Brown Girl Dreaming

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Brown Girl Dreaming Page 12

by Jacqueline Woodson


  Only know the sound of my uncle’s voice,

  stopping me before my name is

  a part of the history—like the ones on the roofs

  and fire escapes and subway cars. I wish

  I could explain.

  Wish I had the words

  to stop his anger, stop the force of him grabbing my hand,

  wish I knew how to say,

  Just let me write—everywhere!

  But my uncle keeps asking over and over again,

  What’s wrong with you?

  Have you lost your mind?

  Don’t you know people get arrested

  for this?

  They’re just words, I whisper.

  They’re not trying to hurt anybody!

  music

  Each morning the radio comes on at seven o’clock.

  Sometimes Michael Jackson is singing that A-B-C

  is as easy as 1-2-3

  or Sly and the Family Stone are thanking us for

  letting them

  be themselves.

  Sometimes it’s slower music, the Five Stairsteps

  telling us

  things are going to get easier, or the Hollies singing,

  He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother

  So on we go . . .

  My mother lets us choose what music we want

  to listen to

  as long as the word funk doesn’t appear anywhere

  in the song.

  But the summer I am ten, funk is in every single song

  that comes on the cool black radio stations. So our

  mother makes us listen

  to the white ones.

  All afternoon corny people sing about Colorado,

  about everything being beautiful

  about how we’ve only just begun.

  My sister falls in love

  with the singers but I sneak off

  to Maria’s house where

  safe inside her room with the pink shag carpet

  and bunk beds,

  we can comb our dolls’ hair and sing along when

  the Ohio Players say,

  He’s the funkiest

  Worm in the world.

  We can dance

  the Funky Chicken, tell imaginary intruders

  to get the funk out

  of our faces. Say the word so hard and so loud

  and so many times,

  it becomes something different to us—something

  so silly

  we laugh just thinking about it.

  Funky, funky, funky,

  we sing again and again until the word is just a sound

  not connected to anything

  good or bad

  right or wrong.

  rikers island

  When the phone call comes in the middle of the night,

  it isn’t

  to tell us someone has died. It’s Robert

  calling from a prison called Rikers Island.

  Even from my half-asleep place,

  I can hear my mother taking a heavy breath, whispering,

  I knew this was coming, Robert. I knew you weren’t

  doing right.

  In the morning, we eat our cereal in silence as

  our mother tells us

  that our uncle won’t be around for a while.

  When we ask where he’s gone, she says, Jail.

  When we ask why, she says,

  It doesn’t matter. We love him.

  That’s all we need to know and keep remembering.

  Robert walked the wide road, she says. And now

  he’s paying for it.

  Witnesses believe there’s a wide road and a narrow road.

  To be good in the eyes of God is to walk the narrow one,

  live a good clean life, pray, do what’s right.

  On the wide road, there is every kind of bad thing anyone

  can imagine. I imagine my uncle doing his smooth

  dance steps down the wide road,

  smiling as the music plays loud. I imagine

  him laughing, pressing quarters into our palms,

  pulling presents for us from his bag, thick gold

  bracelet flashing at his wrist.

  Where’d you get this? my mother asked, her face tight.

  It doesn’t matter, my uncle answered. Y’all know I love you.

  You doing the right thing, Robert? my mother wanted

  to know. Yes, my uncle said. I promise you.

  It rains all day. We sit around the house

  waiting for the sun to come out so we can go outside.

  Dell reads in the corner of our room. I pull out

  my beat-up composition notebook

  try to write another butterfly poem.

  Nothing comes.

  The page looks like the day—wrinkled and empty

  no longer promising anyone

  anything.

  moving upstate

  From Rikers Island, my uncle is sent

  to a prison upstate we can visit.

  We don’t know what he’ll look like, how

  much he’ll have changed. And because our mother

  warns us not to, I don’t tell anyone he’s in jail.

  When my friends ask, I say, He moved upstate.

  We’re going to visit him soon.

  He lives in a big house, I say. With a big yard and everything.

  But the missing settles inside of me. Every time

  James Brown comes on the radio, I see Robert dancing.

  Every time the commercial for the Crissy doll comes on

  I think how I almost got one.

