Brown Girl Dreaming

“I don’t know if these hands will become / Malcolm’s—raised and fisted / or Martin’s—open and asking / or James’s—curled around a pen.” 

The question of how to be a revolutionary and to best effect social change is one theme in this memoir. Woodson is pulled between different examples of powerful Black figures, both in the world and within her own family. 

“They’ll say / Thomas Woodson expected the best of us.”

Woodson’s father has a strong, proud sense of his ancestry, which he tries to transmit to his children. He believes that if they inherit his pride, they will develop a sense of their own worth and will make their way in the world. His sense of family is different from Woodson’s mother’s sense of her own Southern family, which has more to do with nurturing and comfort and less to do with pride and expectations. 

“It’ll be scary sometimes. But think of William Woodson / and you’ll be all right.” 

William Woodson was Woodson’s great-grandfather. He fought and died in the Civil War; Woodson was sent to live with his aunt, where he was the only Black male in his school. It is Jacqueline Woodson’s mother who tells her this story, as a way of warning her about the upheaval, isolation, and prejudice that she will probably face in her life. It is a different way of evoking the Woodson family heritage: less proud, more intimate and sympathetic.

“My time of birth wasn’t listed / on the certificate, then got lost again / amid other people’s bad memory.” 

Woodson’s father, mother, and grandmother all have different, equally fixed ideas about what time she was born. Early on, Woodson confronts different people’s stories and subjectivities, and must learn how to navigate between them. This is also an early lesson for her in the power of a good story, whether that story is accurate. 

“This isn’t Ohio, my mother says / as though we understand.” 

Woodson’s mother’s demeanor changes when she takes her children down South to visit her family there. While more at home with her own family in the South, she is also more guarded in public. She is more protective of her children there as well, who are too young to understand the realities of segregation and racism. They do, however, register their mother’s changed manner, even if they don’t yet understand the meaning of her words.  

“No past. // No future. // Just this perfect Now.”

Woodson’s parents briefly reconcile before permanently separating. Woodson’s father follows Woodson’s mother to South Carolina and begs her forgiveness, after they have fought. It is a rare moment for Woodson of not feeling pulled between different times, places, and loyalties, all the more precious because she senses that it won’t last forever. 

“I went away from here / but now / I’m home again.” 

Woodson evokes the Hocking River, which splits off from the Ohio River and then returns to it, as a way of evoking her family’s journeys from Ohio to South Carolina and back again. Her family has just returned to Ohio, but Woodson will not remain there for long. Different places will become home for her, over the course of this memoir, and she will leave and return to different places. But the river analogy will remain applicable to her life. 

“The Grandchildren / Gunnar’s Three Little Ones / Sister Irby’s Grands”

Woodson and her siblings have different identities in their maternal Southern family than they have had in their maternal Ohio family. They are known less by their first names, and more in relation to the adults around them. They are also known more as children, and less as incipient adults. This has an oppressive, anonymous aspect, but also a communal, comforting one. 

“[I]t’s hard to tell who is white and who is not, still / they call my Grandfather Gunnar / even though he’s a foreman” 

Woodson’s grandfather Gunnar has attained the position of foreman at the printing factory where he works, but he still must cope with disrespect and prejudice from his White underlings. His situation illustrates the complicated reality for Black people in the 1960s South, when they won some provisional freedoms despite many other barriers remaining in place.

“This evening, though, / I am happy to belong / to Nicholtown.” 

Woodson’s Southern grandparents live in a segregated Black neighborhood. Woodson understands that their neighborhood is a poor and disadvantaged one, and that they are excluded from other places; she also hears Southern White people referring to their neighborhood disparagingly. Even so, her neighborhood gives her a sense of belonging and comfort.  

“Our questions come fast but we want / the stories more than we want the answers”

Woodson enjoys the Bible stories that her religious grandmother reads to her, but not for the reasons that her grandmother wants her to enjoy them. She enjoys the stories themselves, more than the lessons that they are meant to impart. The Bible stories are an early lesson for Woodson in the power of narrative and story. 

