I don't often write a personal response to a recently-published book, but on occasion, when I am blown away by admiration and delight, I will make an exception. Jacqueline Woodson's memoir-in-verse, Brown Girl Dreaming, is one such occasion.
I might not have known about the book if I had not happened to know the author in a very six-degrees-of-separation way already. I was having dinner with my friend Odella, and we were, of course, talking about books. She casually tossed in that she has a sister and that her sister writes books. I said, "Oh, I wonder whether I've heard of her."
"You might have," said Odella. "She's pretty well-known in children's and young adult literature these days. Her name's Jacqueline Woodson."
"Holy shit," I yelped. "You mean the one who's friends with my poetry teacher Pam Laskin from the CCNY grad program? I was always a little jealous of her, because she lives on Pam's block, and every time Pam talks about Jackie Woodson and what a great writer she is and how much she loves having Jackie as a neighbor, I start thinking, 'Wahhh, Pam likes this Jackie better than she likes me!'"
I was half-kidding, of course. But the fact is, I'd heard Jackie Woodson's work spoken of with enormous respect and admiration by my friend and writing mentor Pam Laskin (herself no mean poet and children's writer) many times before I ever picked up a book Jackie had written. And one memorable day, during last winter's blizzard season, I'd gamely agreed to mush down to a small theater on the Upper West Side because Pam had tickets to a play that was a dramatization of Jackie's picture book Show Ways, about the legacy of quilting in a Black family, handed down from woman to woman since the days when the quilts were pieced by slaves as maps to show the northward route to freedom. Unfortunately, although we made it to the theater despite the chest-high piles of dirty snow lining the streets, the cast did not - so the performance was cancelled. Our outing turned into lunch at Zabar's and I never got to judge for myself whether Jackie Woodson was as fabulous as Pam kept telling me.
The poetry world is a small one, and people in it run across one another at regular intervals, so late in the spring of last year I had the opportunity to hear Jackie speak at a Poetry Outreach event at CUNY/CCNY, where I learned that she was funny, profound, succinct, and brilliant - basically, no surprise, because so is Odella. And in any case, I could have spotted Jackie in a roomful of strangers as Odella's sister, because they look very much alike, which is a plus on both sides, because both of them are beautiful and have smiles that light up the sky.
A confession: I have stopped reading the New York Times Book Review. Most of the time, when they are raving about some book and telling me I have to read it, I go to the bookstore, pick the book up, look it over, and quickly find out that the New York Times Book Review's tastes are no rule for mine. Nowadays, I just browse the books that catch my eye in the New Arrivals section and see if they grab me. Much of the time, I am sorry to say, they don't.
So I didn't know about Brown Girl Dreaming until Odella mentioned on her Gratitude List that her sister's latest book had been well-received and was being considered for a National Book Award. And that it was a memoir of their childhood, written in verse, and that - another item on the gratitude list - Jackie had only put in her nice memories about Odella. (Odella hinted darkly that this might not necessarily been a given, but I feel this was merely her usual self-deprecating wit.)
A Digression: What, my Gentle Readers may wonder, is the Gratitude List? Very simple - I am in a small group of women who daily exchange emails regarding things we are grateful for in our lives. We try to come up with 5 items a day, and it gives me a shift of perspective whenever I am feeling like my entire life had been nothing but a series of hoagie-sized shit sandwiches. There is something about being forced to acknowledge that I am looking at my blessings through that shard of distorting glass immortalized by Hans Christian Andersen in "The Snow Queen", perversely and deliberately turning them into burdens, that gives me a very healthy dose of Reality Check. And even when there is something legitimately dreadful going on in my day, usually one of the other ladies will say something so funny or profound that it kicks me off the pity pot. (Recent Gratitude Items, for example, have included "Husbands who make weird noises" - as it turns out, all of us married ladies have one of those. The married are grateful that the husband is around to make some of the weird noises and to be sent out of bed with a flashlight at 2 a.m. to investigate others, and the unmarried among us are grateful not to be hearing the weird noises generated by the husbands.)
