Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun: A Personal History of Violence

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1995

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-10

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Symbols & Motifs

John’s Jacket

The episode of John’s stolen jacket, in the first chapter of the memoir, illustrates the desperation—and therefore the unpredictability—of life in the Bronx. As Canada states later in the memoir, “The thing about the South Bronx was that you could never relax. Anything might happen at any given time” (57). John’s stolen jacket is an early foreshadowing of this realization, and for Canada, it marks the beginning of an awareness about his circumstances and how he will need to deal with them.

It tells us much about this neighborhood that John’s jacket is stolen off of him at a playground, and by a child just slightly older than he is. At a playground in a more prosperous neighborhood, children might fight over toys or treats; a jacket, however, would be more likely to be lost, rather than fought over. In other words, jackets are items that many children take for granted, as they take for granted their security and safety in general. There is also the likelihood that the boy who steals John’s jacket does so not so much because he desires John’s jacket in particular, or because he lacks a jacket of his own, but simply to establish domination. A jacket can be seen as a kind of armor that we wear out in the world, and stealing one can therefore be seen as a particularly intimate, invasive theft, much more so than stealing toys or sports items. That a small child would want to steal one might signify that he himself feels unclothed and defenseless, literally or metaphorically, and that he is just seeking to fortify himself.

Canada’s mother’s reaction to the theft is also significant, in that it shows that the adults in his world are as defenseless as the children are, and are therefore as quick to defend themselves. She reacts to the theft of the jacket with anger, not only because she cannot afford to buy another jacket, but because she does not want her children to be victims. She tells Daniel and John to go out and get the jacket back from the bully, and warns them that if they fail in this, “I’m going to give you a beating ten times as bad as what that little thief could do!” (8) The intensity of her reaction shows us that she is upset about more than a stolen jacket; she is upset that Daniel and John have allowed it to be stolen, that they do not yet understand the reality of their neighborhood. Once Daniel and John have succeeded in retrieving the jacket, she justifies her earlier anger by telling all of the boys that they “ha[ve] to stick together” (9).

The implication is that she herself is not always going to be able to protect them, and it is this, in part, that so startles Canada. As many small children (Canada is four) take quotidian items like jackets for granted, so do they take the omniscience and all-protectiveness of their mothers for granted. That Canada has already been disabused of this tendency, at such a young age, illustrates the roughness and precariousness of his world.

Canada’s Knife Wound

Among the violent episodes that take place in Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun, the episode in which Canada accidentally cuts himself with a knife might at first seem relatively minor. He only hurts himself, and while it is a wound that never goes away–he tells us that his pinkie finger is still bent from the cut–it is also a small and slightly ridiculous wound (which only makes it more embarrassing to Canada). The inept lengths that he goes to both to bandage the wound and to conceal it from his mother are almost as funny as they are sad, partly because they take place in his apartment rather than out on the street; there is, therefore, not the same atmosphere of menace around them, and they seem to have more to do with Canada’s vanity than they do with his vulnerability.

The episode can be seen as serious, however, in that it foreshadows Canada’s later experience of walking down his neighborhood street with a gun in his pocket. Just as he finds that having a gun in his pocket radically changes his demeanor, causing him to carry himself in a more aggressive and challenging way, so too does he find that having a knife in his pocket is like a “passport” (91). It allows him, he believes, to move through foreign and dangerous neighborhoods, and to do so in a flamboyant, cocky way. He describes a type of tough-guy strut known as “bopping,” and tells us that before he acquired the knife he walked this way only when he was on relatively safe turf. With the knife in his pocket, however, Canada “would bop right through groups of boys whose challenging looks questioned my right to travel through their block” (91).

Both the knife and the gun are Canada’s secrets, which make him feel omnipotent at first, but which ultimately end up harming him. The concealed knife, of course, harms him in a small but literal way; the concealed gun’s effect on him is both less visible and more serious. It makes him feel not only cocky, but angry. As he tells us in Chapter 10 of the book, “I knew if I continued to carry the gun in the Bronx it would simply be a matter of time before I was forced to use it” (116). His experience with the knife can be seen as an early warning of the dangers of both carrying weapons and striking defiant, macho postures. It shows how important concealment and secrecy (concealment of one’s emotions, as well as one’s wounds) are to the macho pose. Canada first lies about his finger wound to his mother, then hides it from her for the remainder of the time that he lives with her; that he is able to successfully do so is a testament not only to his force of will, but to the distance that exists in his neighborhood between home life and street life. On the street, he presents himself as an outlaw; in his apartment, he is a boy frightened of his mother’s anger. His permanently bent pinky finger exists for him as a reminder of this polarized environment, and of “an earlier time when my priorities were clear and simple: don’t ever be a victim again” (88).