Behold as I "Say Anything" about "Jewel of the Gulf of Mexico" by Selena Gambrell Anderson (Best American Short Stories 2024)

"What I'm about to show you...might seem strange." -Uriah, from "Jewel of the Gulf of Mexico"

I never had a lot of anxiety about math in school. It's not that I was naturally great at it. I was okay. What made math low-stress for me was my secret weapon at home, which was my father. He had a B.S. in math, but it wasn't that he knew a lot about it that made it less stressful for me. It's that he had a very aw, shucks kind of calm simplicity to the way he thought about it, and he was able to communicate that approach to those who asked him questions. When you brought him a math question, he wouldn't immediately act like he knew the answer. He'd slowly talk his way through his reasoning process, not skipping steps, which allowed you to follow what he was doing. More than just following him, though, you would soon realize that math wasn't magic, and neither was he. It became apparent that he didn't just know how to do it. Even he had to think about it for a minute. It taught me that complex math was made up of simple steps, and even a good mathematician would walk through those steps. It also taught me that if you didn't panic, most problems could be broken down.  

I say all this because this story does kind of give me a lot of anxiety. I take it as a given that any good story has levels of meaning beyond the what-and-the-what-and-the-what of the plot, but with a story like this, even after a second reading, I only have glimpses of guesses as to what some of those levels might be. But maybe this is a good thing. I write these analytical posts for non-professional-literature people. If I'm having trouble with this story, I'd wager a lot of other people are, too. So rather than act like I have this all under control, I'm going to reason through this here, sharing not just my answers, but some of the process for how I get to those answers. 

1. Paraphrase

Cleanth Brooks coined the term "the heresy of paraphrase" to explain how he thought that form and content were so closely tied together, it was wrong to try to take the meaning away from the form by restating it in other words. I understand what he meant, but I also think it's a bit of a mystical approach to literature, one that treats texts like they'd too sacred to rip apart and get under the hood of. Paraphrase is helpful specifically because it removes meaning from form. Form is often a means to hide meaning, and stripping the two apart can help reveal what was hidden. Sure, once you've taken the two apart and formed some ideas about meaning, you need to put them back together to test out your theories, but it can still be enormously helpful to start with a simple summary. The dialogue and narrator commentary in "Jewel" is whip-smart and comes at you fast, but my starting point is going to be to make all of that dumb and slow.

Dumbed-down summary of "Jewel of the Gulf of Mexico"

The main character is the unnamed first-person narrator, but I get tired of writing "the narrator" in post after post. Some years, half the stories in BASS are unnamed narrators. The main character used to work at a jeweler's, so I'm calling him Jeweler Jim, or JJ. 

JJ is a young man, but no so young he doesn't already feel like he's late at figuring out his life. So far, he doesn't have much to show for anything he's done. He has negative 34 dollars in his bank account, he quit the only job with any promise to lead somewhere, and it seems like all the options out there involve selling out. He's kind of like the black Lloyd Dobler. 

He thought once that he was interested in jewelry, but more as an art form than a way to sell mass-produced pieces to clueless would-be husbands. That fell apart with a boss who was part paranoid about his employees stealing and part just didn't want to let JJ develop his skills. So JJ quit, but he hasn't found anything else to do since. To make matters worse, his extremely beautiful and spoiled rich long-term boo, Olivia, convinced him to knock her up as a way to shock his system into figuring his shit out. 

Other than the sell-out jeweler, the other example of the "success" that JJ is supposed to aspire to in the story is Uriah, Olivia's eccentric, rich, well-traveled father. Uriah got rich as a rap artist making music even he now thinks wasn't that good. By the time he was JJ's age, he had already peaked in music and was being ushered out the door of the industry. He took his seed money from music, bought hundreds of patents, and got much richer. But he still couldn't gain acceptance into rich people clubs, so he started collecting weird and useless items as a way to be let into their society. He settled on buying slave...memorabilia? artefacts? JJ wants to be somebody ("I wanted to be important,") but he feels terribly inferior, or "simple," compared to Uriah.

The entire story takes place the night of one party Uriah throws. At this party, as a way to get JJ to figure out his life, Uriah "loans" him the prized piece of his collection, a slave ship called the Berthea. Uriah takes JJ out for a spin in the ship in the Aransas Bay, off the coast of Texas and just a thin strip of barrier island away from the Gulf of Mexico. The ship is piloted by three of Uriah's lackeys, whom JJ dubs "the Bobbies." Uriah drops some pseudo-profound wisdom on JJ, then the ship begins to break apart, at which point JJ grabs it, takes it back to safety, and it breaks apart altogether. 

I feel like when Uriah was giving JJ shit for being so lost, JJ should have said, "I'm good at loving your daughter." That would've won Uriah over. 

2. Looking for patterns, images, recurring ideas

Once I've kind of got the plot down, one of the main things I look for in a story the second time through are repeated words or similar words, patterns, and the images in the story. From a writer's perspective, many stories come about through trying to see pictures in the writer's mind, but then in later drafts, writers will pick certain images, pictures, metaphors, etc. that seem to build to a theme. So I assume nothing is there by accident, and everything is a potential clue. With that in mind, here are some of the repeated words, ideas, and images:

It's later than you think

The story's opening lines are: "Springtime again. After ten o'clock." Springtime brings to mind the promise of youth, but the "again" means there's already impatience in that youth. And "after ten o'clock" means that even within the time of youth, it's getting late. JJ feels enormous pressure to have it figured out, and the baby Olivia is going to have makes it all much worse. 

