Black Tickets

Black Tickets (1979) is a collection of short stories by American writer Jayne Anne Phillips. The collection was published by Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence.

The story begins with the narrator looking at his/her mother's wedding picture. The narrator notices details about his/her mother and also the man in the picture which could be his/her father. The narrator then alludes to the death of the man in the wedding picture and about the loss of religion. The picture was taken in the 1940s, so the mother seems to have been pressured to remarry shortly after the death of her first husband. Phillips writes in a dark tone that leads the reader to believe that the lives of the mother and the narrator were not easy and did not go as planned. The narrator does not seem to resent the mother, so it seems that the mother has done the best she can with the circumstances of her life.

A fourteen-year-old prostitute reflects upon her past. She recalls Uncle Wumpy, a man who bought her from Minnie, her then-foster parent who made her work at a luncheonette. The narrator has threesomes with Wumpy and Kitty, Wumpy’s drug-addict partner, though Wumpy refuses to have sex with the narrator. The narrator reveals that Wumpy is the one who introduced her to prostitution. Sometimes the narrator fantasizes about Natalie, an eight-year-old girl she met while in foster care. She recalls when she and Natalie were playing in a shed when their foster father came in and forced Natalie to perform sexual acts on him. Sometimes the narrator fantasizes about Wumpy.

Black Tickets begins with the narrator expressing his desire for Jamaica Delila. He discusses in depth how he watches her and notices that she likes to draw on herself, giving herself “tattoos.” The narrator then begins to expand on his working with Raymond in the coffee shop across from where Jamaica works. Following another fantasy of Jamaica, the narrator begins to tell of being in jail and how his father was not existent in his and his mother’s lives. The narrator then changes abruptly to a recollection of the time he shared with Jamaica. In remembering his time with her, he also speaks of abuse and death. While telling of the times that his brother, Raymond, got Jamaica’s attention, the narrator becomes quite jealous because he always paid attention to her but she preferred that Raymond did not look at her even. Following another flashback to a time where Jamaica told him about how she had wanted to cut her hair and be the boy of the family, the narrator resumes his thought in present day and how he will be soon headed to a larger jail. He then recalls the last day that he saw Jamaica, when he woke up and her hair was all cut off.

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