Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

“If most girls in the troop could be any type of metal, they’d be bunched-up wads of tinfoil, maybe, or rusty iron nails you had to get tetanus shots for.” 

Laurel is responding to the popular Girl Scout song that urges Scouts to open themselves up to making new friends without abandoning old friends, comparing new and old friends to silver and gold. Laurel and her friends, however, are used to being treated as second-class citizens. They see themselves as rough and perhaps even dangerous. 

“We had been taught that adulthood was full of sorrow and pain, taxes and bills, dreaded work and dealing with whites, sickness and death.” 

Throughout her life, Laurel has learned that becoming an adult is not about realizing dreams, but about drudgery and facing monotony, pain, and oppression. The girls at the camp live in the southern suburbs of Atlanta, a predominantly black area that is likely full of working-class people, unlike the white areas that some of the black characters in other stories live in. They see their parents working endlessly like ants who have no hope for better circumstances.

“When you’ve been made to feel bad for so long, you jump at the chance to do it to others.” 

Laurel has, for the first time, understood why her father was so willing to exploit the Mennonite man’s free labor without even thanking him. Pain begets more pain, as wounded people learn that those who are hurting them are the ones in power. Therefore, power becomes a matter of having the ability to exploit and taking revenge on those who have always had even more power.

“If God looked into your heart right then, what would He think? Or would He have to approve because He made your heart that way? Or were you obliged to train it against its wishes?”

Clareese asks a fundamental question about faith in God and religion. She has heard Cleophus’s “sinful” music and discovered that she likes it. Her church has asked her to conform, to wear white even when she’s on her period, to keep her head down and obey. Her enjoyment of this music suggests that there is something inside of her—not something that she has chosen—that makes her like the sound of the blues. If she goes against the nature that she believes was given to her by the god who created her, is this an insult to his creation? Or is this simply a challenge she is required to face?

“Because of people, that’s why. Not God. It’s people who allow suffering, people who create it. Perpetrate it.” 

Clareese responds to Cleophus’s question about how a benevolent god can allow suffering in the world. Clareese gives the stock response, but Cleophus points out that not all suffering is manmade or makes sense. Ultimately, Clareese’s personal suffering arises from the way men treat her for things that are not manmade, such as her crossed eyes, her appearance, and her period. She also suffers for her desire to follow the church in the strictest sense. Cleophus is the first man to show romantic interest in her beyond sex or service, and Clareese will eventually suffer if she accepts the rigidity of her beliefs and turns him away. Cleophus urges Clareese to think about God and religion in a way that is more open and less black-and-white—a suggestion that enrages and frustrates Clareese, as it invalidates her own suffering as a sacrifice to religion.

“Her family was one of four black families in the county, and if another white person ever told her how ‘interesting’ her hair was, or how good it was that she didn’t have to worry about getting a tan—ha ha—or asked her opinion anytime Jesse Jackson farted, she’d strangle them.” 

Lynnea has spent her life as a token black woman in a white area. She has been made to feel exotic and as if she doesn’t fully belong. Well-meaning white people ask questions about her hair or Jesse Jackson to make her feel included (and to make themselves feel less racist), but they are making her blackness seem conspicuous. Lynnea decides to move to Baltimore, where she will not stand out for her blackness. 

“Inner-city Baltimore students would be nothing like the whiny white girl from the bus station.” 

In a sense, Lynnea is correct in this prediction. The white girl at the bus station is privileged. Her biggest problem is a broken vending machine, and she complains dramatically and threatens suicide because she cannot get her chips. Inner-city students face more serious issues, dealing with poverty and violence. Without privilege and the expectation of moving on to college, high school doesn’t seem like a priority, and it becomes the teacher’s challenge to incentivize students into learning. 

“Lynnea knew it was revenge on the fourteen pretend students who’d given him hell in role-play, and she somehow felt complicit, as though she’d had the power to stop him but didn’t.” 

In class and in the bar, Robert the Cop was Lynnea’s friend. In the mock classroom, Robert managed his students and maintained order with a strict hand. Teachers have very little power to seriously discipline a person and must be creative to convince students to participate and behave. As a police officer, however, Robert has a lot of power. His fake students wounded his pride, and his response to even pretend mockery is to go to a black neighborhood and punish residents there as stand-ins. Lynnea isn’t surprised to learn that Robert quit teaching, suggesting that she knew something about how his police training affected the way he looked at students. Even at the end of the story, Robert treats Lynnea as if she is just another black person rather than someone he knows. 

