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Summary and Reviews of Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs

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First Published:
Aug 16, 2022, 224 pages
Aug 2023, 224 pages

Short Stories
Mid-Atlantic, USA
New York State
Contemporary
Parenting & Families
Coming of Age
Dealing with Loss
Adult-YA Crossover Fiction
Black Authors
Strong Women
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Book Summary

Set in a Harlem high rise, a stunning debut about a tight-knit cast of characters grappling with their own personal challenges while the forces of gentrification threaten to upend life as they know it.

Like Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place and Lin Manuel Miranda's In the Heights , Sidik Fofana's electrifying collection of eight interconnected stories showcases the strengths, struggles, and hopes of one residential community in a powerful storytelling experience. Each short story follows a tenant in the Banneker Homes, a low-income high rise in Harlem where gentrification weighs on everyone's mind. There is Swan in apartment 6B, whose excitement about his friend's release from prison jeopardizes the life he's been trying to lead. Mimi, in apartment 14D, who hustles to raise the child she had with Swan, waitressing at Roscoe's and doing hair on the side. And Quanneisha B. Miles, a former gymnast with a good education who wishes she could leave Banneker for good, but can't seem to escape the building's gravitational pull. We root for these characters and more as they weave in and out of each other's lives, endeavoring to escape from their pasts and blaze new paths forward for themselves and the people they love. Stories from the Tenants Downstairs brilliantly captures the joy and pain of the human experience and heralds the arrival of a uniquely talented writer.

An excerpt is available at electricliterature.com .

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

In "Rent Manual," Mimi keeps a running tally of her finances as she goes from gig to gig to make rent. Why might the author have chosen to begin the collection with Mimi's story? What are some themes that are introduced here, that will recur throughout the book?
Consider the sequence at the end of "Rent Manual," when Mimi and Fortune go to the grocery store across town to buy diapers. During this scene, Mimi recalls a time when her mother was made to feel out of place at a similar grocery store. How (if at all) do you think this memory influenced the decision she makes at the very end of the chapter? Based on what you've read, how do you understand Mimi's relationship with her mother?
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Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

Though the lives of these tenants are filled with difficulties — unemployment, dead or absent parents, three people living in a one-bedroom apartment, no tangible prospects for the future — they are not miserable. Their optimism and sheer joy shine through in their picaresque antics. Lively language; feisty characters that might remind you of your own relatives, former classmates, or neighbors; sharp, varied plots; and timely themes: this was a pure pleasure to read. It's a stellar debut from a very talented writer. Fofana should win all the prizes... continued

(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster ).

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Beyond the Book

Rent control in new york city.

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book review stories from the tenants downstairs

The Shortlist

Family, Home and Heartbreak in Three Debuts

Three new books — “Calling for a Blanket Dance,” “Stories From the Tenants Downstairs” and “Sirens & Muses” — explore intimate worlds and communities, as seen through a multitude of perspectives.

Credit... John Gall

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By Joseph Cassara

Aug. 16, 2022

When Ever is only 6 months old, a group of police officers beat his father for refusing to pay a bribe, leaving him with permanent kidney damage. This is how Oscar Hokeah’s devastating debut, CALLING FOR A BLANKET DANCE (258 pp., Algonquin, $27) , begins. The book showcases five decades of Ever’s life, presented from 12 different vantage points, ranging from Ever’s grandmother to his adopted son. The result is a kaleidoscopic bildungsroman set against the backdrop of rural Oklahoma.

Though officially billed as a novel, the narrative structure feels reminiscent of books that blur the line between novel and story collection, like “Olive Kitteridge” and “A Visit From the Goon Squad.”

Hokeah’s characters are drawn with such precision and pathos one can forgive some narrators’ meandering (and at times, repetitive) loquacity. There’s the Army vet with a Purple Heart, recently diagnosed with cirrhosis in its final stage, trying to get sober so he can teach his grandsons a traditional Kiowa dance; the young men who wait for their per capita checks so they can waste it all on liquor and crank; the woman who is four months pregnant by an absent man named Tank and who eventually gives birth to a premature baby with no lungs.

At the heart of “Calling for a Blanket Dance” is a profound reflection on the intergenerational nature of cultural trauma. Hokeah’s characters exist at the intersection of Kiowa, Cherokee and Mexican identity, which provides a vital exploration of indigeneity in contemporary American letters.

What is most skillful throughout is how Hokeah draws readers to Ever, even when Ever is only seen from the periphery. In one harrowing scene, for instance, Ever’s sister stumbles upon his fiancée, Lonnie, shooting meth in a bedroom with a man after a party while Ever is away at a military boot camp. Though Ever is not present, we anticipate his heartbreak. When he finds out about Lonnie’s betrayal, he refuses to believe it. “He stormed out of our mother’s house and found Lonnie Nowater,” his sister says. “Then he lived with her long enough to discover the truth for himself.”

