Brownies

“By our second 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.”

This is the first sentence of the story, which is narrated by Snot. It provides a sort of false in media res, the Latin term for starting a story in its middle, in the present action. While Packer rewinds from this moment in the story, it nonetheless drops the reader into the main action of the plot, providing essential details of the events that will unfold over the course of the narrative. 

“They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.” 

This passage is Snot’s description of Troop 909, upon first glimpsing them. In drawing the reader’s attention to the Disney characters on some of the troop’s sleeping bags,Snot evokesthe mythic quality of whiteness that Troop 909 embodies for Snot and her troop members. Underneath this, however, Packer offers clues to the developmental differences of Troop 909, though Snot and her compatriots do not notice these. 

“It was the word ‘Caucasian’ that got them all going. One day at school, about a month before the Brownie camping trip, Arnetta turned to a boy wearing impossibly high-ankled floodwater jeans and said, ‘What are you? Caucasian?’ The word took off from there and soon everything was Caucasian. If you ate too fast you ate like a Caucasian, if you ate too slow you ate like a Caucasian.”

Here, Packer shows how a word can be taken out of context and made pejorative. As a result of persistent segregation, whites are foreign enough to the members of the troop, and their classmates, to allow the word Caucasian to function as a negative term.