In a Howl Lies the Truth
From “Friday Black,” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah:
“Help!” Angela yells, turning to look at me. She has a reach between her and the girl, but she won’t last much longer. I turn and go to the back room. I look up at the only large SuperShell parka hanging there. I pull it off the hanger. I go outside, and the girl can smell it. She looks in my direction and howls like a wolf.
I won’t be alone with this, she’s saying. They’ll like me now.
She rushes toward me. I dangle the coat out to the side like a matador. She runs toward it, and I let go and keep out of the way as she comes crashing through the parka. Then with the coat in her hands, she says, “Thank you,” in a raspy voice. I watch her at the register. “Have a nice day,” Richard says, as he rings her up. She growls, then says, “You, too.” I punch back in at the computer. Angela puts a hand on my shoulder. “Thanks,” she says.
“Yup,” I say, and then I go back to my section.
The dramatic, action-filled highs of “Friday Black” bring a lot of excitement, shock, and laughter to this story of an exaggerated Black Friday morning.
What I think Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah does best in his story, though, comes in the contrast of that action. When he lets the chaos settle, he lets the reality underneath the drama come to life.
The minutes of the example above exist in the latter stages of Adjei-Brenyah’s short story. You have already seen his narrator, a clothing store employee, fight off hoards of shoppers. You know the bodies on the floor and the wreckage all around. And eventually you see the narrator come to grips with the madness and his role in it, which Adjei-Brenyah funnels all through this line:
I won’t be alone with this, she’s saying. They’ll like me now.
The rabid customer, paused in this allegory, shines the truth about her situation. In all the other moments, she was thrashing. In this moment, she admits why she’s shopping.
Her shopping experience explains the madness by giving a core reason for its being. What she’s really saying in her gaze toward the jacket is that the shoppers want these goods because they feel pressure to belong to a group. Her actions, in a depraved way, lend to the idea that people should be more accepting and less attached to material things, and moreover, if society was structured in a way where brutality wasn’t an accepted part of the shopping experience, we wouldn’t see it on display.
As it relates to the narrator, her shopping etiquette speaks about his participation in that allowance. She brings him into the fold of the madness by saying that, since he allowed the madness, he is complicit.
I love where Adjei-Brenyah places this moment. He sandwiches it between immediate actions of fury and humanity. On top, the woman attacks an employee. On bottom, the woman manages a “thank you.”
In the middle, Adjei-Brenyah shows what exists between the two worlds of selfishness and togetherness. It’s a scary thing that this woman reveals, and it’s something we can all relate to.