In “Calling for a Blanket Dance,” Hokeah shows readers that there are many ways to examine pain, and that sometimes, it’s the indirect view that’s the most agonizing.

If you were to ask Quanneisha B. Miles of Apartment 21J — one of the many tenants in Sidik Fofana’s outstanding story collection STORIES FROM THE TENANTS DOWNSTAIRS (211 pp., Scribner, $26) — about her dream job, she’d say she wanted to work for a magazine, “but every magazine from Fifth to Eighth Avenue treated my résumé like it was invisible.” The brilliance of this debut, however, is that Fofana doesn’t let anyone go unseen.

“Stories From the Tenants Downstairs” takes place at Banneker Terrace, a fictional apartment in Harlem. Over the course of the eight stories in the collection, Fofana renders the struggles and rich inner lives of the building’s tenants after Banneker is sold to a corporate real estate company that is more interested in hiking rents, evicting tenants and, ultimately, turning a profit.

“Stories From the Tenants Downstairs” masterfully paints a portrait of the people most impacted by gentrification. People like Mimi in 14D, who gets involved in a scheme that combines extreme couponing and diapers sold on the black market; Darius in 12H, who turns to hustling when hairstyling work runs dry; and many others. This is an exploration where even the drug addicts playing hand-clapping games on the 25th floor are drawn with humanity.

Fofana brings his characters to life through their idiosyncratic speech patterns. Auxiliary verbs are dropped, words are misspelled, prepositions are jostled, all to create a sense of vernacular authenticity. “You was clickety-clackin up past the 99-cent bins by the Israelites with aluminum foil on they heads who always screamin out that God is Black,” says Mimi of 14D. Grammar is an instrument that Fofana plays by ear, to much success.

The strongest story is also the collection’s longest. “Ms. Dallas” focuses on Verona Dallas of 6B, a paraprofessional in a middle school who works alongside a new teacher who has a savior complex. Verona sees right through him, demonstrating that it is not necessarily the well-intentioned, condescending white liberal who knows what’s best for the community, but rather, the people who call the community home.

The characters in Antonia Angress’s debut novel, SIRENS & MUSES (354 pp., Ballantine, $28) , wake up each day and choose chaos. Structurally, the novel is bifurcated into two sections: The first takes place at an art school called Wrynn (a fictionalized Rhode Island School of Design, perhaps); the second takes place in the New York art world.

The chapters toggle between three students and their visiting assistant professor. There’s Louisa, an art student who hails from Louisiana. She does not come from money, and her ability to afford tuition is of paramount concern. Her roommate, Karina, is the precise archetype one might come to expect in a novel about young artists — she is talented, beautiful, the daughter of wealthy art collectors, recovering from a nervous breakdown. They smoke cigarettes together. There is erotic tension. Now add a man to the triangle: Preston, the bloviating anticapitalist trust-fund art-bro blogger. The result is a tumultuous queer love triangle.

The novel is juggling a lot of questions about what it means to be an artist, the various ways one can or cannot approach the business side of art, and whether or not the undertaking is worth it. In a sense, the novel is deceptively not about art, but rather, about money, power, legacy and the ways that we commodify everything (even likes and blog views) in this late stage of capitalism that we find ourselves in. Though the characters, at times, feel taken from central casting, Angress’s strength is her ability to create an engrossing plot, allowing readers to watch as her messy characters navigate their way to the finish line.

There is a moment toward the beginning of the novel where some students at Wrynn are having a party, painting along to Bob Ross on YouTube. It is meant as a half-joke, a kind of posturing. “Look what we have,” Bob Ross says. “Look around. Beauty is everywhere.” Set against the backdrop of an art world where the lines between intention, irony and performance are blurred, this line stands out — from Bob Ross, of all people — reminding artists to remember that beauty surrounds us everywhere. Because in “Sirens & Muses,” beauty is for lovers; everything else is about power and money.

Joseph Cassara is the author of “The House of Impossible Beauties” and the George and Judy Marcus chair of creative writing at San Francisco State University.

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“Stories from the Tenants Downstairs”: The Raw Humanity of Real-Life Stories

T he soul of a community is nearly impossible to capture in a handful of moments from the lives of its members. Yet Stories from the Tenants Downstairs , Sidik Fofana’s debut story collection set in an apartment building in Harlem, rises to that very challenge, offering a hold-no-punches glimpse into a place that, despite its marginalization, thrives on its own terms.

