Brown Girl Dreaming: Part 1 Summary & Analysis

In this opening poem, Woodson makes it clear that Jacqueline (Woodson’s younger self, and the protagonist of the story) exists in the context of a greater struggle for racial equality. She does this by highlighting the fact of her ancestors’ bondage and by noting the events of the Civil Rights Movement that are taking place when Jacqueline is born. By connecting the very first moments of Jacqueline’s life with these struggles, Woodson is suggesting that the history and preexisting racial conditions of the United States will affect Jacqueline’s life even from its first moments. In noting this, Woodson shows how the legacy of slavery has continued to affect the lives of African-Americans long after the institution of slavery ended.

Woodson further situates the reader in the racial climate of the 1960s when she describes the racial classification on her birth certificate. This shows the reader the way that Jacqueline is officially, legally racialized from the moment she is born. This underscores that racism in the 60s was institutional and governmental as much as it was interpersonal. Evoking the story of Ruby Bridges shows, too, that children like Jacqueline were not exempt from discrimination and vitriolic racism, and nor were they absent from Civil Rights activism.

This poem begins to show Jacqueline’s relationship to family stories and memory. Because Jacqueline was an infant at the time that the event she recounts took place, she is obviously retelling a story that was told to her, not one that she remembers herself. The idea of memory’s effect on storytelling—particularly the unreliability of other people’s memories—later becomes an important theme in the memoir. Woodson also shows the reader early tensions between Jack and Mama, foreshadowing their separation.

Once again, Woodson connects Jacqueline’s personal and family history to greater African-American history, and also, here, to the history of America itself. By including her family’s legend that the Woodsons are descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Woodson highlights how closely the proud mythology of America (represented by President Jefferson, author of the Declaration of independence) is tied to the horrifying institution of slavery (as embodied by Sally Hemings).

In this poem, Woodson shows Jacqueline, as she looks at family photographs, beginning to situate herself in the context of her family’s own stories and reaching into the family’s memory to look for clues to her own identity. The Nelsonville House, for Jacqueline, is the site of her relatives’ childhoods, which then shaped their adulthoods, which later influenced Jacqueline’s own childhood. Woodson also showcases Jacqueline’s early imaginative powers, as Jacqueline pictures her relatives playing there as children.

Jacqueline learns, once again, how intimately her family history is tied with major events in American history. In this poem, Woodson also shows Mama teaching Jacqueline a survival strategy for coping with spaces in which she is the only black person. Mama tells Jacqueline to think of her great-grandfather— effectively showing her how to use stories as a source of strength. As Jacqueline grows up, storytelling will continue to be a source of catharsis and control for her when facing not only racial alienation, but also grief and pain.

Here, Woodson shows that, because of the racism in the South, Jack harbors negative opinions about South Carolina. For him, the overt racism and segregation is so disturbing that he rejects the South entirely. This seems to be a source of tension between him and Mama, who is from the South and loves her home.

Here, Woodson shows the reader one of the ways in which memory can be problematic. As Woodson describes the three different ways that three of her relatives remember her birth, she highlights the unreliability of memory and the way that objective reality becomes lost to people’s perceptions of what happened. Jacqueline, presumably hearing these memories recounted as a child, is upset by the ambiguity of the time of her birth. She implies that a part of her personal narrative is lost to this subjectivity and she resents this “bad” memory as a result. In this poem, memory is a problem for Jacqueline.

This moment provides an element of comedy to the story of Jacqueline’s birth. Again, Woodson cannot possibly remember this moment, and so it is constructed through the memories of other people.

Again, Jacqueline emphasizes memory as a central theme of the memoir.

Throughout the memoir, Woodson catalogues the grief that her family experienced during her childhood. That Jacqueline is telling a story that took place before her birth implies that the sadness of Mama’s loss of her brother still, in some way, affects Jacqueline’s life as well.

By discussing the happiness of Odella’s birth right after the terrible sadness of Odell’s death, Woodson evokes a sense of ambivalence that continues throughout the rest of the narrative. Like memory, the North and South, etc., all aspects of Woodson’s childhood carry elements of both good and bad or mixed connotations.

Here, Woodson shows Mama and Grace’s nostalgic longing for their childhood home in the South. As the two bond over their shared home, Woodson gives the reader a sense of what it’s like to be alienated from familiar home spaces, a theme that continues throughout the book.

When Grace tells Mama that Odella is a gift from God to replace Odell, Woodson shows the reader that religion and religious feeling are limited in their ability to relieve pain. Although the narrative of an all powerful God might seem helpful, it falls flat for Mama—as the memoir later shows, Mama does not find organized religion compelling.

Woodson further emphasizes the distance between Jack and Mama when she describes how Jack does not go with the family to Greenville. Jack’s hatred of the South and Mama’s deep love for her home there become a source of tension. Mama is unable to totally adjust to her life in the North, and continues to be pulled home despite her many connections in Ohio.

Again, Jack’s aversion to the South is primarily due to the overt racism he experiences there, and the grief he feels knowing that his wife and children experience it too when they visit.

In this poem, Woodson shows the everyday consequences of legalized segregation in the South. Her family is affected by these racist laws—they are not just the stuff of history books. Likewise, Woodson shows how, out of a concern for her children’s safety, Mama must comply with these racist laws. Mama’s whispered reassurance to her children is incredibly poignant, as she tries to remind them they are “as good as anybody” in a society that constantly and systematically denies that fact.

Until now, Woodson has only shown Mama to the reader as a person alienated from the place she feels most comfortable, and has only described the South as a place to be loathed or missed. Finally, the reader sees the home in the South that Mama left behind to go to the North with Jack, and this home is a place that is warm and loving.

Mama is able to reconnect with people in Greenville through their shared memories of their childhoods, which shows that memory can be a positive, unifying force instead of a source of disagreement and division. Mama’s sense of being at home in the South is cemented when her cousins assert that she “belongs” there.

When Jack comes to beg Mama’s forgiveness, he comes in spite of his deep aversion to the South. Similarly, Mama, despite feeling so at ease in South Carolina, returns to the North with him. In a moment of unity, the two overcome their sense of foreignness in each other’s territory in order to be together.

After the descriptions of the family’s preparations for travel, Woodson notes that the family must travel at night for fear of racial violence. This remark highlights the high level of hostility that white people harbored towards black people affiliated with the Civil Rights Movement. This hatred could be so intense that even black families with small children and no obvious links to the Movement had to fear for their safety in the South.

Woodson uses the path of the Hocking River as a metaphor for her mother’s departure from, and later return to, the North with Jack.

Woodson takes account of this definitive moment of her childhood—when her mother left her father for the final time. For Jacqueline, this not only means the end of her parents’ relationship, but also the end of her life in Columbus and the beginning of her new life in South Carolina. Woodson foreshadows this new life in the South when she notes that Jack’s skin was red like South Carolina dirt, an image that Jacqueline repeatedly returns to as emblematic of the South.