ALSO BY JACQUELINE WOODSON
Last Summer with Maizon
The Dear One
Maizon at Blue Hill
Between Madison and Palmetto
I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This
From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun
The House You Pass on the Way
If You Come Softly
Lena
Miracle’s Boys
Hush
Locomotion
Behind You
Feathers
After Tupac and D Foster
Peace, Locomotion
Beneath a Meth Moon
NANCY PAULSEN BOOKS
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Copyright © 2014 by Jacqueline Woodson.
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“Dreams,” and “Poem [2]” from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON HUGHES by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.
“Twistin’ the Night Away” written by Sam Cooke. Published by ABKCO Music, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-698-19570-7
Version_1
This book is for my family— past, present and future.
With love.
CONTENTS
family tree
PART I
i am born
PART II
the stories of south carolina run like rivers
PART III
followed the sky’s mirrored constellation to freedom
PART IV
deep in my heart, i do believe
PART V
ready to change the world
author’s note
thankfuls
family photos
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
—Langston Hughes
february 12, 1963
I am born on a Tuesday at University Hospital
Columbus, Ohio,
USA—
a country caught
between Black and White.
I am born not long from the time
or far from the place
where
my great-great-grandparents
worked the deep rich land
unfree
dawn till dusk
unpaid
drank cool water from scooped-out gourds
looked up and followed
the sky’s mirrored constellation
to freedom.
I am born as the South explodes,
too many people too many years
enslaved, then emancipated
but not free, the people
who look like me
keep fighting
and marching
and getting killed
so that today—
February 12, 1963
and every day from this moment on,
brown children like me can grow up
free. Can grow up
learning and voting and walking and riding
wherever we want.
I am born in Ohio but
the stories of South Carolina already run
like rivers
through my veins.
second daughter’s second day on earth
Mother: Mary Anne Irby, 22, Negro
Father: Jack Austin Woodson, 25, Negro
In Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr.
is planning a march on Washington, where
John F. Kennedy is president.
In Harlem, Malcolm X is standing on a soapbox
talking about a revolution.
Outside the window of University Hospital,
snow is slowly falling. So much already
covers this vast Ohio ground.
In Montgomery, only seven years have passed
since Rosa Parks refused
to give up
her seat on a city bus.
I am born brown-skinned, black-haired
and wide-eyed.
I am born Negro here and Colored there
and somewhere else,
the Freedom Singers have linked arms,
their protests rising into song:
Deep in my heart, I do believe
that we shall overcome someday.
and somewhere else, James Baldwin
is writing about injustice, each novel,
each essay, changing the world.
I do not yet know who I’ll be
what I’ll say
how I’ll say it . . .
Not even three years have passed since a brown girl
named Ruby Bridges
walked into an all-white school.
Armed guards surrounded her while hundreds
of white people spat and called her names.
She was six years old.
I do not know if I’ll be strong like Ruby.
I do not know what the world will look like
when I am finally able to walk, speak, write . . .
Another Buckeye!
the nurse says to my mother.
Already, I am being named for this place.
Ohio. The Buckeye State.
My fingers curl into fists, automatically
This is the way, my mother said,
of every baby’s hand.
I do not know if these hands will become
Malcolm’s—raised and fisted
or Martin’s—open and asking
or James’s—curled around a pen.
I do not know if these hands will be
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
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.
football dreams
No one was faster
than my father on the football field.
No one could keep him
from crossing the line. Then
touching down again.
Coaches were watching the way he moved,
his easy stride, his long arms reaching
up, snatching the ball from its soft pocket
of air.
My father dreamed football dreams,
and woke to a scholarship
at Ohio State University.
Grown now
living the big-city life
in Columbus
just sixty miles
from Nelsonville
and from there
Interstate 70 could get you
on your way west to Chicago
Interstate 77 could take you south
but my father said
no colored Buckeye in his right mind
would ever want to go there.
From Columbus, my father said,
you could go just about
anywhere.
other people’s memory
You were born in the morning, Grandma Georgiana said.
I remember the sound of the birds. Mean
old blue jays squawking. They like to fight, you know.
Don’t mess with blue jays!
I hear they can kill a cat if they get mad enough.
And then the phone was ringing.
Through all that static and squawking, I heard
your mama telling me you’d come.
Another
girl, I stood there thinking,
so close to the first one.
Just like your mama and Caroline. Not even
a year between them and so close, you could hardly tell
where one ended and the other started.
And that’s how I know you came in the morning.
That’s how I remember.
You came in the late afternoon, my mother said.
Two days after I turned twenty-two.
Your father was at work.
Took a rush hour bus
trying
to get to you. But
by the time he arrived,
you were already here.
He missed the moment, my mother said,
but what else is new.
You’re the one that was born near night,
my father says.
When I saw you, I said, She’s the unlucky one
come out looking just like her daddy.
He laughs. Right off the bat, I told your mama,
We’re gonna call this one after me.
My time of birth wasn’t listed
on the certificate, then got lost again
amid other people’s bad memory.
no returns
When my mother comes home
from the hospital with me,
my older brother takes one look
inside the pink blanket, says,
Take her back. We already have one of those.
Already three years old and still doesn’t understand
how something so tiny and new
can’t be returned.
how to listen #1
Somewhere in my brain
each laugh, tear and lullaby
becomes memory.
uncle odell
Six months before my big sister is born,
my uncle Odell is hit by a car
while home in South Carolina
on leave from the Navy.
When the phone rang in the Nelsonville house,
maybe my mother was out hanging laundry