Coffee Will Make You Black

Coffee Will Make You Black is a 1994 fiction novel by April Sinclair. A bildungsroman, or coming of age story, it follows a young black woman named Jean “Stevie” Stevenson who grows up in the Southside of Chicago through the Black Power and Civil Rights movements. Composed as a series of episodes, it concentrates intimately on how Stevie registers contemporary historical moments, and how these moments progressively cause her to reconceive what it means to be a black girl in the United States. The novel takes its title from one of a number widely used racist expressions at the time: “Coffee will make you black.” Filled with Stevie’s incisive and funny observations of racism, human rights protests, and her country’s larger sociopolitical tumult, the novel maps out how she negotiates this complex external world with her own evolving sense of self and a nation that both nurtures and fails her.

The novel begins early in Stevie’s childhood. As soon as she becomes old enough to watch television, she perceives that it is rare to see black people represented in the media. She catches onto popular demeaning and objectifying phrases about black people that cause her to question her difference from white people. Such phrases include the novel’s eponymous “Coffee will make you black,” and “I don’t want nothing black but a Cadillac,” two sentiments that commodify black identity, cheapening the value of black people’s experience. As time progresses, she begins to view these elements not as isolated incidents, but rather symptoms of a racist American culture that predates her short life.



Stevie’s experience in school begins in a state of confusion. She frequently succumbs to peer pressure, backing into scenarios where she unfailingly finds value through humor. She is also perceptive about how people respond to racial signals at school. One day, she sees black girls comparing the skin tone of their arms, noticing that they always praise those with the lightest skin, critiquing the friends who have the darkest skin. The episodes frequently stand in juxtaposition: for example, in one scene, Stevie rejects her mother’s concept of black womanhood, arguing that they should be able to express, not hide, their inherent beauty. In the adjacent episode, Martin Luther King’s assassination incites fights at her high school.

Stevie also negotiates a complex sexual life as she grows older. In a humorous vignette, realizing that she is more attracted to a female, white school nurse than her black boyfriend, she questions how people are unthinkingly drawn to models and ideals that regulate their perceptions of beauty. She eventually concludes that she might be gay, though, as with other topics involving identity, makes no absolute claim. She also dawns on the understanding that a society that is outside her control makes her relations with white and black people fundamentally different. Yet, another impasse exists between men and women, and Stevie negotiates the problem of learning how to be a feminist despite the negative and dysfunctional female models that surround her.

By the end of Coffee Will Make You Black, Stevie has completed adolescence, and looks forward to an uncertain future, knowing her identity and resilience will carry her along. The novel is a stark contrast to classical coming of age stories, in which the protagonist’s development as an individual is contingent on her passage through institutions in which she learns to internalize social norms. Sinclair’s novel is about the opposite: how a society that rejects its protagonist, offering no models that match who she wants to become, can be treated with respect but ultimately conquered.