The Young Entrepreneurs Of Miss Bristol’s Front Porch by Sidik Fofana, 2020
The magic trick:
Totally subverting the standard middle-class story form
Possibly the most depressing story in the Stories From The Tenants Downstairs collection.
This story subverts what you might call the standard middle-class story form. I’m making up terminology that doesn’t actually exist, but just humor me. Let’s say the standard middle-class story builds upon a “normal” that is pretty good. Life might not be amazing for our protagonists, but their day-to-day baseline, as established in the story, is fairly comfortable. The conflict then disrupts this normal and temporarily throws their world into discomfort.
Well, in “The Young Entrepreneurs,” that equation is flipped. The baseline for these girls is pretty bad. And not like a “story about wartime” bad. That would be easier to reckon with in some ways, because at least that might feel more extreme and short-term. and fashion advice. This is just monotonous everyday life, seemingly from now until forever. And it’s bad enough that something as simple as the appearance of a new girl in the neighborhood feels like a ray of sunshine. She has an idea to sell candy and household items from the porch. She even wants to write the local news about their business.
So here it’s not the conflict that upends the story’s normal; the normal is the conflict and its’ the potential solution that alters the plot.
This subversion continues when the plot moves into a genuinely scary direction. Some older boys hear about the girls’ business, and they approach with bad intentions.
In the quote-unquote standard middle-class story, this would be the conflict’s peak. And if you’re like me, you probably will read this story feeling that same tension, expecting the same story beats.
But that’s not exactly what happens. The conflict here isn’t what we think a conflict is, remember. The conflict is the story’s normalcy. So even as the tension appears to ramp up with the teenaged boys’ appearance in the story, the conclusion lands us in a different place than you might expect from the standard middle-class story.
It’s pretty shocking, when you think about it, just how simple it is to totally upend the traditional literary community’s traditional understanding of what American life looks like in the story form.
And that’s quite a trick on Fofana’s part.
The selection:
The screen door pop open and Kandese come out with all the candy and that long m-word she be usin. Bernita say hey girl and I shake my head at her. Kandese got all the stuff in a duffel bag. She unzip it like she done all summer. The Blow Pops is all in a small cardboard box that used to be for her grandmuhva’s medicine. Same for the taffy, the Slim Jims and the hot cheese popcorn, all sellin for a quarter more than Old Man Duney sell dem for at the general store across the tracks. Kandese had glued some nice color paper around it and wrote the prices in black marker all straight like she had dotted lines to help her. Narely, she stop her fake giggles right when the screen door opened, and now she grabbin the cartoon drawings and helpin Kandese hang dem up. Bernita, she wait for a little bit to show us she can do whatever she want and then set up the combs and scrunchies, too.
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