What drives Dave’s desire to buy a gun at the beginning of the story? What does he think he will achieve? How does this story build on or subvert literary gun tropes like the Freudian idea of a gun as a phallic symbol?

How does Dave feel about his position in the community of Black workers? How does his perspective relate to the idea of Black masculinity more broadly?

Dave desperately wants to be treated as a “man” and not as a “boy.” How do those two words interplay, and how do they connect to Dave’s experience as an African American man in the Jim Crow South?