'Lurched Forward and Stopped': 'Last Stop on Market Street' and Black Mobility

This article examines the racialized productions of space in Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson's 2015 picturebook Last Stop on Market Street, arguing that depictions of characters' movements show how Black mobility constitutes a form of resistance to state circumscription. Language and illustrations both work to portray CJ and Nana's environment as fundamentally flexible, often exceeding the confines of what appears to be possible. The geographies of their journey on a city bus privilege communication, alternative epistemologies, and the spatial transcendence of creativity over literalism. Yet, importantly, other realities also impact the way characters move; the carceral regulation of Black people within the United States inevitably shadows this book's spatial optimism, and Nana's loving surveillance and careful direction shape the outlines of CJ's imagination. To move while Black, Market Street suggests, is to create new possibilities within the confines of limitations, the process of motion a continual and unsettled oscillation.

Keywords: Race; Mobility; Picturebooks; Place; Space

Katharine Slater is an assistant professor of English at Rowan University, where she teaches courses on children's and young adult literature. Her previous publications include articles in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, The Lion and the Unicorn, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, and a collection on early readers. She is currently at work on a book project that considers how spatial constructs contribute to the ideologies of visual narratives for young people, arguing that these ideologies depend upon geography for their reproduction, survival, and power.

In the Newbery Medal-winning picturebook Last Stop on Market Street, child protagonist CJ and his grandmother Nana take a city bus to volunteer at a soup kitchen. During their journey on the bus, CJ and Nana encounter a friendly assortment of passengers, including a blind man, an elderly woman with a jar of butterflies, and a guitar player, each of whom contributes to building an embracing environment. This optimistic space transcends the limits of the bus's confines, extending to the broader atmosphere Nana attempts to create for her grandson. She encourages the resistant CJ to rethink his critical perceptions of their environment; while he continually focuses on what is missing, or what he dislikes, Nana characterizes their neighborhood and its diverse inhabitants as beautiful. Writer Matt de la Peña and illustrator Christian Robinson depict the bus route CJ and Nana take as a space of fixity and flow, through which characters challenge, perform, and map social identities. Transit, in this text, directly engages with the racial and social politics of mobility, often resisting the hierarchies that structure and restrict urban travel. Through its depictions of CJ and Nana, and the urban spaces within which they move, Last Stop on Market Street not only acknowledges the fundamental human value of Black lives, but demonstrates how geography participates in the process of imagining resistance. Various design elements, CJ's negotiations with their surroundings, and Nana's worldview aim at recoding "Black embodied existence through processes of opposition and affirmation" (Yancy, [27], p. 108).[1] Here, simultaneously, Black lives matter and Black lives are matter: CJ and Nana move through and take up space, their particular mobilities a challenge to narratives that physically and discursively marginalize them. Through this complex rendering of word-image geographies, de la Peña and Robinson suggest to child readers that the practice of Black mobility cannot be understood apart from its limits, its superfluities, or its contexts of power.

As a book that focuses on the movement of Black characters through a city space, Market Street converses with the social realities of racial circumscription and surveillance. In some ways, the text appears to present a nearly utopic reframing of urban public transit, choosing to stress how CJ and Nana's journey opens up radical possibilities of community and imagination rather than curtailing them. Yet in other respects, Market Street suggests that CJ and Nana can never fundamentally reshape the delineated borders of the city or state system that channels their bodies. Their particular mobilities have limits that are tied to state regulations, restrictions, and the larger sociohistorical realities of Black movement to and within the United States. Cindi Katz has termed this process of layering "sedimentation": multiple gradations of social and material practices that reveal how the past, present, and future simultaneously occupy particular geographic sites ([14], p. 17). Importantly, however, Market Street never fundamentally settles on a univocal approach; it privileges neither its optimistic emphasis on radical reimaginings of racialized spaces nor its acknowledgement of how spatial constrictions benefit state interests. As Katherine McKittrick points out, spaces of Blackness "are predicated on struggle... they are not conclusive or finished" (McKittrick, [19], p. xxxi). Market Street's formal and narrative multiplicities reproduce the way mobility works more broadly, as a process that operates through numerous trajectories. Beyond this process, though, the oscillations of this text also honor how Black geographies in particular challenge easily intelligible spatial narratives. They privilege inconclusiveness, interruption, and contestation as the means through which Black mobility's complexities can be made legible.

