When Eddie Levert Comes by Deesha Philyaw

Start a love train, love train.

It’s always a thrill to stumble across a new short-story writer who immediately clicks with me and Deesha Philyaw is absolutely one of them. Her voice is so refreshing and her prose glides along effortlessly. Smooth as butter but carrying a ton of emotional heft. I’m always impressed by writers who can build complex, fully formed characters within such tight narrative confines and When Eddie Levert Comes is a perfect example of that skill.

On the surface, this could have been your typical run-of-the-mill estranged mother/daughter story, but Philyaw elevates it into something far more layered and affecting. Her exploration of Black womanhood, racial politics, and intergenerational trauma hits hard. The protagonist, referred to only as “Daughter,” is the full-time caregiver for her mother (simply called “Mama”) who is living with dementia. Mama, a devoted fan of The O’Jays, spends her days believing Eddie Levert himself is coming to visit her. It’s a premise that could have leaned into sentimentality, but Philyaw uses it to peel back the complicated emotional history between the two women.

Through various flashbacks, we are provided a glimpse into Daughter’s childhood, growing up in a single-mother household alongside her two brothers. Mama’s mercurial moods and relationships with different men, highlight the various contradictions of her own black femininity, especially when she becomes a woman of God. Mama has directly shaped Daughter’s understanding of womanhood in ways she still hasn’t fully unpacked. Caregiving, in her world, is expected of women. Silent, dutiful, automatic. While the men drift on the periphery with little consequence. The story captures this imbalance with painful clarity and Daughter’s simmering resentment toward her absent brother feels achingly real. The burden, as always, falls on her.

What makes Philyaw’s approach so moving is the rawness with which she reveals Daughter’s unresolved trauma. The story doesn’t sensationalize it; instead, it shows how old wounds throb beneath the surface of everyday tasks. Whether it is feeding Mama, washing her hair, picking out her clothes, correcting her memory, it all contributes to absorbing the emotional fallout of a lifetime. Philyaw invites the reader to sit with Daughter’s conflicting emotions: obligation, love, anger, tenderness, exhaustion. It’s an experience that rings true for so many Black women who are expected to hold their families together while carrying their own unspoken pain.

This is only my first taste of Philyaw’s work, so I’m trying not to hype myself up too much, but if this story is any indication, she’s firmly on my radar. I can’t wait to dive into "The Secret Lives of Church Ladies" and see if she continues to conjure this kind of magic.

You can read this story HERE.