Fofana’s eight linked stories overflow with raw humanity. The residents of Banneker Terrace live on the edge, most struggling to make the monthly rent, further threatened by a recent wave of gentrification that encourages evictions to make room for wealthier tenants. The system shows little leniency for those who’ve lived there most of their lives and call Banneker home. Yet they never seem to lose hope or their sense of pride.

The characters in these stories are vibrantly portrayed in their struggles to survive. For Mimi, a self-employed hairdresser and part-time server at a soul food joint, time is a “countdown” until the day the rent is due (“days left: 4 … money you got: $150 … money you need: $240”). Except for an unprofitable rent party, she does not ask anyone for help. She is determined to scrape together enough money for one month’s rent, knowing she’s already five months behind and on the verge of eviction. Swan, the father of Mimi’s son Fortune, knows it’s time to grow up and help his mother and son, yet the only job he can find is working at a chicken restaurant downtown, where he is expected to wear a bird suit. Swan’s mother, Verona, a paraprofessional at the local middle school, is demoralized after she is assigned to a seventh-grade classroom with a Harvard-educated newbie schoolteacher who knows little about how to reach the students and even less about empathy. The administration’s ineptitude put the school at risk of closure and threaten Verona’s livelihood. Kandese, an orphaned teenager living in a homeless shelter, is sent to live in a small town where she establishes a profitable business reselling stolen candy.

Shattered dreams have often disrupted the lives of these characters. Dary, a gay man, imagines becoming the personal stylist of a celebrity he idolizes but, unable to find steady work, is forced into sex work to make ends meet. Najee, Verona’s charge at the middle school, constantly bullied by other students and put down by his teachers, finds joy riding the subway trains and dancing for money until a tragic accident happens. Neisha, who aspired to attend college and become a professional gymnast until she was injured in a fight, finds herself back at Banneker working for the tenants association. She is called upon to help the young woman who caused her injury avoid a pending eviction.

The conflicts faced by the residents of Banneker aren’t solely with the outside world. The older women who run the tenants association behave like the village elders, revered for their defiance of the efforts to evict powerless tenants. Yet not everyone is on board with their fiery activism. Younger residents like Mimi slam them as righteous busybodies, a “gang with they nasty purple toenails and they earrings shaped like Africa and they wrinkled skin smellin like black soap.” Mr. Murray, an older tenant who is arrested for loitering in front of a nearby restaurant, becomes the unwilling symbol of a movement targeting the gentrification of the neighborhood when he simply wants to be left alone.

At the root of Fofana’s robust characterization is his use of language. He allows his characters to speak in their own voices, to be brutally frank and introspective, even call themselves on their own bullshit as much as they condemn the wrongdoing of others. In one of the most touching stories in the collection, Najee, barely literate, writes in the only language he knows – chains of uncapitalized names, misspelled words, and broken sentences, vividly conveying his struggle not just with learning but also with simply being understood as a human being. By using unfiltered expression, Fofana makes the reader struggle along with Najee and feel his frustration.

In imaginative ways, Fofana blends the themes of activism and empowerment, the dehumanization of being judged, the threat of gentrification, and sorrow over broken dreams. The residents of Banneker Terrace are poor but not so destitute that they can’t survive. They are righteously bitter over their mistreatment, but it does not define them. They have regrets, but they have hope, too. There are even moments of humor, including a hilariously elaborate plot launched by Swan and his associates to swindle a local restaurant out of a meal of Chinese food to celebrate the return of their friend Boons, who was just released from prison.

The physical setting is close and connected. There is no private space. The characters constantly move upstairs and downstairs, mirroring the highs and lows of their lives. The building’s four elevators have “minds of their own,” unpredictable and erratic, reflecting how the residents of Banneker can depend on no one but each other.

Fofana’s collection will be compared with Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place for its apartment building setting, fragile sense of community, and novel-in-stories vibe. Yet it also captures some of the richness of Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears in its indictment of gentrification and its impact on the lives of people already struggling. It is a masterful work, worthy of relishing in a single sitting, yet containing individual stories that the reader will want to revisit and revel in for just a while longer.

FICTION Stories from the Tenants Downstairs By Sidik Fofana Scribner Book Company Published August 16, 2022

Posted by: Don J Rath

Don J. Rath holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. A retired finance executive, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes short fiction and creative nonfiction, focusing on themes of identity, race, family, and LGBTQ+ experience. His work has been published in Musepaper (New Millennium Writings), Hypnopomp, Scribes*MICRO*Fiction, Blood and Bourbon, Twelve Winters Journal, Fiery Scribe Review, and Roi Faineant. He is a frequent contributor to The Southern Review of Books.