Brown Girl Dreaming (11 page)

In the books, there’s always a happily ever after.

The ugly duckling grows into a swan, Pinocchio

becomes a boy.

The witch gets chucked into the oven by Gretel,

the Selfish Giant goes to heaven.

Even Winnie the Pooh seems to always get his honey.

Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother is freed

from the belly of the wolf.

When my sister reads to me, I wait for the moment

when the story moves faster—toward the happy ending

that I know is coming.

On the bus home from Greenville, I wake to the almost

happy ending, my mother standing at the station, Roman

in his stroller, his smile bright, his arms reaching for us

but we see the white hospital band like a bracelet

on his wrist. Tomorrow he will return there.

We are not all finally and safely

home.

For a long time, our little brother

goes back and forth to the hospital, his body

weak from the lead, his brain

not doing what a brain is supposed to do. We don’t

understand why he’s so small, has tubes

coming from his arms, sleeps and sleeps . . .

when we visit him.

But one day,

he comes home. The holes in the wall

are covered over and left

unpainted, his bed pulled away from
temptation,

nothing for him to peel away.

He is four now, curls long gone, his dark brown hair

straight as a bone, strange to us but

our little brother, the four of us again

in one place.

Late August now

home from Greenville and ready

for what the last of the summer brings me.

All the dreams this city holds

right outside—just step through the door and walk

two doors down to where

my new best friend, Maria, lives. Every morning,

I call up to her window,
Come outside

or she rings our bell,
Come outside.

Her hair is crazily curling down past her back,

the Spanish she speaks like a song

I am learning to sing.

Mi amiga, Maria.

Maria, my friend.

What is your one dream,

my friend Maria asks me.

Your one wish come true?

My sister, Dell, reads and reads

and never learns

to jump rope or

play handball against the factory wall on the corner.

Never learns to sprint

barefoot down the block

to become

the fastest girl

on Madison Street.

Doesn’t learn

to hide the belt or steal the bacon

or kick the can . . .

But I do and because of this

Tomboy
becomes my new name.

My walk, my mother says,

reminds her of my father.

When I move long-legged and fast away from her

she remembers him.

When my mother calls,

Hope Dell Jackie—inside!

the game is over.

No more reading beneath the streetlight

for Dell. But for my brother and me

it’s no more
anything!
No more

steal the bacon

coco levio 1-2-3

Miss Lucy had a baby

spinning tops

double Dutch.

No more

freeze tag

hide the belt

hot peas and butter.

No more

singing contests on the stoop.

No more

ice cream truck chasing:

Wait! Wait, ice cream man! My mother’s gonna
give me money!

No more getting wet in the johnny pump

or standing with two fisted hands out in front of me,

a dime hidden in one, chanting,

Dumb school, dumb school, which hand’s it in?

When my mother calls,

Hope Dell Jackie—inside!

we complain as we walk up the block in the twilight:

Everyone else is allowed to stay outside till dark.

Our friends standing in the moment—

string halfway wrapped around a top,

waiting to be tagged and unfrozen,

searching for words to a song,

dripping from the johnny pump,

silent in the middle of
Miss Lucy had a . . .

The game is over for the evening and all we can hear

is our friends’

Aw . . . man!!

Bummer!

For real?! This early?!

Dang it!

Shoot. Your mama’s mean!

Early birds!

Why she gotta mess up our playing like that?

Jeez. Now

the game’s over!

My mother says:

When Mama tried to teach me

to make collards and potato salad

I didn’t want to learn.

She opens the box of pancake mix, adds milk

and egg, stirs. I watch

grateful for the food we have now—syrup waiting

in the cabinet, bananas to slice on top.

It’s Saturday morning.

Five days a week, she leaves us

to work at an office back in Brownsville.

Saturday we have her to ourselves, all day long.

Me and Kay didn’t want to be inside cooking.

She stirs the lumps from the batter, pours it

into the buttered, hissing pan.

Wanted to be with our friends

running wild through Greenville.

There was a man with a peach tree down the road.

One day Robert climbed over that fence, filled a bucket

with peaches. Wouldn’t share them with any of us but

told us where the peach tree was. And that’s where we

wanted to be

sneaking peaches from that man’s tree, throwing

the rotten ones

at your uncle!

Mama wanted us to learn to cook.

Ask the boys, we said. And Mama knew that wasn’t fair

girls inside and boys going off to steal peaches!

So she let all of us

stay outside until suppertime.

