One of the many problems with our increasingly tribal world is that life can be especially difficult for those people whom no tribe is willing to admit. Trelawny, the central character in Jonathan Escoffery’s debut novel, If I Survive You, is the Miami-born son of Jamaican parents who migrated to America in the 1970s, and a young man engaged in what seems like a fruitless search for an identity.
Trelawny, whose story is told in a second-person narrative voice (often something to make the heart sink, but handled here with comic skill), has a tangled heritage, described by his mother as “a little of this and a little of that”. Relatively light-skinned, he’s often berated for responding to a greeting in Spanish with a blank look. At school in the 1990s, the Puerto Rican children take him under their wing, until they discover the truth about his heritage.
Meanwhile, “the few decidedly Black kids in school find [him] befuddling.” Trelawny is precociously articulate, and if there’s a tribe to which his manner of speaking suggests he belongs, it’s the one by whom he could never be accepted. “The boys… make fun of the way you speak, calling it White. You, of course, deny any connection to Whiteness. You swear allegiance to Blackness.”
There’s a touch of Adrian Mole in how Harding depicts Trelawny’s efforts to fit in with the black boys: “You ape the way they walk and talk. Specifically, you begin to drag your feet and limp, then bop, and limp, then bop, then limp when you walk home from school. Your new walk has less the effect of helping you blend and instead makes you stand out as having special needs, but no one gains cred beating on a disabled kid, so you keep it bopping.”
Effecting a radical change in the way he talks, Trelawny then finds his teachers accusing him of plagiarism in his essays: “You might talk and dress Black, but you still write White… Your blaccent, you realise, might get you kicked out of school.” It sounds like one of the exaggeratedly farcical happenings you might find in Percival Everett’s novels, but Escoffery, who shares much of Trelawny’s backstory, presents to us a world in which a refusal to believe Black people can be intelligent is so widespread that one is inclined to believe this was based on a real incident.
