From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  IMAGINE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  ALONE

  Chapter Three

  ANGIE

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  BEACHES

  Chapter Six

  SWIMMING

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  SOUND

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  THIRTEEN·GOING· ON·FOUTREEN

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  EC

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  SEAN

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About the Author

  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

  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

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  A division of Penguin Young Readers Group. Published by The Penguin Group.

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.).

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.).

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd).

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India.

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd).

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa.

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

  Copyright © 1995 by Jacqueline Woodson. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Woodson, Jacqueline. From the notebooks of Melanin Sun / Jacqueline Woodson.—

  1st G.P. Putnam’s Sons ed. p. cm. “First published in 1995 by The Blue Sky Press”—T.p. verso.

  Summary: Almost-fourteen-year-old Melanin Sun’s comfortable, quiet life is shattered

  when his mother reveals she has fallen in love with a woman.

  [1. Mothers and sons—Fiction. 2. Lesbians—Fiction. 3. African Americans—Fiction.

  4. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.W868Fr 2010 [Fic]—dc22 2009011314

  eISBN : 978-1-101-15246-1

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks again to all of those who stood behind the dream of this—including Dianne Hess; Anna Grace; Linda Villarosa; my sisters in Alpha Kappa Alpha; Michelle Adams; Catherine Gund; Alicia Batista; MaeBush; Marsha and Carole—and everyone else at the Provincetown Post Office!—and, of course, the MacDowell Colony—for faith, support, and time.

  For my family

  After John Muir

  Today’s news is this:

  the amphibians are vanishing.

  Rice paddie and stomach brooding frogs, gone.

  Glass frog, rain frog, golden toad,

  Corroboree, toadlet, gone. Yosemite toad.

  Tiger salamander, spade foot.

  Bufo bufo, so called “common toad.”

  Cascades, Tara humare, Goliath,

  Medusa excellus.

  It is as if we woke up one morning

  and found our mouths missing,

  the small wet we relied upon

  with inattention.

  It is a dream of a world without lily pads

  no tadpoles absorbing tails

  no eyes afloat on placid ponds.

  No witnesses.

  But this is it for real:

  a world without the single strand

  of tapioca eggs

  chaining from the underside

  of a rare green leaf:

  this precarious

  this brilliant

  this so perfect

  as to seem inevitable.

  —GERRY GOMEZ PEARLBERG

  This is Brooklyn. Summer. Hot like that with a breeze coming across this block every once in a while. Not enough air to cool anybody. Just to let us know we’re still alive. A whole city of us—living and kicking. Walk down any Brooklyn street and there we are. Here I am. Alive. If nothing else, Mama says, we have our lives. Who knows what she means by that.

  Sometimes, I don’t have words. I mean, they’re in my head and they’re zigzagging around, but there’s all this silence in my mouth, all of this air. Maybe people think I’m dumb ’cause I’m kind of quiet and when I do talk, the words come pretty slow. Once they even put me in a slow class, but Mama shot down to that school so fast, the people who had thought up the crazy idea were probably sorry they ever thought anything. Mama says it’s okay to be on the quiet side—if quiet means you’re listening, watching, taking it all in.

  And when I can’t speak it, I write it down. I wish I was different. Wish I was taller, smarter, could talk out loud the way I write things down. I wish I didn’t always feel like I was on the outside looking in, like a Peeping Tom. I wish I could slam-dunk, maybe break a backboard or two. I wish my name was Donald sometimes, or even Bert or Carlos. Or something real normal, like David. But it isn’t. It’s Melanin. Melanin Sun. I’m almost fourteen. Five feet ten inches tall. Still growing. Today I’m wearing a striped shirt. Short sleeves. Baggy shorts. Black Pumas with a white stripe. No socks. A baseball cap turned backwards. I have tiny dreads that I keep real neat—you know—keep them nice so the girls keep coming. A pair of shades I bought on St. Mark’s Place. Cost me twenty-two dollars, but they keep the sun out. Mama had a small fit talking about how we can’t afford twenty-two-dollar shades. Then she tried them on. Checked herself out in the mirror. Checked me out checking her out. “Can I borrow them, Mel?” It’s like that in our house.

  These are my notebooks. My stories. All the things I can’t speak, or try to speak or remember speaking. The stuff I can’t say. Secrets. Skeletons. I used to be so afraid someone would find these notebooks and blab everything. But I don’t really care anymore. A part of me keeps thinking, It don’t matter. Maybe not. I figure I should write it all down, though, the way I’d want someone to read it so that it comes from me, not secondhand and stupid. I’m not a regular boy and I’m not slow. I’m on the outside of things. I wish it didn’t matter so much. But it does, doesn’t it? Difference matters.

