Sag Harbor

The dominant focus of these chapters is the setting of Sag Harbor during the 1980s. The narrator, Benji Cooper, juxtaposes Sag Harbor with New York City, where he lives during the school year. While he enjoys a cosmopolitan middle-class lifestyle in Manhattan, his private school is mainly white, and it’s clear he is often the only Black kid in some of his social circles. Benji doesn’t seem bothered by racism, as he enjoys hanging out with his white classmates, but it is an underlying tension.

In Sag Harbor, all of his friends and neighbors are Black, and he enjoys the sense of belonging and tradition: “We fit in there” (7). Azurest, a subdivision of Sag Harbor where the Coopers spend the summer, is a historically Black town. Founded in the 1940s, Azurest began as a parcel of land that was subdivided into lots by Maude Terry, a Brooklyn school teacher who vacationed there and had the idea that the land would be perfect for middle-class Black Americans who were prohibited, due to Jim Crow segregation, from going to the other nearby ocean beaches like Bridgehampton or Southampton. By the summer of 1985, generations of African Americans have enjoyed their annual return to Sag Harbor. Benji’s mother has been coming for 40 years, ever since her father built the family beach house. It is a familiar, nostalgic tradition that the whole family looks forward to.

The setting also sets up a central irony of the novel: “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses” (71). While Benji has had a privileged upbringing, attending prep schools during the school year, and hanging out at his beach house during the summer, he is well aware that the world sees his situation as unusual. A white man in Manhattan sees the well-dressed, well-poised brothers and assumes they are the sons of diplomats. Middle-class Black people do not fit the narrative of newspaper headlines that focus on the violent troubles experienced by some inner-city Black Americans: “CRISIS IN THE INNER CITY!, WHITHER ALL THE BABY DADDIES, THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WELFARE STATE” (72). Benji realizes that, dressed in his Brooks Brothers outfits and with preppy tastes, he is under society’s baffled gaze (78). He and his friends must carefully navigate acceptable behavior for middle-class Black residents as they try to fit into both Black culture and bourgeois culture. Once Benji arrives in Sag Harbor, he can relax because no one there considers him to be a paradox. Still, the boys must negotiate their tastes carefully, as seen in the argument over appropriate Black and white music.

Benji is aware of the trajectory of other middle-class Black people who become militant in college as they immerse themselves in Black Studies. He notes the hypocrisy inherent in many of these transformations. For example, he satirizes Bobby, who likes to complain about how his parents have succumbed to white culture while at the same time continuing to take advantage of their wealth and privilege, refusing to give up that comfort. Bobby says, “My mom wouldn’t give me twenty dollars for the weekend. She’s sucking the white man’s dick all day, Morgan Stanley cracker, and can’t give me twenty dollars!” (73). Bobby crudely insults his mother for working for a stereotypically white company, yet he is outraged when she doesn’t give him the money she makes from her mainstream career.

While friends like Bobby have a fierce, though perhaps misguided, sense of racial identity, Benji’s consciousness is more permeable. He has a strong desire to take in information about the world and try to classify it to make it understandable, but often the world ends up disorienting to Benji. When he goes into the ocean, he panics when he can’t touch the bottom, worried that he will be cast adrift by an undertow. That sense of being pulled inexorably without control drives much of his anxiety about the world. At the same time, Sag Harbor provides a safe harbor, allowing him the opportunity to fit in and feel connected.