The Rock and The River

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they incorporate details from the text.

“Eyewitness Testimony”

In this activity, students consider multiple perspectives to understand Sam’s movement from simplification into moral complexity, a concept applicable to today’s young adult readers.

At the emotional center of the novel is the confrontation in Raheem’s car after Bucky’s acquittal. Raheem accidentally reveals the gun in his glove compartment, which leads to the police gunfire that kills Stick and begins Sam’s movement toward his epiphany. The shooting is a complex action without any clear right or wrong element.

Imagine that the police have charged the white police officer with killing Stick. With the white officer in custody, the police now require eyewitness testimony to figure out what happened and who is responsible.

Working with a group, create three different accounts of the event: from Raheem’s viewpoint, from Sam’s viewpoint, and from the white officer’s perspective. No single recollection is sufficient to understand the tragedy of the shooting and killing of Stick. Who is to blame?

Each eyewitness testimony should reflect that person’s backstory. Each witness testimony will be truthful but not completely accurate. Once your group has produced all three pieces of writing, compare the perspectives to those of another group. What common concerns or conflicts are evident?

Teaching Suggestion: Complexity is a difficult concept to introduce to young readers. This exercise, which asks the class to function as a microcosm of the justice system, allows students to undergo the same transformative epiphany that Sam experiences. If he is to be like the river, Sam must accept the limits of any single perspective, reject the convenient simplification of the Black world versus the white world, and try to understand both Raheem and his hunger for vengeance and the white police officers who assume that a carful of young Black men means trouble.

Paired Text Extension:

Read the poem by America’s Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman that she recited at the inauguration of President Biden. The poem is available at the CNN site as both a video and a transcript.

• Take the phrase “what just is / Isn’t always just-ice” and apply that insight to the epiphany that Sam has. Examine the distinction Gorman makes between trying to create a perfect union and aiming to create a union with purpose. Write a response that indicates how Gorman’s optimism echoes Sam’s determination that the world is too complex for idealism but too broken for pessimism.

Teaching Suggestion: Amanda Gorman’s poem summarizes the epiphany that Sam undergoes in its determination to work with rather than against the world as it is. By using Gorman’s poem, the class can appreciate the timeliness of the novel and how, despite the advances in civil rights, much work remains to be done.

Differentiation Suggestion: For students who are more artistically inclined, consider allowing them to write poems from Sam’s, Raheem’s, and the white police officer’s viewpoints. A poem about Sam’s epiphany that they read to class if they are willing could be a valuable alternative.