Brown Girl Dreaming

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Jacqueline Woodson, one of today’s finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse.  
Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson’s eloquent poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become.
 
Praise for Jacqueline Woodson:
Ms. Woodson writes with a sure understanding of the thoughts of young people, offering a poetic, eloquent narrative that is not simply a story . . . but a mature exploration of grown-up issues and self-discovery.”—The New York Times Book Review A National Book Award Winner
A Coretta Scott King Award Winner
A Newbery Honor Book
One of TIME MAGAZINE’s 100 Best YA Books of All Time“Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson’s highly lauded collection of free-verse poems about her childhood in New York and South Carolina, has language simple enough to be accessible to tweens and young teenagers and more than enough complexity to engage older readers. The winner of a Newbery Honor, NAACP Image Award, National Book Award and Coretta Scott King Award, Brown Girl Dreaming presents the story of Woodson’s experiences living with the remnants of Jim Crow during the 1960s and 1970s. The author confronts issues like faith, racism and sexual abuse using the elegant, spare language and powerful imagery she has come to be known for.” —TIME MAGAZINE“Gorgeous.”—Vanity Fair“A radiantly warm memoir.”—The Washington Post
“Moving and resonant . . . captivating.”—The Wall Street Journal
“This is a book full of poems that cry out to be learned by heart. These are poems that will, for years to come, be stored in our bloodstream.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A profoundly moving memoir.”—San Francisco Chronicle* “The writer’s passion for stories and storytelling permeates the memoir, explicitly addressed in her early attempts to write books and implicitly conveyed through her sharp images and poignant observations seen through the eyes of a child. Woodson’s ability to listen and glean meaning from what she hears lead to an astute understanding of her surroundings, friends, and family.”— Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW* “Mesmerizing journey through [Woodson’s] early years. . . . Her perspective on the volatile era in which she grew up is thoughtfully expressed in powerfully effective verse. . . . With exquisite metaphorical verse Woodson weaves a patchwork of her life experience . . . that covers readers with a warmth and sensitivity no child should miss. This should be on every library shelf.”—School Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW* “Woodson cherishes her memories and shares them with a graceful lyricism; her lovingly wrought vignettes of country and city streets will linger long after the page is turned. For every dreaming girl (and boy) with a pencil in hand (or keyboard) and a story to share.”—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW* “[Woodson’s] memoir in verse is a marvel, as it turns deeply felt remembrances of Woodson’s preadolescent life into art. . . . Her mother cautions her not to write about her family but, happily, many years later, she has and the result is both elegant and eloquent, a haunting book about memory that is itself altogether memorable.”—Booklist, STARRED REVIEW* “A memoir-in-verse so immediate that readers will feel they are experiencing the author’s childhood right along with her. . . . Most notably of all, perhaps, we trace her development as a nascent writer, from her early, overarching love of stories through her struggles to learn to read through the thrill of her first blank composition book to her realization that ‘words are [her] brilliance.’ The poetry here sings: specific, lyrical, and full of imagery. An extraordinary—indeed brilliant—portrait of a writer as a young girl.”—The Horn Book, STARRED REVIEW* “The effect of this confiding and rhythmic memoir is cumulative, as casual references blossom into motifs and characters evolve from quick references to main players. . . . Revealing slices of life, redolent in sight, sound, and emotion. . . . Woodson subtly layers her focus, with history and geography the background, family the middle distance, and her younger self the foreground. . . . Eager readers and budding writers will particularly see themselves in the young protagonist and recognize her reveling in the luxury of the library and unfettered delight in words. . . . A story of the ongoing weaving of a family tapestry, the following of an individual thread through a gorgeous larger fabric, with the tacit implication that we’re all traversing such rich landscapes. It will make young readers consider where their own threads are taking them.”—The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, STARRED REVIEW* “Woodson uses clear, evocative language. . . . A beautifully crafted work.”—Library Media Connection, STARRED REVIEW Jacqueline Woodson (www.jacquelinewoodson.com) is the winner of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults, the recipient of three Newbery Honors for After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers and Show Way, and a two-time finalist for the National Book Award for Locomotion and Hush. Other awards include the Coretta Scott King Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Miracle’s Boys. Her most recent books are her novel Beneath a Meth Moon and her picture books Each Kindness and This Is the Rope. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York. february 12, 1963I am born on a Tuesday at the University Hospital
Columbus, Ohio
USA—
a country caught
between Black and White.
I am born not long from the time
or far from the place
where
my great, great grandparents
worked the deep rich land
unfree
dawn till dusk
unpaid
drank cool water from scooped out gourds
looked up and followed
the sky’s mirrored constellation
to freedom.
I am born as the south explodes,
too many people too many years
enslaved then emancipated
but not free, the people
who look like me
keep fighting
and marching
and getting killed
so that today—
February 12, 1963
and every day from this moment on,
brown children, like me, can grow up
free. Can grow up
learning and voting and walking and riding
wherever we want.
I am born in Ohio but
the stories of South Carolina already run
like rivers
through my veins.
second daughter’s second day on earth  
My birth certificate says: Female Negro 
Mother: Mary Anne Irby, 22, Negro 
Father: Jack Austin Woodson, 25, Negro
 
In Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. 
is planning a march on Washington, where 
John F. Kennedy is president. 
In Harlem, Malcolm X is standing on a soapbox 
talking about a revolution. 
 
