Monster pt. 4

Explore complex themes in the novel Monster with thought-provoking discussion questions.

Watch 1. Emmanuel Acho says, "Proximity breeds care and distance breeds fear". What does he mean by this? Do you believe this to be true in our society? Explain your reasoning. Watch 2. One of the cops says he approaches situations differently if the suspect is black versus if the suspect is white, due to the sensitivity of the time. The other cop says there is a system that is followed for every person and the routine should be the same. Do you think officers should approach the situations differently? Why or why not? Watch 3. Acho says there is a communication barrier and that is part of our problem. He says, "communicating with a white cultured person versus a black cultured person is different". Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not? Watch 4. Acho asks the officers if they think we will ever get to the point where kids, specifically black kids, trust cops enough to look up to them, confide in them, and go to them for help. What is your answer to this question? Read Friday, July 10thMiss O’Brien was mad today. She said that Petrocelli was using a cheap trick. The judge said he was calling a half-day session because he needed to hear pleas in another case. O’Brien said that Petrocelli wanted to leave as bad an image in the mind of the jury as she could. She brought up the photographs again and made sure that the jury saw them a second time. Miss O’Brien said she wanted the jurors to take the bad images home with them over the weekend and live with them.The photos were bad, real bad. I didn’t want to think about them or know about them. I didn’t look at the jury members when they were looking at the pictures.I thought about writing about what happened in the drugstore, but I’d rather not have it in my mind. The pictures of Mr. Nesbitt scare me. I think about him lying there knowing he was going to die. I wonder if it hurt much. I can see me at that moment, just when Mr. Nesbitt knew he was going to die, walking down the street trying to make my mind a blank screen.When I got back to the cell and changed my clothes, I had to mop the corridors with four other guys. We were all dressed in the orange jumpsuits they give you and the guards made us line up. The water was hot and soapy and had a strong smell of some kind of disinfectant. The mops were heavy and it was hot and I didn’t like doing it. Then I realized that the five guys doing the mopping must have all looked alike and I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t breathe. I tried to suck the air into my lungs, but all I got was the odor of the disinfectant and I started gagging.“You vomit—you just got more to clean up!” the guard said.I held it in and kept swinging the big mop across the floor. To my right and left the other prisoners were doing the same thing. On the floor there were big arcs of gray, dirty water and swirls of stinking, brown bubbles. I wanted to be away from this place so bad, away from this place, away from this place. I remembered Miss O’Brien saying that it was her job to make me different in the eyes of the jury, different from Bobo and Osvaldo and King. It was me, I thought as I tried not to throw up, that had wanted to be tough like them. 5. Steve has a strong reaction to the images of the crime scene, specifically Mr. Nestbitt's body. What do you think about his reaction? Do you think this makes him look more innocent, or more guilty? Explain your reasoning. Read Saturday, July 11thBefore she left, Miss O’Brien warned me not to write anything in my notebook that I did not want the prosecutor to see.I asked Miss O’Brien what she was going to do over the weekend, and she gave me a really funny look, and then she told me she was probably going to watch her niece in a Little League game.“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to cut you off.”She smiled at me, and I felt embarrassed that a smile should mean so much. We talked awhile longer and I realized that I did not want her to go. When I asked her how many times she had appeared in court, her mouth tightened and she said, “Too many times.”She thinks I am guilty. I know she thinks I am guilty. I can feel it when we sit together on the bench they have assigned for us. She writes down what is being said, and what is being said about me, and she adds it all up to guilty.“I’m not guilty,” I said to her.“You should have said, ‘I didn’t do it,’” she said.“I didn’t do it,” I said. 6. Why do you think Steven doesn't want O'Brien to leave? Listen Everybody in here either talks about sex or hurting somebody or what they’re in here for. That’s all they think about and that’s what’s on my mind, too. What did I do? I walked into a drugstore to look for some mints, and then I walked out. What was wrong with that? I didn’t kill Mr. Nesbitt.Sunset said he committed the crime. Isn’t that what being guilty is all about? You actually do something? You pick up a gun and you aim it across a small space and pull a trigger? You grab the purse and run screaming down the street? Maybe, even, you buy some baseball cards that you know were stolen?The guys in the cell played dirty hearts in the afternoon and talked, as usual, about their cases. They weighed the evidence against them and for them and commented on each other’s cases. Some of them sound like lawyers. The guards brought in a guy named Ernie who was caught sticking up a jewelry store. Ernie was small, white, and either Cuban or Italian. I couldn’t tell. The police had caught him in the act. He had taken the money and the jewelry and then locked the two employees in the back room with a padlock they used on the front gates.“But then I couldn’t get out because they had a buzzer to open the front door,” Ernie said. “I didn’t know where the buzzer was and I had locked the two dudes who knew up in the back.”He waited for two hours while people came and tried to get into the store before he called the police. He said he wasn’t guilty because he hadn’t taken anything out of the store. He didn’t even have a gun, just his hand in his pocket like he had a gun.“What they charging you with?” somebody asked.“Armed robbery, unlawful detention, possession of a deadly weapon, assault, and menacing.”But he felt he wasn’t guilty. He had made a mistake in going into the store, but when the robbery didn’t go down there was nothing he could do.“Say you going to rob a guy and he’s sitting down,” Ernie went on. “You say to him, ‘Give me all your money,’ and then he stands up and he’s like, seven feet tall, and you got to run. They can’t charge you with robbing the dude, right?”He was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t guilty. 7. What similarities does Steve see between himself and Ernie? Does Steve think they are guilty? Listen Mama came to see me. It’s her first time and she tried to explain to me why she hadn’t been here before, but she didn’t have to. All you had to see were the tears running down her face and the whole story was there. I wanted to show strong for her, to let her know that she didn’t have to cry for me.The visitors’ room was crowded, noisy. We tried to speak softly, to create a kind of privacy with our voices, but we couldn’t hear each other even though we were only 18 inches away from each other, which is the width of the table in the visitors’ room. I asked her how Jerry was doing and she said he was doing all right. She was going to bring him tomorrow and I could see him from the window.“Do you think I should have got a Black lawyer?” she asked. “Some of the people in the neighborhood said I should have contacted a Black lawyer.”I shook my head. It wasn’t a matter of race.She brought me a Bible. The guards had searched it. I wanted to ask if they had found anything in it. Salvation. Grace, maybe. Compassion. She had marked off a passage for me and asked me to read it out loud: “‘The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped: therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth; and with my song will I praise him.’”“It seems like you’ve been in here so long,” she said.“Some guys have done a whole calendar in here,” I said.She looked at me, puzzled, and then asked what that meant. When I told her that doing a calendar meant spending a year in jail, she turned her head slightly and then turned back to me. The smile that came to her lips was one she wrenched from someplace deep inside of her.“No matter what anybody says…” She reached across the table to put her hand on mine and then pulled it back, thinking a guard might see her. “No matter what anybody says, I know you’re innocent, and I love you very much.”And the conversation was over. She cried. Silently. Her body shook with the sobs.When she left I could hardly make it back to the cell area. “No matter what anybody says…”I lay down across my cot. I could still feel Mama’s pain. And I knew she felt that I didn’t do anything wrong. It was me who wasn’t sure. It was me who lay on the cot wondering if I was fooling myself. 8. Describe Steve's meeting with his mother. What comment haunts Steve after his visit?