Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm, written by underground Hip-Hop legend Percy Carey and illustrated by artist Ronald Wimberly, is in the simplest sense a coming-of-age story, told in form of a graphic or "cartoon" memoir. It is — as the title suggests — in many ways about consequences, not only chronicling Carey's three year prison sentence, but also the paralysis he faced after an attack by rival drug dealers. The memoir is both a history of what led up to that event and a depiction of the years that follow. However, a striking aspect of this narrative is that while it focuses on these dire consequences, it at the same time adamantly and consistently insists on the agency of the individual.
The form of any book is integral to the development of characters and also a reader's understanding of subject matter. However, in a graphic work, this role is heightened; the graphic memoir achieves — in the words of Will Eisner — a "special reality" that allows for a variety of modes of first-person narration, complicating the character on the page and ultimately creating layers of perception unavailable in prose alone. Direct speech in the comic, delivered by the narrator through the word balloon, might be likened to conversation or monologue relayed in traditional prose; the "thought bubble," in which the reader gains an intimate knowledge of the character's interior life" provides a second kind of narration; and the text box (usually square and often found at the top of a panel) is most commonly present-tense narration that reflects on the action that appears in the panel below. These three modes combined mean that situation, immediate thought, and retrospective insight can be simultaneous. The visuals unify all of these narratives and also provide a reader with immediacy of experience; in the case of Sentences, Wimberly's gripping black-and-white illustrations allow audiences unfamiliar with the worlds Carey inhabits to enter each scene completely.
A striking example of these strategies all simultaneously in play is the book's prelude and segue into the first chapter. The first sentence of the book proclaims, "This is how it went down." Three short panels within a larger illustration of a city street in winter reveal a conversation between two men on their way somewhere. One is Carey, who is told by the other as he starts the car, "There's no looking back from here. We're gonna do shit the right way now. Everyone don't get a chance like — " (2). This interrupted speech bubble is at the bottom of the page, and the next scene — a two-page spread — is an almost overwhelming explosion of action. Snow and gunfire depicted by white spatter and oversized text almost obscures the larger scene: four gunmen surrounding the car and shooting into the passenger and driver-side doors. The exact nature of the action across the two pages is understood through small text boxes and panels moving from left to right across the chaos of the pages. "They hit us out of nowhere," writes Carey, and subsequently describes the bullets that punctured his lungs, arm, back, neck, and side. At the close of the prelude, the artist's perspective pulls back panel by panel as Carey loses consciousness. Strategically, Carey withholds the context of the prelude's conversation. The title page of the first chapter instead begins with a split image: Carey as a child in the lower half and Sesame Street's Big Bird above, backlit and looming with a God-like appearance. This section is called "Heartbeat," implying perhaps that the dying Carey is experiencing his own life flashing before his eyes.
The opening segment with Big Bird is a virtually unnarrated illustration of Carey's loss of innocence and a foreshadowing of his disability. An actor on Sesame Street, which was filmed a few blocks from where Carey's family lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the late seventies, the boy Carey wanders the halls of the television studio and discovers the upper half of Big Bird's costume propped on a pole, legless and staring back at him from a darkened room. The disembodiment of the character is clearly shocking to the boy, just as it is for the reader; subsequent panels reveal Carey's emotions shifting from horror to skepticism and then cynicism. The latter expression, with only a few exceptions, remains on Carey's face throughout the rest of the memoir.
However, this moment and others that describe childhood incidents are in no way a justification of the life that leads to the shooting. Even in the prelude, he writes plainly, "I can't say I was surprised this happened…I knew we were somewhere we didn't belong, and I knew something like this was bound to happen eventually" (5). The book is filled with similar statements that reinforce the active role Carey played in all the events that culminate in both his paralysis and jail sentence. He also credits a group of strong role models, from his mother and stepfather to his older half-brother, his close childhood friend Al, and a long list of mentors in the world of Hip-Hop. These all contribute to focusing Carey's development from curious child on a television set to a young adult who "can't resist trouble" on his individual choices.
A question in Sentences inextricable from that of agency is the freedom of the individual. In a telling but relatively short scene (less than a page) at Carey's high school, a teacher is giving a lesson on slavery, the word written in large letters across the chalkboard. Carey reflects, "That shit fucked me up for a minute. I just remember thinking, 'how could you just roll over and let that happen?'" (37). He rejects the lesson — and school — saying, "Besides, when I'd be in the hallways, I was FREE to do whatever the fuck I wanted to do." Carey has already described the way that "crews" operated at school and his initial adoption into that network; however, his adolescent definition of freedom does not allow for a consideration of how his life outside of class — both at school and on the streets — is dictated by circumstance. This seems like a missed opportunity for text-box narrative insight on Carey's part, but the question of freedom and rights throughout Sentences is posed and explored largely (and perhaps sufficiently) through a direct recounting of events later in the book.
Carey's disability is only fully addressed in the last section of the book — less than a quarter of the whole. After his release from the hospital, for example, his paralysis is rarely mentioned, though the image of him in a wheelchair does appear consistently in the visuals. When Carey's disability check proves insufficient to pay his bills, Carey returns to dealing drugs and gets arrested and thrown — almost literally — in jail. Because he does not want to project an image of a "weak cripple" (93) to clients, Carey doesn't bring his wheelchair with him on drop-offs, and the police therefore don't know he's paralyzed. What follows is shocking enough to require no narrative text-box voiceover: the prison refuses to give him a wheelchair. Carey writes, "For 45 days I literally had to crawl around the filthy county jail floor…And the thing is, I can FEEL the lower half of my body, I just can't MOVE it, so this was all physically painful as well" (95). The description of the state prison system Carey spends the next three years in is only marginally better, since many are not equipped for inmates with disabilities: "I remember a few times I had to stay in solitary confinement because it was the only thing they could get me into" (101).
The apparent turning point in Carey's life is prison, where he works on his music, writes letters to senators and representatives about his case, and becomes a spokesman for inmate rights to legally ensure that facilities would be updated to accommodate disabled inmates. Carey comments, "My whole life experience has really made me question FREEDOM and RIGHTS — and did I ever have either in the first place. But I don't dwell on it too much." This short statement revises his high school understanding of freedom, but once again Carey does not explore this in depth, leaving the reader to ponder its full significance.
It is partly his matter-of-fact and understated narrative voice that makes Carey's story so resonant. Scott McCloud, in his book Understanding Comics, writes, "The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled…when you look a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself." Carey and Wimberly have created such a place, where new connections can be forged between self and other, person and body, circumstance and action.