  He’s my favorite uncle, I say one afternoon.

  He’s our ONLY uncle, my sister says.

  Then goes back to reading.

  on the bus to dannemora

  We board the bus when the sun is just kissing the sky.

  Darkness like a cape that we wear for hours, curled into it

  and back to sleep. From somewhere above us

  the O’Jays are singing, telling people all over the world

  to join hands and start a love train.

  The song rocks me gently into and out of dreaming

  and in the dream, a train filled with love goes on and on.

  And in the story that begins from the song, the bus

  is no longer a bus and we’re no longer going to

  Dannemora. But there is food and laughter and

  the music. The girl telling the story is me but

  not me at the same time—watching all of this,

  writing it down as fast as she can,

  singing along with the O’Jays, asking everyone

  to let this train keep on riding . . .

  “riding on through . . .”

  and it’s the story of a whole train filled

  with love and how the people on it

  aren’t in prison but are free to dance

  and sing and hug their families whenever they want.

  On the bus, some of the people are sleeping, others

  are staring out the window or talking softly.

  Even the children are quiet. Maybe each of them

  is thinking

  their own dream—of daddies and uncles, brothers

  and cousins

  one day being free to come on board.

  Please don’t miss this train at the station

  ‘Cause if you miss it, I feel sorry, sorry for you.

  too good

  The bus moves slow out of the city until we can see

  the mountains, and above that, so much blue sky.

  Passing the mountains.

  Passing the sea


  Passing the heavens.

  That’s soon where I will be . . .

  A song comes to me quickly, the words moving through

  my brain and out of my mouth in a whisper but still

  my sister hears, asks who taught it to me.

  I just made it up, I say.

  No you didn’t, she says back. It’s too good. Someone

  taught that to you.

  I don’t say anything back. Just look out the window

  and smile.

  Too good, I am thinking. The stuff I make up is too good.

  dannemora

  At the gate of the prison, guards glare at us, then slowly

  allow us in.

  My big brother is afraid.

  He looks up at the barbed wire

  puts his hands in his pockets.

  I know he wishes he was home with his chemistry set.

  I know he wants to be anywhere but here.

  Nothing but stone and a big building that goes so far up

  and so far back and forth that we can’t see

  where the beginning is

  or where it might end. Gray brick, small windows

  covered with wire. Who could see

  out from here? The guards check our pockets,

  check our bags, make us

  walk through X-ray machines.

  My big brother holds out his arms. Lets the guards pat him

  from shoulder to ankle, checking

  for anything he might be hiding . . .

  He is Hope Austin Woodson the Second, part of a long line

  of Woodsons—doctors and lawyers and teachers—

  but as quickly as THAT! he can become

  a number. Like Robert Leon Irby is now

  so many numbers across the pocket

  of his prison uniform that it’s hard

  not to keep looking at them,

  waiting for them to morph into letters

  that spell out

  my uncle’s name.

  not robert

  When the guard brings our uncle to the waiting room

  that is filled with other families

  waiting, he is not

  Robert. His afro is gone now,

  shaved to a black shadow on his perfect skull.

  His eyebrows are thicker than I remember, dipping down

  in a newer, sadder way. Even when he smiles,

  opens his arms

  to hug all of us at once, the bit I catch of it, before

  jumping into his hug, is a half smile, caught

  and trapped inside a newer, sadder

  uncle.

  mountain song

  On the way home from visiting Robert,

  I watch the mountains move past me

  and slowly the mountain song starts coming again

  more words this time, coming faster

  than I can sing them.

  Passing the mountains

  Passing the sea

  Passing the heavens

  waiting for me.

  Look at the mountains

  Such a beautiful sea

  And there’s a promise that heaven

  is filled with glory.

  I sing the song over and over again,

  quietly into the windowpane, my forehead

  pressed against the cool glass. Tears coming fast now.

  The song makes me think of Robert and Daddy

  and Greenville

  and everything that feels far behind me now, everything

  that is going

  or already gone.

  I am thinking if I can hold on to the memory of this song

  get home and write it down, then it will happen,

  I’ll be a writer. I’ll be able to hold on to

  each moment, each memory

  everything.

  poem on paper

  When anyone in the family asks

  what I’m writing, I usually say,

  Nothing

  or

  A story

  or

  A poem

  and only my mother says,

  Just so long as you’re not writing about our family.

