When We Was Fierce by E.E. Charlton-Trujillo (review)

T (or Theo, or Theodore, depending on who’s talking) has only recently recovered from a serious beatdown under the order of his older brother, Jives leader Money Mike, when he finds Ricky-Ricky, clearly another victim of the Jives, bleeding and down for the count a in front of the Wooden Spoon. Fearing that otherwise Ricky-Ricky might die, T checks out the scene, but that decision puts T in back in his brother’s crosshairs, and the police, who arrived too late to the scene to sort the good guys from the bad guys, have T on their radar as well. The Jives strike at T again for his audacity, and when he’s released from the hospital, his frantic mother and his pregnant sister try to keep him safe indoors. They’re doomed to failure, though, because he needs the freedom to patrol his turf, support his friends, and pursue a romance with smart, grounded Nia, and he chooses to risk an inevitable confrontation with his brother, even though it’s likely to be fatal next time around. We’ve seen plenty of spins on the theme of a good kid trying to stay alive and decent in a crime-ridden neighborhood, but Charlton-Trujillo raises the bar, with T’s narration a total immersion experience inside T’s head and a tour de force mashup of street patois and poetry. This is not the novel-as-rap approach, but a format-defying ragged-right-edged monologue that catches the staccato cadence of conversation among people who hold feelings close to the vest (“‘I got my own think.’/ ‘Yeah. . . .You do but/ that ain’t it’”) and startling bursts of internal rhyme (“She smile undeniable . . . ripe!/ I lose all the cool I keep in stockpile”). T isn’t just a character who lingers in the mind; he’s seared there to stay.