Two kinds of fool: "The Entertainer" by Whitney Collins

America has a long racial history of wanting minority groups to entertain the majority. The cliche, which remained prevalent in acceptable American discourse up to the mid-20th century, of the black minstrel is an example of this. According to the cliche, black people are intrinsically good-natured, happy, and ready to sing and dance, which white people encouraged them to do for the enjoyment of white people. Given this long history, I assumed, at the beginning of "The Entertainer" by Whitney Collins, that the protagonist was a person of color being asked to entertain a rich white family:

"Mrs. Billingsley asks Rachel's mother, not Rachel, if Rachel would like to accompany them to the beach for two weeks. 'There's no television, no A/C. It's almost embarrassingly primitive, but Rachel is just so entertaining. Such a delight. I know she'd make my girls happy.'"

But this is different kind of minstrelsy being forced on Rachel here, one based in class, rather than race. Rachel has come into contact with wildly rich teens Devlin and Davenport Billingsley at a tennis camp--a camp Rachel's mother had to pay for with a credit card--and apparently, Rachel did something there to catch their interest, or at least the interest of their mother. We don't learn exactly what it is she did, but it's clear the two rich girls enjoy experiencing Rachel's "normal" life vicariously. Rachel, who did not want to go but was forced into it, understands her role as a "jester to the elite," someone who can "introduce the joyless to the concept of joy--if not in a way they can experience, at least in a way they can witness." 

The jester, or fool, can work in two ways. The fool can be the butt of jokes, but the fool can also "punch up," as we say nowadays, speaking truth to power through humor in order to get away with saying what needs to be said. The fool can have an important social role by subverting the social order and questioning power structures. 

Rachel doesn't seem to have much power over whether she is going to be a jester, but she might have the ability to control what kind of jester she becomes. Will she be the object of jokes or will she be the one doling out the punishment?

It turns out Rachel's not the only joker in her family. Her father left in order to follow his dream of being a comedian. He seems to be largely unsuccessful at it, working on catch phrases in front of small audiences, some of whom heckle him to "give it up, man." But her father has stuck to it, believing "he deserved--his word--applause." Her father, then, aims to be the kind of jester who punches back, but usually ends up as the punching bag. 

We only see the first day of Rachel's trip with the Billingsleys. They fly by private jet to a private Caribbean island. The Billingsley girls are terrrible--think Kardashian or Hilton-level of decadent and wasted. 

"Devlin and Davenport lean across the narrow aisle to punch one another in the upper arms for a time, back and forth like papier-mahce marionettes, until their arms are red and welted from shoulder to elbow. It's as if both have been grabbed and shaken by a middle-aged lover who's discovered he's been jilted for a pool boy.

'Trucey-trucey?" Devlin asks.

"Vodka juicy," Davenport answers.

Rachel isn't sure how she is going to fulfill her role as designated entertainer for the girls, but her first success leans in the direction of being made fun of rather than making fun of others. She eats while the girls, who are starving all the time so they can one day marry rich men, practically achieve orgasm watching her. After polishing off a huge lunch, Rachel takes three bows as the girls watch.

It looks like it's going to continue like that, with the girls playing a game where they try to say things poor people would say, and Rachel judges whether the things they say are accurate, eating Skittles for their entertainment if they get it right. Then the girls ask what Rachel's father does, a question she dodges by saying he's an entertainer. The girls say that their own father also likes to entertain, throwing parties with magicians or piano players. Once, he brought an owl. Davenport remembers being stunned that the thing was so beautiful. 

The girls then pass out, drunk and high, but Rachel can't stop thinking about the owl. Did it get startled and start to fly around the room? This is the moment of Rachel's transformation. (Karen Carlson looks at this transformation in terms of intrinsic and instrumental values here.) She doesn't want to be like the owl, giving the rich their money's worth while she gets her feathers petted. The denouement has Rachel speaking to Mrs. Billingsley, who is getting hammered in Rachel's bed and trying to tell Rachel to do whatever it takes to marry well. Mrs. Billingsley also asks Rachel to teach her girls something--anything--useful. Rachel, now just annoyed and seeing through the ruined rich for who they are, says she can, then imagines the surf sounds like applause. It seems to me at this point that she's imagining herself one day eviscerating people like the Billingsleys and being applauded for it, turning herself from object of joke to the one dishing it out to those currently laughing at her. Even though it's not a first-person story, one could potentially read the narrative as her origin story of how she came to be the Robin Hood of derision, stealing esteem from the rich to give to the poor. 

A few quibbles

It's a tight story, well-conceived and well-plotted out. The main theme, which asks the reader to answer the question of what kind of jokes you're going to tell to those with everything, is good stuff. There were a few small issues I had with the structure, which I point out more as an example of how hard it is to write a perfect story than I do to suggest the story isn't solid. 

First, the story is cut up into sections separated by line breaks. There's nothing unusual about that, but two of the first three sections have an omniscient POV, navigating between Rachel's mind and her mother's mind. After that, it's all third-person limited from Rachel's POV. Given that we don't keep coming back to Rachel's mother and she's not a character who undergoes any change in the story, it feels a little like cheating to jump inside her head at the beginning in order to flesh out Rachel's world a bit more, only to abandon the mother once she's no longer needed. 

Secondly, Rachel notes at one point that the Caribbean "sounds different from other oceans." If Rachel is, in fact, from a family struggling a bit, so much that tennis lessons set them back, I wonder how many oceans she could have been to and how often in order to be able to compare the Caribbean to them. 

Last, while I understand the principle of punching up, and the Billingsleys, as the worst form of America's debauched rich, deserve it, the story seems to rest a little too easily in the notion that rich people turn out to be morally reprehensible. My own experience is that while it would be nice to think the rich are always repugnant, the fact is that rich people often turn out to be really wonderful people. When you have the luxury of not worrying about how you're going to make ends meet, you have time and space to develop things like empathy. It's us who scrap for everything with each other who have a hard time being magnanimous sometimes. Rich people aren't the ones who are astounded owls even live somewhere other than a forest in Germany. They're the ones using their wealth to save the owls, because they went on some amazing vacation as kids and have never forgotten their encounter with the owls there. 

Those are minor things, though, and don't take away from my admiration for how the story said so much with so little space.