Hegemonic Western narratives around mobility typically position it either as a pathological threat or a social good, both ideological frameworks that consistently prioritize the careful management of human motion. The state "wants to create fixed and well-directed paths for movement to flow through," in order to benefit its disciplinary interests (Cresswell, [5], p. 49). Nativist discourse positions the mobility of refugees and immigrants as an inherent danger to the ostensible integrity of borders, framing state futurity within an "ontology of exclusion" (Mountz, [22], p. 321). Other kinds of traffic receive the assistance of commercial and social sluiceways that encourage movement, as when the ideological work of gentrification re-signifies impoverished neighborhoods as "attractive" to wealthy prospective buyers while pushing out long-term residents. Mobility is always inextricable from its performances within and through the nation state's continual efforts to dictate the range, frequency, and surveillance of human motion.

This knotty entanglement of systems and bodies prompts us to consider the complexities of mobility, particularly in contexts where the state translates movement as menace. For Black people in the United States, paths that afford spatial passage are consistently and intentionally circumscribed, channeling movement towards punitive ends. Rashad Shabazz's analysis of state carceral power's impact on Black masculinity notes that "history shows that the mobility of Black men (and Black people in general) was sharply restricted. Rather than being on the move, Black men have been locked in a struggle with white society for the right to move" (Shabazz, [23], p. 52). Space is racialized; race is spatialized. To consider Black geographies is to consider how Blackness "is integral to the production of space," a project that simultaneously acknowledges the situated constraints placed by white supremacy and the ability of Black people to manipulate and exceed those constraints (McKittrick, [19], pp. xvi-xvii).

Mobility—both Black and non-Black—occurs in the contexts of larger structures of power. Ole B. Jensen uses a performative metaphor to point out how mobility universally exists at multiple scales: "Mobilities do not 'just happen' or simply 'take place.' Mobilities are carefully and meticulously designed, planned, and 'staged' (from above). However, they are equally importantly acted out, performed, and lived as people are 'staging themselves' (from below)" (Jensen, [13], p. 4). Public transportation, for example, is funded, implemented, and designed at national, regional, and local levels. Its operation also depends on the interactions of the human beings who use it. The movements made and perpetuated by human beings—whether micro-level movements or macro-level shifts—occur simultaneously at the embodied level and at the systemic level, implicating a broad range of desires, tensions, and pressures.

Places are therefore not static or homogenous. They are fragmented collections that constitute a series of entrances and exits, all enacted in relationship to what Doreen Massey identifies as "power geometry":This... concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn't, although that is an important element of it; it is also about power in relation to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway [sic] differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don't; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it. (Massey, [18], p. 149)If mobility is tied up in power geometry, in the spectrum of increasing and decreasing regulation at multiple scales (the child whose teacher instructs her to raise her hand, or the government directive that prevents a plane of refugees from landing) then an interrogation of mobility's functions must consider how its representations help determine the impact of these regulations. Although mobility is an embodied practice, its embodiments are only comprehensible through language. What makes mobility more visible—more consumable—are the regulatory narratives we attach to it, ideas that privilege particular ranges and kinds of movement for differently governed subjects.

These narratives manifest in Last Stop on Market Street in ways that refuse a homogenous response to the possibilities and impossibilities of mobility. The book depicts multiple forms of motion, but its central movement occurs on and through the bus CJ and Nana take, a location that encapsulates the push-and-pull between unimpeded passage and its restrictions. Buses are signifying geographic sites through which citizens and systems navigate the politics of spatial justice, frequently in ways that show how cities perpetuate social inequity through the limitations of movement. As a locale, the bus is a focal point or contact zone for negotiations around citizens' rights and access to mobility.

