At the beginning of the collection, the author quotes Roots by Alex Haley: “Join me in the hope that this story of our people can help to alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners” (xix). Since most of the literary canon is written by white authors, black voices are drowned out or silenced by history. The stories in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere are about average African American people in the United States. Their stories are ordinary and sometimes anti-climactic. The characters try and often fail at their objectives as many of them are alienated, learning to define their own identities and their places in the world in relation to blackness and whiteness.

Alex Haley’s Roots is a generational story about the history of a black family beginning with American slavery. Conversely, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is about the loss of familial roots and missing family members whose voices died or disappeared with them. Each of the main characters experiences isolation in some way. Many, such as Spurgeon (“The Ant of the Self”), Dina (“Drinking Coffee Elsewhere”), and Doris (“Doris is Coming”) are the only African Americans in predominantly white schools.