A lyrical portrait of Black pain
In the story collection, “The Best That You Can Do,” PEN/Malamud Award-winner Amina Gautier has drawn an ambitious portrait of African-American women’s lives over the past 60 years in moments that are sometimes celebratory but all too often seething with pain and frustration. For these characters, even common activities such as going to work, driving to pick up a child at school, taking a walk in the neighborhood — or just the act of placing their bodies out in the world — is dangerous. And one of Ms. Gautier’s great talents is to require the reader to share in the risk.
In “Prone” a woman has been shopping for holiday gifts to give to her “coworkers, colleagues, bosses, Secret Santas and Hanukkah Harrys” gifts for people she doesn’t particularly like and who only seem interested in her when they need something from her.
Despite this — or maybe because of the transactional nature of these relationships — she is preoccupied and not taking care as she walks to her car with the gifts. She doesn’t appreciate that the parking lot is empty or that she’s being watched. Instead, she rationalizes that being attacked in a situation like this “is the kind of thing that happens mostly to white women. They were the ones most prone. … They were not her.” The mistake she makes is to think that, for once, the statistics for safety run in her favor. They do not.
A frantic mother is late picking up her daughter at elementary school in “Dismissal” and, stuck in traffic, her anxiety ticks higher and higher, leading her to think about all the ways she disappoints her daughter. She doesn’t have a job with reliable hours or a car that can be counted on to make the daily commute — and the school itself is a nightmare. Even when she’s close and can see her daughter is safe, she imagines the girl’s fear, wondering where her mother has been, and what could have happened to her.
Maybe she wonders “if I’m dead somewhere, slumped over the steering wheel of my car, shot by the officer who stopped me on the way to her. She already knows that this is a thing that can happen to people who look like us. Or maybe she’s reciting our address and phone number and wondering who she might go to in order to tell them that she’s lost. The teachers are all gone for the day, and she knows to never, ever call the police.”
The fear, of course, is that their safety is only ever temporary.
It is necessary for the very legitimate fear and anxiety on display in so many of these stories to eventually transform into incredulity and exasperation. One that really brings this home to the reader is “Tears on Tap.” Here an unnamed narrator uses the secret password “Becky” to gain entrance to the new hot-spot bar in town and partake of its latest drink sensation — a liquor made from the tears of white girls, the owner collecting the tears whenever “a Becky got caught and called out for taking it upon herself to monitor and police a black body.”
The best moment is Ms. Gautier’s description of the flavor of the drink, a crescendo of language that is both bitter and hilarious, and that lays bare so much of the racial tension at work in the United States.
No one would blame readers for getting caught up in the social commentary of Ms. Gautier’s stories, but that would ultimately sell them short. There is a new lyricism in the writing here, and each fiction feels intensely personal, inviting the reader to linger over lines and images.
The result is that we are regularly taken by surprise not only by the circumstances of the plot, but also by the incandescence of the prose. “The Best That You Can Do” is one of our most important writers working at the height of her powers.