“This is memory.” So says the narrator of Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn (HarperCollins, purchased e-book), her first novel for adults in 20 years. As haunting as her memoir in verse, Brown Girl Dreaming, which won a National Book Award for YA literature last year, it reads like a prose poem. Narrator August spins her story of girlhood, friendship and loss in a series of lyrical vignettes that slip dreamily through time and memory.
“Somehow, my brother and I grew up motherless yet halfway whole. My brother had the faith my father brought him to, and for a long time, I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.”
This is narrator August in the first chapter, looking back 20-some years to the 1970s, when her father uprooted her and younger brother from Tennessee and brought them to a Bushwick apartment. Now an anthropologist who researches funeral customs in different countries, she is back in Brooklyn to help her brother bury their father. A chance encounter with a girlhood friend sends her on an odyssey into the past, but not before she elliptically foreshadows some of its darkness.
At 11, August and her three friends function almost as a single entity, braving the watchful eyes of neighborhood boys and men, shrugging off the private griefs of family. They listen to Al Green, trade clothes, share hopes and secrets. They laugh, and they reassure one another about their looks and their futures. Gigi wants to be an actress. Angela can dance, really dance. Sylvia’s father wants her to be a lawyer. August wants to be Sylvia, beautiful and brilliant.
“Everywhere we looked, we saw people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn.”
Their Brooklyn has disabled Vietnam vets, drug addicts, working girls who lose their children to social services, a rapist in a basement stairwell who catches Gigi when she is 12. She doesn’t tell anybody but her girls, saying her mama would just put the blame on her. The foursome try to hold on to childhood, playing jacks and running after the ice cream truck. But then the teenage boys come, stealing kisses in the dark and wanting more. First love is “terrifying and perfect.” Betrayal is a wound. Memory is a bruise.
Woodson’s time-shifting narrative is compact and compressed, years invoked and imagined in a few vivid sentences. I loved every word.
On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever 