Brown Girl Dreaming

Home > Other > Brown Girl Dreaming > Page 5
Brown Girl Dreaming Page 5

by Jacqueline Woodson


  are covered in grass and dew.

  New York doesn’t smell like this, she says.

  I follow her, the dew cool against my feet

  the soft hush of wind through leaves

  my mother and I

  alone together.

  Her coffee is sweetened with condensed milk,

  her hair pulled back into a braid,

  her dark fingers circling her cup.

  If I ask, she will hold it to my lips,

  let me taste the bittersweet of it.

  It’s dawn and the birds have come alive, chasing

  each other from maple to pine and back

  to maple again. This is how time passes here.

  The maple will be bare-branched come winter,

  Mama says. But the pines, they just keep on living.

  And the air is what I’ll remember.

  Even once we move to New York.

  It always smelled like this, my mother says.

  Wet grass and pine.

  Like memory.

  harvest time

  When Daddy’s garden is ready

  it is filled with words that make me laugh

  when I say them—

  pole beans and tomatoes, okra and corn

  sweet peas and sugar snaps,

  lettuce and squash.

  Who could have imagined

  so much color that the ground disappears

  and we are left

  walking through an autumn’s worth

  of crazy words

  that beneath the magic

  of my grandmother’s hands

  become

  side dishes.

  grown folks’ stories

  Warm autumn night with the crickets crying

  the smell of pine coming soft on the wind

  and the women

  on the porch, quilts across their laps,

  Aunt Lucinda, Miss Bell and whatever neighbor

  has a breath or two left at the end of the day

  for sitting and running our mouths.

  That’s when we listen

  to the grown folks talking.

  Hope, Dell and me sitting quiet on the stairs.

  We know one word from us will bring a hush

  upon the women, my grandmother’s finger suddenly

  pointing toward the house, her soft-spoken

  I think it’s time for you kids to go to bed now ushering

  us into our room. So we are silent, our backs against

  posts and the back of the stairs, Hope’s elbows

  on his knees, head down. Now is when we learn

  everything

  there is to know

  about the people down the road and

  in the daywork houses,

  about the Sisters at the Kingdom Hall

  and the faraway relatives we rarely see.

  Long after the stories are told, I remember them,

  whisper them back to Hope

  and Dell late into the night:

  She’s the one who left Nicholtown in the daytime

  the one Grandmama says wasn’t afraid

  of anything. Retelling each story.

  Making up what I didn’t understand

  or missed when voices dropped too low, I talk

  until my sister and brother’s soft breaths tell me

  they’ve fallen

  asleep.

  Then I let the stories live

  inside my head, again and again

  until the real world fades back

  into cricket lullabies

  and my own dreams.

  tobacco

  Summer is over, a kiss

  of chill in the southern air. We see the dim orange

  of my grandfather’s cigarette, as he makes his way

  down the darkening road. Hear his evening greetings

  and the coughing that follows them.

  Not enough breath left now

  to sing so I sing for him, in my head

  where only I can hear.

  Where will the wedding supper be?

  Way down yonder in a hollow tree. Uh hmmm . . .

  The old people used to say

  a pinch of dirt in the mouth

  can tell tobacco’s story:

  what crops

  are ready for picking

  what needs to be left to grow.

  What soil is rich enough for planting

  and the patches of land that need

  a year of rest.

  I do not know yet

  how sometimes the earth makes a promise

  it can never keep. Tobacco fields

  lay fallow, crops picked clean.

  My grandfather coughs again

  and the earth waits

  for what and who it will get in return.

  how to listen #3

  Middle of the night

  my grandfather is coughing

  me upright. Startled.

  my mother leaving greenville

  It is late autumn now, the smell of wood burning,

  the potbellied stove like a warm soft hand

  in the center of my grandparents’ living room,

  its black pipe

  stretching into the ceiling then disappearing.

  So many years have passed since we last saw

  our father, his absence

  like a bubble in my older brother’s life,

  that pops again and again

  into a whole lot of tiny bubbles

  of memory.

