Brownies

“They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.” 

This passage is Snot’s description of Troop 909, upon first glimpsing them. In drawing the reader’s attention to the Disney characters on some of the troop’s sleeping bags,Snot evokesthe mythic quality of whiteness that Troop 909 embodies for Snot and her troop members. Underneath this, however, Packer offers clues to the developmental differences of Troop 909, though Snot and her compatriots do not notice these. 

“It was the word ‘Caucasian’ that got them all going. One day at school, about a month before the Brownie camping trip, Arnetta turned to a boy wearing impossibly high-ankled floodwater jeans and said, ‘What are you? Caucasian?’ The word took off from there and soon everything was Caucasian. If you ate too fast you ate like a Caucasian, if you ate too slow you ate like a Caucasian.”

Here, Packer shows how a word can be taken out of context and made pejorative. As a result of persistent segregation, whites are foreign enough to the members of the troop, and their classmates, to allow the word Caucasian to function as a negative term. 

“At the end of that first day, when half of our troop made their way back to the cabin after tag-team restroom visits, Arnetta said she’d heard one of the Troop 909 girls call Daphne a ni****.” 

This false declaration by Arnetta is the catalyst for the rest of the story’s action. While not explicitly stated, all of the members of the Brownie troop know Daphne is quiet, and not likely to contest Arnetta’s lie, which she does not. 

“We’d seen them, but from afar, never within their orbit enough to see if their faces were the way all white girls appeared on TV—ponytailed and full of energy, bubbling over with love and money. All I could see was that some of them rapidly fanned their faces with their hands, though the heat of the day had long passed. A few seemed to be lolling their heads in slow circles, half-purposefully, as if exercising the muscles of their necks, half ecstatically, like Stevie Wonder” 

In this passage, Snot communicates what she has learned about white adolescents through the media. Unlike other members of her Brownie troop, however, Snot is able,at least to some degree, to discern reality from fantasy, implicitly admitting that she can learn little from what she observes of Troop 909. Embedded in this description, however, is foreshadowing of the discovery that Troop 909 are differently-abled in the reference to musician Stevie Wonder, who is blind. Furthermore, Wonder is black, and, through the reference to him, Snot is able to compare the Troop 909 girls to a media figure that she is both familiar with and who is the same race as her, thereby attempting to make the 909 girls more similar to her, as opposed to wholly other, which Arnetta and Octavia seem set to do from the start. 

“‘Snot,’ Arnetta said, and then sighed. ‘Don’t think. Just fight. If you even know how.’” 

This passage typifies Arnetta’s personality. While Snot is a thinker, like Daphne, both Arnetta and Octavia are doers, so much so, in the case of Arnetta, that she tells a lie in order to justify taking action against Troop 909.

“We had all been taught that adulthood was full of sorrow and pain, taxes and bills, dreaded work and dealing with whites, sickness and death. I tried to do what the others did. I tried to look silent.” 

This passage refers to Mrs. Margolin’s comment on the “operation” she had at some undisclosed point in the past. “Brownies” is, in part, a coming-of-age story; here, Packer shows that the girls know enough of the adult world to ascertain that specific situations require certain kinds of responses. Snot, not wanting to be singled out, mimics what she sees the others around her doing. 

“Arnetta leaned down toward me and whispered so that Mrs. Hedy, who’d taken over Mrs. Margolin’s task of counting Popsicle sticks, couldn’t hear. ‘No, Snot. If we get in trouble, you’re going to get in trouble with the rest of us.’” 

If Snot, in the quote discussed above, wants to blend in, here she attempts to stand out, not wanting to be a part of the group headed to the restrooms, to confront the girls in Troop 909. Arnetta, the leader of the group, demands that Snot accompany them. Daphne, however, the person who was the supposed victim of the racial slur, is allowed by Arnetta to remain behind. 

“We made our way through the darkness by flashlight. The tree branches that had shaded us just hours earlier, along the same path, now looked like arms sprouting menacing hands. The stars sprinkled the sky like spilled salt. They seemed fastened to the darkness, high up and holy, their places fixed and definite as we stirred beneath them.”

In a manner similar to the way the bathroom ceiling morphed into something more foreboding earlier in the story, Packer here has Snot’s perception of the trees grow sinister, personifying the branches until they turn to “menacing hands.” Added to this is the analogy of the stars being “like spilled salt”; in some European cultures, the spilling of salt is a bad omen. 

“No one talked about fighting. Everyone was afraid enough just walking through the infinite deep of the woods. Even though I didn’t fight to fight, was afraid of fighting, I felt I was part of the rest of the troop; like I was defending something.” 

Here, we see that Snot is glad to be part of the group. This push-and-pull between individualism and group identity emerges consistently over the course of “Brownies,” and is a common trope in coming-of-age narratives. 

“That was to be expected, that they’d deny the whole thing. What I hadn’t expected was the voice in which the denial was said. The girl sounded as though her tongue were caught in her mouth. ‘That’s a BAD word!’ the girl continued. ‘We don’t say BAD words!’”

This is the initial moment when Snot realizes her perception of the girls in Troop 909 is very different from the reality. Packer does not employ much dramatic irony in the lead-up to the story’s climactic moment; that is, the reader is not made privy to the fact that the 909 girls are developmentally-disabled before Snot herself is. Instead, the reader learns in the same moment Snot does. 

“All of Troop 909 burst into tears. It was as though someone had instructed them all to cry at once. The troop leader had girls under her arm, and all the rest of the girls crowded about her. It reminded me of a hog I’d seen on a field trip, where all the little hogs gathered about the mother at feeding time, latching onto her teats.” 

Packer chooses to have Snot use a decidedly unflattering analogy to describe the Troop 909 girls after the fallout from their confrontation, with Snot comparing the girls to baby pigs. This analogy is uncharacteristically unsympathetic at a superficial level, even though Snot does seem, at the same time, to harbor sympathy for the Troop 909 girls. This dichotomy at once deepens Snot’s character while also highlighting hernaiveté. 

“‘It could have happened. See. Our girls are not retarded. They are delayed learners.’ She said this in a syrupy instructional voice, as though our troop might be delayed learners as well.”

Here, Packer compares Snot’s Brownie troop to the Troop 909 girls. If the 909 troop is developmentally challenged, Snot’s troop’s understanding of the 909 girls being differently-abled arrives only after their attempt to harm them. At play here, too, is the realization that while the 909 troop is unable to change how they are, Snot’s troop has willfully chosen to not challenge the lie fabricated by their leader, Arnetta, and find themselves in trouble as a result. 

“‘He said,’ I began, only then understanding the words as they uncoiled from my mouth, ‘it was the only time he’d have a white man on his knees doing something for a black man for free.’ I now understood what he meant, and why he did it, though I didn’t like it.When you’ve been made to feel bad for so long, you jump at the chance to do it to others.” 

Snot recounts the reason for her father requesting that a group of Mennonites paint the porch of Snot’s family home. The decision has nothing to do with aiding the Mennonites on their own theological mission; rather, it’s an opportunity to exact revenge on white people, an attempt to claim some compensation for the centuries of harm they’ve inflicted on black Americans. While Snot can understand why her father does this, she doesn’t agree with the motives behind the decision, as the act simply perpetuates cycles of abuse predicated on racist attitudes and behavior.