ISBN: 978-0-399-25251-8
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| Book cover courtesy of www.penguin.com |
Woodson's memoir examines the many dualities of her early life. South Carolina versus Brooklyn, New York. Raised as a Jehovah's Witness by her grandmother, but privately skeptical. Desperate to write down the stories swirling in her head and hampered by dyslexia. Binding the series of poems together is a thread of familial love and devotion. It ends with a few reflective poems where Woodson ruminates on her personal journey and how all the dichotomies that have formed her journey have helped shape who she is today.
Most of the poems are written in free verse, but Woodson peppers the novel with several haiku. The haiku are often meditations or some other realization in response to the events surrounding the young Jacqueline. By writing those small moments in haiku, it sets them apart from the longer free verse poems. The structural brevity of the haiku gives Woodson's thoughts in those moments a measure of profundity and emotional depth out of all proportion to their size. Several of the haiku are series titled "How To Listen". The third in the series simply describes her grandfather's coughing fit in the middle of the night and Woodson's reaction to it, but the ominous air around the poem is palpable. The final word of the poem -- "startled" -- is written as a sentence by itself, which helps create the sense of unease in the poem.
Overall, the poems have a sense of immediacy. We experience Greenville of the 1960s and later Brooklyn of the 1970s through Woodson's eyes in a first-person narrative. This is illustrated with brutal honesty in two separate poems: "How To Listen #2" and "The Fabric Store". In both poems, Woodson paints a picture about her experiences shopping in Greenville. She writes of store clerks following her or her grandmother around the store "in case they try to / steal something" because of their skin color (Woodson 2014, 90). Woodson also deftly uses the poems to demonstrate the difficulty of straddling two cultures as a child -- the religious upbringing of her childhood and her own skepticism, returning to Greenville after living in Brooklyn for a while, learning to realize the difference between orally telling stories (and having them thought lies) and writing them down and having them recognized (and lauded) as fiction. Woodson's poems perfectly capture the bemusement of a child at having someone mock their style of speech or the confusion at a teacher's disappointment that she isn't more like her older sister.
Woodson subtly scatters figurative speech throughout the poems in Brown Girl Dreaming. In "Second Daughter's Second Day", she juxtaposes the image of her baby hands against the hands of several civil rights figures:
I do not know if these hands will become
Malcom'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... (Woodson 2014, 5)
This juxtaposition serves to allow Woodson to look back and wonder what her hands will accomplish, born in the turmoil of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Woodson also effectively uses simile to give her poems a richness of sensory language. She describes her grandparents' love as a blanket, enveloping Woodson and her brother and sister in its warmth. In the poem "Hair Night", Woodson (2014) compares her sister's voice to "a hand on my shoulder" as Odella reads aloud to the young Jacqueline while their grandmother does Woodson's hair on Saturday night (84). The figurative language seems to come organically in the poems. The words aren't flowery or flamboyant, but they still effectively create a sense of what Woodson felt, saw, heard, or otherwise experienced as a child. Probably the best and most visual use of figurative language in the novel occurs when stories first begin to swirl through Woodson's imagination, begging for her to write them down. She uses personification to describe the stories that appear in her head saying, "The story / wakes up and walks all over the room. Sits in a chair, / crosses one leg over the other, says / Let me introduce myself. Then just starts going on and on" (Woodson 2014, 217). As a sometime writer, I can say that Woodson's description of the moment when something pops into your head, and insists that you write it down right now, thank you, is spot on.
Woodson also judiciously uses pauses in her poetry. They're purposeful and built into the poems to allow the moment to percolate and roll around on the tongue and in the brain of the reader. The pauses help set certain words and phrases apart from the rest of the poems. Generally, these are nuggets of insight the adult Woodson can see in the events of her childhood.
The book should appeal to middle grades. The free verse format of the poems can often make you forget you're reading poetry at all. Woodson's language is accessible, but she doesn't condescend to her juvenile audience. In fact, there are several moments where Woodson couches issues like learning disabilities or fatal illnesses in so much figurative language that an older or more observant younger reader will immediately understand what Woodson is saying. Those moments are few and far between, so it won't make younger readers feel as if they can't follow the main plot lines of the novel. The book will also appeal to adult readers and older students who enjoy reading memoirs. To most students, Woodson's childhood is simultaneously unfamiliar with its historical setting in the 1960s and 1970s and yet the struggles to read, the delight in finding a book with characters who looked like her, the bullying at the hands of other children in Greenville are all familiar topics to many young readers. The memoir can also offer readers insight into the civil rights era from the point-of-view of a child. Younger readers might also appreciate learning about the civil rights era from a narrator that is their age and learning about Woodson's personal experiences with racism.
All of the poems are uniformly excellent. There is not a single poem that feels out of place in this novel. Even the last two poems, which are written from the perspective of the adult Woodson feel organic and natural in their place at the end of the novel. The two poems before the last two serve as a bridge between Woodson's childhood and how it has informed the outlook she now has as an adult.
The novel contains a brief table of contents. It doesn't list all the poems, which makes it difficult to track down a specific poem. Woodson divided the memoir into five parts, and the table of contents lists those parts. It also includes a family tree that includes four generations of Woodson's family. Woodson also includes family photos of her parents, various aunts and uncles, her grandparents, and her two brothers and sister. All readers will enjoy being able to put faces to the names in the book.
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Spotlight on...
"Hope Onstage"
Until the curtain comes up and he's standing there,
ten years old and alone in the center of the P.S. 106 stage,
no one knew
my big brother could sing. He is dressed
as a shepherd, his voice
soft and low, more sure than any sound I've ever heard
come out of him. My quiet big brother
who only speaks
when asked, has little to say to any of us, except
when he's talking about science or comic books, now
has a voice that is circling the air,
landing clear and sweet around us.
....................................................................................
Maybe, I am thinking, there is something hidden
like this, in all of us. A small gift from the universe
waiting to be discovered. (Woodson 2014, 232-233)
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Throughout Brown Girl Dreaming, Woodson struggles to live up to the scholastic examples of her older brother Hope and older sister Odella. Both Hope and Odella were excellent students in school, and Woodson often describes how easy learning came to them and how much she struggled with school. She also details the disappointment her teachers visibly felt once they realized that she was not going to be a model student, like Odella. We all know how it feels to be compared to someone else -- to our siblings, our classmates -- but like Woodson says in "Hope Onstage" we can all do something well.
What is your gift? Can you cook, draw, dance, sing, build things with Legos or Tinker Toys? Do you work well with small children? (And believe me, that is a gift!) Can you envision the way a building should look? Fix cars? Tell us about it.
Write a poem, a story, an essay, or even draw a picture that describes your gift. You can even share a moment when you realized you had this particular gift. Students who are willing to share can upload their work to the class blog or give an oral presentation to the class.
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Works Cited
Woodson, Jacqueline. 2014. Brown Girl Dreaming. New York: Nancy Paulson Books.