The act of depicting the bus in Market Street, then, summons a long history of civil rights activism that continues into the present day. The mid-1950s bus boycotts in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Montgomery, Alabama protested the racist discriminatory practices on buses in the Jim Crow South, pushing back against one of the few forms of segregation in which white people and Black people were separated while remaining visibly co-contained (Morris, [21], p. 17). Other struggles within the United States over the right to unimpeded public movement have also occurred in and through bus systems. In the 1980s and early 1990s, American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) used civil disobedience to ensure all city buses would come equipped with lift systems. In 1994, the Bus Riders Union successfully challenged the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in court on the basis of discrimination, forcing the MTA to spend a proportionate amount of its federal reserves on the underfunded bus system (Shapiro, [24], p. 127; Grengs, [11], p. 165). To this day, urban transportation systems are a primary site through which "the geography of U.S. cities continues to be defined by and through racial inequality," posing impediments to the mobility of numerous marginalized groups, including and especially disabled people, working class people, and people of color (Inwood et al., [12], p. 430). Although Market Street does not directly name this genealogy, the allusion is inescapable: CJ and Nana's passage through their nameless city occurs on and through a vehicle that stands in for what Joseph Shapiro terms "the most basic symbol of equality" (p. 128). A prominent disability placard in the window on page 11 invokes the history of struggle over equitable transportation access for disabled people. Their journey, then, is irrevocably bound up in the sociohistorical fight over civil rights for marginalized persons, inviting readers to consider how various forms of structural inequities—even ones not readily apparent—might potentially channel or direct CJ and Nana's particular mobilities.[2]

Within Market Street, the bus underscores the possibilities of flexibility and coercion, marking it as a site of struggle. A bus enables more rapid movement than walking; a bus also coerces and curtails its occupants. Certainly de la Peña and Robinson's written text and illustrations heavily emphasize the productive potentials of the bus space, frequently in ways that idealize CJ and Nana's journey. While Market Street's bus may not privilege or enable choice in the same way a car does, de la Peña and Robinson nevertheless depict it in ways that identify it as flexible, creating a kind of elasticity that contributes to the text's production of joy. Even before CJ and Nana enter the space of the bus, readers are introduced to it with supple language and kinetic visuals. In response to CJ's question "[H]ow come we don't got a car?" Nana informs him, "We got a bus that breathes fire," and the narrator tells us that the bus "sigh[s]" as it stops at the curb (de la Peña and Robinson, [8], pp. 5–7).[3] Animating metaphor and personification work here to transform the bus into something that extends beyond its literal confines, producing a sense of uncurtailed possibility.

The design of the page spread that introduces the bus is also dynamic. Conspicuously, many of Robinson's lines here are diagonal ones, implying movement, and the slanting outlines of rain, sidewalk, cars, bus, bus stop, and bodies coalesce to suggest a feeling of motion. Near the center of the page spread, the illustration of CJ anticipates the written narrative. While de la Peña's narrator informs us that the bus stops, "and the doors swung open," Robinson's illustration shows us CJ already inside the bus, his arm extending toward the driver at a rising angle (pp. 7–8). CJ, then, is part of the page spread's commitment to diagonals, to a sense of movement or momentum. His body is positioned in a way that implicitly invokes the yet-to-come: an optimistic futurity not guaranteed to Black children in the United States. The visual's expectancy, coming before the written text, tells us CJ and Nana have entered the bus. It shows CJ with one anticipatory foot stepping up, arm reaching out, confidently moving towards his next destination: a place that wants and welcomes him. In his Newbery Medal acceptance speech, de la Peña states that the implicit point of Market Street is not simply that Nana wants CJ to see the beauty of his surroundings, but "something much more fundamental. She's teaching CJ to see himself as beautiful. To see himself as worthy" (de la Peña, [7]). Self-love and self-worth require a sense of possibility, and in this illustration of CJ's body, we see Robinson make manifest de la Peña's reading of his own text, a process that affirms and centers Blackness. With this first illustration of the bus, Market Street frames public transportation through a lens of optimistic possibility, one that positions the bus as fundamentally flexible.

Although the bus can never fully escape its semiotic orientations, Last Stop on Market Street works hard at portraying a mobile experience that transcends the restrictions of public transportation. CJ's longing for another method of travel ("How come we don't got a car?") creates a clear contrast between the bus and the personal automobile, and although he privileges the latter, readers are invited to prefer the former. Beyond Nana's careful redirection away from the prosaic car and towards what she presents as the imaginative space of public transit, the interior of the bus in this picturebook is a communal site, presented in implicit opposition to the coercive model of the car. On page six, we see CJ's friend Colby driving off with his father, not in the front with him but seated in the back. Cars provide opportunities for internal surveillance, particularly from adults towards children, using rear-view mirrors and other tactics to monitor behavior. Children's arrangement in car spaces is regulated by adults, whether by law—in the case of car seat requirements—or individual adult preferences. This positioning influences the child's capacity to move or act (Barker, [1], pp. 65–66). Colby is therefore subject to a kind of surveillance that CJ is not. Although CJ's grandmother remains with him in Market Street, guiding and directing his particular mobilities, their choice of public transportation results in a deemphasizing of strict spatial hierarchies through Robinson's horizontal and dynamic renderings of occupants.

