Coffee Will Make you Black

Locations
Call Number: Fiction
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction	4-week checkout	On Shelf

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Coming of age submitted by redwood on July 24, 2023, 1:04pm I enjoyed this book more and more as I kept reading it. Published in the 90s and set in the late 60s (from 1965 to 1969), this young adult novel shows Jean “Stevie” Stevenson’s coming-of-age in Chicago amidst a time of political upheaval. It begins with Stevie not knowing what “virgin” means and ends with her questioning her sexual identity through her friendship with the white school nurse. Stevie’s narration is straightforward and sarcastic at the same time, and it drew me in more and more.

Some of the story feels similar to the white coming-of-age stories from a similar time that I read growing up—Stevie tries to like boys and have a boyfriend, especially at the urging of her best friend Carla, gets her period for the first time, and so on. But there’s a lot more going on here—a lot of Stevie’s challenges with her friends and family relate to the growing Black Power movement and changes in Black life and politics. Stevie’s mother is very much in favor of respectability—she forbids Stevie to wear her hair in an Afro; encourages her to befriend more elite Black girls instead of Carla, whose sisters are unmarried mothers; and can’t believe people are saying “Black is beautiful.” On the other hand, Stevie’s grandma says, “Lord have mercy! I never thought I would live to see the day when ‘black’ would be called beautiful! It makes me damn proud!” Issues of class and colorism shape Stevie’s life and relationships.

At her high school, Stevie occasionally joins with the Afro-American club, even if some of her stances aren’t as radical as theirs (she does believe it’s possible to befriend a white person, and wants to retain her friend Nurse Horn instead of hiring a Black nurse). These tensions are never melodramatic, and never more explosive than a simple fight between Stevie and her mother—Stevie’s reckoning with different models of Blackness is simply a part of her growing up, same as her period.