82 pages • 2 hours read
Jason ReynoldsWhen I Was the Greatest
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Stoop
The stoop is a designated haven for the three boys and appears frequently throughout the story as a meeting place for them. It is a place where they can be themselves and have their own community within the larger Bed-Stuy community. This is an especially valuable space for Noodles and Needles because it is a welcome reprieve from their toxic home environment.
It is also a symbol of their friendship. While the combinations may vary, whether it is Noodles and Ali, Noodles and Needles, or more rarely, Ali and Needles, one of them is almost always out on the stoop. When Needles is beaten, Noodles’s inaction causes a fracture in his friendship and in his relationship with his brother. In the aftermath of this, the stoop remains empty for several days. This is partly because Ali is grounded and Needles is languishing in bed, but Noodles stays away from the spot as well. His absence is a sign of his recognition of the wrong he has done. In this period, the stoop stops being a place of comfort, safety, and community—particularly for Noodles, who violated all these principles.
In the concluding chapter, John sits on the stoop with Ali and Jazz for the first time. He also invites Noodles to join them and, in doing so, pushes the boys to take the first steps toward reconciliation and restoring their relationship. When Needles finally emerges from the building, he walks straight to the stoop and cries out. He chooses the place where he spent the most time with those closest to him to express his physical and emotional agony. For him, this is perhaps the only place he can do so.
Food
Food, more specifically the preparing and sharing of food, symbolizes characters’ feelings toward each other and characterizes their relationships. For example, in Doris’s absence, Jazz regularly prepares meals for herself and Ali. It is a role that she relishes, and her cooking is always accompanied by scenes of bonding for the siblings. This is a subtler way of matching Ali’s more obvious gestures of physical affection and symbolizes how siblings show care for each other even if they don’t communicate using the same love language.
In the final chapter, Ali and John cook breakfast for the family, which is a messy exercise in male bonding. Doris also cooks for them, an act that is meaningful because she is always so busy. She never makes Ali and Jazz breakfast “because she leaves so early,” and in her time off work, she is often “too busy resting to worry about making [them] food” (192). By skipping work—something she very rarely does—she shows her willingness to make time for them. Making John’s favorite meal, barbeque chicken, adds another layer of significance to her gesture. By making the relatively small sacrifice of her time to make a dish for John, she shows gratitude to John for making a much more meaningful sacrifice for their son. It also signals that she is allowing John back into their lives.
Food is not always deployed as a symbol of positive emotion. When Ali shares a beef patty with his friends, Needles only breaks off a corner before he hands it to his brother. This symbolizes Needles’s recognition of his brother’s feelings of resentment and frustration toward him. This is not the only instance where the tension in the brothers’ relationship is symbolized through food. Noodles deprives his brother of food on several occasions. For example, when Ali and Noodles first meet, Doris invites him up for dinner, but Needles does not get to partake in this meal because he is not introduced to Ali until three months later. Before the party, Noodles does it again, showing up alone for food Jazz prepared for all four of them. This is especially cruel behavior because the boys live in an abject state of poverty and rarely have food in their home.
The Barbershop
In Black culture barbershops are revered spaces for grooming and for congregating and finding a sense of belonging. Ali points to their social importance when he says barbershops are the “black man’s country club” (71). Reynolds has spoken about his desire to reflect real life in his work and uses the barbershop to add verisimilitude to this representation of Black life. Brother’s barbershop contributes to the story’s theme of community by supporting and protecting members of Ali’s neighborhood. When the men who were looking for Ali threatened this haven, Brother does not hesitate to remove them. The sign to Brother’s shop says, “WELCOME TO BROTHER’S BARBERSHOP, WHERE EVERYONE IS FAMILY,” and like Ali, Brother values family above all else.
Real-life barbershops are animated by discussions on everything from politics and culture to sports and gossip. People often give and receive advice in these spaces, and Reynolds reflects this in Ali and Noodles’s journey to find yarn. Brother first checks to see if he has any in a storeroom and, failing to find any, the guys in the shop give the boys directions to the yarn store.
The day Brother’s shop is closed, Black steps in gives Needles and Noodles haircuts. Though Black’s home is not a formal barbershop, Needles still gets a barbershop-type experience. A sharp haircut gives him an empowering confidence that he carries with him to the party. The effect on his self-esteem is immediate, causing him to produce a big smile, thus symbolizing hair’s value to one’s sense of self and the Black barbershop’s value to shaping identity.
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