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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Fabiola think at the end of Chapter 24?

2. In Chapter 30, what does Fabiola tell Dray to do?

3. What does Fabiola tell Kasim in Chapter 22?

4. What does Fabiola do at the of Chapter 26?

5. In "Drayton's Story," who does Dray say he accidentally shot?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Fabiola see in Chapter 29 at the party behind the police tape? How does she feel about Kasim at the end?

2. In "Kasim's Story," how does Kasim say Dray and Q have been for him and his mother?

3. What do Kasim and Fabiola do in Chapter 28 at Kasim's house? What does Fabiola tell Kasim at the end of the Chapter?

4. What does Fabiola find out about her cousins in Chapter 21? Why have they done this?

5. In "Drayton's Story," what does Dray say about dying? What does he realize?

6. In Chapter 32, what does the Francois family do with 8800 American Street? What do they drive away to do?

7. In "Drayton's Story," what does Dray reveal about his connection to Phillip? What had he felt because of that connection?

8. In Chapter 32, what does Fabiola think as she looks at the Michigan landscape? What does she say about the American people?

9. Where do the cousins and Fabiola go in Chapter 23? What does Dray come by and do?

10. What happens to Donna in the evening in Chapter 23? What does Fabiola think about America?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Kasim's name literally means "divided among many" (36). How does the meaning of his name come to play out in the novel? How does his name show how he is connected to the other characters? Write a response to his character and how he is connected to others.

Then connect his death and how the novel treats his death to the larger pattern of police shootings towards black and brown young men in American. How is the novel tying Kasim to the larger social picture? Why, through this analysis, is it Kasim who is killed?

Essay Topic 2

Research the earthquake in Haiti. Use two sources to write about what happened. Then look at how Fabiola remembers the experience of being in the earthquake and how she relates this to the events at the end of the novel. How is the book a memory project of the events of the earthquake? How does it show a survivor of an event such as this continues to interpret their experience after it happens?

Essay Topic 3

When Dray dies, in the next chapter, "Drayton's Story," he says that you realize after death you have died before and recalls how he previously died while running with a bullet to the head (313). How do his lives and deaths connect to the larger struggle of systematic racism? Tie his story to one other character's story. How are they fighting against something larger than themselves? What is the novel saying with this circularity about the history of racism and systematic struggle?

(see the answer keys)

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