  You were just a baby, he says to me.

  You’re so lucky you don’t remember the fighting

  or anything.

  It’s like erasers came through her memory, my sister says.

  Erase. Erase. Erase.

  But now, my mother is leaving again.

  This, I will remember.

  halfway home #1

  New York, my mother says.

  Soon, I’ll find us a place there. Come back

  and bring you all home.

  She wants a place of her own that is not

  The Nelsonville House, The Columbus House,

  The Greenville House.

  Looking for her next place.

  Our next place.

  Right now, our mother says,

  we’re only halfway home.

  And I imagine her standing

  in the middle of a road, her arms out

  fingers pointing North and South.

  I want to ask:

  Will there always be a road?

  Will there always be a bus?

  Will we always have to choose

  between home

  and home?

  my mother looks back on greenville

  After our dinner and bath,

  after our powdered and pajamaed bodies are tucked

  three across into bed,

  after Winnie the Pooh and kisses on our foreheads

  and longer-than-usual hugs,

  my mother walks away from the house on Hall Street

  out into the growing night,

  down a long dusty road

  to where the Nicholtown bus

  takes her to the Greyhound station

  then more dust

  then she’s gone.

  New York ahead of her,

  her family behind, she moves

  to the back, her purse in her lap,

  the land

  pulling her gaze to the window once more.

  Before darkness

  covers it and for many hours, there are only shadows

  and stars

  and tears

  and hope.

  the
last fireflies

  We know our days are counted here.

  Each evening we wait for the first light

  of the last fireflies, catch them in jars

  then let them go again. As though we understand

  their need for freedom.

  As though our silent prayers to stay in Greenville

  will be answered if

  we do what we know is right.

  changes

  Now the evenings are quiet with my mother gone

  as though the night is listening

  to the way we are counting the days. We know

  even the feel of our grandmother’s brush

  being pulled gently through our hair

  will fast become a memory. Those Saturday evenings

  at her kitchen table, the smell

  of Dixie Peach hair grease,

  the sizzle of the straightening comb,

  the hiss of the iron

  against damp, newly washed ribbons, all of this

  may happen again, but in another place.

  We sit on our grandparents’ porch,

  shivering already against the coming winter,

  and talk softly about Greenville summer,

  how when we come back,

  we’ll do all the stuff we always did,

  hear the same stories,

  laugh at the same jokes, catch fireflies in the same

  mason jars, promise each other

  future summers that are as good as the past.

  But we know we are lying

  coming home will be different now.

  This place called Greenville

  this neighborhood called Nicholtown

  will change some

  and so will each of us.

  sterling high school, greenville

  While my mother is away in New York City,

  a fire sweeps through

  her old high school

  during a senior dance.

  Smoke filled the crowded room

  and the music

  stopped

  and the students dancing

  stopped

  and the DJ told them

  to quickly leave the building.

  The fire

  lasted all night

  and when it was over,

  my mother’s high school had burned

  nearly to the ground.

  My mother said it was because

  the students had been marching,

  and the marching

  made some white people in Greenville mad.

  After the fire the students weren’t allowed to go to

  the all-white high school.

  Instead they had to crowd in

  beside their younger sisters and brothers

  at the lower school.

  In the photos from my mother’s high school yearbook—

  The Torch, 1959,

  my mother is smiling beside her cousin

  Dorothy Ann and on her other side,

  there is Jesse Jackson,

  who maybe was already dreaming of one day

  being the first brown man to run

  for president.

  And not even

  the torching of their school

  could stop him or the marchers

  from changing the world.

  faith

  After my mother leaves, my grandmother

  pulls us further

  into the religion she has always known.

  We become Jehovah’s Witnesses

  like her.

  After my mother leaves

  there is no one

  to say,

  The children can choose their own faith

  when they’re old enough.

  In my house, my grandmother says,

  you will do as I do.

  After my mother leaves,

  we wake in the middle of the night

  calling out for her.

  Have faith, my grandmother says

  pulling us to her in the darkness.

  Let the Bible,

  my grandmother says,

  become your sword and your shield.

