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Summary
Chapter One
The narrator of On the Come Up is 16-year-old Bri Jackson, who tells the story in first-person. As her story begins, she sits in her ACT prep class, her phone having been confiscated by her teacher, Mrs. Murray. Bri is waiting for a call from DJ Hype to invite her to perform at the Ring, where popular rap battles take place. Sonny and Malik, Bri’s two best friends, are in the after-school class, too, taking a practice test and eager for Bri to get the call. Bri is so distracted that she forgets to take the test and hurriedly fills in the answers at the last second. Mrs. Murray lectures Bri about her falling grades in school. She is surprised Bri wants to be a rapper like her late father, Lawless, who was an underground rap legend before he was killed 12 years ago. Bri says Mrs. Murray, who is Black, sounds like Ms. Collins, the white counselor in her school who doesn’t know how to talk to Black students.
Bri goes home, where the heat has been turned off because her mother, Jay, cannot pay the bill. Jay is briefly home from work before heading to classes to earn her social work degree. Like Mrs. Murray, Jay expresses concern that Bri is not giving enough attention to her schoolwork, but Bri remains distracted as she anxiously awaits DJ Hype’s call. Bri says that Jay often compares her to her father, with whom Bri shares traits like impatience, stubbornness, and a bad temper, along with a light complexion and dimples. Bri is disturbed when she realizes that Jay brought home “Popkenchurch,” dinner from three different fast-food restaurants, because Jay only gets the meal when something is wrong. Before Bri can find out the bad news, she finally gets the call from DJ Hype, who invites her to the Rookie battle at the Ring that evening.
Chapter Two
Bri rushes to the Ring with her Aunt Pooh. Aunt Pooh is wearing green, like always, because green is the color of the Garden Disciples gang, of which Aunt Pooh is a member. When Bri arrives at the Ring, she tells the story of an unarmed Black boy who was killed by the cops the previous year, resulting in riots.
The crowd at the Ring treats Bri like royalty because of her father, calling her “Li’l Law,” a reference to Lawless. Bri skips the line and goes inside, noting that there are mostly male rappers in the Ring. She reminisces about how Aunt Pooh introduced her to hip-hop when she was eight years old and says that hip-hop changed her life. Bri learns that Dee-Nice, a rapper from her neighborhood, Garden Heights, just got a million-dollar record deal, which gives her hope for her own future.
Chapter Three
In her first rap battle at the Ring, Bri faces Milez, a local teen rapper who has already released a popular song called “Swagerific.” Bri doesn’t think highly of Milez or his song. Milez is the son of Supreme, who was Lawless’s old manager. In the first round of the battle, Milez references Bri’s father’s murder at the hands of a gang called the Crowns, and Bri becomes so upset that she can’t think of a single lyric and loses the first round of the battle.
In the second and third rounds of the battle, Bri calls Milez out for being fake, untalented, and unoriginal, and she claims he has a ghostwriter. She raps about her own talent and brilliance, wowing the crowd and unanimously winning the battle.
Analysis
The opening chapters introduce one of the central conflicts of the novel: Bri’s struggle to overcome the stereotypes that shape other people’s perceptions of her. In the first three chapters, Bri relates numerous examples of feeling misunderstood. She chafes at the counsel of Mrs. Murray and Jay, who are both skeptical of Bri’s dream of becoming a rapper. She also resents Ms. Collins, who talks to her like she’s a stereotype of a Black kid instead of a human being. Bri grapples with her father’s legacy, resenting that DJ Hype and others in the Ring see her not as a talent in her own right but as “Lil’ Law,” an extension of a man they admired. Bri seems annoyed that others view her through the lenses of racial and gender stereotypes, rather than seeing her for who she really is.
For Bri, rap is a medium through which she can fight back against stereotypes and express her true self. This is why she despises Milez, whose lyrics are inauthentic and probably written by someone else. Rather than fighting stereotypes, Milez, who in reality is a well-off suburban kid, adopts the persona of a stereotypical gangster. On the other hand, Bri regards icons of hip-hop with an almost-spiritual reverence, calling the Notorious B.I.G. “legendary” and saying that Nas made her feel like she was waking up for the first time. She describes the first hip-hop album that Aunt Pooh introduced her to as life-changing and spiritual. For Bri, hip-hop is the music that defines the culture in her neighborhood and connects her to the people she loves.
Bri’s dream of becoming a rapper gives her something positive to focus on and hope for, and her ambition offers a potential escape from the difficult circumstances that she faces in Garden Heights. When Ms. Collins and Mrs. Murray ask Bri about her life, Bri doesn’t reveal how exhausting it is to live in a violent neighborhood, to continually grapple with her father’s death, and to come to terms with her mother’s abandonment and battle with addiction. Bri is still haunted by the traumas of her past and prefers to deflect discussion about them and instead talk about her dream of becoming a rapper.
But it impossible for Bri to deflect reality; even when she receives an invite to the Ring, she struggles to fully enjoy the moment because she is certain that her mother’s Popkenchurch is a sign that something is wrong. When Milez raps about Lawless’s murder and Bri chokes in the first round of the battle, it seems as though the trauma of her past may overwhelm her. However, Bri recovers and decisively defeats Milez by calling him out as a fake and touting herself as a true talent. The approval of DJ Hype and the crowd signal that Bri’s dream of rap superstardom may indeed come true.
