Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Slices of Harlem Apartment Life: “Is it despair or prevail?” Stories from the Tenants Downstairs (2022) is a set of eight slice of life tales depicting various inhabitants of Banneker Terrace apartment building in Harlem: Mimi, a young single mother trying multiple strategies to come up with $350 for rent, hindered by her sweet lead poison brain damaged little son Fortune; Swan, the boy’s father still living in his mother’s apartment realizing that despite a black president he and his freshly out of prison friend will never really change; Ms. Dallas, Swan’s mother trying to earn rent money while working two jobs, one as “para” chaperoning a special needs child at the precarious Sojourner Truth Middle School; an anonymous girl living in Clinton and mutely falling under the spell of Kandese, who, after being expelled from Sojourner Truth, stays the summer with her grandmother; Dary, a young gay man trying to become a hairdresser while not becoming a prostitute; Najee, a twelve-year-old writing a letter explaining how he came to start dancing for money on trains and cause a tragic accident; Neisha, an ex-gymnast and university dropout returning to Banneker to work on the Committee of Concern connecting a lawyer to residents on the eviction list (including the childhood friend who ruined her gymnastics dream); and Mr. Murray, a philosophical old man who likes keeping a low profile and sitting on the sidewalk playing chess with passersby. Many of the stories end abruptly without our learning how the protagonist is going to be. We get hints as to that when characters from earlier stories are referenced in later ones, but the stories are not linked plot-wise. In Swan’s story, he never mentions his son or Mimi; in Najee’s story, he doesn’t really mention Kandese; in Ms. Dallas’ story, she never mentions her grandson or Mimi). It’s not a composite novel. The stories mostly lack epiphanies and metamorphoses and often end on a note of quiet devastation. The characters have their dreams, but we know (and they mostly come to know) they ain’t coming true. The rap-like “Intro” ends, “Everybody got a story, everybody got a tale/ Question is: Is it despair or prevail?” And Fofana’s people rarely “prevail.” So I wince whenever a character says something like, “Imma get a job and buy a house for my mother.” I also get frustrated at key moments when the sensitive but often passive characters know they should say or do something but end up staying silent or watching. Author Sidik Fofana is showing how the difficult and stressful lives of people of color drain positive vigor from them, and it often makes for depressing reading. On the plus side, some of the characters have an impressively uncompromising pride and ethical standard. Although when pushed to it Mimi will charge double to do her friend’s daughter’s hair and use her son’s backpack to shoplift diapers, she will NOT move back home with her tail between her legs to live with her mother and four sisters on welfare; although Dary will have sex with a stranger in a DC hotel room, he will NOT take money for it. Small moments of resistance and integrity if not victory. These are stories FROM the tenants, so seven of them are first person, one second person, and each has a distinctive, savory, demotic, AAVE voice talking to the reader, like in this excerpt from the first story, “Rent Manual—Mimi, 14D”: “Banneker Terrace on 129th and Fred Doug ain't pretty, but it's home. Until now, it's been the same since you moved here when you was pregnant with Fortune. One long gray-ass building, twenty-five floors, three hundred suttin apartments. Four elevators that got minds of they own. Laundry full of machines that don't wash clothes right. Bingo room that the old folks hog up and a trash chute that smell like rotten milk.” Fofana writes conversations without quotation marks: You gonna go over there and live by yourself? Your ma asked. That’s what I said, Ma, didn’t I? Chase after a man that don’t want nothin to do with no baby? And how you gonna make for rent? Imma get a job like responsible people. I heard that before. And he writes lots of the n word and lots of the mf word and lots of slang and expressions like “be like that's what I'm tryna say,” or “I know suttin that make you happy,” or “big-ass pot.” The distinct voices of the character-narrators are enhanced by each story having a different—excellent—audiobook reader. My favorite is Dominic Hoffman as the old chess playing Mr. Murray (what a savory voice!), but Bahni Turpin as Mimi is also great. There is some telling social criticism, like about liberal white people naively thinking they can enrich ghetto kids’ lives by making them read literature* or about the trend in companies forcing low-income residents out and renovating apartments to get higher paying ones and upscale restaurants replacing older ones. *Actually, young and white Mr. Broderick, who constantly boasts about graduating from Harvard, force feeds Steinbeck and Shakespeare to the poor Sojourner Truth kids, and unfairly resents and scorns Ms. Dallas is a little too clueless to believe. As I am white, grew up comfortably, and only once temporarily got a mild taste of poverty (living on a TA’s salary in graduate school) and disappointment (having my cv rejected 300 times), it was illuminating, moving, and sobering to read these stories. I would read another book by Fofana. View all my reviews
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