“Will the words end, I ask / whenever I remember to. / Nope, my sister says, all of five years old now” 

Woodson’s older sister Odella is bookish in a different, more studious way than Woodson is. They share, however, a love of words and stories. This exchange between them shows their bond, and also Odella’s precocious bossiness.  

“We are never to say huh? / ain’t or y’all / git or gonna.”

Woodson and her siblings must navigate different rules for speaking in the different places where they live. In the South, they learn to speak in a manner that will compensate for their marginal social status as Black people. Once they move to New York City, they will learn a quicker and more aggressive way of speaking, which will serve to make them alien in the South.

“Walk toward a thing / slowly.”

Woodson’s grandfather Gunnar advises Woodson and her siblings to be gentle and deliberate in asserting their rights as Black people, but to assert their rights, nevertheless. He advocates a brand of peaceful resistance followed by many civil rights activists in the South. This is different from the more confrontational strategy of the Black Panthers, which Woodson will later learn about in New York City.

“In the stores downtown / we’re always followed around / just because we’re brown.” 

The South is where Woodson first begins to experience overt racial prejudice, and to realize that she is not welcome in certain spaces. She must decide whether to accommodate this racism and live around it, as her grandmother does, or to challenge it, like the activists in her neighborhood.

“[S]o you can still see the words, right there / like a ghost standing in front / still keeping you out.” 

These words are segregated bathroom signs in Greenville, South Carolina; they state, “Whites Only.” They have been painted over but are still visible. It is a metaphor for the prevalence of racism and prejudice, even when some of the rules and laws have changed.

“Retelling each story. / Making up what I didn’t understand / or missed when voices dropped too low […]”

Woodson cannot always hear the stories of the adults around her, so she makes up her own stories instead. This is one of many ways in which obstacles fuel her purpose and imagination as a writer. She must also navigate the obstacle of her learning disability, which leads her to memorize entire stories and eventually gives her the courage to read her own work out loud in class. 

“Will we always have to choose / between home // and home?” 

Woodson often feels torn between different homes in her life, which sustain and comfort her in different ways. In this case, she is torn between New York City and South Carolina. She is echoing the ambivalence of her mother, who is attached to her Southern family and culture, but also drawn to the promised freedoms of New York City.

“Sister Dell and me are silent / wanting only what’s right outside. / Wanting only this world.” 

Woodson and her older sister love their grandmother, but often resent the routine and restrictions that she has imposed on them. Her Jehovah’s Witness faith dictates that the afterlife is more real than the present life, but the Woodson siblings connect more to the present life. They especially resonate with the rich and sensory natural world of the South, just outside their door.

“Our hearts are tiny and mad. / If our hearts were hands, they’d hit. / If our hearts were feet, they’d surely kick somebody!”

Woodson and her siblings must stay inside and study the Bible, and must watch neighborhood children play on their own swing set while they are doing so. Their grandmother counsels them to have big hearts and to turn the other cheek, but they have a hard time doing so, especially as the neighborhood children are not only playing on their swing set but taunting them. Their grandmother’s advice echoes the training that Southern Black civil activists receive, to ignore harassment and be patient; it is difficult training even for an adult to follow.  

“Maybe it’s another New York City / the southerners talk about. Maybe that’s where / there is money falling from the sky”

Woodson’s first glimpse of New York City is disheartening; it’s not at all what she had imagined. It is a place of riches only for some people, not for everyone. Woodson does, however, obtain some valuable self-knowledge there. 

“She was looking up at the tiny piece of sky. / And she was smiling.” 

Woodson’s mother is relaxing, soaking her bare feet in an open water pump on a hot summer day. These lines also suggest both the freedom and the constriction of city life; Woodson’s “piece of sky” is small, but it is all hers. 

“Nothing in the world is like this - / a bright white page with / pale blue lines.”

The act of writing is often challenging to Woodson, as someone with a learning disability. Yet she also loves the appearance of empty notebooks, and the space and possibility that they suggest. Her appreciation marks her as a writer, even if the act of writing is difficult for her.