Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

In “Brownies,” Arnetta is the most outspoken of the troop of girls and acts as their self-appointed leader. She has convinced Mrs. Margolin, their troop’s scout leader, that she can do no wrong, which gives her leeway to misbehave. Arnetta insists to the rest of the troop that she heard one of the white girls call Daphne a racial slur. She stirs up the fight between the two troops but is also the one to back down when she realizes that the white girls are intellectually disabled. On the bus after camp, Arnetta mocks the girls in the white troop and imagines having the opportunity to humiliate white Mennonites, demonstrating Laurel’s newfound understanding that someone who has been treated badly for a long time will pass that mistreatment on to someone else. 

In “Brownies,” Daphne is quiet, intelligent, and seemingly troubled. At school, Daphne won a contest with a poem about her veteran father and his trauma and received a journal as a prize. Laurel wants to be her friend, but Daphne is overwhelmed by Laurel’s excitement about her poem. When Arnetta announces that one of the white girls called her a racial slur, Daphne seems to want to deny that it happened but gives into pressure from the other girl. Daphne is mysterious and sensitive, although Laurel notices that she is likely poor. Daphne cleans the messy bathroom instead of planning revenge, and Arnetta excuses her from the fight because she sees Daphne as someone to protect. At the end of the story, Daphne inexplicably gives Laurel the journal she won, which she hasn’t written in at all. Daphne perhaps has her own trauma from her father’s military service, but her actions are never explained.

In “Every Tongue Shall Confess,” Clareese is a deeply religious African American woman who leads her church choir and works as a nurse at a hospital. At work, she frequently disobeys her superiors by sharing her faith with her (mostly unwilling) patients. At her church, Clareese is angry and frustrated because the men there treat poorly because she is cross-eyed and doesn’t attract men who are looking for wives. She endures abuse and ridicule but remains stubborn and staunch in her faith. Even when Cleophus shows romantic interest in her, Clareese is much more interested in saving his soul and putting his musical abilities to work in the church. Although Clareese seems unchanged throughout the story, she does open herself up to Cleophus, perhaps becoming slightly less rigid.

In “Every Tongue Shall Confess,” Clareese meets Cleophus as one of her patients in the hospital. He is a black man and an amputee with an infected knee who used to play the blues. Cleophus is amused by Clareese’s insistence on preaching to her patients but provokes Clareese by questioning the truth of her religion and prompting her to scream at him and potentially lose her job. When Cleophus shows up at Clareese’s church, Clareese knows that he is only there to see her but believes that she can still help him change. Cleophus seems to be more interested in helping Clareese change.

In “Our Lady of Peace,” Lynnea finds herself at a dead end in her hometown after college. She moves to Baltimore on a whim and decides to become a teacher. Lynnea epitomizes the underprepared educators who are sent into inner-city public schools with little support or assistance. Because she is privileged and went to a mostly white high school, Lynnea is baffled by students who refuse to respect her and don’t seem to care about school at all, but no one will help her figure out how to manage her classroom. Lynnea is strict and tries to enforce the rules, finally alienating the one student who tried to maintain order in Lynnea’s class. Lynnea’s frustration and anger at her students build until she lets her feelings come to a peak, hitting two black teens with her car when they stubbornly refuse to respect her and get out of the road. The teens live, but Lynnea gives everything up and leaves the scene of the accident, convinced that she never had the ability to make a difference in students’ lives at all. 

In “Our Lady of Peace,” when Lynnea learns that Sheba, who has a criminal record for stabbing a previous teacher, will be in her class, she is less than enthusiastic. Sheba, however, surprises Lynnea because she wants to learn. Unlike Lynnea, Sheba has had few advantages in life, and for a while, she shows Lynnea that there is more to her students than she was initially able to see. Through Sheba, Lynnea had the opportunity to learn to connect with her students and become an effective teacher. When Sheba gets pregnant, she changes, and just at the moment when Lynnea might have reached out and helped Sheba to stay in school, Lynnea chooses to be rigid instead and enforce the rules. Lynnea gives up on her, and Sheba becomes one more student who fails in school.