At the party, he is seated "where the geraniums used to be." The flowers of spring are now gone, and JJ, like them, will soon be gone, too. Nearby is a former ballerina, already washed up at age 23. JJ is stuck trying to figure out his way in life, and it's all so, so much worse because he can feel the clock ticking and the final Jeopardy music playing. He senses that a lot of older people are full of shit, and yet they seem to be doing so well in their shit. In what may be my favorite line of a BASS story ever, he laments being forced to be a part of "someone else's stupid yet realized dreams." He resents having to watch Uriah enjoy his success: "You can only congratulate a person so many times. You can't be happy about the other person's good fortune forever. It's actually inhumane." The sense of time being nearly out before JJ's life has really begun makes all these feelings much stronger. 

JJ's body has a lot of reactions to stimuli

JJ seems to be having all kinds of psychosomatic responses to stress or to unpleasant stimuli. Here is a list of some of the ways his body reacts:

-choking 

-Glasses start to fog, the way they always do when he realizes he's about to get in trouble. (He also broke his glasses when he first met Uriah)

-body threatening to go supernova

-glasses fog up again in hallway

-the nothingness above the slave ship "poured into (his) stomach like sand"

-the talented tenth "raises his core temperature"

-his ears start to burn

JJ really wants a high level of intimacy with Olivia, but thinks it's impossible 

JJ twice mentions his desire to have a high level of closeness to Olivia, but also his feeling that it will never happen. Once, he thinks that he might have been relieved by how happy she made him, but "in reality, there's no such thing as mutual understanding. You're a chump to want it." 

Another time, in his mind, JJ imagines Olivia, and when he does, he imagines her reaching a hand back to scratch the back of her head, only "it felt like my head was the one getting scratched. That's how close I wanted to get to her." 

JJ clearly loves Olivia, even after a fairly long courtship. Nonetheless, he sees a threat in her. He describes her face using weaponry images, saying she has a "dagger nose, and chin pointed at my heart." Or again, he describes her looking at him "with lashing winds,"  something he's soon to become very familiar with when he rides the Berthea. 

There are a lot of earth elements in this story

Jewels and metals show up everywhere. They are trying to keep the story tied to Earth, but Uriah seems to think jewels represent something else, the "preternatural" and the "visionary." In other words, the transcendent, or that which goes beyond the Earth. But when he tries to take the Berthea, the "jewel of the Gulf of Mexico," out to sea, he finds it belongs to the land. He has misread what jewels mean. Dolphins, the mammals who figured out how to get off the land and take to the sea, just laugh at the attempt. 

Uriah isn't a total heel, but his experiences have led him to misread a lot of signs in life. He's slightly misread one sign after another, until he has come to believe that owning the tools of some of the most inhumane actions ever done by humanity are a sign of culture, of having "outdone himself." 

JJ has some self-made proverbs he lives by, but they're not really working out for him

JJ has tried to find some way to ground himself as he drifts through early life. He's come up with some bespoke proverbs. "Don't wait more than fifteen minutes for anyone" is one, and he claims it was given to him by God himself. Another is, "You only need directions if you're lost." He's trying to create rules to help him find his way, but he is still lost, and just like a man, he's too stubborn to stop and ask for directions. 

3. Okay, so what's the deeper point here?

I guess this is the point where I have to stop delaying and solve for X. Is there any hope for JJ and his "busted feeling"? In a world where even art seems to only be used cynically, can he hope to find some grounding? 

I think there is, and it's around Olivia's finger. Early in the story, she leans in next to him and tells him to snap out of it. She is wearing her engagement ring, which is "a pear-shaped amethyst that had survived two fire sales." This is the solid stuff of Earth, something made to last.

Most of JJ's dreams will, perhaps, come to nothing. We can't all be singers and artists. I myself am on year 22 of working a job while I wait to hit it big as a writer. But one of his dreams, it turns out, isn't all that stupid. 

Early on, JJ kind of kvetches that Olivia treats his failures like her own bad memories, but he doesn't realize that this is her giving him exactly the "scratch your head and I feel it on mine" kind of intimacy he's looking for. He figures it out at the end. When the boat crashes in the marsh and they are saved, she eases "herself under (JJ's) blanket like she'd been traumatized, too." She grabs him by the earlobes, perhaps sensing the "burning ears" he had just been feeling. She is in tune with all his crazy bodily reactions to everything. She looks at his eyes, and her own eyes turn to "sparkling confetti." JJ concludes, "That's how it is when you find what you're looking for." It's a catharsis with a one-sentence denouement, the simple "You crazy fool" from Olivia.   

JJ really does love Olivia. He might take shots at her for being one of the most spoiled black kids he's ever seen, but he loves her. And unlike a lot of the realizations characters come to in stories, the idea that this kind of earthly love is what can really ground us while we deal with the frustrations of not taking off and flying is actually a good insight about life. 

See also Karen Carlson's reading of this story, in which she does some good field work running down the origins of elements in the story, as she so often does.