  So I keep quiet. Watch. And write it all down.

  IMAGINE

  Imagine yourself on the corner of a city street. Maybe leaning against the lamppost there, or pausing after leapfrogging over the fire hydrant a few feet away.

  Down the block, two girls sit on a third-floor fire escape, their faces pressed into its grating. Stil
l another window, another building, a young-looking woman holds her baby up. She holds tightly to the baby. It’s a long way down.

  Some of the windows are boarded up. Some are hung with ragged dusty blinds. In the center of the block there is a gap where another building once stood. Flattened cans and broken bottles are strewn over the long grass pushing itself up in the lot. Right up in front, an old couch has been set on fire. Its charred remains are scattered in the lot, spilling over onto the sidewalk. Two stained mattresses have been thrown out. Three small kids are jumping on them.

  The block grows loud with the sounds of bigger kids returning in groups and pairs, their schoolbags draped carelessly across their shoulders. The girls are laughing and teasing each other. There’s Angie, the girl I’m a little bit in love with. Hey, Angie, I want to whisper. You gave me your number today because it’s the last day of school and you want me to give you a call sometime. “The summer is long,” you said. “We should get together.”

  Hey, Angie, I’m not like everybody else but you have to have a way to walk in this world so people don’t laugh and call you soft. I can’t call you right away ’cause people will start talking. But someday . . .

  Angie has ribbons braided into her hair. She walks like the world belongs to her. Maybe it does.

  The boys are quieter than the girls, their hands shoved deep into the pockets of their oversized jeans. There’s me, a couple of steps back from everybody else. Always a bit distant, Mama says. Always a half a step to the left of everybody.

  Imagine you could be two places or four or a million. Where would you be? Leaning against the lamppost watching yourself? Trying hard to get a hold of yourself from all the many places you are when you’re almost fourteen? Where would you be?

  Imagine your mother.

  A woman makes her way slowly up the block. She is wearing blue pants and a white shirt, wire-rimmed glasses. A dot of a gold earring shines on the side of her nostril. The woman’s name is Encanta. Encanta Cedar. EC to her friends.

  Mama to me.

  Mama slows as she nears our building, the third from the corner, then swings through the gate that hangs from rusted hinges and makes her way into the dim hallway. She stops for a moment, just inside, immersed in the cool, dark quiet. Slowly, from somewhere in the building, the sound of a baby’s cry winds a tinny melody through her quiet. I wonder if that sound reminds Mama of me years and years ago when I was no more than a tiny crying bundle wrapped up in wool.

  “Will he always be so dark?” neighbors nosed.

  When Mama tells me how they always asked her this, her voice drops down, gets low and steady, like she’s wishing she had had some of the answers she has now. “I hope so,” she would tell them, pulling me—her baby, her small warm future—closer to her breasts.

  The story is legend. Mama’s legend.

  “Melanin,” she whispered when the doctor asked her what name should go on the birth certificate. “Melanin Sun.”

  Mama always talks about the strange look the doctor gave her. About how he shook his small pale head and glanced at his nurse. About how the nurse gave a slight nod as if to say, “Don’t worry, Doctor, I’ll handle it.” Then she turned to Mama and said, “But, Encanta, melanin is pigment—a tint, a stain. Surely you don’t want this poor boy moving through this world . . . stained!”

  Mama tells me how she nodded, slowly, waiting long enough after the nurse had spoken to let her know she had heard, then said softly, “Melanin is what makes him so dark, Melanin is what will make him strong. And Sun, because he looks up at me and I can see the sun right there in the center of him, shining through.”

  Mama’s a bit corny at times. . . .

  “But they’ll call him Melanin,” the nurse warned.

  “They’ll call him Mel, they’ll call him Sun. . . . There’ll be a hundred names for him. But he’ll know who he is.”

  Mama climbs the stairs slowly now. Five flights to where the light trickles in from the roof, to where the floors soften into rich smooth pine. To where there is quiet. That’s why she chose this apartment. Not like there was much of a choice because few people were willing to take a single mom and her dark baby son into their building.

  “You planning on staying awhile?” one landlady asked, cornering Mama in the middle of the apartment she was looking at and pulling my blankets back to take a good look at me.

  “I’d like to,” Mama said softly, pulling me tighter to her. She was twenty then.

  Maybe she was thinking about her own mother—how she had died the year before of diabetes. How she had struggled to have Mama and raise her alone after her husband walked out into the night and disappeared. Maybe Mama whispered to herself, “I want to do the right thing.”

