Brown Girl Dreaming

The National Book Award winner this year for young people's literature was Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson. Initially I didn't think it would interest me, as it is a book-length poem about the experiences of an African-American girl growing up in the north and south. As old as I am I should know better, that it's not the subject, it's the quality of the writing. Interested in seeing if this would be good for sixth-graders, I checked it out, and it's brilliant.

Woodson is about my age, born in the early '60s, in Ohio. Her mother came from South Carolina, so when her parents split she moved there. Her father railed against the South, with good reason, of course. Woodson lives with her loving grandparents, but when her mother moves to New York City she moves, too, but summers down in Greenville.

I'm hard pressed to think of any cataclysmic that happens in this book. Just the stuff of life, but she renders it so beautifully that it reminds us that the stuff of daily life is cataclysmic--every day brings a new surprise, and our lives are like flowing rivers, branching and eddying.

The poetry is free verse, although she breaks in every now again with some haikus. Some are very pointed, like:

"In the stores downtown
we're always followed around
just because we're brown."

Racial prejudice is always on the surface, such as when she accompanies her grandmother to ride the bus:

"Even though the laws have changed
my grandmother still takes us
to the back of the bus when we go downtown
in the rain. It's easier, my grandmother says,
than having white folks look at me like I'm dirt."

But we also follow Woodson as a future writer. It's her older sister who's the smart one:

"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."

Woodson, though, learns to love to read and tell stories:

"If someone had taken
that book out of my hand
said, You're too old for this
maybe
I'd never have believed
that someone who looked like me
could be in the pages of the book
that someone who looked like me
had a story.

You may find yourself shedding a tear or two by the time the book is over, especially when Woodson's beloved grandfather, who she calls Daddy, dies:

"On the day he is buried, my sister and I wear white dresses,
the boys in white shirts and ties.
We walk slowly through Nicholtown, a long parade of people
who loved him--Hope, Dell, Roman and me
leading it. This is how we bury our dead--a silent parade
through the streets, showing the world our sadness, others
who knew my grandfather joining in on the walk,
children waving,
grown-ups dabbing at their eyes."

It turns out it's too late to order any more books, so Brown Girl Dreaming will have to wait for next year's class. But it's a book for all ages, as the best books are.