Another Brooklyn (10 page)

Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don't always do or say what a writer wishes. I am often asked to explain this and find that I can't—when I am inside my novel, it makes sense. But once I emerge from the world I've created, I find it difficult to go back to the moments before my characters walked through it with me. I guess in many ways, the characters a writer creates have always existed
somewhere
.

Long before I began to sketch the lives of August, Gigi, Angela, and Sylvia, I was thinking about
what it means to grow up girl in this country—remembering and imagining, as the poet Rilke wrote, “the powerful, the uncommon, the awakening of stones.” So while
Another Brooklyn
is a work of fiction, for the years the story took to feel “done,” I have lived inside the lives of my characters, asking questions of myself about their own survival—who makes it big, who doesn't, who lives, what will they wear, do, say, how long or short is their hair, how old will they be at the beginning, in the end?

Who will they love? How will they leave us, and what will they leave behind?

And, most of all: What is the bigger story?

I do know that as the novel takes shape on the page, it's hard for characters' lives not to intersect with the writer's own life. As we unpack our characters' stories and actions, it's hard not to unpack our own history. In
Another Brooklyn
,
I looked back to my teenage years, mining them, rediscovering the deep love I had for my friends, the startling joy and fear of first loves, the will's intensity to survive, and the slow-motion ferocity of the end of childhood.

When I started writing
Another Brooklyn
,
I wanted to write about the bonds we share as young people and of all the parables of those bonds. I wanted to set this story in Bushwick—the neighborhood of my childhood, the neighborhood I once knew so well.

A writer writes to hold on. I wanted the Bushwick of my childhood remembered on the page—so I created four girls who were fascinating and foreign to me, stepping far outside of my own childhood. Then I sat them down in a neighborhood that was once as familiar to me as air.

I did not know what August, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi would do or how they would do it. I did not know who would live and who wouldn't. I did not yet know how I would feel, or how I wanted to feel, in the end. But I wrote toward the hope and longing for the girls' survival. I wrote toward the questions I had as though I could plow through them with my own words and emerge more conscious and clearheaded.

Do I know more now? About girlhood? About what it means to be a woman of color, vibrant and
visible and adored? About what it means to hold on to that love and then, just as quickly, let it go? I think so . . .

Another Brooklyn
took me on a journey. I looked up from the finished manuscript a little older, more thoughtful, and ever thankful for the village of women who have supported me as I wrote: my partner, Juliet Widoff; my sisters from other mothers—Linda Villarosa, Jana Welch, Toshi Reagon, Bob Alotta, An Na, Cher Willems, Nancy Paulsen, Kathleen Nishimoto, Kirby Kim, Charlotte Sheedy, Jane Sasseen, Jayme Lynes, Odella Woodson . . . this list could go on and on.

My brothers from other fathers—Ellery Washington, Nick Flynn, Chris Myers, Kwame Alexander, Jason Reynolds . . . this list, too, could go on and on.

This book wouldn't be here without my crew from the past—Donald Douglas, Michael Mewborn, Maria and Sam Ocasio, Renée and Emilio Harris, Sophia Ferguson, and Pat Haith.

Tracy Sherrod and Rosemarie Robotham
both helped me to shape this novel into something people living outside my head could understand. Thank you.

At the day's end, a writer lives alone with her story, wrestling with characters and settings, and the way light filters into and out of a scene. The deeper messages often escape her. Sometimes I take for granted the journey through the telling. At other times I curse the muse's power. But through it all, I live each day in deep gratitude.

—JW

JACQUELINE WOODSON
is the bestselling author of more than two dozen award-winning books for young adults, middle graders, and children, including the
New York
Times
bestselling memoir
Brown Girl Dreaming
,
which won the 2014 National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor Award, an NAACP Image Award, and the Sibert Honor Award. Woodson was recently named the Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

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.

“In this elegant and moving novel, Jacqueline Woodson explores the beauty and burden of growing up
Girl
in 1970s Brooklyn through the lens of one unforgettable narrator. The guarded hopes and whispered fears that August and her girlfriends share left me thinking about the limits and rewards of friendship well after the novel's end. Full of moments of grief, grace, and wonder,
Another Brooklyn
proves that Jacqueline Woodson is a master storyteller.”

—Angela Flournoy, author of the National Book Award finalist
The Turner House

“
Another Brooklyn
is a sort of fever dream, containing both the hard truths of life and the gentle beauty of memory. The story of a young girl trying to find herself in the midst of so many conflicting influences and desires swallowed me whole. Jacqueline Woodson has such an original vision, such a singular voice. I loved this book.”

—Ann Patchett,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Commonwealth
and
This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

“And Sister Jacqueline Woodson sings memory. Her words like summer lightning get caught in my throat, and I draw August up from Southern roots to a Brooklyn of a thousand names, where she and her three ‘sisters' learn to navigate a new season. A new herstory. Everywhere I turn, my dear Sister Jacqueline, I hear your words, a wild sea pausing in the wind. And I sing.”

—Sister Sonia Sanchez

“Jacqueline Woodson's
Another Brooklyn
is another kind of book, another kind of beautiful, a lyrical, hallucinatory, heartbreaking, and powerful novel. Every gorgeous page leads to another revelation, another poignant event or memory. This is an incredible and memorable book.”

—Edwidge Danticat, author of
Claire of the Sea Light

“Jacqueline Woodson's spare, emphatic novel about young women growing up in 1970s Bushwick brings some of our deepest silences—about danger, loss, and black girls' coming-of-age—into powerful lyric speech.
Another Brooklyn
is heartbreaking and restorative, a gorgeous and generous paean to all we must leave behind on the path to becoming ourselves.”

—Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
Life on Mars
and
Ordinary Light

“Jacqueline Woodson's
Another Brooklyn
is a wonder. With a poet's soul and a poet's eye for image and an ear for lyrical language, Woodson delivers a moving meditation on girlhood, love, loss, hurt, friendship, family, faith, longing, and desire. This novel is a love letter to a place, an era, and a group of young women whom we've never seen depicted quite this way or this tenderly. Woodson has created an unforgettable, entrancing narrator in August. I'll go anywhere she leads me.”

—Naomi Jackson, author of
The Star Side of Bird Hill

“Grief and friendship are the hallmarks of this story that leaps from the pages in a musical prose that is exacting and breathtaking. Woodson illustrates the damning invisibility and unrelenting objectification of girls in this tender tale that effuses a spirit of unrelenting hopefulness.
Another Brooklyn
is a tableau of the personal and the collective that is at once graceful, restrained, and potent. It is an exquisite telling.”

—Lauren Francis-Sharma, author of
'Til the Well Runs Dry

MEMOIR

Brown Girl Dreaming

YOUNG ADULT & MIDDLE GRADE FICTION

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

COVER DESIGN BY ROBIN BILARDELLO

COVER PHOTOGRAPH © THOMAS HOEPKER/MAGNUM PHOTOS

ANOTHER BROOKLYN.
Copyright © 2016 by Jacqueline Woodson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN: 978-0-06-235998-8

EPub Edition August 2016 ISBN 9780062446329

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