Many public buses in the United States mimic and extend the vertical structure of cars, providing rows of seats facing forward; however, the bus depicted in Market Street is designed differently, with a side-seating layout. Although de la Peña's text never explicitly states the name of the city in which this book takes place, readers arguably encounter a representation of San Francisco, given the buildings' architectural style; the steep streets; the reference to Market Street itself, a major urban artery in that city; and, in particular, the presence of the Hotel Herold, low-income housing on Eddy Street in the Tenderloin.[4] The bus CJ and Nana take is colored differently than MUNI, San Francisco's bus system, but the geographies of its interior are identically arranged, with seat designs that enable passengers to look at one another rather than facing ahead. While MUNI is not a universally accessible space, it does constitute one of the few remaining opportunities for cross-class and cross-race interaction in an increasingly gentrified and segregated city. MUNI riders as a group are significantly more race and class-diverse than riders on other transit systems (Corey et al., [4]). The implied use of MUNI therefore enables de la Peña and Robinson to build on this multiplicity, depicting compassionate and generative interactions between its diverse kinds of riders. Passengers who appear to be white possess mobilities that appear to be relatively indistinguishable from the mobilities of passengers of color, a dynamic that seeks to imagine co-equal movement rather than stratified mobilities. By invoking MUNI, an integrated real-world transportation system, Market Street identifies its bus as a space with the potential for racial equity. What's utopic about this is not only the aspirational objective, but the way the book derives its depictions from reality; this integrated space exists in San Francisco, implying that Market Street's bus can be imagined—and possibly produced—outside the realm of fantasy.

Through this emphasis on heterogeneity and connection, Robinson depicts a spatial relation that facilitates community engagement, functioning as a kind of resistance to the social hierarchies that inevitably structure human existence. The multiracial passengers smile at one another, encouraged by the bus's geography to interact rather than have a solitary experience solely based around the goal of forward momentum. Even Market Street's bus driver, Mr. Dennis—who might be expected to take a hierarchical surveilling role similar to that of an adult in a car—engages with the space of the bus in ways that mimic passenger behavior. He looks across towards the door of the bus, horizontally, indicating a rhizomatic equity that challenges the hierarchy of looking forward or back. This challenge is carefully positioned in response to the book's engagement with history. De la Peña's narrator informs us that CJ and Nana "sat right up front" after entering the bus, their location signaling a time and place in which the characters' race would have prevented them from choosing a front seat unimpeded (p. 10). That "right up front" is not forward-facing, but side-facing, allows CJ and Nana to occupy a space that rejects historical barriers while participating in a spatial realignment that seeks interpersonal connection.

Nana's acts of discursive re-framing also shape the geographies of their journey. She encourages CJ to see the world around him through language that stresses expansive possibilities. Rain impedes easy mobility for CJ, who wonders "[h]ow come we gotta wait for the bus in all this wet?" Nana's response, "Trees get thirsty, too. Don't you see that big one drinking through a straw?" confuses him, the metaphor resisting easy translation. Robinson's illustration, however, which centers the tree on the page, encourages child readers to see the long branch differently, its horizontal stripes recalling a familiar pattern reprinted on many drinking straws. CJ looks "for a long time," a phrase that invites readers to look for a long time, too, perhaps in the process managing to see what CJ cannot and therefore enjoying a form of textual mastery that implicitly validates Nana's way of looking at the world (pp. 3–4). Just like the "bus that breathes fire," which conjures fantastic images of dragons visually reinforced by the advertisement of a dragon on the bus's side, the straw metaphor assigns animating qualities to a natural act performed without independent thought. In this particular case, the metaphor personifies the tree's action into a human need, underscoring what de la Peña has articulated about Nana's actions: she seeks to show CJ that his life, as a Black child, has inherent value and worth. The animation of the tree is an indirect way of attempting that goal, encouraging CJ to acknowledge the needs of another living being, able to take up space and seek contentment from the environment. If CJ is unable to see the straw made by the tree branch, then Nana will keep pressing him to look differently, until his navigation of the physical world incorporates different ways of understanding than hegemonic perceptions.