“She thought of herself as an ant, foolish enough to believe that if she kept ambling along, the giant foot above wouldn’t come smashing down.” 

Lynnea moved from her hometown to Baltimore to escape the conspicuousness of her black skin in a white county. She takes a job as a teacher not because she dreams of making a difference but because she believes that the money and the benefits will make the job worth the hard work. She is interested not in fighting or standing out, but simply in being an ant that stays in line and avoids notice. However, the anonymity she experiences as a black woman in Baltimore makes her a target in a different way. Robert has no qualms giving her a ticket because even though he knows Lynnea, he sees her blackness first, as if she is culpable for every crime committed by a member of the black community.

“I could always think of things to say about a debate topic like US-China diplomatic relations, or deliver a damning rebuttal on prison overcrowding, but it was different with someone like Mrs. Ampersand—all debate logic fell away, and in my head I’d call her a bitch, tell her that the strongest stuff in my mother’s house is a bottle of Nyquil.”

Spurgeon is an accomplished student. He worked for his academic achievements to avoid spending time with—and eventually becoming like—his father. When Mrs. Ampersand suggests that Spurgeon can succeed if he avoids drugs, Spurgeon’s ability to control his emotion and respond logically is overtaken by rage at the condescension as well as the implication that Spurgeon is like his father underneath. This well-meaning advice generalizes black men and black students, implying that Spurgeon is more likely than another student to fall prey to drugs.

“Quite a few whites also stop to look as if to see what this thing is all about, and their hard, nervous hard smiles fit into two categories: the ‘Don’t mug me!’ smile, or the ‘Gee aren’t black folks something!’ smile.” 

The Million Man March brings hundreds of thousands of black men to Washington DC. Spurgeon notices the two ways in which white onlookers categorize black men. Either they are afraid or they do not take the March seriously. Spurgeon prefers to avoid participating. Having had a poor role model for a father, he has not been taught to value and assert black masculinity. He has only learned to mitigate it to try and appear unthreatening.

“I’m not here to atone. I’m here to sell birds.” 

Spurgeon is insulted at the implication that he ought to forgive his father or give him understanding. Ray’s unapologetic abuse of his son gives Spurgeon plenty of impetus to remain angry and refuse to forgive. By selling birds, Spurgeon is remaining outside of the March. He and his father are trying to exploit the celebration of black men that connects masculinity and blackness to African roots. Ray proves over and over that he will never be a decent father to his son. By urging Spurgeon to atone, the men are urging him to let go of his expectations for his father and take Ray for what he is. Spurgeon cannot overcome his own anger until he stops allowing his father to hijack his life and veer him off course.

“Most people think that you find something that matters, something that’s worth fighting for, and if necessary, you fight. But it must be the fighting, I tell myself, that decides what matters, even if you’re left on the sidewalk to discover that what you thought mattered means nothing after all.” 

When Spurgeon’s father attacks him, Spurgeon fights back. Before Ray dragged him to DC, Spurgeon was making his own way in life. He was fighting his father figuratively by earning academic achievements to live a different life. He fights Ray literally when Ray takes the car, defending himself but losing the fight. Spurgeon tries to convince himself that the fight only seemed like it mattered because it was a fight, consoling himself for having given into his father.

“On Greenmount Avenue you could read schoolbooks—that was understandable. The government and your teachers forced you to read them. But anything else was antisocial. It meant you’d rather submit to the words of some white dude than shoot the breeze with your neighbors.” 

Dina describes the distrust of the white educational system in her black neighborhood and the fact that she cannot pursue academic or intellectual achievements within that system without being treated as a traitor. Since Dina has made it to Yale, she has succeeded academically, but she doesn’t feel at home with white students or the few black students there. Although her education is her best tool for lifting herself out of poverty, she does not trust anyone around her to welcome her into a community and cannot allow herself to succeed. 

“Her response was to nod politely at the perilous elaborateness of it all; to nod and save herself from the knowledge that she would never be able to get where she wanted to go.”

Dina has a dream about her mother, who died of cancer. Dina’s therapist has just questioned her about her sexuality and the fact that Dina has never had romantic feelings for anyone. In her dream, Dina’s mother is thoroughly confused by Dina, who is giving a long lecture about the biology of whales. Dina fears that she is becoming someone her mother wouldn’t recognize or understand. 

