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47 pages 1 hour read

Jonathan Escoffery

If I Survive You

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2022

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“In Flux”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“In Flux” Summary

This story, told in the second person (addressing the reader as “you”), is an account of the narrator Trelawny’s childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. He details the difficulty of being a first-generation Jamaican American in the Miami suburb of Cutler Ridge (now called Cutler Bay). Having been born in the United States makes the narrator too American to truly feel at home among his Jamaican family members, but because of his Jamaican heritage, he still seems foreign to his classmates. He recalls the shame he felt when his father visited his classroom to talk about his profession on career day. His father’s thick accent rendered his speech nearly unintelligible to his classmates. Although those speech patterns are familiar to Trelawny, the very fact that he can understand a Jamaican accent makes him feel somehow less American. And yet, his own speaking voice lacks the vocabulary and cadence of his parents, a difference that makes him feel separate from his family.

The narrator recalls coming into contact with multiple, conflicting understandings of race as an adolescent: Jamaicans and Americans see race differently, and his classmates are eager to know if he is Black. When Trelawny asks his mother, she tells him that his family includes Black, Irish, Jewish, and possibly even Arab ancestors. She finds his question “foolish,” and although he does not understand why, he gleans that he is not supposed to ask her about Blackness again. However, because he is light-skinned, he remains uncertain whether he counts as Black, and his mother’s response does little to answer his question. His parents are the source of even more racial confusion. His mother does not seem to want him to date white or Black girls, and he cannot quite figure out what counts as “too Black” for his mother. “Brown” seems the best racial category for his family, but that identification does not exist in the late 1980s.

He recalls the difficulty of his parents’ relationship. The “duppy” is an impish, mythical creature said to be responsible for the household ills. It was not the boys who broke their mother’s vase, but the duppy. The duppy’s hooliganism, in their household, though, became more nefarious: The duppy hid their father in bars, making him disappear from the home. The narrator recalls his mother having to contact the police about her missing husband.

Hurricane Andrew hits at the beginning of Trelawny’s sixth grade year, and the family relocates north to Broward County. Though he initially befriends a group of Puerto Rican boys, they drop him when they realize that he is Jamaican, not Hispanic. His older brother, Delano, has to explain to him that in this country, there is a “one-drop rule.” In other words, although their light skin in Jamaica meant that they were “not Black,” in the United States, they are. But Trelawny is too American and too light-skinned for the Jamaican boys, who tease him and quiz him about his Jamaican heritage.

Delano and their father begin returning to their old house in Cutler Ridge to repair the hurricane damage, and after several months of work, the two move there, leaving Trelawny with his mother. Trelawny relocates again to Kendall, another southern Miami suburb. At his new school, all the cool kids are Black, and Trelawny tries to fit in with them. Eventually, he succeeds. In doing so, though, he confuses both his family and his teachers: His speech may now read as “Black,” but his writing strikes his teachers as “too white,” and he is accused of plagiarism. His father is disappointed that Trelawny seems like an African American rather than a Jamaican. Delano, in contrast, reminds Trelawny more and more of their father. After a hate crime gets national news coverage, Trelawny recalls being beat up for not being Black enough. Blackness having “failed” him, he embraces his Jamaican roots. He explores Jamaican food, music, and culture. He begins to tell people that he is Jamaican when asked, “What are you?” (3). Their response, however, is usually, “You don’t look Jamaican” (25).

Trelawny recalls leaving for college in the Midwest. Racial categories are different there, and no one mistakes him for anything but Black. Trelawny observes that whiteness is more fraught in the Midwest than it is in south Florida. At a party, he meets an Argentine student, a Mexican American student, and a Jewish student, all of whom identify as white because of their “European bloodlines.” It frustrates them that Midwesterners do not see their whiteness. Trelawny remembers dating two white women, both named Katie. Although both women seem to genuinely like him at first, after he has been dating them for a while, they begin to make stereotypical comments about his lips and his hair. Trelawny continues to struggle socially: Black students do not accept him as Black. The white students do not see him any other way, even though he doesn’t feel Black. He is not biracial either, because he does not have one white parent. Only in Jamaica does he look like his peers, but in that crowd, as soon as he opens his mouth, he is outed as an American. Even there, he is seen as “other.” He asks his Jamaican friends and family about colonialism, enslavement, and their shared African ancestry. He is met with guffaws, and the sentiment that those are things “only Yankees think about” (38).

