Pestilence by Jonathan Escoffery, 2020
The magic trick:
Controlling the narrative by telling what happened and how it made everyone feel
We’ve got a summer weekend double for you from the much-lauded recent collection If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. It follows Trelawney and his family, having moved to Miami from Jamaica in the 1970s. He’s trying to figure out where he fits culturally, economically, and in most other ways too.
In “Pestilence,” we go back to childhood in the Cutler Ridge area of Miami. It is a good example of what I would call Escoffery’s peculiar way of controlling his stories. There is nostalgia, but it doesn’t get sappy. There is terror, but it doesn’t get scary. There is tragedy, but it doesn’t get sad.
The narration doesn’t let your emotion form. It’s very interesting. The narration tells you what happened but also how it felt, so you really don’t to put your own response into the equation. It’s all there for you already.
And that’s quite a trick on Escoffery’s part.
The selection:
He told me we’d better bury the bird, and I didn’t stop to ask why we would bother; I had a vague sense that we were honoring the dead, that this life we’d taken was somehow different, more valuable than those of the insects and toads and crabs. To tear life down from the sky like that… or maybe I had begun growing into my conscience, and my guilt stood independent of what we’d killed.
We dug a shallow grave not far from where the nighthawk had first appeared. My brother suggested we look for its nest and eggs, to toss them into the hole, to wipe out its line and prevent future attacks, but I remember this with clarity: I had no stomach for it.
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