Author Jacqueline Woodson holds the idea of black girlhood as almost sacred.
Her young adult, middle grade and picture books are almost all told from the perspective of young African-American girls growing up around Brooklyn. Her 2014 memoir-in-verse “Brown Girl Dreaming” won a National Book Award and her book covers are frequently adorned with honors from the Newbery, NAACP and Coretta Scott King awards.
But it has been 20 years since her last novel for adults. Woodson returns to the form with “Another Brooklyn,” a story about a young woman coming to terms with her father’s death, her mother’s absence and the memories of her girlhood friends in 1970s Bushwick.
“I wanted to put the character of Bushwick on the page,” Woodson says. “Everything I write about Bushwick is from my memory of Bushwick from that time. [It’s] the most autobiographical character on the page.”
In that setting, Woodson creates a world for August, Gigi, Sylvia and Angela, four young African-American girls who form a sisterly bond while navigating the trials of their home lives as well as the city around them, which was upturned by white flight, drug addiction and its reputation as an urban ghetto.
“At the same time, it was a nurturing place for so many people who felt very very safe there,” Woodson says.
Woodson’s years of experience writing for young people and working in the medium of poetry are apparent in “Another Brooklyn’s” prose. Like an extended poem, the novel continuously returns to the phrase “This is memory,” with the narrator, August, continually reminding the reader that these are her recollections and hers alone. The entire narrative is tinted by the lens of memory.
“No one can challenge your memory, right?” Woodson explains. “Your memory is your memory. What she’s saying is ‘This is mine, this is what I own.’ And so no one can step inside of this and take it away from you.”
And in the same way that August is claiming her story, Woodson is claiming her own story with that same declaration.
“It was a way of doing that with Bushwick,” she says, “and it was also a way of doing that with black girlhood. I think there is not a lot of narrative out there that talks about how important it was and is for black girls to have their space and their voice and their existence in the world. I grew up not seeing it a lot in the books I read. And I really wanted to basically write a love song to that.”
Woodson will be appearing at the Decatur Book Festival on Saturday, Sept. 3 on the Decatur Presbyterian stage.
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