Drawing from a sociohistorical understanding of the roles of texts for African American males and data from a recent survey of teens' meaningful experiences with texts, the author provides a general understanding of the roles of texts among African American males and African American male adolescents' meaningful relationships with texts. These understandings are necessary for re-orienting these young males toward meaningful literacy exchanges with fiction and nonfiction texts with socioemotional and cognitive orientations. Implications for shaping more responsive textual pathways for struggling and non-struggling readers are offered.