Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans

Black people don’t burn.” Erica the narrator reassures us in that Michael is lighter than Jasmine, and that she is lighter than Michael, but that really all three of them burn in the sun. That’s them white girls you’ve been hanging out with, got you wearing sunscreen. Evans doesn’t come out and say this instead she leaves room for the readers to figure it out, which doesn’t take long if the character is younger, around teen aged. For instance, in “Virgins,” when Erica, Michael, and Jasmine are at the pool, Jasmine is quick to harass Michael for wearing sunblock: “Sunscreen…is some white-people shit.

The characters in Suffocate are, more often than not, black.

You might be wondering why I pointed out the grandmother is white. The characters often find themselves in some sort of trouble, but never the same kind of trouble, whether it’s being honest about being a virgin pretending/wanting to handle grown-up relations, like Erica in the story “Virgins,” or Tara nearly dying the summer she lives with her white grandmother and her cousin in “Snakes.” Looking at Evans’s stories, I can surmise why she chose this quote and title. “Before you suffocate your own fool self” is a quote from Donna Kate Rushin’s “The Bridge Poem.” The poem suggests a speaker who must remind someone to not be foolish, to take a deep breath and not let the worst version kill the best versions of him/herself. When I heard the title of her book, I knew I had to read her writing. I first saw Evans at an AWP conference a few years ago and loved the way she spoke.

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans