Brown Girl Dreaming - LOWE'S GROVE NAVIGATORS (PDF)

  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 PAU LSEN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) LLC 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia New Zealand | India | South Africa | China penguin.com A Penguin Random House Company Copyright © 2014 by Jacqueline Woodson. Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. “Dreams,” and “Poem [2]” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HU GHES 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 Version_1  This book is for my family— past, present and future. With love.  CONTENTS family tree PART I i am born PART II the stories of south carolina run like rivers PART III followed the sky’s mirrored constellation to freedom PART IV deep in my heart, i do believe PART V ready to change the world author’s note thankfuls family photos    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   february 12, 1963 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.  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 . . .