Although de la Peña has noted that he "set out to write a story about diverse characters that has nothing to do with diversity," Market Street's representation of Nana's perspective must be considered within the context of racial difference (Danielson, [6]).[5] Her particular way of moving through the world is part of a larger tradition of epistemic reframing particular to Black womanhood. Patricia Hill Collins argues that because white-controlled hegemonic institutions have historically discounted Black women's experiences, Black women have developed alternative epistemologies that prioritize other ways of knowing. A Black feminist epistemology, for Collins, prioritizes lived experience, empathy, reciprocal dialogue between active listeners, and personal accountability. This process fundamentally calls "into question the content of what currently passes for truth and simultaneously challenges the process of arriving at that truth" (Collins, [3]/2008, p. 271). Because experience "as a criterion of meaning with practical images as its symbolic vehicles is a fundamental epistemological tenet in African-American thought systems," metaphor functions as a key method for conveying knowledge and truth (p. 258).

In this respect, Nana's emphasis on figurative language is part of a long historical tradition that rejects positivism—the belief that all accurate knowledge is located within scientific data—instead looking towards narrative and symbolism to tell a believable story. The syntactical structure of "Don't you see that big one drinking through a straw?" not only pushes CJ to see outside his literalist paradigm, but also suggests that Nana's perception carries a definitive authority, despite its location outside positivist truths. The implication is that the action transcends the metaphorical, that the tree is, in fact, drinking through a straw, and CJ should see it happening. The rhetorically negative framing of "don't you see" slyly winks at its positive(-ist) opposite. Although not every act of re-imagining involves figurative language, each instance focuses heavily on the meaningful expressiveness of individuals. Nana tells CJ that she feels sorry for CJ's friends, who will never "get a chance to meet Bobo or the Sunglass Man," or Trixie, with her "brand-new hat" (p. 12). The ethics of caring within a Black feminist worldview values not only communal interactions, but what Collins terms "individual uniqueness," a priority that also emerges in starkly contrasting squares in collectively authored quilts created by Black women (p. 263). By directing CJ's attention towards the value of individual expression, Nana encourages her grandson to pay attention to the heterogeneity of experience, a practice that implicitly shows him how his own existence has inherent worth.

These speech acts are not only about producing knowledge; they also result in the physical reshaping of CJ's lived environment and apparent potential for mobility. While CJ listens to a guitar player on the bus, he closes his eyes, and de la Peña's narrator tells us that "in the darkness, the rhythm lifted CJ out of the bus, out of the busy city. He saw sunset colors swirling over crashing waves. Saw a family of hawks slicing through the sky. Saw the old woman's butterflies dancing free in the light of the moon. CJ's chest grew full and he was lost in the sound and the sound gave him the feeling of magic" (pp. 17–18). For the first time on these pages, Nana's metaphors aside, Market Street departs somewhat from its grip on realism. The language depicts impossibilities that can certainly be understood as imagined—CJ defying gravity, in particular—but, importantly, also refrains from undermining the authenticity of CJ's experience. CJ witnesses these acts of natural beauty; he hears music that takes him beyond the confines of his bodily surroundings; he physically transcends the bus, in a moment that recalls the motif of flying in Black spirituals and folktales (Martin, [17], p. 184). Building off of Nana's framing, CJ's experience constitutes a rejection of constrictive reality. This rejection is an act that suggests hopeful geographies for Black youth must imagine new narratives, ones that simultaneously acknowledge the necessity for freedom and reshape what might be possible.

As a complement to de la Peña's words, Robinson's page spread depicts CJ with arms opened wide and a blissful smile on his face, accompanied by a blue backdrop dotted with butterflies and hawks. His surroundings here are divorced from the rest of the book's realism, distinguished primarily not by identifiable landmarks, vehicles, and people, but by design components that privilege feeling and sensation over a coherent narrative. The abstract round shapes and bright colors here are visually welcoming, while simultaneously slipping from the realism the rest of the book largely favors. Evoking other kinds of spatial dimensionality, the mixed-media elements Robinson uses—cut-out figures layered on top of one another—create the sense that CJ is moving out of the page, collapsing some of the distance between character and viewer in a lateral movement that encourages both geographic and emotional connection. This departure from CJ and Nana's familiar environments, brief as it may be, is in some respects a realization of Nana's worldview, diverting from the boundaries of what is and locating a place in which possibility transcends literalism. In its rejection of a backdrop that favors verisimilitude, this page spread arrives at an understanding of place that mirrors what Katherine McKittrick locates in the poetry of Dionne Brand: that "the earth is also skin," that a Black child may "legitimately take possession of a street, or an entire city, albeit on different terms than we may be familiar with," that geographic rules are "alterable, and that there exists a terrain through which different geographic stories can be and are told" (pp. ix–x). To be a Black child in the United States is to exist within a hierarchical system that summons the sedimentations of confinement: a history and an ongoing present reality. A hopeful narrative, therefore, must necessarily imagine experiences for CJ outside those narrow borders, outside the steel and hiss of the bus.

