Brown Girl Dreaming

ALSO BY JACQUELINE WOODSON

Last Summer with Maizon

The Dear One

Maizon at Blue Hill

Between Madison and Palmetto

I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This

From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun

The House You Pass on the Way

If You Come Softly

Lena

Miracle’s Boys

Hush

Locomotion

Behind You

Feathers

After Tupac and D Foster

Peace, Locomotion

Beneath a Meth Moon

NANCY PAULSEN BOOKS

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Copyright © 2014 by Jacqueline Woodson.

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“Dreams,” and “Poem [2]” from
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES
by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

“Twistin’ the Night Away” written by Sam Cooke. Published by ABKCO Music, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-698-19570-7

This book is for my family— past, present and future.
With love.

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

—Langston Hughes

I am born on a Tuesday at 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.

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 . . .

Good enough name for me,
my father said

the day I was born.

Don’t see why

she can’t have it, too.

But the women said no.

My mother first.

Then each aunt, pulling my pink blanket back

patting the crop of thick curls

tugging at my new toes

touching my cheeks.

We won’t have a girl named Jack,
my mother said.

And my father’s sisters whispered,

A boy named Jack was bad enough.

But only so my mother could hear.

Name a girl Jack,
my father said,

and she can’t help but

grow up strong.

Raise her right,
my father said,

and she’ll make that name her own.

Name a girl Jack

and people will look at her twice,
my father said.

For no good reason but to ask if her parents

were crazy,
my mother said.

And back and forth it went until I was Jackie

and my father left the hospital mad.

My mother said to my aunts,

Hand me that pen,
wrote

Jacqueline
where it asked for a name.

Jacqueline, just in case

someone thought to drop the
ie.

Jacqueline, just in case

I grew up and wanted something a little bit longer

and further away from

Jack.