“I told Dr. Raeburn how I meant to tell Heidi that my mother had died, that I knew how one eventually accustoms oneself to the physical world’s lack of sympathy: the buses that are still running late, the kids who still play in the street, the clocks that won’t stop for the person who’s gone.” 

Although Dina is black and Heidi is white, Dina does understand the profound experience of having one’s own reality seem like it has stopped while the rest of the world keeps turning. However, her defense mechanism of acting nonchalant and unaffected keeps her from reaching out and connecting to Heidi about her mother’s cancer. As much as Dina pretends not to care, she does care deeply, but she cannot allow Heidi to know that.

“We all look the same to them anyway.”

Marcelle reassures Tia that no one will recognize or remember her because white people cannot distinguish between African Americans. This anonymity as a young black girl hides Tia in plain sight, even when she stands next to a “MISSING” poster that bears her photo. Anonymity also deindividualizes African Americans in these stories, allowing white people to either tokenize or discriminate against them as if they are all the same.

“They loved her and she loved them, but it was a smothering sort of love: love because you had to, never getting the chance to find out whether you wanted to or not.” 

Tia has been raised by her aunt but doesn’t trust that her aunt chooses to love her rather than just feeling obligated to do so. Since Tia’s mother chose to abandon her, Tia searches for her as someone who can now decide to choose to love her. Instead, the woman Tia believes might be her mother rejects Tia, and Tia looks for love from Dezi instead. Dezi shows that it’s easy to pretend to love someone to manipulate them, and that Tia’s understanding of love might be idealized.

“She knew this was her chance, like birth, to be a part of someone. Then it hit her with a sadness: if sex and birth meant being part of someone, then death meant you belonged to nobody at all.” 

As Dezi attempts to have sex with Tia, Tia considers giving in. She likens sex to giving birth. Tia’s mother gave birth to her, and therefore Tia believes that she will always be a part of her mother. Since sex is literally about connecting physically, Tia imagines that sex can create a similar bond. She almost allows Dezi to have sex with her as if she can replace what her mother did not give her, but then she realizes that everyone dies, and she would still die alone. This realization wakes her up and spurs her to leave.

“She didn’t tell him that she didn’t want to sweep floors, that too many Japanese had already seen American movies in which blacks were either criminals or custodians.” 

Dina demonstrates the parable of the ants that the pastor shares during the Million Man March in “The Ant of Everything.” When Dina isn’t quite out of money or hope, she believes that she can find a job that will allow her to have dignity rather than simply chasing the next crumb. As her job prospects become impossible, Dina becomes too hungry for her ideals or to maintain her understanding of herself as being above certain jobs. In the end, she sells her body because she is starving and must do what it takes to survive. 

“It was a secret they shared: there were two types of hunger—one in which you would do anything for food, the other in which you could not bring yourself to complete the smallest task for it.” 

With no money and no food aside from what Ari brings in from the job he will soon lose, Dina and her roommates have given up. They were doing whatever they could, including stealing, to feed themselves and stay alive. When that becomes an impossibility, hunger overtakes them. They are desperate, but too hungry to fight for their lives. Zoltan’s desperation leads him to try to catch a goose, and desperation turns into despair when he fails. In the end, Dina gives up her principles and ideals to avoid starvation.

“She remembered how she’d marveled when she’d read it, amazed that anyone would do such a thing; how—in the all-knowing arrogance of youth—she’d been certain that given the same circumstances, she would have done something different.” 

Dina remembers learning about kamikaze pilots in school and how, as a child, she was unable to imagine sacrificing herself for an ideal or an ideology. Dina discovers that her desire to stay and survive in Japan instead of returning to the safety of her hometown means more to Dina than the preservation of her sense of self. She likely would never have imagined that she would willingly have sex for money, but she learns that she is capable of wanting something so badly that she will sacrifice what she understands as her boundaries and herself.

“It’s those little things, Doris. Why do your people concentrate on all those little, itty-bitty things?”

Alice, Livia’s friend, brushes off Doris’s comment that the phrase “flesh-colored” doesn’t include the color of her flesh. As someone who has lived with white privilege her entire life, Alice doesn’t understand how something that seems small and insignificant can be invalidating, especially when so many “itty-bitty things” add up to a lot of exclusion.