BookBrowse Reviews Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana

BookBrowse:

Sidik Fofana's debut novel-in-stories orbits a Harlem apartment complex and spins bittersweet tales of ambition and disappointment in a range of vibrant voices.

"Everybody got a story, everybody got a tale / Question is: Is it despair or prevail?" These last lines of a short introduction in verse set up Sidik Fofana's aim: to depict the shifting fortunes of the residents of Banneker Terrace in Harlem. The building has new owners who plan to renovate and raise the rates. For many of the tenants, it's already a struggle to make rent each month, even if they hold down two or more jobs. So, while gentrification might be considered a positive thing in a neighborhood for some, it's bad news for the protagonists of these linked short stories.

Illegal hustling starts to look like a tempting option — if not a necessity. In "The Rent Manual" (which has second-person narration, in contrast to the first-person perspective of the other seven stories), Mimi is a waitress at a soul food restaurant and runs an informal home hairdressing business, but also gets drawn into a friend's scheme to resell cheap diapers. She's five months behind on her rent and knows eviction proceedings will start soon if she doesn't do something drastic.

Minor characters from some stories go on to have starring roles in others. For instance, Swan, mentioned as the father of Mimi's son in the first story, becomes the antihero of the second, "The Okiedoke." His friend Boons, newly released from jail after four years, has a hankering for Chinese food. However, the pals find themselves short of cash, so concoct a prank to play on the delivery person to get the food for free.

Endearing scoundrels are also the focus in several later stories. In "The Young Entrepreneurs of Miss Bristol's Front Porch," Kandese has been sent to the country for the summer as punishment for acting out at school. She forms a gang of girls who steal snacks from the general store and resell them. Once they clear $500, Kandese thinks, she'll report their entrepreneurial achievement to the local news station. Darius, the narrator of "Camaraderie," wants to be a stylist to the stars but, in the meantime, lets his neighbors fix him up with a posh escorting gig. In "lite feet," a few of Kandese's classmates start breakdancing on subway trains for tips.

The kids' school, Sojourner Truth Middle, across the street from Banneker Terrace, is another key location. Fofana, himself a Brooklyn public school teacher, wittily recounts the students' all-too-believable hijinks in "Ms. Dallas," an overall standout. The title character, Swan's mother, works as a paraprofessional and casts a jaded eye over the Harvard-educated seventh-grade English teacher's attempts to get his rowdy class to engage with American literature. When the failing school gets 24 hours' notice of an inspection, the students put on their best behavior for a discussion of A Raisin in the Sun — a perfect commentary on this book due to the theme of dreams ending in defeat.

Most of the stories are narrated in thick African American Vernacular English (AAVE). For instance, "finna" is short for "fixing to" or getting ready to do something; "suttin" is Fofana's rendering of "something." The way the characters speak reflects who they want to be, or the generation they belong to. Ms. Dallas and elderly Mr. Murray from "Federation of the Like-Minded" use less slang and fewer obscenities than the teenagers and young adults. The twelve-year-old narrator of "lite feet" writes in phonetic spellings and text speak, while in "Tumble," Neisha, who trained to be a professional gymnast and went to college, does not use AAVE, presumably because she feels that it could hold her back from being successful in the wider world.

Though the lives of these tenants are filled with difficulties — unemployment, dead or absent parents, three people living in a one-bedroom apartment, no tangible prospects for the future — they are not miserable. Their optimism and sheer joy shine through in their picaresque antics. Fofana even references the lyrics of the Journey song "Don't Stop Believin'" twice, as if to sum up his characters' irrepressible spirits.

Lively language; feisty characters that might remind you of your own relatives, former classmates, or neighbors; sharp, varied plots; and timely themes: this was a pure pleasure to read. It's a stellar debut from a very talented writer. Fofana should win all the prizes.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in September 2022, and has been updated for the August 2023 edition. Click here to go to this issue.