In “The Ant of the Self,” Spurgeon is a black teenager who has built his life around avoiding making the same choices that his father has made. In his father’s absence and irresponsibility, Spurgeon has had to become an adult. When he bails Ray out of jail, Ray is unable to even drive legally, but the greater toll that his father’s influence has taken on Spurgeon’s life is a disconnect with his own blackness and masculinity. At a predominantly white high school, Spurgeon has no black male role model and instead has focused on his father as an anti-role model. Spurgeon feels superior to Ray and above the Million Man March, even criticizing the oratory styles of the speakers. At the end of the story, however, Spurgeon winds up drunk, broke, and without transportation, much like his father. He finally falls from his pedestal and must evaluate himself and his own self-importance.

In “The Ant of the Self,” Ray, Spurgeon’s father, is intelligent, ambitious, and handsome, but also cruel and unscrupulous. Although Spurgeon doesn’t respect Ray, Ray manages to command Spurgeon to obey him. He also has no qualms about coercing his son by insulting him and questioning his masculinity. Ray hurts not only his son but his ex-girlfriend, Lupita, and he is willing to betray anyone whom he loves or who loves him in service of his next money-making scheme. As insulting as Ray is toward his son, he shows that he is truly brutal when he beats Spurgeon and takes the car, leaving his son with nothing and no way to get home. Ray is behind Spurgeon’s determination to live a better life, his neglect pushing Spurgeon to succeed academically in order to avoid him. He also, however, shows fear beneath the surface and brings out Spurgeon’s deep-seated worries that he might become just like his father.

In “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” Dina, a young black woman who is starting at Yale, feels out of place among her privileged, mostly white classmates. Rather than finding her niche, Dina deliberately pushes her fellow students away, hiding alone in her room. Dina is unsure about her own identity as a black woman and as a student. She has no family life or support to speak of, with a dead mother and a father she hates. When Heidi befriends Dina, Dina begins to question her own sexuality despite her apparently ingrained homophobia. Dina starts to fall in love with Heidi, but when Heidi comes out of the closet, Dina pushes her away. She rejects Heidi, even when Heidi badly needs her friend after her mother dies. In the end, Dina goes home to an aunt she barely knows, full of regrets for what she gave up when she gave up Heidi’s friendship.

In “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” much like Dina, Heidi is confused about her identity. Heidi is white, and without explanation, she chooses Dina as a friend and forces her way into Dina’s life. When they first meet, Heidi is unsure of her gender identity and wants to be called Henrik, although she seems to abandon that idea quickly. While Dina is afraid to change, Heidi discovers herself and changes by leaps and bounds. She comes out of the closet as a lesbian and finds a group of lesbian friends. Because Heidi is white, she fits in at Yale; it is much easier for her to find like-minded people. At the end of the story, Heidi still doesn’t understand how her whiteness makes her life simpler, giving her room to explore and discover herself at Yale.

In “Speaking in Tongues,” Tia’s drug-addicted mother lost custody of seven-year-old Tia to Tia’s great-aunt Roberta. Now, at age 14, Tia has begun to question her religious Christian upbringing. She and her best friend Marcelle are the only ones their age in their Pentecostal church who haven’t spoken in tongues, a sign of religious coming-of-age. Tia begins to wonder if her life would be better if she lived with her mother. She remembers her mother as much more loving than her aunt, despite her aunt’s assertions that her mother was neglectful. Tia feels unloved and decides to seek out her mother by running away to Atlanta. However, when her mother, or someone who sounds like her mother, rejects Tia and denies her as a daughter, Tia seeks love elsewhere and becomes vulnerable to Dezi, a drug dealer and pimp who tries to take advantage of her. Tia desperately wants to feel connected but learns over the course of the story that affection doesn’t equal love and love doesn’t always come with affection. Tia matures and begins to understand the world more as an adult, arriving at her coming-of-age in a different way.

