Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America

Makenzie “Mak” Taylor is a Black girl who lives in North Atlanta. Because her father is a banker and her mother an attorney, they live in the wealthy part of Atlanta with a large home and gated property. She attends a mostly white, wealthy school.

Mak is at the Starlight drive-in theatre in the backseat with a boy, Kamari Funderburke. As they kiss, she thinks about the fact that she had promised her mom that she would never come here. Her mom tells her that it is a place where kids come to have sex and do drugs, and “not a place for nice young ladies like her” (345).

She thinks back to the first time she saw Kamari when she drove by with her cousin, Crystal, and he was leaving the Starlight. Crystal’s family lives in the poorer area of Atlanta, which her mom refers to regularly as “the ghetto,” in a small home with a large family. Her mother often looks down on her sister Trish (Crystal’s mom) and their situation, telling Mak that Trish had no desire to break the cycle and instead continues to live in poverty. Despite this, Mak notes how Crystal is much smarter than she is, with plans to attend Duke on a full scholarship. Crystal tells Mak to stay away from Kamari, informing her that he recently got a girl pregnant and forced her to get an abortion.

Mak remembers the first time she interacted with Kamari. She took her friend Tess to her boyfriend’s house so they could reconcile and waited in the car reading. Kamari got into her car, surprising her. She realized that he is a Percy Jackson fan, having read the books to his younger brother, and the two talked about the books.

The week before the drive-in, Kamari and Mak talked again. On her way to her aunt’s, she got a flat tire in “the ghetto.” When she pulled out her phone, she had messages from Kamari, who had gotten her number from Tess. She called him for help, saying that she was “stranded with a flat tire on your side of town” (385). He was jokingly offended by her use of “your side of town,” but she felt bad for insulting him while asking for help. He showed up and fixed her tire, despite making himself late for basketball practice.

She thinks about Kamari and his life, and how both Crystal and Mak’s mother judge Kamari for where he comes from. When she waved to him once in the car with her mom, she remarked on how he was smoking weed openly and was a “thug.” However, Mak thinks about how when she goes to parties, she watches rich white boys openly do coke on the table.

She works up the courage to ask Kamari about what Crystal said, and whether he really got a girl pregnant and forced her to have an abortion. He tells her that he did get his ex-girlfriend pregnant, but that he wanted to keep the child, and she chose to have an abortion. He never corrected her when she told people that it was his choice, wanting to allow her to save face.

Kamari reveals how wrong he was about Mak. He thought of her as “bougee” and materialistic and did not think she would be interested in him. Makenzie reflects on how they were both wrong about each other—how her “carefully constructed world” is unraveling” (366)—as she kisses him again.