May 7, 2024
Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, by Sidik Fofana
“But what’s sad in this whole thing is Wild One ain’t the criminal here. No, no, no. He jus a dude who did suttin. The criminals is us people around him, the people watching someone shake someone else awake from a dream and not doin nothin to stop it.” —”The Young Entrepreneurs of Miss Bristol’s Front Porch.”
Reading Sidik Fofana’s debut Stories from the Tenants Downstairs was especially meaningful for me because my friend B. recommended it to me when I was staying at her house last week, and she reads my book recommendations all the time but it’s not so often that I get to return to the favour. And what a rewarding favour this was, 8 stories from the perspectives of residents of a Harlem apartment building whose owners are pushing tenants down and out in a project of redevelopment and gentrification, all this the quiet backdrop to the foregrounded experiences of characters ranging from Ms. Dallas, a teaching assistant (who moonlights doing security at the airport); her son Swan whose friend has just come out of prison and who imagines that everything has changed with the new Black president; Mimi, struggling to get enough money to pay her overdue rent; Kandese, who we meet first in Ms. Dallas’s class, whose father dies while they’re living in a shelter; Darius, venturing into sex work and notorious after a run-in with his favourite celebrity goes viral; Najee, another student in Ms. Dallas’s class, whose scheme to make money by dancing on the subway has tragic consequences; Quanneisha, a top gymnast turned drop out who has come to face a world she’d thought she’d left behind; and finally Mr. Murray, the old man who plays chess outside of the restaurant across the street around whom the community rallies when he’s forced from his spot, but he doesn’t respond to their good will in the way that he’s meant to.
And subverting expectations is what this book is all about, in terms of the characters, but also the stories themselves, each of which comes with the most devastating pivot, sometimes on an epic scale, sometimes unbearably subtle (the push of an elevator button at the end of one story that I will never get over). As a reader, I want things to work out for these characters, but Fofana, a public school teacher in New York City (as well as a celebrated short story writer out of the gate—not everybody gets a blurb from Lorrie Morrie), does not give us the satisfaction, the catharsis.
Instead, the reader sits with the discomfort, with the injustice, a situation as intractable as those of these characters who are part of a system that was never built to serve them. Sometimes, often, this is how it is.