In “Speaking in Tongues,” Dezi is an attractive 32-year-old black man in Baltimore who is a drug dealer and a pimp. He is also a predator and recognizes Tia’s vulnerability when he spots her at McDonald’s. When Tia meets Dezi, she is a child and naively trusts a man who tries to act like a parent and take care of her. Even after Dezi tries to have sex with Tia, Tia returns to him because she has nowhere else to go. Dezi lures her in by treating Tia like a girlfriend and making her feel like he sees her as an adult. Tia learns that not everyone who treats her affectionately is safe or cares about her, and she likely narrowly escapes being trafficked for sex. Dezi represents the unseen danger that waits for young black girls who become anonymous after they disappear. 

In “Speaking in Tongues,” Tia is jealous of Marie at first, believing that she is Dezi’s girlfriend. This misconception reveals Tia’s innocence and lack of sophistication at the beginning of the story. Marie calls herself Dezi’s business partner, but in truth, he seems to be Marie’s pimp. When Marie is drunk, she opens up to Tia and asserts that she is only doing sex work temporarily so she can save up for an apartment with her young daughter. She has a son who lives with his father, Marie’s ex-husband who divorced her because he’s gay. Marie has had a difficult life, and she recognizes that Tia is a child and what will become of her if she stays with Dezi. Although Marie is not particularly warm to Tia, in the end she protects her, with help from the other sex workers, by fighting Dezi and giving Tia money to escape. For a brief moment, Marie functions as the mother Tia doesn’t have.

The text is unclear as to whether Dina in “Geese” is the same character as the protagonist in “Drinking Coffee Anywhere.” Although there are no other characters who cross over into multiple stories, both are young black women from Baltimore, and both seem ambiguous in their sexuality. In “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” Dina talks about her mother’s funeral and how she imagined that she was far away, drinking strong Arabic coffee in a Middle Eastern country. In “Geese,” Dina does travel far from everything she knows when she moves to Japan, and even after she finds herself unemployed, she sells her plane ticket and turns her stay into a one-way trip. Dina starves and steals, struggling to survive, but there is never any question of giving up and going home. Dina compares herself to a kamikaze pilot who goes out expecting to sacrifice and die. At the end of the story, Dina does sacrifice her body by having sex for money.

In “Geese,” Dina meets Ari in her job at an amusement park shortly after she arrives in Japan. Ari is generous, almost to a fault. He seems to feel obligated to take in people who have nowhere to go. Even with five people crowded into his tiny one-room apartment, Ari never complains. He is the only one with a job, and he quietly shares everything he has and provides for the others. Ari treats his roommates like family, welcoming them all unconditionally even after Sayeed threatens to kill Dina. However, when none of the roommates intervenes to help Dina, Ari is the one who leads Sayeed away from her. Dina never fully understands why Ari unselfishly invites the others to live with him, but she does learn from his community-minded spirit. 

In “Doris is Coming,” Doris is a black teenager from a poor, working-class family in a small town. It’s 1961 and Doris desperately wants to join into the historical civil rights protests that are occurring in the United States. However, she has been raised under the authority of the Pentecostal church, and the Reverend, who believes that the Rapture is about to occur, won’t allow Doris to participate, calling the demonstrations a distraction from God. Doris is interested in the world around her, and she spends time at Mr. Stutz’s shop, watching the news about the marches and sit-ins. Doris is a good student, the only African American in her advanced history class, but until she meets Livia, a rich white girl, she is afraid to break the rules or make herself seen. At the end of the story, when Livia announces that she is moving north and that Doris ought to as well, Doris realizes that Livia has the opportunity to do anything she wants, unlike Doris. At the end of the story, Doris finally comes into her own. She stages her own individual protest, bravely sitting alone at the white diner and ignoring those who tried to dissuade her from joining the movement.