Eight linked stories follow the residents of Banneker Terrace, a low-income high-rise in Harlem, as rent comes due and gentrification presses in from every side. Each story is told in the first-person voice of its central tenant, so neighbours recur first as protagonists and then as figures glimpsed in someone else's account: Mimi in 14D scrambling to make rent while raising her son and doing hair on the side; Swan in 6B unsettled by a friend's release from prison; Dary in 12H doing sex work while holding to hopes for a different future; Quanneisha, a former gymnast who cannot quite leave the building; and elderly Mr. Murray in 2E, whose sidewalk chess games mark a Harlem that is disappearing. Fofana, a New York City public-school teacher, renders the narration in vivid Black English vernacular, moving between comedy, profanity, tenderness and violence without flattening any character into a case study. The collection's force lies in accumulation: no single story carries the whole building, but together they build a portrait of a community negotiating eviction, work, family and loyalty, and insisting on its own interior life.
Author: Sidik Fofana ยท Original publisher: Scribner (New York), 2022
