There is a moment in Bystander – the sixth story in Witness, Jamel Brinkley’s second collection – when a family pauses in the middle of a heated argument to listen to the tune played by their rice cooker. The daughter, Dandy, has told her social media followers that she wished she had the means to have the president assassinated; her mother, Anita, who scrutinises Dandy’s habits of eating, speech, and dress obsessively while failing to conceal the fact that she is doing so, is desperate to impress on her daughter that “her dual burdens, being Black and female, meant she had to be more careful and intelligent than any other sort of person”; while Anita’s husband, Horace, tries to be more droll and serene in his panic as he doles out “sweeping fatherly wisdom”. “Before Dandy could protest, the rice cooker beeped out a tinny version of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Everyone listened quietly, almost respectfully; for some reason the device’s little tune was sacrosanct.”
Witness is an extraordinary gathering of stories that confirms Brinkley’s place among the most moving, compelling and virtuosic practitioners of the short form. The holy pause occasioned by this appliance’s tinny tune captures something precise and intimate about what a family can share even in the midst of the complex generational disputes that are one of Brinkley’s recurrent preoccupations. The space hollowed out by the beeping nursery rhyme, around which the three characters fall silent for a spell, becomes a version, a tiny exemplification, of what Brinkley’s stories manage to achieve. Like all the finest exponents of the short form, from Isaac Babel to Alice Munro, the scope and scale of the works collected in Witness is a central feature of their achievement: each is a brief and localised gathering akin to the trio suspended around the rice cooker, an experiment in the lives that can be held together – both the characters’ and the reader’s – by the tune of Brinkley’s words.
