ZZ Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Here’s the opening of “Brownies,” the first story in ZZ Packer’s marvelous new collection of short stories: “By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909.” 

The story, first published in Harper’s and reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 2000, is narrated by a quiet, keenly observant girl the others in her all-black troop from the south suburbs of Atlanta call “Snot.” These are fourth-grade girls who think the pine woods smell just like air freshener; they’re members of the A.M.E. church, made to memorize pious acronyms (Jesus: Jehovah’s Example Saving Us Sinners). Their knowledge of white girls comes mostly from the ones they’ve seen on television, ponytailed and full of energy, bubbling over with love and money.

So naturally they’re fascinated by Troop 909 and their Snow White sleeping bags, their “shampoo commercial hair,” even their smell, “like Chihuahuas,” says Arnetta, the troop rabble-rouser. “Wet Chihuahuas.”

It’s Arnetta who claims one of the white girls has used a racial epithet and decides they need to be taught a lesson. But when confronted, the girls in Troop 909 prove to be other than what they seem, more unnervingly different than can be conveyed by their leader’s polite euphemism, “delayed learners.”

It’s an amazing story—funny and authentically strange, a knowing exploration of bitterness. “When you’re made to feel bad for so long,” the narrator remarks, you jump at the chance to do it to others. 

Again and again in these eight remarkable stories, Packer’s protagonists, mostly black teenagers and young women, discover the previously unexplored and unimagined dark recesses and rough contours of the world—and themselves—through their encounters with the other.

In the book’s longest story, “Speaking in Tongues,” 14-year-old Tia, one of the only saved girls at Rutherford B. Hayes High School, is accused unfairly of laughing at Him. She decides to run away from her Aunt Roberta in the vague hope of finding her mother; she boards a Greyhound and embarks on the most harrowing tour of Atlanta as underworld since Flannery O’Connor. 

She sleeps in a car; she plays her clarinet for spare change in the park. Tia is tough and smart but she’s in over her head. Before long, she’s fallen in with sweet-talking, nylon-suited Dezi, a man who carries a thick wad of bills and can spot a runaway church girl a mile away. 

Lynnea, the protagonist of “Our Lady of Peace, signs up for a kind of Teach for America program, mainly because she wants a job with benefits, and after eight weeks of training, finds herself in one of Baltimore’s roughest high schools. She tries gamely to lead discussions of Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Great Gatsby (“I still think Myrtle is a ho”), but she’s afraid “with good reason” to turn her back on the class in order to write on the board.

Her class is joined by Sheba, an imposing 6-foot resident of a home for girls, who reportedly knifed a teacher at her old school, and who, for a time, forms an unlikely alliance with Lynnea. “You all need to shut up and learn something,” she tells her new classmates, and for once, they stay in their seats.

When Lynnea drops Sheba off one night and sees her “home” for herself, she learns something. She achieves a disturbing visceral understanding of what she’s up against, feels a truth that’s not in the school district’s gauzy brochures—a truth the lurks beneath the happy altruistic clichés about “reaching just one.” 

Down a scary maze of narrow streets is Our Lady of Peace: “its own planet, singular, immense, imposing. A sign with a picture of a lightning bolt on it was attached to the high electric fence that ran around the building. Next to it, another sign, wooden and hand-painted, read: “TRY TO GET IN OR OUT WITHOUT PERMISSION OR DIE.”

Every one of Packer’s stories is full of complexity and surprise: her characters are all utterly convincing and memorable. “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” first published in the New Yorker’s Summer 2000 Debut Fiction issue, is the story of a black first-year student at Yale, a loner who lays in a pile of ramen noodles so she never has to visit the Commons. Surrounded by the Gothic architecture, she can’t help but imagine “how the college must have looked when it was founded, when most of the students owned slaves.”

Invited during an orientation get-acquainted exercise to say what inanimate object she’d most like to be, she says, “A revolver.”

Packer, 30, has degrees from Yale, Johns Hopkins, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a tremendously talented young writer who doesn’t feel the need to announce her genius or prove on every page she’s edgy. The world, she obviously knows, is full of sharp edges, thank you very much. 

She does what the best artists do: Takes pains to show us—with clarity and compassion—the ragged, sometimes sinister, almost always heartbreaking mess we make of things, and in the fact of that, the possibility of decency, generosity, and courage. 

—The Buffalo News