belle book and candor: A Girl Grows Up In Brooklyn

"I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this."

Black girlhood has never been written with such poetic potency.

Even though I grew up in a suburban South Texas neighborhood during the 1990s and went to predominately White schools, I understood this story fully. Reading this book was like re-entering my childhood, just this time I got to view it from a distance, finding myself appreciating the sometimes arduous, often awkward journey that was growing up Girl.

It is true that we all experience growing pains and angst. We all at some points of our lives vie to belong somewhere and find “our people”. We all have felt the flutter of first love. We all begin to see our elders live confusing, convoluted lives, and hope to God we don’t turn out like them in the end. We have all become aware of our maturing bodies, wondering where our unique beauty lies within the images we see on TV screens. We all have friendships that are fleeting, sometimes one-sided, but shape us beyond the time frame. And we will at some point, by some strange osmosis, have these friendships come back to us, just that a new script will be in tow.

No matter the gender or the race, we all come of age in similar ways, but Another Brooklyn pinpoints a unique adolescent. The announcement is right in the title. This is 'another Brooklyn', a Brooklyn removed from the Irish immigrant experience of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, and more specifically, a city, a time era, and a racial community removed from Betty Smith’s classic A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. I don’t know if this was Jacqueline Woodson's intent --- I’m just taking a stab in the dark --- but while reading echoes of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn sound, with Another Brooklyn's narrator August sharing the same lonely, but fiercely determined spirit as Francine Nolan. Still, I feel, Woodson is also making a point to say that Brooklyn is too often defined through a White lens, when the city holds so many more conversations and stories outside of that limited focus.

This story belongs to and is seen through the eyes of August. At the start, August is returning to her Brooklyn neighborhood to attend her father’s funeral. During her stay, she thinks back at her childhood, and rekindles many memories of when she moved with her father and younger brother from the rural Southern town of Sweet Grove to the concrete jungle of Brooklyn. Through August's memories, we meet her three best friends --- Sylvia, Gigi, and Angela --- and become privy to their united coming of age in the post-Civil Rights era.

Another Brooklyn is not a linear tale as it's rather skeletal in its structure. It seems designed to flow freely, poem-like, without much context or character development as memories are broken up into taunt paragraphs that zip erratically throughout time. Some readers will be annoyed (are annoyed) by Woodson’s choice for this. I was at first. I wanted less of a fractured structure, a little more detail and more clarity for the characters themselves, and it did get annoying when you’re jarred out of one memory and pushed into the next. Also, the story just...ends. As if a spell was broken and you're back to reality.

Author Anne Patchett described Another Brooklyn as a fever dream in her praise blurb, and she is correct. Most of every scene that is remembered is in slow motion, opaque, and not fully realized, much like memories themselves. With memories, we don’t remember every detail, every word spoken. Sometimes the memory is even organized differently, but we do remember specifically how we felt, and how we dealt when we were in the moment. In a way, Woodson's choice to hold back is how we are about our own stories. We don’t share what we hold onto too close. August doesn't tell us everything, she is unreliable in the way we all are about sharing details about our lives.

August's memories, even as fractured as they are, do have a sublime way of popping off the page. Thanks to Woodson's prose I could feel Brooklyn circa 1970s. Hear the DJs set up under streetlights, see the breakdancers spin atop open cardboard boxes, feel August's confusion, denial, and her desperate need to understand the absence of her mother. I also felt her fierce desire to belong to and within the diverse worlds of Sylvia, Gigi, and Angela. Felt her anger melt when her little brother extended his soft love, and felt her cautious relief when Sister Loretta comes to press the reset button on the family after her father joins the Nation of Islam.

Woodson does have a few melodramatic lines here and there that can cause a couple of eye rolls, and at times these girls talk older than their years. Still, largely, Woodson will either lounge her words in plush lyrical paragraphs, or throw them out like sharp knives, nailing down with precision the reality of growing up young, hated, ignored, hopeful, confused, and unapologetically Black in America.

This book made me not miss being a girl (I really do not want to return to braces, puberty…or middle school), but it made me appreciate and honor what growing up (Black) Girl is, how precious it was, and how even with its constant speed bumps and closed doors it brought me to (Black) Woman in the best possible way.

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from the margins