  And I’m not.

  Well, not really . . .

  Up in the mountains

  far from the sea

  there’s a place called Dannemora

  the men are not free . . .

  daddy

  It is early spring

  when my grandmother sends for us.

  Warm enough to believe again

  that food will come from the newly thawed earth.

  This is the weather, my mother says, Daddy loved

  to garden in. We arrive

  not long before my grandfather is about to take

  his last breaths,

  breathless ourselves from our first ride

  in an airplane.

  I want to tell him all about it

  how loud it was when the plane lifted into the sky,

  each of us, leaning toward the window,

  watching New York

  grow small and speckled beneath us.

  How the meals arrived

  on tiny trays—some kind of fish that none of us ate.

  I want to tell him how the stewardess gave us wings

  to pin to our blouses and shirts and told Mama

  we were beautiful and well behaved. But

  my grandfather is sleeping when we come to his bedside,

  opens his eyes only to smile, turns so that my grandmother

  can press ice cubes against his lips. She tells us,

  He needs his rest now. That evening

  he dies.

  On the day he is buried, my sister and I wear white dresses,

  the boys in white shirts and ties.

  We walk slowly through Nicholtown, a long parade

  of people

  who loved him—Hope, Dell, Roman and me

  leading it. This is how we bury our dead—a silent parade

  through the streets, showing the world our sadness, others

  who knew my grandfather joining in on the walk,

  children waving,

  grown-ups dabbing at their eyes.

  Ashes to ashes, we say at the grave site

  with each handful of dirt we drop gently onto his

  lowering casket.

  We will see you in the by and by, we say.

  We will see you in the by and by.

  how to listen #7

  Even the silence

  has a story to tell you.

  Just listen. Listen.

  after greenville #2

  After Daddy dies

  my grandmother sells the house in Nicholtown

  gives the brown chair to Miss Bell,

  Daddy’s clothes to the Brothers at the Kingdom Hall,

  the kitchen table and bright yellow chairs

  to her sister Lucinda in Fieldcrest Village.

  After Daddy dies

  my grandmother brings the bed our mother was born in

  to Brooklyn. Unpacks her dresses

  in the small empty bedroom

  downstairs,

  puts her Bible, Watchtowers and Awakes,

  a picture of Daddy

  on the little brown bookshelf.

  After Daddy dies

  spring blurs into summer

  then winter comes on too cold and fast,

  and my grandmother moves a chair to the living room

  window

  watches the tree drop the last of its leaves

  while boys play skelly and spinning tops in the middle

  of our quiet Brooklyn street.
r />   After Daddy dies

  I learn to jump double Dutch slowly

  tripping again and again over my too-big feet. Counting,

  Ten, twenty, thirty, forty deep into the winter until

  one afternoon

  gravity releases me and my feet fly free in the ropes,

  fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety . . .

  as my grandmother watches me.

  Both of our worlds

  changed forever.

  mimosa tree

  A mimosa tree, green and thin limbed, pushes up through

  the snow. My grandmother brought the seeds with her

  from back home.

  Sometimes, she pulls a chair to the window, looks

  down over the yard.

  The promise of glittering sidewalks feels a long time

  behind us now, no diamonds anywhere to be found.

  But some days, just after snow falls,

  the sun comes out, shines down on the promise

  of that tree from back home joining us here.

  Shines down over the bright white ground.

  And on those days, so much light and warmth fills

  the room that it’s hard not to believe

  in a little bit

  of everything.

  bubble-gum cigarettes

  You can buy a box of bubble-gum cigarettes for a dime

  at the bodega around the corner.

  Sometimes, Maria and I walk there,

  our fingers laced together, a nickel

  in each of our pockets.

  The bubble gum is pink with white paper

  wrapped around it. When you put it in your mouth

  and blow, a white puff comes out.

  You can really believe

  you’re smoking.

  We talk with the bubble-gum cigarettes

  between our fingers. Hold them in the air

  like the movie stars on TV. We let them dangle

  from our mouths and look at each other

  through slitted eyes

  then laugh at how grown-up we can be

 

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