68 pages • 2 hours read
Nathan McCallMakes Me Wanna Holler
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Respect
Respect, disrespect, and the desire for respect are present throughout McCall’s book. For black Americans, a group of people disrespected for centuries, respect was central to their psychology and motivated many of their actions. Perceived disrespect was a serious offense often countered with violence.
Power
The desire for power in black America was like respect. Black Americans had no power and hadn’t for some time, so they relished any ability to gain power. This motivated the rise of guns in black communities. Guns commanded power, which commanded respect.
Manhood
McCall spends a lot of his memoir reckoning with the definition of manhood. Parents of this generation didn’t communicate things like manhood to their children, so they were left to figure it out on their own. McCall learned about manhood on the streets, and it was defined by a macho mentality, mistreatment of women, and violence. Later, in prison and after his release, McCall grew to understand integrity, intelligence, character, and other virtues that truly encompass manhood, and he rejected his previous, flawed definition.
Time
How people spend their time is a major concern of McCall’s. When young, he notices how white racists spend their time and energy, and the time his father spends working for racist whites. At his high school graduation, McCall is forced to reckon with how he spent his time when young, while observing others who spent theirs differently, and who are receiving honors for their hard work. In prison, productive use of time is central to McCall’s self-improvement. After his release, time priority and restrictions govern many of his choices. McCall’s life is to a large extent about time.
Bondage
Bondage cannot be escaped in McCall’s book. It is as if slavery did not end, and McCall and his community still lived in chains. While not physically bound, the black communities McCall describes are bound by institutions, psychologies, and systems that keep them where they are: at the bottom rungs of society.
Cycles
The cyclical nature of life reoccurs in McCall’s book. Individual lives cycle through patterns of destructive decisions, generations engage in cycles that shackle communities, and the country cycles indefinitely through periods of progress and regression. Rarely, someone breaks a cycle and possibly begins a new, positive cycle, such as McCall and Monroe both attending college, but most cycles are negative.
