The Streets and Courtrooms of Modern Harlem

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Died, Part 102
Walter Dean Myers, Monster

Steve Harmon, sixteen years old and Black, is on trial for felony murder. That’s a technical term for the charge when someone dies during another felony—in this case, armed robbery. His co-conspirators say he was their lookout man, while he… remains strangely noncommittal. Locked up amidst convicts two and three times his age, he keeps a journal describing his Dante-like journey through the hell of the New York State penal system.

Walter Dean Myers was a remarkably prolific author. In a career stretching half a century, he wrote over a hundred books, both fiction and nonfiction, about the African American relationship with power. His histories of Civil Rights pioneers are frequently required reading in public school history courses, while many English classes assign his novels. This novel remains probably his most widely assigned, because it’s so universally accessible.

Steve, a regular at his high school film club, keeps his journal in the form of a first-draft movie script. In it, he describes his trial, before an apparently mixed-race jury, from his untempered teenage viewpoint. He attempts to communicate with his White attorney in plain English; she responds in legal terminology, while warning him to prepare for the worst. If convicted, he faces twenty-five to life, if the jury feels lenient. Steve, who again is just 16, could get life.

Interspersed with these scenes, Steve includes flashbacks to his pre-arrest life. Raised in Harlem, he spent plenty of time sitting on front stoops needing to prove his manfulness credentials to petty criminals who burned out before turning twenty. But he and his brother long to emulate Batman and Robin. And he argues with his film teacher about whether a story’s resolution should be predictable or abrupt, a clear nod to him not knowing how his trial will resolve.

Perhaps Steve’s most striking characteristic is his complete lack of introspection. Though an aspiring artist with, his film teacher assures us, a remarkable eye for telling detail, he never turns that eye toward himself. His proposed movie describes everyone around him: the Harlem street toughs whose respect he longs to earn, the overwhelmingly White criminal justice system, and his mother, brother, and favorite teacher. Steve himself remains beyond our reach.

Walter Dean Myers

Because of this, we never discover whether Steve actually did what he’s accused of. He tells his attorney he isn’t guilty; she reminds him that’s a far cry from innocent. Unlike, say, Harper Lee’s character Tom Robinson, Steve’s culpability remains murky, even as we sympathize with him. Regardless of his guilt, he fronts bravely, telling the jury he scarcely knows his accused co-conspirators… even though we know, having read his prior journal, that that’s a lie.

The screenplay format permits Steve, as Myers’ stand-in narrator, to keep things external. He describes his life and trial in terms of camera angles and cross-fades, not thoughts and memories. His friendships and family relationships come across in telling moments, but Steve never lets them touch him personally, admitting, in his copious handwritten notes, that he must remain detached and aloof, lest he weep in prison, the worst place to appear weak.

Intermittently between blocks of text, we get photographs, drawings, and handwritten thoughts. This book is illustrated by Christopher Myers, Walter Dean Myers’ son, and between them they create a multimedia text that’s potentially more accessible to today’s school-age readers, who weren’t raised on the printed word like prior generations were. They establish Steven as someone who thinks in images, and communicate with an audience who probably thinks likewise.

When this book appeared in the late 1990s, the highest-rated television drama was a courtroom procedural called Law and Order. Black Americans have long recognized this phrase as dog-whistle language for institutional racism, especially back then: Steve Harmon name-checks Mayor Giuliani among the forces steering him into a foreordained outcome. One hears echoes of that whitewashed vision of “the criminal justice system” in Steve’s plaintive story.

This novel, like most of Myers’ corpus, is considered a young-adult book. That’s because it features a teenage protagonist, plain English storytelling, and no vulgarities you couldn’t repeat in school. But like most young-adult literature, it offers copious rewards for adults reading, too, on issues of race, crime, and at what point our society considers a man “grown.” It’s published with a readers’ guide. Share this volume with your students, church youth, or your own kids.

Because I hate to say it, but many things about American justice have only gotten worse in the twenty years since this book appeared.