55 pages • 1 hour read
Ibi ZoboiMy Life as an Ice Cream Sandwich
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Ibi Zoboi’s Stories
In 2022, Ibi Zoboi published a biography of the 20th-century Black author Octavia E. Butler, Star Child. Like Ebony-Grace, Butler had a robust imagination and an interest in science fiction, publishing many famous stories and novels like Kindred (1979) and “Bloodchild” (1995). Though Butler’s work is more overtly political than Ebony-Grace’s narrative—her stories explicitly address issues like racism and Black slavery in the United States—they both have robust imaginations, or, as Granddaddy calls them, “imagination location.”
In My Life as an Ice-Cream Sandwich, Zoboi uses different mediums to convey Ebony-Grace’s story. There are comics, song lyrics, and, near the end of Chapter 17, a poem/story set in cascading type. Zoboi applies genre-mixing to her Butler biography, using poems, snippets from interviews, and prose to convey Butler’s story. Ebony-Grace doesn’t want to be a flavor, but if she had to be, she’d be one “made up of all the things in the Milky Way” (112). Zoboi applies Ebony-Grace’s wish to be many things to her Butler’s and Ebony-Grace’s books: They’re not only narratives in prose.
In 2017, Zoboi published American Street—a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The story centers on a Haitian immigrant, Fabiola, who must learn how to navigate another world (Detroit) and get along with her cousins after immigration officials arrest her mom. Fabiola is older than Ebony-Grace and directly confronts issues—like drugs and sex—that mostly remain in Ebony-Grace’s background. While Ebony-Grace creates missions in her imagination, Fabiola has a real mission: to get her mom out of jail.
Historical and Cultural Context: New York City in the 1980s
People and the media portray 1980s New York City as a dangerous place. In Alabama, Ebony-Grace watches the news and hears about “all the very bad, terrible, and awful things happening in New York City” (11). In the 1970s, New York City almost went bankrupt. Still struggling with its finances and services into the 1980s, the city, never enjoying a particularly gentle reputation, became known as particularly cruel and chaotic—exploding with criminals and drugs. On February 25, 1981, Leonard Buder published a New York Times article headlined, “1980 Called Worst Year of Crime in City History.” The odious portrait of New York City makes Momma give Ebony-Grace all sorts of rules about what she can’t do when she’s in Harlem.
In Harlem, Ebony-Grace sees signs of struggle and hardship, but she doesn’t experience violence. She stays safe, and the generally helpful community around her undercuts the popular portrayal of New York City as an inhuman place. What Ebony-Grace mostly witnesses in New York is culture. The Nine Flavas crew expose her to breakdancing and hip-hop. The girls reference the hip-hop group Run-DMC, the woman rapper Roxanne Shanté, and the B-girl Baby Love. As Daddy tells Ebony-Grace, “Harlem is where it’s at. This is the heart of the city. [….] We got soul, over here. We got music” (169). What was happening in Harlem and New York in the 1980s would help make rap culture into a profitable, global commodity.
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