As a boomer, I was surprised this century to learn that the Marvel Universe had expanded. The Spider-man I grew up with was a white teen named Peter Parker who gained super-powers from a radioactive spider's bite. Now we learn about parallel universes where other young men and women have that same experience. In 2016, I read the YA novel by Jason Reynolds, Miles Morales: Spider-man about a 15-year-old boy in Harlem whose father is African-American and whose mother is Puerto Rican. He's a scholarship student in a mostly-white private academy in Manhattan. The novel, which I read in ten-minute intervals during my 7th graders' "drop everything and read" period, inspired one of my best blogposts ever.
In Miles Morales Suspended, Reynolds continues the story. Miles is suspended from class for participating in a protest against the white supremacist version of American history being taught in their class. With an assortment of classmates, including his crush and a nerdy library assistant (secretly possessed by a supernatural entity), he's stuck in a classroom with two proctors and a pile of work to do. Each teacher has sent him an assignment to make the young man reflect on his own character through subject-appropriate metaphor. For example, reminding Miles how brown bananas emit ethylene that turns nearby yellow bananas brown, the Chemistry teacher asks Miles to reflect on times he may have been a yellow banana or a brown one.
While this set-up locks the action into one classroom and one school day broken into one-hour periods, it also gives Miles (and Reynolds) lots of opportunities to take flight in verse. Miles discovered poetry in that first novel. In this one, most of the action is interior, and a lot of the lines in this book don't reach the end of the page.
Still, my favorite part of the book takes place during the night before the day of his punishment. When his jovial roommate Ganke is fast asleep, Miles suits up and goes to the window. Pausing to look at the skyline, he imagines "all the stars that were supposed to be there had fallen, and now sparkled much closer to the ground" (44). A deep breath, and then he jumps -- into some of my favorite poetry in the book:
AIR begins "When I'm in / the air / I feel // free. Like something / someone / has // let go of." By the end of the poem, the lines have led Miles to wonder at himself: "I feel / like I can / let go."
In the next moment, he literally lets go, free-falling before he shoots a web. For an exhilarating paragraph, we experience Spider-man's web-slinging from the inside, as he leaps from building to building, soon landing at the top cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. He sees the lights of Times Square from a distance, and there follow some memories of that place, including an incident when he chased down a pickpocket to retrieve an old man's wallet -- and left the desperate pickpocket with money from Miles's own pocket.
That section is so vivid and joyful that I've remembered all its details since the book was new.
I reopened the book this week because I heard Jason Reynolds on NPR. The format of the interview show is to ask famous people a personal question drawn from a deck of cards. I didn't catch the question, but the answer endeared Reynolds to me. He is taking care of his elderly mother these days, "bathing the only Creator he has ever touched, the vessel who gave me everything I have become." He is determined to "maintain her dignity and comfort." He says to her, "I'm going to help you transition ... after you taught me to be bold."
His Miles Morales, too, expresses love and gratitude for family as he struggles to be as good as they want him to be.
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