If I Survive You

This story, told in the second person (addressing the reader as “you”), is an account of the narrator Trelawny’s childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. He details the difficulty of being a first-generation Jamaican American in the Miami suburb of Cutler Ridge (now called Cutler Bay). Having been born in the United States makes the narrator too American to truly feel at home among his Jamaican family members, but because of his Jamaican heritage, he still seems foreign to his classmates. He recalls the shame he felt when his father visited his classroom to talk about his profession on career day. His father’s thick accent rendered his speech nearly unintelligible to his classmates. Although those speech patterns are familiar to Trelawny, the very fact that he can understand a Jamaican accent makes him feel somehow less American. And yet, his own speaking voice lacks the vocabulary and cadence of his parents, a difference that makes him feel separate from his family.

The narrator recalls coming into contact with multiple, conflicting understandings of race as an adolescent: Jamaicans and Americans see race differently, and his classmates are eager to know if he is Black.