Today I am grateful for Brown Girl Dreaming. Here's why.
1. It is wonderful to find a new author you love, whose books you haven't read all the juice out of yet. The fact that I loved this book means there are more of Ms. Woodson's books out there to gulp down in a day (as I did this one, reading it cover-to-cover, non-stop, all afternoon) and then revisit to savor afresh, time after time.
2. Having been fortunate enough to do a postgraduate degree in writing has given me an appreciation for craftsmanship that I didn't have before. When an author is in complete command of her voice and, with apparent effortlessness (the kind that betokens, as I well know, hour upon hour of painstaking and agonized revision and excision that the reader of the finished product never suspects took place, because everything on the page flows like silk thread off a spool) shifts us back and forth through time, perspective, and theme, all I can do is gasp with awestruck envy, thinking, "Wow, I can't believe how well she did that! Brava! Brava!"
3. I love a writer who can juggle a lot of balls at the same time. Take, for example, Part I - "I Am Born." Well, right there, I smiled, because it's an allusion to the title of Chapter 1 of David Copperfield, and so I know that a Bildungsroman is on its way. It is definitely cheeky and audacious to steal from Dickens, so that earns points with me as well - let's remember, as T.S. Eliot pointed out, that "Good writers borrow - great writers steal."
Ms. Woodson proceeds to lay her cards on the table with a magisterial aplomb that left me reeling with admiration. She instantly establishes that this is a book about legacy . . . the legacy implicit in being born, as the title poem "February 12, 1963" states, in
a country caught
between Black and White.
By the second day of her life - and the second poem of the book, "Second Daughter's Second Day on Earth," she is juxtaposing herself and her tiny, yet-barely-awakening consciousness, against the monumental events of the day. Martin Luther King, Jr. is planning the March on Washington; Malcolm X is preaching revolution from a soapbox in Harlem; six-year-old Ruby Bridges was walking into an all-white school past the jeers and threats a mere three years before, so that brown children not yet born or dreamed of would be able to follow; James Baldwin is writing novels and essays that would change the world; Rosa Parks is reflecting that seven years have now passed since her historic bus ride. It is an impressive heritage to live up to; how will she do it? The poet pans back on her infant self like a camera, focusing at last on those small, helpless baby hands that adults love to marvel at -
My fingers curl into fists, automatically
This is the way, my mother said,
of every baby's hand.
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 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...
4. Who doesn't like to glimpse people we only got to know as grown-ups through the lens of "Tell me a story about when you were a little girl"? Especially when you find out that you were that same little girl? Here is my friend, doing exactly what I did at her age when, like Odella, I was known as:
The Reader
When we can't find my sister, we know
she is under the kitchen table, a book in her hand
a glass of milk and a small bowl of peanuts beside her.
We know we can call Odella's name out loud,
slap the table hard with our hands,
dance around it singing
"She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain"
so many times the song makes us sick
and the circling makes us dizzy
and still
my sister will do nothing more
than slowly turn the page.
It's Odella under the table; it's me in the forked branches of the pink crab apple tree, licking a Good Humor bar I'm holding in my left hand while awkwardly trying to turn the pages of The Secret Garden without getting ice cream drips on them with my right; it's Francie Nolan on her Williamsburg fire escape, in the shadow of the Tree that Grows in Brooklyn, noshing from a little blue bowl of dime store candy and perusing her cherished library book (she is reading her way through the stacks, alphabetically), "as happy as only a little girl could be with a fine book and a little bowl of candy." It's Everygirl who ever got teased for "always having your nose stuck in a book" but who knew being ragged on for being a bookworm was small potatoes compared with the the magic of being instantly transported into another and vastly more interesting world, merely by turning back the front cover with the alluring title and the fascinating picture and reading, "Chapter 1...I Am Born."
5. It is an immense joy to open a book by a living author and feel the tingle down my spine that tells me that greatness on the printed page still exists. In the age of the e-Everything, we bookworms get kind of nervous about that, you know.
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