However, despite this textual emphasis on imaginative expansiveness, Market Street also depicts other kinds of movement besides unrestricted flow. The structure of the book predominantly follows a controlled set of questions and responses, establishing a familiar rhythm: CJ continually asks Nana "how come," and Nana refuses to answer him directly, instead carefully directing CJ toward a different perspective "where he never even thought to look" (p. 23). Although Nana helps CJ to realize important possibilities that create space, both emotional and embodied, for CJ to acknowledge his inherent value, the conversations between grandmother and grandson also heavily privilege Nana's wisdom over CJ's desire to know "how come." That emphasis redirects focus away from CJ's questions about the realities of social inequality. The power geometry of this book, the ways Market Street directs the flows of mobility, includes the person whose perspective determines how readers move through it: Nana. This pattern of question-and-deflection propels the narrative forward by neglecting to take time to explore what CJ asks. When CJ wonders why they don't have a car when his friend Colby does, or why he and Nana have to wait for the bus "in all this wet," or why the neighborhood they walk through is "so dirty," Nana refuses to answer CJ; her responses are never ones that touch on reasons why some families have cars and others do not, or why some neighborhoods have "crumbling sidewalks and broken-down doors" (p. 21). Instead, she establishes and channels the narrative's momentum away from CJ's questions, producing a movement that looks towards new possibilities while disregarding the open exploration of lived realities. Through Nana's redirections, the relationship between Colby's whiteness and his access to a car is unexplored, as are the systems that create soup kitchens and poor infrastructure. The emphasis on beauty is transformative for CJ, and simultaneously silencing.

This question-answer exchange also functions as a kind of loving surveillance, one that supplants the hierarchical spatialities of the car in order to direct CJ's behavior and interactions with the other occupants of the bus. Research on public transportation emphasizes the extent to which bus passengers are required to be in constant negotiation with the space's formal and informal rules, a process of navigation that "puts the passenger in a situation of constant choice" (Koefoed et. al., [15], p. 730). For CJ and Nana, the act of taking the bus is also a pursuit of interactions that seek communal affiliations; however, CJ's experience on the bus stands in opposition to the choice-based practices granted to other passengers. If the "dense spatial economy of a bus ride makes one aware of one's body and the intensity of corporeal relation... [making] the mobile negotiation an embodied and situated practice," then CJ's negotiations and awareness of his physical environment occur in response to the directions of the adults who accompany him (ibid). Nana wonders why CJ wants "one of those," a line that invites readers to look at Robinson's illustration, where two boys, sharing earbuds, listen to music on a cell phone: "What for? You got the real live thing sitting across from you. Why don't you ask the man if he'll play us a song?" Before CJ can make a request, the man in question begins playing his guitar, and a blind man sitting next to Nana and CJ whispers, "To feel the magic of music, I like to close my eyes." Nana, CJ, and the blind man's dog do likewise (pp. 15–16). While CJ arguably makes choices in response to the milieu of his environment, consenting to pay attention to the guitar player and to heed the blind man's request to close his eyes, these actions occur largely as a result of adult encouragement and supervision, a spatial re-orientation that fundamentally privileges the wisdom of the older people around him. His encounters here are entirely reactive rather than agential. Even the guitar player seems to anticipate what the text implies CJ needs: an experience with music made accessible.

Although Market Street presents this process as both affirming and necessary—a series of insights CJ must have in order to shift his perspective to incorporate Nana's wisdom—the visuals here implicitly acknowledge the extent to which the adults around CJ restrict his experience. To this point, the book's illustrations have been large ones, taking up full page spreads and, more rarely, single pages. By extending in nearly all cases to the edge of the page, Robinson's drawings communicate expansiveness; however, in this moment, readers encounter increasingly smaller images, squeezing the bus's occupants into tighter and tighter spaces. A woman's feet spill over a panel's borders, as though the illustration cannot contain her. The shrinking borders of the smaller panels are notably in contrast with the rest of the book's full page illustrations, but they also constitute a kind of spatial commentary: the coercive itineraries of the bus space are not uniformly liberating, even if these practices lead CJ to briefly transcend the bus's confines.

