Brown Girl Dreaming Read online

  ALSO BY JACQUELINE WOODSON

  Last Summer with Maizon

  The Dear One

  Maizon at Blue Hill

  Between Madison and Palmetto

  I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This

  From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun

  The House You Pass on the Way

  If You Come Softly

  Lena

  Miracle’s Boys

  Hush

  Locomotion

  Behind You

  Feathers

  After Tupac and D Foster

  Peace, Locomotion

  Beneath a Meth Moon

  NANCY PAULSEN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © 2014 by Jacqueline Woodson.

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  “Dreams,” and “Poem [2]” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

  “Twistin’ the Night Away” written by Sam Cooke. Published by ABKCO Music, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-698-19570-7

  Version_1

  This book is for my family— past, present and future.

  With love.

  CONTENTS

  family tree

  PART I

  i am born

  PART II

  the stories of south carolina run like rivers

  PART III

  followed the sky’s mirrored constellation to freedom

  PART IV

  deep in my heart, i do believe

  PART V

  ready to change the world

  author’s note

  thankfuls

  family photos

  Hold fast to dreams

  For if dreams die

  Life is a broken-winged bird

  That cannot fly.

  Hold fast to dreams

  For when dreams go

  Life is a barren field

  Frozen with snow.

  —Langston Hughes

  february 12, 1963

  I am born on a Tuesday at University Hospital

  Columbus, Ohio,

  USA—

  a country caught

  between Black and White.

  I am born not long from the time

  or far from the place

  where

  my great-great-grandparents

  worked the deep rich land

  unfree

  dawn till dusk

  unpaid

  drank cool water from scooped-out gourds

  looked up and followed

  the sky’s mirrored constellation

  to freedom.

  I am born as the South explodes,

  too many people too many years

  enslaved, then emancipated

  but not free, the people

  who look like me

  keep fighting

  and marching

  and getting killed

  so that today—

  February 12, 1963

  and every day from this moment on,

  brown children like me can grow up

  free. Can grow up

  learning and voting and walking and riding

  wherever we want.

  I am born in Ohio but

  the stories of South Carolina already run

  like rivers

  through my veins.

  second daughter’s second day on earth

  My birth certificate says: Female Negro

  Mother: Mary Anne Irby, 22, Negro

  Father: Jack Austin Woodson, 25, Negro

  In Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr.

  is planning a march on Washington, where

  John F. Kennedy is president.

  In Harlem, Malcolm X is standing on a soapbox

  talking about a revolution.

  Outside the window of University Hospital,

  snow is slowly falling. So much already

  covers this vast Ohio ground.

  In Montgomery, only seven years have passed

  since Rosa Parks refused

  to give up

  her seat on a city bus.

  I am born brown-skinned, black-haired

  and wide-eyed.

  I am born Negro here and Colored there

  and somewhere else,

  the Freedom Singers have linked arms,

  their protests rising into song:

  Deep in my heart, I do believe

  that we shall overcome someday.

  and somewhere else, James Baldwin

  is writing about injustice, each novel,

  each essay, changing the world.

  I do not yet know who I’ll be

  what I’ll say

  how I’ll say it . . .

  Not even three years have passed since a brown girl

  named Ruby Bridges

  walked into an all-white school.

  Armed guards surrounded her while hundreds

  of white people spat and called her names.

  She was six years old.

  I do not know if I’ll be strong like Ruby.

  I do not know what the world will look like

  when I am finally able to walk, speak, write . . .

  Another Buckeye!

  the nurse says to my mother.

  Already, I am being named for this place.

  Ohio. The Buckeye State.

  My fingers curl into fists, automatically

  This is the way, my mother said,

  of every baby’s hand.

  I do not know if these hands will become

  Malcolm’s—raised and fisted

  or Martin’s—open and asking

  or James’s—curled around a pen.

  I do not know if these hands will be

  Rosa’s

  or Ruby’s

  gently gloved

  and fiercely folded

  calmly in a lap,

  on a desk,

  around a book,

  ready

  to change the world . . .

  a girl named jack

  Good enough name for me, my father said

  the day I was born.

  Don’t see why

  she can’t have it, too.

  But the women said no.

  My mother first.

  Then each aunt, pulling my pink blanket back

  patting the crop of thick curls

 
tugging at my new toes

  touching my cheeks.

  We won’t have a girl named Jack, my mother said.

  And my father’s sisters whispered,

  A boy named Jack was bad enough.

  But only so my mother could hear.

  Name a girl Jack, my father said,

  and she can’t help but

  grow up strong.

  Raise her right, my father said,

  and she’ll make that name her own.

  Name a girl Jack

  and people will look at her twice, my father said.

  For no good reason but to ask if her parents

  were crazy, my mother said.

  And back and forth it went until I was Jackie

  and my father left the hospital mad.

  My mother said to my aunts,

  Hand me that pen, wrote

  Jacqueline where it asked for a name.

  Jacqueline, just in case

  someone thought to drop the ie.

  Jacqueline, just in case

  I grew up and wanted something a little bit longer

  and further away from

  Jack.

  the woodsons of ohio

  My father’s family

  can trace their history back

  to Thomas Woodson of Chillicothe, said to be

  the first son

  of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

  some say

  this isn’t so but . . .

  the Woodsons of Ohio know

  what the Woodsons coming before them

  left behind, in Bibles, in stories,

  in history coming down through time

  so

  ask any Woodson why

  you can’t go down the Woodson line

  without

  finding

  doctors and lawyers and teachers

  athletes and scholars and people in government

  they’ll say,

  We had a head start.

