Sonia Singh

Redefining What Marks Us

Interpretations of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “Revenge of James Brown” | A ‘Steenth Street Story

Student Exhibition and Reflections | Spring 2025

How can we move past conventional depictions of race in a story? Can characters embody experiences of race without including racial markers?

The art of storytelling is its limitless ability to represent human experiences. Alice Dunbar-Nelson challenges the way we think about racial representation in her short story, “The Revenge of James Brown.” The short story resists the idea that we have to mention the color of our skin for a story to include race through the protagonist’s, James Brown’s, experiences as a little boy navigating his life. He represents and normalizes the experiences of children of color, allowing us to see ourselves as main characters, moving away from the expectation that a main character is white by default when melanin is not mentioned in the ways mainstream literature often writes about.

Featured Works

The Alice Dunbar-Nelson Papers, University of Delaware Library Special Collections

“The Revenge of James Brown” is about a thirteen-year-old boy named James (Jimmy) Brown who is the oldest child in a family with little money. Jimmy must figure out how to manage when a resource center called “The Pure in Heart Mission” opens in his low-income urban neighborhood and changes his life. Jimmy does not want his family to have anything to do with the Mission, even though the center provides helpful services like food and health care. He tells all his friends not to go there. But when his younger brother, Buddy, comes down with chicken pox and the family is desperate for food, Jimmy’s mother, Mrs. Brown, demands that Jimmy seek help at the Mission. Initially, Jimmy refuses, so Mrs. Brown spanks him. Her punishment embarrasses him so much he eventually agrees to ask the Mission for help. 

The family receives aid and his little brother recovers. To get “revenge” on his mother for forcing him to go to the Mission, Jimmy takes it upon himself to provide for his family by getting a job (his father does not work). Even though Jimmy’s friends beat him for receiving help after he had forced them to stay away, Jimmy is satisfied with getting a job as “revenge” against the Mission and his mother. At the story’s end, the narrator tells us that Mrs. Brown had gotten what she wanted, so she did not tell Jimmy what she thought about him getting a job. 

Why is Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “The Revenge of James Brown” an important story?  

When I was growing up, the only stories that included an Indian or South Asian character represented these brown characters as the super nerdy sidekick to the white protagonist whose only purpose was to make you laugh at embodied and exaggerated racial stereotypes.

I never got to see or read media that included a protagonist that was Indian and more than a straight-A teacher’s pet with a funny accent. Little me wondered if I was never meant to be the main character, even in my own story. Yet, as I’m about to graduate college in the Spring of 2025, I get to heal that part of my inner child by seeing myself represented in mainstream popular culture, like in season two of the TV show Bridgerton directed by Chris Van Dusen. In season two, one of the main characters is Kathani or Kate Sharma, the eldest daughter who comes to Britain with her mother and younger sister to find her sister a husband and who ends up falling in love with the male lead, Anthony Bridgerton. Kate Sharma is played by Simone Ashley. Kate Sharma is fiercely independent, caring, determined, and witty.

Her dark skin and strong personality resists common, stereotypical depictions of South Asian characters who aren’t seen as desirable or smart outside of the classroom. When I see a protagonist like Kate, I feel like I too can redefine myself beyond the color that marks me and be who I want to be. Similarly, Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s short story, “The Revenge of James Brown,” makes me feel like my experiences being a person of color in the United States are normal and less alone in being “othered” by the rest of the world, never fitting into the molds other people try to force me into.

Stories like these normalize important conversations about experiencing race in America. The society we live in is inherently centered around the color of our skin, and reading a story about a snippet of this little Black boy shows me that I don’t have to exist solely as how society represents me. I can choose to represent myself in ways that are authentic. 

Resistance through Representation

Photo by Julian Myles. Three Black men posing in New York, 2019.


Representation can move beyond conventions of writing characters and their experiences by not using stereotypes designed to categorize people of color in ways that aren’t authentic to our lived experiences. I don’t need to read the word “Black” or “brown” to understand how race shapes the story of Jimmy Brown and how the world he’s growing up in is shaped by systems of racial oppression. He doesn’t need to be racialized for readers of color to see themselves reflected in his story.

“The Revenge of James Brown” does not include explicit racial markers of any of the characters. Alice Dunbar-Nelson did not write in the color of Jimmy and his family’s skin: she did not have to for us to read this story as one about a little Black boy. When I read this story, I considered Dunbar-Nelson’s race, as a Black woman, and where this story was published. Dunbar-Nelson often created works that focused on themes of racial resistance, injustice, and activism stemming from her experiences navigating life in the United States of America as a Black woman during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

You could ask then how can we be sure that Jimmy Brown is, in fact, Black, but I think the better question is how can we be sure that he is not? When the author doesn’t describe the amount of melanin in a character’s skin, they resist the assumption that characters are white by default. The beauty of diversity is that each of us embodies race differently based on how we move through the world, and that’s no different for me or James Brown.  

SONIA SINGH (they/them) is a senior at Villanova University majoring in English. They are an active member of the English Department’s Student Advisory Council, BIPOC Writers Group, and VU Pride and are a Co-Coordinator of Outreach and Administration of Ellipsis Literary Art Magazine and Resident Assistant. Their passion for literature stems from a desire to empower underrepresented voices by engaging with the intersectionality of race, identity, and representation in a postcolonial system.