If the "where" of Blackness is partially defined by the inconclusive and unfixed struggle Katherine McKittrick argues is inherent to Black geographies, then a single sentence in Market Street captures this contestation. After CJ and Nana board the bus and greet its occupants, de la Peña informs readers: "The bus lurched forward and stopped, lurched forward and stopped" (p. 11). This seemingly innocuous description of the bus's movements accurately captures the felt experience of public transit, but also gestures more broadly towards the realities of Black existence within the conditions of violence and negation that define U.S. supremacist structures. "Forward," as a spatialized concept, frequently functions as a signifier of mobility that evokes the possibilities of justice. For example, the word "progress" denotes both forward movement and advancement, making social change perceptible through geographic language. Yet CJ and Nana's bus doesn't just move forward: it "lurches." To lurch is to deny the unrestrained propulsion of forward acceleration. It's a word that has its origins in nautical use: "a sudden leaning over to one side, as of a ship," a staggering that prevents momentum (Lurch, n.3., [16]).

That nautical etymology of "lurch," and its use within a narrative that depicts the possibilities and limitations of Black mobility, invite us to consider what other kinds of containers de la Peña's language evokes. A "lurching" bus exceeds its ontological confines, recalling the concept of a ship through its lexical history, and the linkage between bus and ship summons a past that denies the hegemony of now. As Christina Sharpe shows us, Black lives in the United States—even in the twenty-first century—are always articulated and rearticulated within the specters of the Middle Passage. The slave ship and the slave hold are geographic and embodied processes that continue to define Black being, producing material conditions Sharpe terms "the wake": a form of consciousness that necessarily contends with "the continuous and changing present of slavery's as yet unresolved unfolding" (Sharpe, [25], p. 14). Market Street, of course, is a picturebook that engages only indirectly with race, choosing instead to focus primarily on how perspective might productively shift one's environment, rather than on the ways Black existence inevitably articulates itself within the material afterlives of slavery. Despite the book's emphasis, however, "lurched forward and stopped" shows how processes of Black mobility in Market Street still occur within Sharpe's wake, calling up the semiotics of regulation, captivity, and resistance. For Market Street's bus to lurch forward, then, is also a process by which it makes visible the ship, the container, the regulatory transit that partially constitutes what Sharpe terms "the ongoing location of Black being" (p. 16).

To acknowledge this relationship between de la Peña's language and Sharpe's lens is to acknowledge that even in a text "that has nothing to do with diversity," as de la Peña argues, race matters and race is matter: CJ and Nana's Blackness participates in dictating the possibilities (lurching) and impossibilities (stoppage) of their journey. The communal optimism of Market Street's narrative is facilitated by Nana's presence on the bus, which codifies CJ as a grandchild with his grandmother rather than as a racialized threat. It's unclear exactly how old CJ is, although textual clues—the relative complexity of his sentence structure, his height, the way he holds Nana's hand while walking down the sidewalk—suggest perhaps six or seven. Despite his age, however, CJ's race impacts the way others interpret him; non-Black adults consistently view Black boys as older than they are, disallowing them the presumption of innocence afforded to white children. A 2014 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology notes that the present research suggests Black children "may be viewed as adults as soon as 13, with average age overestimations of Black children exceeding four and a half years in some cases... In other words, our findings suggest that, although most children are allowed to be innocent until adulthood, Black children may be perceived as innocent only until deemed suspicious" (Goff et. al., [10], p. 541). While Nana's redirections limit CJ's mobility in important ways, largely determining how he interacts with his environment, it's also apparent that her presence makes possible the public approbation of CJ's movement, arguably inciting other adults to view him as the child he is. If alone on the bus, CJ's gender and race might lead him to be interpreted as suspect, even dangerous; the narrative of social panic over young Black people in U.S. cities produces a carceral lens that marks Black boys as disruptive and in need of regulation. In her article on Black youth and public transit, Nicole Fleetwood describes the interactions of San Francisco bus riders with a young Black man holding his small daughter:In another context the young man, without child in arm, may have been easily avoided as threatening. Yet his clearly demonstrated role of father mediated how the adults on the bus regarded him. A professionally dressed white woman sat across from him asking his daughter's age and name, commenting on his attentiveness and care. ... His visual markers of racialized youth set him apart from adults, but the care he lavished on his daughter allowed adults to engage with him in a nonthreatening way. Here he was positively acknowledged as a productive social agent. (Fleetwood, [9], p. 40)Parent-child (or grandparent-child) relationships are therefore a mechanism through which Black families can perform social relationships in ways that alleviate non-Black anxieties over unaccompanied youth. While Last Stop on Market Street does not suggest to readers through word or image that the bus's occupants would inevitably see a solitary CJ as a public threat, the book nevertheless exists within a broader social reality that regulates Black movement, and so CJ cannot be extricated from that context. His affirmative experience, therefore, is one that emerges through his contextual codification as a safely contained child, one whose potential for social disruption has been effectively "stopped" through his grandmother's carefully channeled directions and constrictions.

