MIAMI — Writer Jonathan Escoffery left Miami 11 years ago, but the city, as it often does, lingers in his memory. Partly because he still has family in town. Partly because his feelings about growing up as the son of Jamaican immigrants in Cutler Ridge, now Cutler Bay, are complicated.
To Escoffery, Miami is a rich source of inspiration. But he also says that it’s the only place he has lived where people have told him: “I don’t really like Black people, but you seem OK.”
“I’ve lived in the South, in Boston, in Minneapolis, and I think Miami is the most anti-Black place I’ve ever lived,” says Escoffery, who is currently living in Oakland, California. “It’s not the only place where this kind of racism is going on, but in Miami there’s just this ease with which it’s communicated. I don’t know if that’s better or worse.”
Casual racism and cultural dislocation are only a few of the subjects Escoffery, 41, tackles with humor and an insider’s insight in “If I Survive You,” a novel-in-stories that was long listed for the 2022 National Book Award. Often comic, sometimes heartbreaking and once or twice downright horrifying, the book follows the members of a Jamaican-American family in and around Miami from the 1980s to the 2000s. Their lives are primarily seen through the eyes of the youngest son, Trelawny, who can never quite escape the question that shapes the book’s central theme: “What are you?”
Escoffery, who was born in Houston, says firmly that “If I Survive You” is not autobiographical. This is a work of fiction. But shaping the stories of Trelawny’s struggle to define his identity — is he Black? What is he? — are Escoffery’s experiences and observations, written with a sharp eye and engaging grace.
Escoffery’s Miami is not the usual glamorous waterfront playground for the wealthy. Miami Beach figures prominently in “Independent Living,” but the story is set in Section 8 housing, not a deluxe beachfront condo. The Florida Keys, glimpsed in the chilling story “Splashdown,” is a home for the working class — and for hustlers. Poverty is real, and good jobs hard to come by.
Throughout, South Florida blazes to life. Crabs scuttle across Old Cutler Road by the thousands. Mount Trashmore gleams and stinks in the subtropical sun. And Hurricane Andrew, the touchstone of the 1990s, ravages lives, especially for those who don’t have a lot to lose.
Escoffery, who graduated from G. Holmes Braddock High and went on to attend Florida International University, says Miami’s diversity is fertile ground for a writer.
“It’s a place that has so many different communities, largely immigrant communities,” he says. “I was constantly interested in how people maintained those cultures and how those cultures came together beautifully or collided. As a writer you’re always observing and always trying to figure out where the boundaries are, for your own identity and other people’s identities. ... You’re forced to learn about other cultures because of proximity. The way race operates in Miami is fascinating and a little bit unique.”
His memories of Hurricane Andrew will sound familiar to any local. His parents boarded up their home, then took their sons to stay with friends in Kendall.
“I had a huge comic book collection I decided to leave behind,” Escoffery says. “We were excited. We weren’t taking it that seriously as kids. It seemed like it was going to be some kind of sleepover party.” When a tree limb crashed through a window, everyone hunkered in a walk-in closet until the winds slowed. When he saw his mother crying the next day, he knew the situation was dire: “I look at it as the event that closed out my childhood.”
After Andrew, he had to move to Miramar in Broward, which he calls “a rough experience — I was someone who loved school until that point.” Though he knew he wanted to be a writer, he felt uncertain about his path after graduation. He started at FIU, dropped out, worked a series of jobs, got married.
At 24, separated from his wife, he returned to FIU — and found his way.
“Professors started putting better books in front of me,” he says. “A Harlem Renaissance class excavating lived experience and culture was what made me want to write about something I knew. I was reading Cuban-American writers talking about that experience and second-generation Americans talking about the culture they were coming out of, and I thought, ‘I would love to do something similar with Jamaican-American characters.’ ”
Novelist John Dufresne, a professor of English at FIU, had Escoffery in his class as an undergraduate (Escoffery went on to get his MFA in fiction at the University of Minnesota). He says Escoffery was always passionate about his work and “pretty remarkable from the get-go.”
“Miami is his muse,” he says. “He has sopped up everything from his and other cultures. It’s so important to hear a younger voice that represents the community. ... He’s fascinated with the danger just below the surface. His characters will seem to be OK, but then they’re not, like the guy who’s living in his car because his father threw him out. But Jonathan loves these characters. He doesn’t judge them.”
Escoffery, who returned to Miami in September for a packed reading at Books & Books, has wondered if he’s being too hard on Miami.
“Am I snitching?” he jokes. “It’s a city I love. I criticize it because I love it. We have to talk about these problems, though I don’t know if everybody will appreciate that I’m talking about them.”
Where he finds hope is where so many of us look for it: In the next generation.
“My optimism lies with the children of the people saying these things,” he says. “It’s been too easy to say that we’re a majority minority city and that prejudice is just culture. That’s incredibly racist. But the children of the people who hide behind that are educating themselves. I’m not saying racism is just going to go away. I just think there’s a wave of really aware people who are willing to say to their parents: ‘This is wrong.’”
