1. ZZ PACKER grew up in Atlanta, Georgia,
and Louisville, Kentucky. "ZZ" was a childhood
nickname; her given name is Zuwena (Swahili for
"good", Arabic dialect for "beautiful"). Recognized
as a talented writer at an early age, her first
significant publication was in Seventeen
magazine at the age of 19. She is a 1990 graduate
of Seneca High School, in Louisville, Kentucky.
Packer attended Yale University, where she received
a B.A in 1994. Her graduate work included an M.A.
at Johns Hopkins University in 1995 and an M.F.A.
from the Iowa Writers' Workshop of the University
of Iowa in 1999. She was named a Stegner Fellow in
fiction at Stanford University. Shortly thereafter, she
entered the national literary scene with a highprofile appearance in the Debut Fiction issue of The
New Yorker (2000). Her short story in the issue
became the title story in her collection Drinking
Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead Books, 2003), which
was published to considerable acclaim. (wiki)

4. "Brownies" looks at what
happens to those who've
been cast aside. In some
souls, kindness and
compassion bloom. In
others, malignant forces
take hold. Snot realizes
that, "When you've been
made to feel bad for so
long, you jump at the
chance to do it to others."
http://shortygetdown.blogspot.be/2013/03/drinking-coffee-elsewhere-brownies-by.html

7. The main issue in “Brownies” is apparent from
the beginning:race. The entire conflict of the story
comes from the fact that the two troops are
completely segregated between the color of their
skin. Even near the end of the story a lot of the
african american girls still dislike whites and see
them as an unusal and rare thing because of the
area they live in. Even the main character’s father
treats a group of Caucasians badly because they
were mennonites and he had them paint his
porch. His reasoning for asking them to do this is
“it’s the only time he’d ever have white folk on
their knees working for him.” After telling this
story the main character realizes that actions like
this is just leading to the circle of hate to continue
and that the only way to stop it was to be a better
person herself.

13. Beatrice Froute de DomecApril 19, 2013 at 11:04 AM
Z Z Packer's short story, "Brownies," possesses numerous
qualities that we associate with the fiction of such more
established and highly respected writers as Flannery
O'Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Kate Chopin, and Zora
Neale Hurston, the last of these an African-American writer
like Parker. The story's multiple levels — social, moral,
historical, psychological — fuse to portray the confusion of
a young black girl, the story's conflicted narrator, Laurel, or
"Snot." Laurel is more sensitive and somewhat more
mature than her friends in her "Brownies" troop. She
resists her friends' mindless, mean-spirited plans to beat
up a group of white "Brownies" that are sharing a camp
site. Reluctantly, Laurel chooses to participate in the
beating out of her loyalty to her friends, up until some
adults intervene. Still too young to understand, Laurel
nevertheless intuits the meanness and ignorance present
in the reverse racism of her companions, as well as the
cruelty of the mental afflictions of the white campers:
hence the story's announced theme, "I ... suddenly knew
there was something mean in the world that I could not
stop." The story's title, "Brownies," ingeniously suggest the
foolishness of black/white stereotypes.