That stoppage is the other half of the bus's movements in Market Street, an equally significant signifier that motions at the environment in which Black people struggle against regulation and containment. Beyond Nana's guidance, an act of love that simultaneously restricts and protects CJ, the language of "stopped" summons a brutal systemic holding: dehumanizing confinements that serve supremacist state interests. Christina Sharpe reads the hold of the slave ship as a site that established the geographic conditions for centuries of antiblackness. This site continues into the present in the form of state acts that spatially confine Black people: "Swallowed whole by the state, purged by the police, stopped and frisked, back broken, humiliated, interned in 'camps' for women and children" (p. 78). The hold, then, is a place that immobilizes bodies, a place that wakes out into contemporary Black life in the forms of other kinds of stoppage: stop-and-frisk practices, detention centers, traffic stops. And even though de la Peña and Robinson do not overtly acknowledge this social reality, CJ's future as a Black child is as much structured by the prospect of these stoppings as it is by the optimistic diagonal of his body on the page spread where CJ enters the bus, his placement anticipating the words below him. Possibility connotes not only optimism, but the dangers of multiplicity. CJ may learn to see himself and his environment as beautiful, but that perspective inevitably occurs within a larger geography of confinement, a pathway that keeps him grounded within a white supremacist system that calls for the "regulation, discipline, and dispersal" of Black men and boys (Shabazz, [23], p. 79). What we have, then, with "lurched forward and stopped, lurched forward and stopped," is a repetition that takes us back both formally and metaphorically. Back to the phrase, back to the ship, back to the hold. It shows us that to be moving while Black is to exist in a space that makes return out of mobility. For the most part, Last Stop on Market Street seeks to underscore hopefulness through Nana's discursive framework, but in "lurched forward and stopped," the language of the book captures the conditionality of this beauty, its precariousness, locating a tension between the hopes and horrors of possibility.

Blackness is anagrammatical, according to Christina Sharpe; blackness as rhetorical process puts "pressure on meaning and that against which meaning is made," a slippage that occurs "through the rearranging of the letters of a text," resisting unfixed signification (pp. 76–77). In the United States, a Black boy is not a child, but a threat. In the United States, a bus can be a ship. In this book, a tree is a straw, a bus breathes fire, and a Black boy is beautiful, is constrained; he flies towards an expectant future, then gets pulled back by the realities of his environment. Language is a thing that, in coming apart, can paradoxically exceed its boundaries. As CJ and Nana arrive at the soup kitchen, seeing "familiar faces in the window," CJ tells his grandmother, "I'm glad we came" (p. 25). Nana agrees with him: "Me too, CJ. Now, come on" (p. 26). In these final lines, the verbiage summons again the complicated tension of movement captured through "lurched forward and stopped": CJ offers "came," Nana adds "come on," the past tense evoking a kind of pause or completion or stoppage, the call to forward movement advocating continuation. Robinson's illustration on the final page spread shows CJ and Nana already in the soup kitchen, serving others, having arrived at their destination. "Come on," then, gestures at a movement that extends beyond the book itself, toward other destinations, other realities, other possibilities. Given that Blackness is anagrammatical, a reordering of signifiers that produces new meaning, Black being in this book is something that must simultaneously operate within the container and outside it, rearranging the grammar of white supremacy. In the end, Last Stop on Market Street's map is not San Francisco, or the Tenderloin, or even the geographies of pagination, but a map of survival and resistance: a map that shows us how Black mobility must always be understood as a process of tension between its limits and its excesses.

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