51 pages • 1 hour read
ZZ PackerDrinking Coffee Elsewhere
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
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Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
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Overview
Clareese (“Every Tongue Shall Confess”) describes helping a woman whose child ate ants, calling them, “God’s creatures, and though disturbing, they wouldn’t harm the boy” (36). In “The Ant of the Self,” Spurgeon listens to a speech at the Million Man March in which a preacher asserts “that freedom is attained only when the ant of the self—that small, blind, crumb-seeking part of ourselves—casts off slavery and its legacy, becoming a huge brave ox” (101). Ants function on instinct, moving one tiny crumb of food at a time. They are small, but they have the capability to be disproportionately strong, especially when they work together. The need to eat and shelter themselves is all-consuming, however, leaving little time and energy beyond meeting the basic needs of survival. Similarly, after slavery and desegregation, African Americans were left to lift themselves out of poverty, beginning with virtually nothing.
With the parable about ants and oxen, the preacher suggests that slavery to the basic necessities is distracting from the fight for freedom. Ants are also anonymous, creating an assembly line in which the individual is unimportant. In “Our Lady of Peace,” Lynnea compares herself to an ant when Robert the Cop pulls her over near the end of the story. Lynnea had hoped to keep moving with the other ants and avoid attracting attention, imagining that “the giant foot above wouldn’t come smashing down” (78). However, the reality of racism and racial prejudice is that a person can follow the rules and stay in line, but a mistake or an accidental misstep will draw attention from those who have power, just as an ant that wanders out of line with the colony for a moment might be stepped on.
Tia (“Speaking in Tongues”) describes her fellow churchgoers as ants, judging her for her inability to speak in tongues, “their thoughts headed toward the same conclusion as tiny ants march toward the same mammoth crumb of bread” (152). As a group, they decide that Tia is not a believer and therefore does not belong. Tia runs away to escape the edict of conforming and the predictable life that she’ll have if she stays. Like many of the protagonists in these stories, Tia goes where she is alone and must fight for herself. The characters in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere are average people who either fight to avoid disappearing into the crowd or fight to stay a part of the colony. Although one ant can’t do much alone, Doris (“Doris is Coming”) demonstrates that there is strength and power in standing up alone.
Parents and Children
At the end of “The Ant of the Self,” Spurgeon sees a father holding his sleeping son, having come from the Million Man March. This instance is one of very few positive parental relationships across the different stories. Like Spurgeon, most of the characters struggle with absent, dead, or dysfunctional parents. Octavia (“Brownies”) endures her mother’s emotional outbursts as her parents go through a divorce. Sheba (“Our Lady of Peace”) lives at a girls’ home and has no parents, reluctantly continuing the cycle now that she is pregnant herself. Dina (“Drinking Coffee Elsewhere”) hates her father and blames him for her mother’s death. Tia (“Speaking in Tongues”) runs away because she believes that she is missing out on real parental love after being abandoned by her drug-addicted mother.
Those with dysfunctional parental relationships are left vulnerable, unprotected, and forced to give up their childhoods. Spurgeon becomes emotional when he sees the father and son at the train station because his own father left him stranded with no money and without a thought about Spurgeon’s well-being. Spurgeon tamps down the emotion and refuses to cry because without a father, he must become an adult. Tia is cared for by her aunt but doesn’t feel that she receives the unconditional love that she imagines she would receive from her mother. She runs away and ends up having to support and protect herself like an adult but without the tools of an adult.
Black Bodies
The stories approach issues of race and racial difference, primarily in the 1990s. The schools, churches, and businesses that the characters attend and patronize are legally desegregated but are still racially divided. As singular African Americans in predominantly white schools and towns, these characters feel conspicuous. Although Doris’s story (“Doris is Coming”) comes at the end of the book, her description of her history class, in which she is the only black person, echoes throughout other stories in the book. Doris is self-conscious about being the only black body in the room and tries to avoid attention. Dina (“Drinking Coffee Elsewhere”) makes it to Yale, but as one of very few black students. As a defense mechanism, Dina isolates herself. Spurgeon (“The Ant of the Self”) notes that as a young black man, his teachers value him not for his intelligence and debating ability but because he seems non-threatening, unlike stereotypical black men.
In particular, black women’s bodies are valued very differently from men’s bodies in the stories. Clareese is cross-eyed and deemed unattractive, so she is only valued for what she can give the men at the church. Clareese knows that the men don’t consider her to be worthy of marriage, so they use her and dismiss her as they please. Tia (“Speaking in Tongues”) is only a teenager, but her developing body attracts the attention of a pimp who is only interested in how he can use her sexually and then sell her body. In “Geese,” Dina is unable to find a job to feed herself. As a black woman, she is undesirable as a model in Japan, but her body is fetishized by Japanese men, who harass her in public. In the end, she can only survive by giving in to the fetishizing and selling her body.
Much of the religion and churchgoing in the book are about the belief that the spirit can transcend the oppression of black bodies. At the beginning of “Doris is Coming,” the church congregation is anxiously anticipating the Rapture, in which they will shed their bodies and ascend to a higher plane. The belief in the Rapture, which of course does not come, is a way of avoiding the need for protest and social action. Instead of demanding equality from man, one can wait to be lifted out of oppression supernaturally. The civil rights demonstrations themselves are very physical, requiring protestors to endure assault and bodily humiliation. In Doris’s protest at the end of the book, she decides to put her own body in harm’s way in the name of the greater good.
