Escoffery has a reality he would like to share
Stories not strictly autobiographical but feel true to experiences
Ackee is ripe when the fruit starts to open, revealing its black, glossy seeds. That’s how you know it’s safe to cook, the author Jonathan Escoffery explained: “If you force the ackee pod open and eat the edible parts, you’ll poison yourself.”
The narrator of Escoffery’s award-winning short story “Under the Ackee Tree,” a Jamaican immigrant who fled to the United States, delivers a similar warning to his sons while teaching them about ackee and saltfish, his home country’s national dish. The fruit becomes a flash point between generations, one of countless things that the father and his younger son, Trelawny, can’t understand about the other — a symbol of the Jamaican identity that both unites them and drives them apart.
The story is part of Escoffery’s debut collection, “If I Survive You,” which was recently released. The book follows Trelawny and his family as they make their way in Miami, in linked stories that leap between perspectives and tone. “In Flux,” the opening piece, traces Trelawny’s lifelong reckoning with race, and the question, “What are you?” while “Independent Living” finds him sleeping in his car and working at an assisted living facility. The title of another — “If He Suspected He’d Get Someone Killed This Morning, Delano Would Never Leave His Couch” — speaks for itself.
Though Escoffery’s stories are not strictly autobiographical, he wrote a world that feels true to his
own — and the decades in which he worked to carve out a writer’s life.
“One of my primary jobs is to reflect reality,” he said recently from Oakland, California. That includes confronting social assumptions about race, masculinity and living in the United States as a second-generation immigrant.
Escoffery, 41, was born in Houston to a newly arrived Jamaican family and grew up in Miami. As a child, he thought “classrooms were the most beautiful, magical places,” he said, and was an avid comic artist. His father read the Miami Herald every morning and considered journalism “the most important kind of writing,” while his mother enjoyed fiction and budgeted for Escoffery’s frequent bookstore visits to pick up the latest R.L. Stine or “Hardy Boys” title.
Throughout middle and high school, Escoffery tagged along to parties with his older brother, where scenes of teenage melodrama honed his eye for detail. Many of his peers considered themselves “Jamaican first,” even if they’d lived in the U.S. for most of their lives.
Escoffery was fascinated by the contradiction of his parents’ generation, “simultaneously wanting you to be Jamaican and also telling you you’re not Jamaican,” he said. “It’s this odd kind of unwinnable dynamic, where they want you to have pride in your Jamaican heritage, but they also want to be the ones who are safeguarding Jamaican heritage from you.”
Though his father was a dedicated news reader, he did not endorse Escoffery’s literary ambitions. “When you move your entire life to a new country, you have to be concerned with tangible things that are going to allow you to survive,” Escoffery explained.
Escoffery wanted to be a writer and planned to study journalism at Florida International University. But he soon got married, dropped out and found himself working multiple jobs. For two years, while working overnight at Home Depot, he attempted to draft a sci-fi novel, but fell asleep in front of his computer most mornings.
Newly separated at 24, Escoffery returned to FIU and placed second in the school’s annual poetry contest. That year, he read “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros, which offered a model for “stories that stand alone but are building toward a bigger, novel-esque world,” Escoffery said. “That was one of the first books that made me think, ‘I’ve got my own neighborhood experience that I would love to write about, in a way that I haven’t seen written about.’ ”
Langston Hughes’ essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” made him reconsider his approach to writing about racial identity.
“When I was 10, when I was 20, I probably would have said, ‘I don’t want to be a “Black artist,” I want to be just “a really great artist,” ’ ” Escoffery said. Reading Hughes, he realized that his perspective on identity would add “the value and the depth and the texture and the reality” to his work.
After graduating with his master’s degree from the University of Minnesota, Escoffery moved to Boston and became the program coordinator at GrubStreet, a popular writing center, where he started
the Boston Writers of Color group.
While there, he sent a query letter to the literary agent Renee Zuckerbrot, who was “floored” by his writing, she said. With Zuckerbrot’s notes, he spent a few years revising the stories that became “If I Survive You.”
In 2020, the Paris Review honored “Under the Ackee Tree” with the Plimpton Prize, a decision Mona Simpson, the magazine’s publisher, said was almost unanimous among its board of directors.
“It was such a masterful story,” she said, “in the way it managed to cover generations.”
Though he had not previously been familiar with the Paris Review,
Escoffery’s father told everyone he met about his son’s prize-winning story. “He was really, really proud,” Escoffery said.
Escoffery’s father spent the last several years battling a terminal illness and died in August.
“He doubted he was going to live to see the book come out,” Escoffery recalled. “Rather than him wanting me to ‘stop all this writing foolishness and get a job,’ he was rooting for me to get this book out.”
At the beginning of the summer, Escoffery gave his father an advance copy. His father turned it over in his hands, then told him to go to the living room and place it on top of Michelle Obama’s memoir, “Becoming.”