Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

At a primarily African American Girl Scout camp, Camp Crescendo, a group of black Brownies decides to beat up the all-white Troop 909. Laurel, the story’s narrator, explains, “Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp” (1). The girls watch the white Brownies as they arrive, and Arnetta, the most outspoken of the group, makes everyone laugh by joking that the white girls smell like wet Chihuahuas. Their troop leader, Mrs. Margolin, ignores Arnetta’s misbehaving because Arnetta is the best student in Mrs. Margolin’s Bible-centered teaching of the girls. Mrs. Hedy, the mother of Octavia, another girl in the troop, scolds them vaguely. Laurel notes that at the girls’ school, it was a common pastime to adopt long and exotic-sounding words into use as slang, and the students had been using the word Caucasian as a popular insult.

The troop is from the southern suburbs of Atlanta, and they rarely see white people in their everyday lives. On the second day of camp, Arnetta tells the girls that “she’d heard one of the Troop 909 girls call Daphne a nigger” (5). Daphne is a quiet, thoughtful girl who once won a journal in a contest for Langston Hughes Day for a poem she wrote.