<\/a>a sea of swirling colors and cultures. In a Miami high school, he is too brown to hang with the Blacks, too mono-lingual to hablar with the Latinos, and too Yankee \u2013 meaning adverse to speaking the island patois \u2013 to other Jamaicans. In a Midwest college, amid a cloud of pink-toned classmates, he is \u201cunquestionably Black.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\nHis older brother, Delano, tells him: \u201cYou\u2019re Black, Trelawny. In Jamaica we weren\u2019t, but here we are. There\u2019s a \u2018one-drop\u2019 rule.\u201d But then a white co-worker, after making a racist remark, says to Trelawny: \u201cWhat do you care? You\u2019re not Black. You\u2019re Jamaican.\u201d Suddenly, thinks Trelawny, \u201cBlack Americans are the only Blacks. Blacker than Africans. Black in the (lowered voice) bad way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Escoffery places Trelawny\u2019s personal journey amid a prism of stories about the searches of life: Cukie, a friend of Trelawny\u2019s searches for his father, only to find that truth can lead to betrayal; a tragedy gives Delano one more chance to follow the ambition he abandoned for more pragmatic pursuits; a mysterious middle-aged woman, smitten with love, wishes to weasel her way into the old-folks home where Trelawny works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Again and again, \u201cIf I Survive You\u201d returns to Trelawny\u2019s relationship with his father, a general contractor who dotes on Delano and sees his younger son as weak and adrift, an affront to his immigrant mindset that places survival about all else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trelawny does indeed wander. Booted from father\u2019s house, he moves into his car, and uses the perception that \u201cevery light brown thing in Miami is exotic\u201d to entice female tourists with \u201ccolonial desires\u201d to take him back to their hotels, where he will have a bed for the night. He cycles through jobs both tedious and perverse (punching a woman in the face for an art project, watching an affluent white couple have sex). Through it all, he seeks to make peace with himself and, at least inwardly, with his father.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The New York Times called Escoffery \u201ca gifted, sure-footed storyteller, with a command of evocative language and perfectly chosen details.\u201d Dead-on right. There are not many pages in \u201cIf I Survive You\u201d that lack a savory turn of phrase or a piquant observation, many of them about Miami and its environs, an extra treat for those of us who, rightly or wrongly, see South Florida as the slightly off-kilter uncle in the American family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As a man of the Anglo-Saxon-mongrel variety, I never had to worry about identity. Sure, in the working-class, industrial city where I grew up we kids would ask each other What are you? But whether we answered Irish or Italian … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[809,236,838,837],"class_list":["post-2194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-book","tag-haiti","tag-miami","tag-novel"],"yoast_head":"\nBookshelf \u2013 \u201cIf I Survive You,\u201d Jonathan Escoffery - Tim Porter's Second Draft<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"As a man of the Anglo-Saxon-mongrel variety, I never had to worry about identity. Sure, in the working-class, industrial city where I grew up we kids would ask each other What are you? 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