seven and will be around to parent his and Lisa’s daughter when she’s born—and that he’ll be able to continue to follow Dre and Mr. Wyatt’s advice to feel his emotions rather than run from them.
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Masculinity and Fatherhood ThemeTracker
Masculinity and Fatherhood Quotes in Concrete Rose
One of them yell out, “Don’t let them punk you, Li’l Don and Li’l Zeke!”
It don’t matter that my pops been locked up for nine years or that King’s pops been dead almost as long. They still Big Don, the former crown, and Big Zeke, his right-had man. That make me Li’l Don and King Li’l Zeke. Guess we not old enough to go by our own names yet.
I study Iesha real hard. She got bags under her eyes she didn’t have before. “Anybody helping you with him?”
“Help?” her momma says, like I cussed. “Who supposed to help her? Me?”
“C’mon now, Yolanda,” says Ma. “This is a lot for anyone to handle, let alone a seventeen-year-old.”
“T’uh! She wanna act grown, she can deal with this like she grown. By. Her. Self.”
Iesha blink real fast.
I’m feeling real bad for her all of a sudden. “If he is mine, you won’t be doing this alone no more, a’ight? I’ll come over and help as much as I can.”
“You good?”
Hell no. My life got thrown into a blender and I’m left with something I don’t recognize. On top of that, I’m suddenly somebody’s pops and I wish I had my pops.
Nah, man. I can’t freak out. I gotta handle mine, on some G shit. “I ain’t tripping.”
“You know it’s okay to be scared, right?”
“Scared of what? A li’l baby?”
“Of all the stuff that come with having a li’l baby,” Dre says. “First time I held Adreanna, I cried. She was so beautiful, and she was stuck with me for a father.”
I look at my son, and damn, I feel that.
“I decided I was gon’ be the kind of father she deserved,” he says. “I had to man up. That’s what you gotta do, Mav. Man up.”
“Fool, I’m a man already,” I say.
“I walked out on him last night, Dre.”
“Who? Your son?”
I nod. “He wouldn’t stop—I didn’t know how to make him stop crying man, and I was tired and—” I shake my head at myself. “I walked out of the house and left him crying.”
“Did you go back?”
I look up at him. “Of course I did.”
“That’s what matters,” Dre says. “Parenting is hard, cuz. You gon’ break sometimes. The most important thing is that you pull yourself together and go back, playboy.”
Pops told me the other day that grief something we all gotta carry. I never understood that till now. Feel like I got a boulder on my back. It weigh down my whole body, and I be wanting to cry out to make the pain go away.
Men ain’t supposed to cry. We supposed to be strong enough to carry our boulders and everybody else’s.
“Everybody in the set already think I’m soft, Shawn.”
“So?” he says. “Forget what them fools think. You gotta live for you and Dre now, you feel me? You can do everything he didn’t get a chance to do.”
I never thought of that.
“Raise your son. Be the best father you can be,” Shawn says. “That’s how you honor Dre. A’ight?”
“Son, one of the biggest lies ever told is that Black men don’t feel emotions. Guess it’s easier to not see us as human when you think we’re heartless. Fact of the matter is, we feel things. Hurt, pain, sadness, all of it. We got a right to show them feelings as much as anybody else.”
“We need to start calling you Old Man Carter,” Rico says. “I take that back. My grandma get out more than you and she fresher than you.”
“Whatever,” I mumble.
The first bell ring for class. I follow Rico and Junie down the hall as they discuss the dance and their plans. It’s like they speaking a language I ain’t fluent in anymore. The words real familiar, but they done lost all meaning for me.
“Word around the school is that you’ve had some life-changing developments this year,” he says.
I wait for the look. I swear, when grown folks know I got two kids, I see myself become trash in their eyes. It’s like they see my babies as trash, too, just ‘cause I made them so young. Hell nah.
Lisa stare at me real hard. “You’re selling drugs with King again, aren’t you?”
I sigh. “Man, look—”
“You know what? Don’t answer that,” she says. “Do whatever you want, Maverick. Me and my baby will be all right.”
“There you go, acting like I won’t be around.”
“Because you won’t!” Lisa says. “I make plans, knowing that. My baby needs one of us to think about the future.”
She don’t get it. She really don’t get it.
There’s a lot of things I never wanted to know ‘bout my pops. It come with the territory when your father is Big Don. I’d rather hear that he bought kids’ shoes and fed families at holidays. Not that he got people hooked on crack.
Sometimes one person’s hero is another person’s monster, or in my case, father. Yet it’s hard for me to judge him when I’m plotting to kill somebody else’s father. But see, taking Red out is the best way for Dre to get justice. It ain’t much different from a judge sentencing Red to death row.
I think.
“Daddy’s here. It’s okay.”
Them few words do me in. I say them to Seven all the time, but I ain’t heard them myself in years, and they everything I ever needed. “Dre should be here,” I blubber.”
“He should be.”
“He deserve better.”
“He did.”
“I wanna do this for him. I got to.”
Pops smile so sad it’s hard to call it that. “There were a lot of things I thought I had to do, too. Reality was, I only had to be there for you and your momma, and I failed at that.”
But when it comes to the streets, there’s rules.
Nobody will ever write them down, and you’ll never find them in a book. It’s stuff you need in order to survive the moment your momma let you out the house. Kinda like how you gotta breathe even when it’s hard to.
If there was a book, the most important section would be on family, and the first rule would be:
When somebody kills your family, you kill them.
“Why didn’t you do it?”
“I thought of my kids, my momma, and…and you. What it would do to y’all if I got caught or killed.” I close my eyes. Tears slip outta them. “I’m such a fucking coward.”
“No,” Lisa murmurs. “You sound like a man to me.”
I look at her. “How? That fool murdered Dre, Lisa. And what I do? I let him run away. What kinda justice is that?”
“It wouldn’t have been justice if you threw your life away to kill him.”
I almost laugh. “My life ain’t worth much. I just didn’t wanna put my babies through that. I know what it’s like to not have a father around.”
“You don’t owe me an explanation,” he says. “Like I told you the other day, you’re becoming your own man. You don’t need my permission or approval.”
“Yes, sir.”
Pops take another deep breath. “On some real shit, son? There’s a lot of grown men in the game who don’t wanna be in it. They don’t have the guts to admit it like you do. They too caught up or scared of what people will think. They end up accepting that they stuck.”