  “Goodness, don’t baby boys grow up to give me trouble,” the landlady declared. “How come he so dark, anyway? You’re brown-skinned.”

  Mama left without explaining. She would wait until I was old enough to do my own talking. Even then she didn’t speak for me.

  So many landlords said no to Mama. They wanted me to have a daddy. They wanted Mama to have a car. They wanted Mama to be older, to have more money, nicer clothes, better teeth, straighter hair.

  Even then it was hard. But Mama found this place, stuck at the corner of somebody else’s world—a world of first-generation West Indian and Puerto Rican people. A world of akee and pasteles, of salsa and calypso. A world where people minded their own business while minding the business of fifty other people at the same time. She found a top-floor apartment and decided this was as close to heaven as she was ever gonna get. This place nestled at the edge of Prospect Park. Calling itself Flatbush on a good day. Full of noise and music. “Qué día bonita,” the old men sing on the first warm day. And I echo them, “What a pretty day.” I learned the language of the other people here. “What for yuh wanna be a-doberin she?” The liquid fire of the West Indies. Mrs. Shirley’s Southern, “Boy, I’ll go upside your head so hard you gonna wish you was never born.” The slow quiet of the old people, seated in folding chairs beneath trees that really aren’t more than saplings. “Mmm mmm mmm. Now ain’t that somethin’ else?” My homeboy Sean got the nerve to tell me I’m not bilingual, talking about a little bit of this tongue and a little bit of that one isn’t enough to put on a job application. What for da boy wanna say dat?

  This block. This apartment at the top. Me and Mama sipping iced tea while the sun pours into the living room, turning us and everything around us gold. This is all anybody needs to be happy.

  “Was I a good sleeping baby?” I asked on my fourth birthday. We were sitting in the dark, watching the candles melt down on the chocolate birthday cake. I took a thick scoop of frosting on my finger and missed my mouth. Mama leaned over, wiping my cheeks and chin with a napkin.

  “You were the best sleeping baby in the world,” she said. “Now make a wish and blow out the candles.” I wished for a red fire truck with a working horn, some Tonka cars, a Lego set, a fire hat, and a water gun.

  “No guns,” Mama said when I opened my presents later. “Never any guns.”

  But there was a fire truck, a deluxe Lego set, some Tonka cars, and a fire hat.

  I remember some parts of those good times with Mama. And sometimes, when I’m remembering deep and hard, I start wishing me and Mama could go back to those easy close days when our lives were as simple as chocolate cakes and Lego sets.

  Imagine.

  Chapter One

  It had been pouring all week. Some rain had managed to leak past the crumbling wood around the windowsill, puddling in the corners of it. Now the sky was dark and vague.

  “What time is it?” I asked Mama, rubbing the sleep from my eyes as I sat down across from her at the kitchen table. It was Thursday morning. Somewhere along the way we had fallen into this routine of me waking up and joining her at the kitchen table, rubbing my eyes and asking what time it was—as though I had someplace important to be. School was out for the summer now and all that was left wa
s hanging with Ralphy, Sean . . . and Mama when she had time.

  “Your growing time,” Mama said, a smile curving up at the sides of her mouth. Usually she just told me the time and we left it at that without all the philosophy.

  I stopped rubbing my eyes and stared at her impatiently but she was looking off, past the sheets of rain cascading over the windowpane.

  The apartment felt damp and cold even though it was the beginning of July.

  After a few minutes, Mama turned away from the window, took a long sip of coffee, pulled the sweater she had draped over her shoulders closed, and put her feet up on the small cabinet next to the stove. She’s always putting her feet up on something because she says since her legs are so long, she bumps her knees against the undersides of tables.

  “I boiled some water for you.”

  I got up and made myself some tea, then sat down again.

  “What growing time?” I asked finally, not being able to stand the quiet any longer.

  Mama looked at me as if I had just spoken another language. I hated when she was like this, mixed up and distant. She called this her “traveling mood.” I call it “distracted.” Sometimes she just goes off somewhere right in the middle of a conversation with you and you practically have to scream to get her attention again. I wondered what was so heavy on her mind this morning that was taking her so far away from me. And why there were bags under her eyes on a Thursday morning.

  After a moment, she was back, focusing in on me and although I hadn’t noticed my stomach was tight, I felt it loosen, relax. She shifted her legs, took another sip of coffee, and sighed. I stared at the tiny gold hoop in her nose. Last summer she let me pierce my ear and gave me her other hoop. Sometimes we just sit across from each other, playing with our rings. It might seem kind of strange to anyone outside of our family—our tiny, tiny family that’s only Mama and me—but to us, it’s just something we do. Mama says that’s what matters—what feels right to us.