“What’s your name mean?”
“Joy,” I told her. “In Kikongo, it means joy. My father was in Zaire when I was born.”
Kiese Laymon. Heavy: An American Memoir. 2018.
This past spring semester, the students did their presentation blog posts in the Advanced Fiction workshop on stories from The Best American Short Stories 2020, edited by Curtis Sittenfeld. One story we read and discussed that never got written up is the first that appears in the anthology, “Godmother Tea” by Selena Anderson (originally published in Oxford American). This story is effectively understated, “impersonating a vibe” in a way that resonates.
The story is narrated in the first person by a young woman named Joy and opens with Joy’s mother bringing her the unwanted gift of a large ornate mirror. In this mirror Joy glimpses fragments of her ancestors in what seems like a figurative way until we get the official introduction of the acute tension:
One evening I was alone in my apartment impersonating a vibe. I was fixing a dinner of cachapas and instant coffee when I noticed the godmother wanted to have a chitchat.
By way of the godmother’s request for “‘a synopsis of what’s going on,'” we get Joy’s chronic tension, her fear that she’s becoming a “vagabond,” losing the only two significant connections she’s made in her life, her best friend Nicole and her one-time boyfriend André. The godmother succinctly sums up what amounts to Joy’s chronic tension: “‘…you’re tired of living.'”
The godmother suggests that Joy needs to “‘lower those expectations if you got to be happy,'” then cooks her a dinner significantly better than Joy had cooked for herself. That week Joy goes to a dinner party with Nicole at a mansion where she observes Nicole fitting in and “becoming one of them” while Joy, one of the people “who weren’t supposed to be at the party” steals a bottle of wine, which she drinks when she gets home before calling André, which then leads to a self-pitying conversation with the godmother, who makes macaroni and cheese casserole. The next afternoon Joy drives by André’s, and they end up getting food and having “disembodied” sex in Joy’s car outside André’s house while his new girlfriend Porsche is inside wearing his shirt; afterward, knowing André is over her, Joy demands the shirt, thinking that making this demand will make her more like the godmother, and André gives it to her; afterward at home she talks to the godmother, who tries to convince Joy that André was a “false love.” The next day Joy drives to the DMV to renew her long-expired driver’s license, but it’s closed because it’s Sunday–Easter Sunday. Nicole declines Joy’s call, and in the midst of calling André, Joy is nearly hit by a car. Back at home she puts on “Robert Earl Davis Jr.’s greatest hits” and gets in a bubble bath, where, while eating leftover eggplant, the godmother confronts her about having given up and not being “real.” The godmother throws the eggplant at her and Joy imagines attacking her, then realizes she’s still just sitting in the tub. When Joy gets out, the godmother makes her tea, and Joy realizes she doesn’t want to be “terrible” like the godmother anymore, which confuses her because she “had never changed my mind about a person before,” and she starts to pray, and the godmother disappears, as do the chastising/judgmental voices of her ancestors in the mirror when she dresses and goes out to get a Dr Pepper. At the register she realizes she’s forgotten her wallet, but the cashier begrudgingly lets her have the drink. Outside she watches the people coming and going from her own apartment and realizes she is and has been one of them, and notes that this is how she “got over.”
This is effectively the story of a character learning how to be, the coming-of-age narrative template. Sittenfeld summarizes why she chose each story in one line in the BASS 2020 intro:
I loved “Godmother Tea” by Selena Anderson because it showed me how enthrallingly magical realism, daily despair, and class commentary can mix together.
I was reminded of Anderson’s story when I learned of the recent death of the influential academic theorist Lauren Berlant and was reading a 2019 article the New Yorker reposted about Berlant’s field of Affect Theory. The very first line of Berlant’s critical text Cruel Optimism regarding this theory names one of the twin engines of character-driven plot:
A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2011
If the plot of a short story is often driven by a character’s fear and/or desire, in this story, the epiphany hinges on the idea of changing your desire, the realization the godmother helps guide Joy to. The godmother is an embodiment of Joy’s connections to her history, to relatives living and dead. It’s interesting that the plot itself is driven by Joy’s non-blood relations, the people she herself has chosen. The structure, a three-day one, is built on scenes of what seem to amount to Joy’s final alienation of these two connections, first Nicole at the party, then Andre when she goes to his house.
Anderson is coy about the story’s setting, leaving the “city” Joy lives in officially unnamed:
I live down south in a city whose economy probably should not have outlasted the twentieth century, although folks around here celebrate this accident as proof of their regional superiority. The highways we’ve built are among the greatest curiosities of the world. The haze from nuclear power plants lends the skyline a romantic look, like a vintage postcard. The air is so thick with the stench of gasoline and doughnuts that a deep breath can make you shed one hysterical tear.
Anderson (along with Matthew Salesses, the author of the other primary text we used in the Advanced Fiction workshop this semester, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping) earned her PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston, and Houston is unmistakably evoked in this description, if you change the “nuclear power plants” to “oil refineries.” A couple of other details support the Houston setting, the first in an encounter she has at the rich dinner party:
Chudi said he was a doctor and filled my glass with cough syrup and ginger ale, which isn’t even the recipe. We engaged in some almost dangerous banter that made my head swim—but his bootsy syrup could’ve given the same effect.
This detail is best read in conjunction with another that appears near the end, what provides the soundtrack to her final climactic exchange with the godmother after providing the initial segue into this scene after she’s almost hit by a car when she’s on the phone with André, the car speeding away then “zipping the city back in order”:
I handled my brush with eternity by putting on Robert Earl Davis Jr.’s greatest hits and drawing myself a bubble bath. Maybe you already know this, but after too many loops, your favorite song starts to turn on you. The potency of the bass line begins to fade and like that, you’re fresh out of new sounds.
And then right after she gets out of the tub in the middle of the final climactic dialog exchange:
In the background Robert Earl Davis Jr.’s chopped-up, joyous pain pressed into my shoulders. The feeling showed in the mirror, and as I passed by, fragments of my ancestors looked out with mild concern.
Robert Earl Davis Jr. is better known as DJ Screw, who, as his Wikipedia page linked to there notes, “was an American hip hop DJ based in Houston, Texas, and best known as the creator of the now-famous chopped and screwed DJ technique.”
The second invocation of Davis with the “chopped-up, joyous pain” description hints at this, while also connecting directly to the character via her name, or more specifically, her name-as-affect.
DJ Screw is then connected to what amounts to the climactic epiphany:
I wanted so badly to be in harmony with the city I called home and with my time on this earth and for this to show in my face and the way I talked.
The way Joy talks is tied to racial identity, a significant element of what Sittenfeld identifies as the story’s “class commentary.” The last thing the godmother says to her in dialog:
“Has anyone ever told you that you talk like a white girl?” she said.
It’s also worth noting that in this climactic sequence with the godmother, Joy never actually drinks the titular tea…which brings us to the use of food as an objective correlative. Food is always associated with the godmother’s appearances, culminating in the imaginary eggplant attack that makes the tea offering feel more like a denouement more than a narrative climax, though it essentially marks one–the godmother’s disappearance, a concrete, if technically imaginary, indicator that Joy has somehow evolved emotionally.
The use of objects extends beyond food, with the mirror being a major one introduced in the story’s opening that develops the godmother’s function as a manifestation of Joy’s connection to her larger history–the mirror shows her her own literal reflection while enabling her to reflect on her connections to that history and the connections she’s chosen for herself.
-SCR
the pva creative writing review 