And by then,
she says, putting our breakfast on the table,

it was too late.

When Maria’s mother makes

arroz con habichuelas y tostones,

we trade dinners. If it’s a school night,

I’ll run to Maria’s house, a plate of my mother’s

baked chicken with Kraft mac and cheese,

sometimes box corn bread,

sometimes canned string beans,

warm in my hands, ready for the first taste

of Maria’s mother’s garlicky rice and beans,

crushed green bananas

fried and salted and warm . . .

Maria will be waiting, her own plate covered in foil.
Sometimes

we sit side by side on her stoop, our traded plates

in our laps.

What are you guys eating?
the neighborhood kids ask

but we never answer, too busy shoveling the food we love

into our mouths.

Your mother makes the best chicken,
Maria says.
The best

corn bread. The best everything!

Yeah,
I say.

I guess my grandma taught her something after all.

It’s easier to make up stories

than it is to write them down. When I speak,

the words come pouring out of me. The story

wakes up and walks all over the room. Sits in a chair,

crosses one leg over the other, says,

Let me introduce myself.
Then just starts going on and on.

But as I bend over my composition notebook,

only my name

comes quickly. Each letter, neatly printed

between the pale blue lines. Then white

space and air and me wondering,
How do I

spell introduce?
Trying again and again

until there is nothing but pink

bits of eraser and a hole now

where a story should be.

Ms. Moskowitz calls us one by one and says,

Come up to the board and write your name.

When it’s my turn, I walk down the aisle from

my seat in the back, write
Jacqueline Woodson
—

the way I’ve done a hundred times, turn back

toward my seat, proud as anything

of my name in white letters on the dusty blackboard.

But Ms. Moskowitz stops me, says,

In cursive too, please.
But the
q
in Jacqueline is too hard

so I write
Jackie Woodson
for the first time. Struggle

only a little bit with the
k.

Is that what you want us to call you?

I want to say,
No, my name is Jacqueline

but I am scared of that cursive
q,
know

I may never be able to connect it to
c
and
u

so I nod even though

I am lying.

Even though so many people think my sister and I

are twins,

I am the other Woodson, following behind her each year

into the same classroom she had the year before. Each

teacher smiles when they call my name.
Woodson,
they

say.
You must be Odella’s sister.
Then they nod

slowly, over and over again, call me Odella. Say,

I’m sorry! You look so much like her and she is SO brilliant!

then wait for my brilliance to light up

the classroom. Wait for my arm to fly into

the air with every answer. Wait for my pencil

to move quickly through the too-easy math problems

on the mimeographed sheet. Wait for me to stand

before class, easily reading words even high school

students stumble over. And they keep waiting.

And waiting

and waiting

and waiting

until one day, they walk into the classroom,

almost call me Odel—then stop

remember that I am the other Woodson

and begin searching for brilliance

at another desk.

On the radio, Sly and the Family Stone are singing

“Family Affair,” the song turned up because it’s

my mother’s favorite, the one she plays again and again.

You can’t leave ’cause your heart is there,
Sly sings.

But you can’t stay ’cause you been somewhere else.

The song makes me think of Greenville and Brooklyn

the two worlds my heart lives in now. I am writing

the lyrics down, trying to catch each word before it’s gone

then reading them back, out loud to my mother. This

is how I’m learning. Words come slow to me

on the page until

I memorize them, reading the same books over

and over, copying

lyrics to songs from records and TV commercials,

the words

settling into my brain, into my memory.

Not everyone learns

to read this way—memory taking over when the rest

of the brain stops working,

but I do.

Sly is singing the words

over and over as though

he is trying

to convince me that this whole world

is just a bunch of families

like ours

going about their own family affairs.

Stop daydreaming,
my mother says.

So I go back to writing down words

that are songs and stories and whole new worlds

tucking themselves into

my memory.

Before my teacher reads the poem,

she has to explain.

A birch,
she says,
is a kind of tree

then magically she pulls a picture

from her desk drawer and the tree is suddenly

real to us.

“When I see birches bend to left and right . . .”
she begins

“Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think”—

and when she reads, her voice drops down so low

and beautiful

some of us put our heads on our desks to keep

the happy tears from flowing

—“some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay

As ice-storms do.”

And even though we’ve never seen an ice storm

we’ve seen a birch tree, so we can imagine

everything we need to imagine

forever and ever

infinity

amen.

When I sit beneath

the shade of my block’s oak tree

the world disappears.