Lonely in the Midwest, Trelawny remembers the moment he decided to move home to Miami after college. He calls his mother, and she replies that she, too, is moving home: to Kingston. Trelawny takes a DNA test and finds that his ancestry is mostly European. Still, he is too Black to be biracial in the Midwest, but not Black enough for his Black friends, several of whom are upset that he’s majored in literature rather than in a field that would add wealth to Black America.

“In Flux” Analysis

This short story, the first in the collection, begins to establish Trelawny’s characterization. The use of second person, which appears in other stories as well, emphasizes the author’s goal of forcing the reader to step into the protagonist’s point of view; that is, Escoffery aims to force the reader to confront the uncomfortable experiences that often accompany being an immigrant of color in the United States. Through the narrator’s memories of his adolescence and early adulthood, Escoffery explores the themes of Immigration and Cultural Identity and Immigration and Fraught Family Dynamics. Hurricanes begin to emerge as a motif, and the south suburban Miami setting of Trelawny’s Cutler Ridge and Kendall neighborhoods grounds the collection in the history and experiences of Miami’s sizeable Jamaican community.

The short story situates the reader in the context of immigration, using its protagonist’s perspective to make clear how immigration permeates and complicates identity and familial relationships. Trelawny, a light-skinned Jamaican American teenager, does not feel comfortable in any racial, national, or familial group: In each one, he is told that he does not belong. He is “too American” for his Jamaican friends and relatives and even for his family, all three other members of which were born in Jamaica. His Jamaican parentage renders him Jamaican to many of his classmates, even though he was born in the United States. His light skin makes him “not Black enough” for his African American classmates in Miami, but renders him Black to his midwestern classmates in college. He experiences colorist prejudice from darker-skinned Jamaicans and racialized fetishization from his girlfriends. Over and over again, people greet him with the question “what are you” (3). These experiences speak to how immigration can destabilize cultural and racial identity, given how culture, including perceptions of race, differ across countries. Trelawny will spend much of his life searching for belonging, both within his family and within various peer groups. Because he does not fit neatly into any identitarian category, he struggles to develop a strong sense of self.

Trelawny’s internal struggle and unstable family situation manifest in the stormy imagery Escoffery uses to describe the devastation of Hurricane Andrew and its difficult aftermath. In general, hurricanes emerge as an important motif in this story and the collection overall, representing both literal and figurative “storms.” In part, the hurricane in this story speaks to the intensifying tension and turmoil in the family, augmenting depictions of Trelawny’s parents’ rocky marriage. In addition, Hurricane Andrew also speaks to the theme of Intersectionality, Socioeconomic Status, and Race. Namely, the story captures how the brunt of the hurricane’s destruction was felt by the socioeconomically disadvantaged, immigrants-of-color communities in the area of South Miami, where Andrew’s winds were the strongest and the devastation was the greatest. Without financial safety nets, many in Trelawny’s community (as well as Escoffery’s own community) struggled to rebuild. In reality, as in the story, the process was often done by hand rather than by hired contractors, the labor of rebuilding falling entirely on the shoulders of the already burdened community.

Setting, too, emerges as an important part of this collection in “Flux.” Escoffery grew up in the same section of southern suburban Miami that his protagonist does. Escoffery describes the building boom that brought an influx of new families, many of them immigrants, into this lower-cost, but still desirable, area of Miami. Although there are other Jamaican neighborhoods in Miami, with many people settling in Coconut Grove, Miami’s Kendall and Cutler Ridge suburbs (now called Cutler Bay) represented a small step up. Although much of the hastily built housing was vulnerable to Hurricane Andrew’s destructive winds, the area has (and had) lower crime rates and better schools. Trelawny notes the diversity of his neighborhood and high school; this diversity, too, is representative of the diversity of this part of Miami. Immigrants from all over the Caribbean and South America make their home in the southern Miami suburbs. Escoffery thus grounds his story in the real-life, lived experiences of multiple immigrant communities of color in the region.

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