Eden C. Stein
The memoir in verse 'Brown Girl Dreaming' begins with a family tree and the Langston Hughes poem “Dream Deferred.” It is divided into five parts. The first part, “i am born[15],” begins in 1963 and introduces the topics of segregation, and differences between North and South, right from the start, “I am born Negro here and colored there”.16 She was born to a Southern mother and Northern father, in Ohio, with her father’s highly educated and professional family close by. Woodson also mentions the titles of the subsequent sections of her memoir in the first few poems, and notes the major influences of the times also influenced her identity,
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 pen17
Before she is 1 year old her mother takes her and her brother and sister to her own family’s home in Greenville, South Carolina. In the South, her first actual memories of racism, in the form of sitting in the back of the bus take place, yet at the same time she is told by her grandmother “we’re as good as anybody”.18
Part II of the memoir, “the stories of south carolina run like rivers,” explore in depth Woodson’s happy childhood growing up in the rural South. Her grandmother, descendent of enslaved people, is strong and loving, and an active member of the Jehovah's Witness church, which she has the children all participate in while Jacqueline’s mother moves to New York City where her sister is to start a new life, eventually planning on bringing her children there. In the poem “south carolina at war,” she reports, “We can’t go to downtown Greenville without seeing the teenagers walking into stores, sittin where brown people aren’t allowed to sit and getting carried out, their bodies limp, their faces calm”.19 She also sees political meetings, marchers, and hears about the training the sit-in demonstrators go through. Her upbringing is both loving and strict, and she is not allowed to use words such as ain’t, huh, y’all, git, gonna or even Ma’am. Throughout the book Woodson interspersed a series of “how to listen” poems which are only three lines each but explore some of the most important influences of her youth. Her writing style is clean, sparse, with only rare forays into figurative language. Her older sister is seen as brilliant, while she herself is a slow reader though she very much loves stories. Toward the end of this section the children receive a letter from their mother informing them she is coming to get them, and that she has a new baby on the way. Jacqueline’s days as a Southern child and the baby of the family are over, and she is clearly regretful about both.
Part III is set up as analogous to earlier moves of brown-skinned people North with the title “followed the sky’s mirrored constellation to freedom. Now she experiences a rich urban childhood in Brooklyn with its own influence on her racial identity, brought to light by people’s comments about her brother, “Our baby brother Roman, was born pale as dust, His soft brown curls and eyelashes stop people on the street. Whose angel child is this? They want to know”. 20 And most importantly, her identity as a writer begins to form. She loves school right from the beginning though she is often compared to her sister and falls up short. She is fascinated by her first notebook and begins to make up stories. Their life in Brooklyn is not a privileged one, and her younger brother develops pica, eating lead paint, and ends up hospitalized for an extended period. Her mother’s brother Robert, a big influence on her, ends up in Rikers Island and the state prison Dannemora, where they visit him, and he becomes a Muslim. It seems like he is one of the first to recognize her talent, evident in the poem “believing,” while her own mother is more skeptical. “Keep making up stories, my uncle says. You’re lying, my mother says”.21 While they have lost touch with her biological father and their Ohio family, summers are spent in Greenville, and her bond with Gunnar, her maternal grandfather whom they call Daddy, is strong. However, the siblings are laughed at there for being different, and they do not clearly belong to either the North or the South.
In Part IV, “deep in my heart, i do believe,” Jacqueline struggles to write down the stories she makes up, and it does not come easily to her at first. Her exposure to poetry and literature begins and she falls in love with the poets they study in school such as Robert Frost and Langston Hughes. Her talent as a storyteller and writer becomes evident in school when she can retell Oscar Wilde’s “The Selfish Giant” verbatim in front of the class and writes a book of seven poems about Butterflies. She catalogues the music of the times, life as a child in the streets of Brooklyn, and as a Jehovah’s Witness with the atheistic influences of her mother and grandfather. When Gunnar dies her grandmother sells the house in Greenville and they no longer return to the South.
Part V, the final section of the memoir, is aptly titled “ready to change the world.” The teenage Woodson is clearly impacted by the chaotic times, and she mentions Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, and the Vietnam War. The clarity of the brown girl’s dream has solidified by the closing poems of the book. In “every wish, one dream” she finally confesses what it always was and is, and the fact that she has achieved this and more in her career as a writer is one of life’s greatest inspirations.