Brownies By ZZ Packer

I thoroughly enjoyed this short story, due primarily to ZZ Packer’s relentless use of detailed character description in her text. The story holds an interesting conflict between two very different Brownie troops. The conflict is successful for Packer paints the two troops as polar opposites.

She opens her story with, “By the end of our first day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions like a bland of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney Characters.” Soon thereafter, she describes the image of the other Brownie troop’s adult leader. “Mrs. Margolin even looked like a mother duck—she had hair cropped close to a small ball of a head, almost no neck, and huge, miraculous breasts. She wore enormous belts that looked like the kind weight lifters wear, except hers were cheap metallic gold or rabbit fur or covered in gigantic fake sunflowers.”

I love the contrasting characteristics between the two troops. Where troop 909 consists of prim young white girls concerned with Disney Princess, Packer explains the other as being led by a large, immensely-tacky supervisor, naturally providing the foundation for conflict. Packer’s story is intriguing, for it features stereotyping and the not-so-hidden tension still existent between whites and blacks. This is further brought to light in one of the final moments in the story when ‘Snot’ explains a time when, out of religious motivation, white people once painted her porch.

Packer writes, “Daphne asked quietly, ‘Did he thank them?’ I looked out the window. I could not tell which were the thoughts and which were the trees. ‘No,’ I said, and suddenly knew there was something mean in the world that I could not stop.” This moment solidifies the tension between the two opposing sides. It’s a rich way to end the story.