  But we do not know yet

  who we are fighting

  and what we are fighting for.

  the stories cora tells

  In the evening now

  Coraandhersisters come over to our porch.

  There are three of them

  and three of us but Hope

  moves away from the girls

  sits by himself

  out in the yard.

  And even though my grandmother tells us

  not to play with them,

  she doesn’t call us into the house anymore

  when she sees them walking down the road. Maybe

  her heart moves over a bit

  making room for them.

  A colorful mushroom grows

  beneath the pine tree. Purple and gold and strange

  against the pine-needled ground.

  When I step on it,

  Coraandhersisters scream at me,

  You just killed the Devil while he was sleeping!

  Sleeping in his own house.

  Cora warns me

  the Devil will soon be alive again.

  She says, He’s going to come for you,

  late in the night while you’re sleeping

  and the God y’all pray to won’t be there protecting you.

  I cry as the sun sets, waiting.

  Cry until my grandmother comes out

  shoos Coraandhersisters home

  holds me tight

  tells me they are lying.

  That’s just some crazy southern superstition,

  my grandmother says.

  Those girls must be a little simple not knowing

  a mushroom when they see one.

  Don’t believe everything you hear, Jackie.

  Someday, you’ll come to know

  when someone is telling the truth

  and when they’re just making up stories.

  hall street

  In the early evening, just before the best light

  for hide-and-seek

  takes over the sky,

  it’s Bible-study time. We watch

  from our places on the front porch, our cold hands

  cupped around hot chocolate

  half gone and sweetest at the bottom

  as the Brother and Sister

  from the Kingdom Hall make their way up our road.

  Pretty Monday evening, the Brother

  from the Kingdom Hall says.

  Thank Jehovah, the Sister

  from the Kingdom Hall says back.

  We are silent, Brother Hope, Sister Dell and me.

  None of us want to sit inside when the late autumn

  is calling to us

  and frogs are finally feeling brave enough

  to hop across our yard. We want

  anything but this. We want warm biscuits

  and tag and jacks on the porch,

  our too-long sweater sleeves

  getting in the way sometimes.

  But we are Jehovah’s Witnesses. Monday night

  is Bible-study time.

  Somewhere else,

  my grandfather is

  spending time with his brother Vertie.

  Maybe they are playing the harmonica and banjo,

  laughing and singing loud. Doing

  what’s fun to do on a pretty Monday evening.

  Jehovah promises us everlasting life in the New World,

  the Brother from the Kingdom Hall says

 
and Brother Hope, Sister Dell and me are silent

  wanting only what’s right outside.

  Wanting only this world.

  soon

  When the phone rings in my grandmother’s kitchen,

  we run from wherever we are,

  jumping from the front porch swing

  climbing out of the mud-filled ditch out back,

  running quick from the picked-clean garden—

  but

  my brother, Hope, is the fastest, picking up the phone,

  pressing it hard

  against his ear as though my mother’s voice

  just that much closer means my mother is

  closer to us. We jump around him:

  Let me speak! until my grandmother comes

  through the screen door

  puts down the basket of laundry, cold and dry

  from the line

  takes the phone from my brother,

  shushes us,

  shoos us,

  promises us

  a moment with our mother soon.

  how i learn the days of the week

  Monday night is Bible study with a Brother and Sister

  from the Kingdom Hall.

  Tuesday night is Bible study at the Kingdom Hall.

  Wednesday night is laundry night—the clothes

  blowing clean on the line above

  my grandfather’s garden. When no one is looking,

  we run through the sheets,

  breathe in all the wonderful smells the air

  adds to them.

  Thursday night is Ministry School. One day,

  we will grow up to preach

  God’s word, take it out

  into the world

  and maybe we’ll save some people.

  Friday night, we’re free as anything,

  Hope and Dell’s bikes skidding along Hall Street,

  my knees bumping hard against the handlebars

  of my red three-wheeler. One more year maybe

  Dell’s bike will be mine.

  Saturday we’re up early: The Watchtower and Awake!

 

‹ Prev