Brown Girl Dreaming

Nonfiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Middle Grade | Published in 2014

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Sections 1-2

Sections 3-5

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Themes

The Relation Between Struggle and Creativity

Jacqueline Woodson is drawn to stories and to storytelling from a very young age. She must face down certain obstacles, however, in order to fulfill her dream of becoming a writer. One of these obstacles is her difficulty in spelling and sounding out words, which makes her self-conscious about reading out loud in school. It also makes her different from her older sister Odella, a famously successful student. Woodson learns how to compensate for her dyslexia by developing a strong memory. She learns entire songs and stories by heart, and eventually impresses her teacher by reciting Oscar Wilde’s “The Selfish Giant” out loud to the class. Reciting this story gives her the confidence to later recite a poem that she has written to a different class, and she is recognized as a strong writer in her own right. While her learning disability bars her from certain kinds of conventional success, then, it forces her to find alternate paths and to develop other parts of herself; in other words, it forces her to be creative.

Woodson embraces storytelling in part because it is a way of making sense of her often turbulent life. In this way, too, her struggle fuels her writing. She sometimes tells stories in order to better understand her life, as when she writes a poem about the Black struggle for civil rights. At other times, she tells stories in order to avoid painful truths, as when she lies to her classmates about her absent father or about her uncle’s incarceration in the poem “moving upstate”: “When my friends ask, I say, He moved upstate / We’re going to visit him soon // He lives in a big house, I say. With a big yard and everything” (266). In “each world,” Woodson eventually realizes that storytelling is a way of bending the literal truth in the service of a larger truth, and is also a way of reconciling her different identities and influences: “When there are many worlds / you can choose the one/ you walk into each day” (319).

Disparate Views on Tackling Racism

In the beginning of this memoir, Woodson imagines herself as a newborn baby, surrounded by famous Black revolutionaries and civil rights leaders. In “second daughter’s second day on earth,” she invokes such disparate figures as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Rosa Parks, and she wonders what her baby fists will turn into as she grows up: “Malcolm’s—raised and fisted / or Martin’s—open and asking / or James’s—curled around a pen” (5).

Different members of Woodson’s family have different ideas about how to comport themselves as Black people and how best to achieve equality. Woodson’s father believes that Black people should achieve conventional success in the world, rather than challenge the social structures that determine this success. Though aware of the existence of racism, he prefers not to engage with it but rather to avoid places like the American South, where racism is overt. In “journey,” he counsels his children to carry themselves with pride and to not allow anyone to treat them like second-class citizens: “Never gonna be a Woodson made to look down /at the ground” (29).

Woodson’s mother is both more accommodating and more rebellious than Woodson’s father, in how she copes with the realities of racism. As a South Carolina native, she believes in doing what she is told and not calling attention to herself. Also as a South Carolina native, she believes in challenging the segregation of her community by occupying White-owned spaces: a strategy of peaceful resistance that is as much a spiritual discipline as a political one. In church meetings, Southern Black people learn how to cope with harassment by White people when they sit down in segregated restaurants and diners. Woodson describes this process in a poem aptly named “the training”: “How to sit at counters and be cursed at / without cursing back, have food and drinks poured / over them without standing up and hurting someone” (76).

In order to take part in these peaceful protests, Woodson’s mother must escape the watchful eye of her own mother, a strict Jehovah’s Witness. Just as Woodson’s parents have different views about how to cope with racism, Woodson’s grandparents have different views as well. Woodson’s grandmother finds solace in her religion and in the idea of a different, fairer world, even while she also recognizes racial injustice. As a Jehovah’s Witness, she believes herself to be “in the world but not of the world”: a belief that necessitates abstaining from political protests, as well as other worldly rituals (162). Woodson’s grandfather, however, does not share his wife’s religious faith, and talks more openly about the Black struggle for equality and civil rights. In “south carolina at war,” he counsels his grandchildren to “[w]alk towards a thing / slowly” but also to “be ready to die / […] for what is right” (73).

Once Woodson and her family move to New York City, Woodson begins to hear about the Black Panther movement and Angela Davis; both her mother and her uncle Robert support this movement as well, which has less to do with peaceful resistance and more to do with open combat. While thrilled by the Black Panther movement, Woodson also does not disown what she has learned in Ohio and in South Carolina. In “what I believe,” she ultimately addresses how, as a fiction writer, she claims many different types of revolutions: “I believe in the city and the South / the past and the present / […] I believe in nonviolence and ‘Power to the People’” (317).

The Meaning of Home

Woodson’s childhood is a peripatetic one, as she moves between many different homes and ideas of home. She spends the first year of her life in Ohio, near her paternal family; her mother then takes her and her siblings to live with her maternal grandparents in South Carolina. Woodson spends her early childhood in South Carolina, and grows attached to the place and to her grandparents as well; her mother then uproots her family once more, taking them to New York City, where she believes that more freedom and opportunity exists for Black people. Initially, Woodson and her family find solace in the community of transplanted Black southerners that exists in New York City: A community that includes Woodson’s Aunt Kay.

As Black Americans, Woodson’s family has a difficult time putting down roots; they must cope with different forms of racism no matter where they live. At the same time, because they are marginalized, roots and community are extremely important to them. Woodson experiences one sort of belonging in South Carolina, with her grandparents in their Black community. Though much about her South Carolina life is oppressive—the overt segregation and racism, and also her grandmother’s strict religious beliefs—she also has a sense of stability and comfort there. In “at the end of the day,” she affirms that feels cared for by her grandparents, and she likes the closeness and neighborliness of Nicholtown, even if it is a segregated community: “I am happy to belong / to Nicholtown” (54).

Woodson’s New York City life is less cozy and predictable at first, and is marked by instability more than stability. Woodson and her family change apartments several times, and must cope with the death of Woodson’s aunt Kay, the incarceration of her uncle Robert, and the illness of her young brother Roman. Woodson also struggles as a student in New York City, both because she has a learning disability and because her identity as a Jehovah’s Witness isolates her from her fellow students. For a time, Woodson feels herself to exist in a limbo between New York City and South Carolina, fully belonging neither to one place nor to the other. In “mrs. hughes’s house,” though she continues to miss the South and her grandparents there, she also feels out of place when she visits them; she now has a Northern accent, and has become a slightly different person: “Our feet are beginning to belong / in two different worlds—Greenville / and New York” (194-95).

However, Woodson gradually comes to accept New York City as her new home. Part of her acceptance is circumstantial; her Southern grandfather dies, and her grandmother moves in with them. While Woodson retains a sense of her Southern family, then, she is no longer so bound to the South itself. At the same time, with her new best friend Maria, Woodson finds a larger improvised family beyond her given family. Maria is Spanish, and being around her family and taking part in their rituals—which are different from those of her own family—gives Woodson a sense of belonging to a wider world. In school, Woodson also learns about the history of her Bushwick neighborhood, a history of upheaval and strife that resembles her own family history. This history gives her a sense of belonging that is different from what she experienced with her grandparents in the South. It is more a feeling of belonging to a wider Black community than to her own particular family, and it inspires Woodson to write about this change in “bushwick history lesson”: “I didn’t just appear one day / […] I keep writing, knowing now / that I was a long time coming” (298).