Oreo

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The first time I read Fran Ross’s hilarious badass novel, Oreo, I was living on Fort Greene Place, Brooklyn in a community of people I thought of as “the dreadlocked elite.” It was the late 1990s, and the artisan cheese shops and organic juice bars had not yet fully arrived in the boroughs, though there were hints of what was to come. Poor people and artists could still afford to live there. We were young and black and we’d moved to the neighborhood armed with graduate degrees and creative ambitions. There was a quiet storm of what Greg Tate described as “black genius” brewing in our midst. Spike Lee had set up a production studio inside the old firehouse on DeKalb Avenue. Around the corner on Lafayette Street was Kokobar, a black-owned espresso shop decorated with Basquiat-inspired paintings; there were whispers that Tracy Chapman and Alice Walker were investors. Around the corner on Elliot Street, Lisa Price, aka Carol’s Daughter, sold organic hair oils and creams for kinky-curly hair out of a brownstone storefront.

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