Let the Great World Spin: Book 2, Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Fernando Yunqué Marcano rides a subway train with a camera. He is trying to take pictures of the graffiti tags he sees scrawled on the dark tunnel walls. He got on the train in the Bronx and is currently riding between two train cars, standing on the metal platform that moves this way and that as the train thunders around corners. He is technically on his way to work at his stepfather’s barbershop downtown, but what he’s really interested in is seeing who has been in the tunnels during the night. He wants to know who might have come and spray-painted their initials or their nickname or their gang name.

Fernando’s interest in graffiti stems from wanting to be included by the other Puerto Rican kids he goes to school with, the ones who do the actual spray-painting. When he tried to hang out with them, though, they told him to get lost, so he went and got his camera and came back. He told them that he could take pictures of their work and make them famous. They only laughed at him, and one of the younger kids slapped him across the face.

Fernando was discouraged by the fact that he was excluded, but then one morning on his way to work he stepped between two subway cars and saw a magnificent tag, though it flashed by only briefly and then it was gone. On his way home that evening to the government housing projects in the Bronx, he rode between the cars and saw the tag more clearly, and he was amazed that whoever had spray-painted it had come this far into the tunnel to make something so intricate and time-consuming.

If he were ever to do a tag of his own, Fernando figures he would do something extraordinary with his color choice, something that would shock anybody who saw it. It makes him think of an idea he once had to project his father’s face onto the walls of his house so that his mother would be forced to confront the face of the man she kicked out and replaced with Fernando’s stepfather, Irwin, who Fernando dislikes.

Fernando once tried to get one of his photographs published in The New York Times. It was a picture of a graffiti artist spray-painting the Van Wyck overpass. When he went to the offices to deliver it, though, the security guard told him to leave it at the front desk. Fernando pleaded with him to let him stay until the photo editor came down into the lobby. The security guard consented, and when the editor emerged, Fernando gave him the photograph. Unfortunately, he never heard from the editor again. After that, he submitted it to a much smaller publication in the Bronx, but they declined it.

Still between subway cars, Fernando makes his way into downtown Manhattan, where there is generally not very much graffiti in the tunnels. But then he spies something new, an unfamiliar looking tag. It is red and silver and large. Excitement shoots through him. He wants to move to the back of the train so that he can keep looking, but suddenly they are in the station at Wall Street. He hears police radios, and sees officers rushing up the platform. He thinks they’ve seen him and that they’re going to ticket him for riding between the cars, but then he sees them rush through the turnstiles, off to attend some other disaster. Invigorated by the commotion and by the new tag, Fernando steps out of the train, deciding that he will not go straight to work. He moves in the direction of the police officers, clutching his camera as he goes.