Outside the window of University Hospital, snow is slowly falling. So much already covers this vast Ohio ground.  
In Montgomery, only seven years have passed 
since Rosa Parks refused 
to give up 
her seat on a city bus. 
 
I am born brown-skinned, black-haired and wide-eyed. I am born Negro here and Colored there  
and somewhere else, 
the Freedom Singers have linked arms, 
their protests rising into song: 
Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome someday.  
and somewhere else, James Baldwin 
is writing about injustice, each novel, 
each essay, changing the world. 
 I do not yet know who I’ll be what I’ll say how I’ll say it . . .  
Not even three years have passed since a brown girl 
named Ruby Bridges 
walked into an all-white school. 
Armed guards surrounded her while hundreds 
of white people spat and called her names. 
 
She was six years old. 
 I do not know if I’ll be strong like Ruby. I do not know what the world will look like when I am finally able to walk, speak, write . . . Another Buckeye! 
the nurse says to my mother. Already, I am being named for this place. Ohio. The Buckeye State. 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 . . .   it’ll be scary sometimes  My great-great-grandfather on my father’s side 
was born free in Ohio, 
 
1832. 
 
Built his home and farmed his land, 
then dug for coal when the farming 
wasn’t enough. Fought hard 
in the war. His name in stone now 
on the Civil War Memorial: 
 William J. Woodson United States Colored Troops, Union, Company B 5th Regt.  
A long time dead but living still 
among the other soldiers 
on that monument in Washington, D.C. 
 
His son was sent to Nelsonville 
lived with an aunt 
 
William Woodson 
the only brown boy in an all-white school. 
 You’ll face this in your life someday, my mother will tell us 
over and over again. 
A moment when you walk into a room and  no one there is like you.  It’ll be scary sometimes. But think of William Woodson and you’ll be all right. 
 
 
the beginning  
I cannot write a word yet but at three, 
I now know the letter J love the way it curves into a hook 
that I carefully top with a straight hat 
the way my sister has taught me to do. Love 
the sound of the letter and the promise 
that one day this will be connected to a full name, 
 
my own 
 
that I will be able to write 
 
by myself. 
 
Without my sister’s hand over mine, 
making it do what I cannot yet do. 
 
How amazing these words are that slowly come to me. 
How wonderfully on and on they go. 
 Will the words end, I ask 
whenever I remember to. 
 Nope, my sister says, all of five years old now, 
and promising me 
 
infinity.
 
 
 
hair night  
Saturday night smells of biscuits and burning hair. 
Supper done and my grandmother has transformed 
the kitchen into a beauty shop. Laid across the table 
is the hot comb, Dixie Peach hair grease, 
horsehair brush, parting stick 
and one girl at a time. 
Jackie first, my sister says, 
our freshly washed hair damp 
and spiraling over toweled shoulders 
and pale cotton nightgowns. 
She opens her book to the marked page, 
curls up in a chair pulled close 
to the wood-burning stove, bowl of peanuts in her lap. 
The words 
in her books are so small, I have to squint 
to see the letters. Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates. The House at Pooh Corner. Swiss Family Robinson. Thick books 
dog-eared from the handing down from neighbor 
to neighbor. My sister handles them gently, 
marks the pages with torn brown pieces 
of paper bag, wipes her hands before going 
beyond the hardbound covers. 
Read to me, I say, my eyes and scalp already stinging 
from the tug of the brush through my hair. 
And while my grandmother sets the hot comb 
on the flame, heats it just enough to pull 
my tight curls straighter, my sister’s voice 
wafts over the kitchen, 
past the smell of hair and oil and flame, settles 
like a hand on my shoulder and holds me there. 
I want silver skates like Hans’s, a place 
on a desert island. I have never seen the ocean 
but this, too, I can imagine—blue water pouring 
over red dirt. 
As my sister reads, the pictures begin forming 
as though someone has turned on a television, 
lowered the sound, 
pulled it up close. 
Grainy black-and-white pictures come slowly at me 
Deep. Infinite. Remembered 
 On a bright December morning long ago . . .  
My sister’s clear soft voice opens up the world to me. 
I lean in 
so hungry for it. 
 Hold still now, my grandmother warns. 
So I sit on my hands to keep my mind 
off my hurting head, and my whole body still. 
But the rest of me is already leaving, 
the rest of me is already gone.
 
 
 
the butterfly poems  
No one believes me when I tell them 
I am writing a book about butterflies, 
even though they see me with the Childcraft encyclopedia 
heavy on my lap opened to the pages where 
the monarch, painted lady, giant swallowtail and 
queen butterflies live. Even one called a buckeye. 
 
When I write the first words 
Wings of a butterfly whisper . . .  
no one believes a whole book could ever come 
from something as simple as 
butterflies that don’t even, my brother says, 
live that long.  
But on paper, things can live forever. 
On paper, a butterfly 
never dies. US

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