  They’ll say,

  Thomas Woodson expected the best of us.

  They’ll lean back, lace their fingers

  across their chests,

  smile a smile that’s older than time, say,

  Well it all started back before Thomas Jefferson

  Woodson of Chillicothe . . .

  and they’ll begin to tell our long, long story.

  the ghosts of the nelsonville house

  The Woodsons are one

  of the few Black families in this town, their house

  is big and white and sits

  on a hill.

  Look up

  to see them

  through the high windows

  inside a kitchen filled with the light

  of a watery Nelsonville sun. In the parlor

  a fireplace burns warmth

  into the long Ohio winter.

  Keep looking and it’s spring again,

  the light’s gold now, and dancing

  across the pine floors.

  Once, there were so many children here

  running through this house

  up and down the stairs, hiding under beds

  and in trunks,

  sneaking into the kitchen for tiny pieces

  of icebox cake, cold fried chicken,

  thick slices of their mother’s honey ham . . .

  Once, my father was a baby here

  and then he was a boy . . .

  But that was a long time ago.

  In the photos my grandfather is taller than everybody

  and my grandmother just an inch smaller.

  On the walls their children run through fields,

  play in pools,

  dance in teen-filled rooms, all of them

  grown up and gone now—

  but wait!

  Look closely:

  There’s Aunt Alicia, the baby girl,

  curls spiraling over her shoulders, her hands

  cupped around a bouquet of flowers. Only

  four years old in that picture, and already,

  a reader.

  Beside Alicia another picture, my father, Jack,

  the oldest boy.

  Eight years old and mad about something

  or is it someone

  we cannot see?

  In another picture, my uncle Woody,

  baby boy

  laughing and pointing

  the Nelsonville house behind him and maybe

  his brother at the end of his pointed finger.

  My aunt Anne in her nurse’s uniform,

  my aunt Ada in her university sweater

  Buckeye to the bone . . .

  The children of Hope and Grace.

  Look closely. There I am

  in the furrow of Jack’s brow,

  in the slyness of Alicia’s smile,

  in the bend of Grace’s hand . . .

  There I am . . .

  Beginning.

  it’ll be scary sometimes

  My great-great-grandfather on my father’s side

  was born free in Ohio,

  1832.

  Built his home and farmed his land,

  then dug for coal when the farming

  wasn’t enough. Fought hard

  in the war. His name in stone now

  on the Civil War Memorial:

  William J. Woodson

  United States Colored Troops,

  Union, Company B 5th Regt.

  A long time dead but living still

  among the other soldiers

  on that monument in Washington, D.C.

  His son was sent to Nelsonville

  lived with an aunt

  William Woodson

  the only brown boy in an all-white school.

  You’ll face this in your life someday,

  my mother will tell us

  over and over again.

  A moment when you walk into a room and

  no one there is like you.

  It’ll be scary sometimes. But think of William Woodson

  and you’ll be all right.

  football dreams

  No one was faster

  than my father on the football field.

  No one could keep him

  from crossing the line. Then

  touching down again.

  Coaches were watching the way he moved,

  his easy stride, his long arms reaching

  up, snatching the ball from its soft pocket

  of air.

  My father dreamed football dreams,

  and woke to a scholarship

  at Ohio State University.

  Grown now

  living the big-city life

  in Columbus

  just sixty miles

  from Nelsonville

  and from there

  Interstate 70 could get you

  on your way west to Chicago

  Interstate 77 could take you south

  but my father said

  no colored Buckeye in his right mind

  would ever want to go there.

  From Columbus, my father said,

  you could go just about

  anywhere.

  other people’s memory

  You were born in the morning, Grandma Georgiana said.

  I remember the sound of the birds. Mean

  old blue jays squawking. They like to fight, you know.

  Don’t mess with blue jays!

  I hear they can kill a cat if they get mad enough.

  And then the phone was ringing.

  Through all that static and squawking, I heard

  your mama telling me you’d come.

  Another
girl, I stood there thinking,

  so close to the first one.

  Just like your mama and Caroline. Not even

  a year between them and so close, you could hardly tell

  where one ended and the other started.

  And that’s how I know you came in the morning.

  That’s how I remember.

  You came in the late afternoon, my mother said.

  Two days after I turned twenty-two.

  Your father was at work.

  Took a rush hour bus

  trying

  to get to you. But

  by the time he arrived,

  you were already here.

  He missed the moment, my mother said,

  but what else is new.

  You’re the one that was born near night,

  my father says.

  When I saw you, I said, She’s the unlucky one

  come out looking just like her daddy.

  He laughs. Right off the bat, I told your mama,

  We’re gonna call this one after me.

  My time of birth wasn’t listed

  on the certificate, then got lost again

  amid other people’s bad memory.

  no returns

  When my mother comes home

  from the hospital with me,

  my older brother takes one look

  inside the pink blanket, says,

  Take her back. We already have one of those.

  Already three years old and still doesn’t understand

  how something so tiny and new

  can’t be returned.

  how to listen #1

  Somewhere in my brain

  each laugh, tear and lullaby

  becomes memory.

  uncle odell

  Six months before my big sister is born,

  my uncle Odell is hit by a car

  while home in South Carolina

  on leave from the Navy.

  When the phone rang in the Nelsonville house,

  maybe my mother was out hanging laundry