If You Come Softly

by Jacqueline Woodson

  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 . . .

  a girl named jack

  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.

  the woodsons of ohio

  My father’s family

  can trace their history back

  to Thomas Woodson of Chillicothe, said to be

  the first son

  of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

  some say

  this isn’t so but . . .

  the Woodsons of Ohio know

  what the Woodsons coming before them

  left behind, in Bibles, in stories,

  in history coming down through time

  so

  ask any Woodson why

  you can’t go down the Woodson line

  without

  finding

  doctors and lawyers and teachers

  athletes and scholars and people in government

  they’ll say,

  We had a head start.

  They’ll say,

  Thomas Woodson expected the best of us.

  They’ll lean back, lace their fingers

  across their chests,

  smile a smile that’s older than time, say,

  Well it all started back before Thomas Jefferson

  Woodson of Chillicothe . . .

  and they’ll begin to tell our long, long story.

  the ghosts of the nelsonville house

  The Woodsons are one

  of the few Black families in this town, their house

  is big and white and sits

  on a hill.

  Look up

  to see them

  through the high windows

  inside a kitchen filled with the light

  of a watery Nelsonville sun. In the parlor

  a fireplace burns warmth

  into the long Ohio winter.

  Keep looking and it’s spring again,

  the light’s gold now, and dancing

  across the pine floors.

  Once, there were so many children here

  running through this house

  up and down the stairs, hiding under beds

  and in trunks,

  sneaking into the kitchen for tiny pieces

  of icebox cake, cold fried chicken,

  thick slices of their mother’s honey ham . . .

  Once, my father was a baby here

  and then he was a boy . . .

  But that was a long time ago.

  In the photos my grandfather is taller than everybody

  and my grandmother just an inch smaller.

  On the walls their children run through fields,

  play in pools,

  dance in teen-filled rooms, all of them

  grown up and gone now—

  but wait!

  Look closely:

  There’s Aunt Alicia, the baby girl,

  curls spiraling over her shoulders, her hands

  cupped around a bouquet of flowers. Only

  four years old in that picture, and already,

  a reader.

  Beside Alicia another picture, my father, Jack,

  the oldest boy.

  Eight years old and mad about something

  or is it someone

  we cannot see?

  In another picture, my uncle Woody,

  baby boy

  laughing and pointing

  the Nelsonville house behind him and maybe

  his brother at the end of his pointed finger.

  My aunt Anne in her nurse’s uniform,

  my aunt Ada in her university sweater

  Buckeye to the bone . . .

  The children of Hope and Grace.

  Look closely. There I am

  in the furrow of Jack’s brow,

  in the slyness of Alicia’s smile,

  in the bend of Grace’s hand . . .

  There I am . . .

  Beginning.

  it’ll be scary sometimes

  My great-great-grandfather on my father’s side

  was born free in Ohio,

  1832.

  Built his home and farmed his land,

  then dug for coal when the farming

  wasn’t enough. Fought hard

  in the war. His name in stone now

  on the Civil War Memorial:

  William J. Woodson

  United States Colored Troops,

  Union, Company B 5th Regt.

  A long time dead but living still

  among the other soldiers

  on that monument in Washington, D.C.

  His son was sent to Nelsonville

  lived with an aunt

  William Woodson

  the only brown boy in an all-white school.

  You’ll face this in your life someday,

  my mother will tell us

  over and over again.

  A moment when you walk into a room and

  no one there is like you.

  It’ll be scary sometimes. But think of William Woodson

  and you’ll be all right.

  Turn the page for a look at JACQUELINE WOODSON’s companion to If You Come Softly

  The Ending

  Jeremiah

  YOU DO NOT DIE. YOUR SOUL STEPS OUT OF YOUR BODY, shakes itself hard because it’s been carrying the weight of your heavy skin for fifteen years. Then your soul lifts up and looks down on your body lying there—looks down on the blood running onto concrete, your eyes snapped open like the pages in some kid’s forgotten picture book, your chest not moving. Your soul sees this and feels something beyond sadness—feels its whole self whispering further away. Shhhh. Shhhh. Shhhh—past the trees in Central Park, past the statues and runners and children playing on swings. Shhhh. Shhhh. Shhhh. Over yellow taxicabs and late-afternoon flickering streetlights. Shhhh away from the dusting of snow, the white tips of trees, the darkening sky. Already you hear your mother screaming. Already you see your father dropping his head into his hands. Helpless. Already you see your friends—walking through the halls of Percy Ac
ademy. Stunned. But you do not die. Each breath your soul takes is cool and reminds you of a taste you loved a long time ago. Licorice. Peppermint. Rain. Then your soul is you all over again, only lighter and freer and able to be a thousand and one places at once. Your new soul eyes look around. See two cops standing there with their mouths hanging open. One cop curses and kicks a tree. Slowly your soul realizes it’s in a park. There are trees all around you. And both cops look scared.

  He’s dead, one cop says.

  And the other curses again. Your soul doesn’t like the way the curse word sounds. Too hard. Too heavy in the new soul-light air.

  The cops can’t see you. They see a dead body on the ground—a young boy. A black boy. They know this is not the man they’d been looking for. They know they’ve made a mistake. Your soul looks at the boy and knows his friends called him Miah but his full name was Jeremiah Roselind. Tall. Dark. He has locks and the locks are spread over the ground. His eyes are opened wide. Greenish gray lifeless eyes. Your soul thinks—somebody loved that boy once. Thinks—once that boy was me. The wind blows the snow left, right and up. You are so light, you move with the wind and the snow. Let the weather take you. And it lifts you up—over a world of sadness and anger and fear. Over a world of first kisses and hands touching and someone you’re falling in love with. She’s there now. Right there. Look closely. Yeah. That’s her. That’s my Ellie.

  The Hurting

  Ellie

  FOR A LONG TIME AFTER MIAH DIED, SO MANY PEOPLE DIDN’T sleep. At night, we lay in bed with our eyes wide open and watched the way night settled down over wherever we were. I was in a room on the Upper West Side, in a house my parents moved to a long time ago. Not a house—a duplex apartment in a fancy building with a doorman. My dad’s a doctor. My mother stays at home. I go to Percy Academy. Some people look at me and see a white girl in a uniform—burgundy jacket and gray skirt—and think, She has all the privilege in the world. I look back at them, thinking, If only you knew.

  If only they knew how we were sprinkled all over the city—me in my big room, Nelia in her Fort Greene brownstone, Norman in his girlfriend’s apartment, aunts and uncles and cousins, even strangers—all over New York City—none of us slept. We lay there staring up at our ceilings or out into the darkness. Or some days we stopped in the middle of doing something and forgot what it was we were doing. We thought, Jeremiah’s dead. We whispered, Jeremiah’s dead. As if the whispering and the thinking could help us to understand. We didn’t eat enough. We peed only when the need to pee got so big, we thought we’d wet our pants. We pulled the covers off ourselves in the mornings then sat on the edge of our beds, not knowing what to do next. If those strangers looked, really looked into my privileged white girl face, they would have seen the place where I wasn’t even there. Where a part of me died too.

  Miah died on a Saturday afternoon. That evening, the calls started coming. First his mom, Nelia, asking if Miah was still with me. Then his dad, Norman. Then the cops. Then silence. Silence that lasted into the night and into the next dawn. Then the phone ringing one more time and Nelia saying, Ellie, Miah’s been shot. . . .

  I don’t remember much more than that. There was a funeral. There were tears. There were days and days spent in my bed. A fever maybe.

  There was no more Miah.

  No more Miah.

  No more Miah and me.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.