Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson Plot Summary

August reflects on her early childhood: she thinks about how she and her brother grew up in Brooklyn without a mother, though she felt for a long time that this didn’t mean her mother was actually dead. In those days, August’s father and brother focused on their devotion to the Nation of Islam while August invested herself in her friendships with Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi. While August’s brother had religion to cope with the absence of their mother, she had her friend group, which helped her navigate the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Now, though, she and her brother have just said goodbye to their father, who died of liver cancer. Sitting in a diner, they ask each other how they’re doing. August’s brother is still religious and playfully tries to convince August to settle down with a good Islamic man, but August easily sidesteps this lighthearted suggestion by assuring him that she’s doing well. When August says that she already misses their father, her brother simply replies, “All praise to Allah for calling him home.”

August no longer fears death—in the 20 years since she last lived in Brooklyn, she has become an anthropologist who travels the world and studies how other cultures respond to death. However, simply being in Brooklyn unsettles her. On the subway back to her father’s apartment after seeing her brother, she looks up and realizes she’s sitting across from Sylvia. Shocked, August studies Sylvia’s beauty, noting how well she has aged. August has a flashback of what Sylvia used to look like, envisioning her in a school uniform with her stomach just beginning to bulge. Just then, Sylvia looks up and recognizes her. Excitedly, she asks when August got back to Brooklyn, but August stands and jumps out of the closing subway doors even though she hasn’t reached her stop. August has lost touch with all her Brooklyn friends. The last time she heard Angela’s voice, for instance, was when Angela called her during college and spoke about the tragedy that befell Gigi. Since then, though, August has had no contact with any of the girls.

Jumping back in time, August narrates her childhood. She’s eight when her mother first starts hearing voices. Clyde, her mother’s brother, has just died in the Vietnam War, but August’s mother refuses to believe this so she speaks to Clyde quite often. Unsettled, August’s father takes August and her brother away from SweetGrove, which is what the family calls their home in Tennessee. Heading north, he brings them to Brooklyn. As they settle in, August and her brother talk about their mother’s absence, and August insists that their mother is on her way and that she will surely be there “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” During this time, their father tells them to stay inside when he’s at work, so they spend their days gazing out the window at the streets, wishing they could join the children outside. It’s while looking out this window that August first sees Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi; she becomes familiar with them from a distance, wanting nothing more than to become part of their tight-knit group.

One day, August’s brother leans so hard against the window that the glass shatters, slicing his arm. Thankfully, his father sweeps into the room and rushes him to the hospital. From this point on, their father lets August and her brother leave the house. Around this time, August encounters Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi at school, and Sylvia asks August why she always stares at them. Sylvia clarifies that she’s not trying to be mean—she’s genuinely curious what August sees in them. “Everything,” August replies. “I see everything.” Sylvia puts her hand to August’s cheek and asks if she is the girl with no mother, but August lies, insisting that she’s not that girl. Holding August’s hand, Sylvia declares, “You belong to us now.”

Not unlike August, Sylvia is a new arrival in Brooklyn—her family moved from the Caribbean island of Martinique the year before. Sylvia’s parents are sophisticated; Sylvia’s father, for instance, quotes philosophers to her in French. Gigi also recently came to Brooklyn because Gigi’s mother wanted to have her 21st birthday in New York—when she tells August this, she urges her not to do the math, adding that “it just adds up to teen pregnancy.” Such a thing, August and the rest of her friends think, will never happen to them. Angela is the only person in the group who doesn’t talk about her background. Sometimes, though, she descends into a dark mood, clenching her fists and avoiding her friends’ questions when they ask what’s wrong.

August recalls the night her father took her and her brother away from SweetGrove. Leading up to that night, her parents argued extensively, and her mother even threatened to take a butcher knife to bed and sleep with it beneath her pillow. August’s mother also accused her father of cheating, claiming that Clyde told her that August’s father was with another woman. By then, August notes, Clyde had been dead for years.

In Brooklyn, August and her family get by while living in poverty, though they make do with what they have. Each night, August assures her brother that their mother will soon join them. August and her friends all have different relationships with their mothers. Gigi’s mother, for instance, is young and determined to make Gigi a star, insisting that she’s beautiful and talented enough to become famous. August, Sylvia, and Angela all agree, frequently telling Gigi how pretty she is and talking about how everyone will someday know her name. “What keeps keeping us here?” Gigi asks one day, and though the girls don’t know why she’s talking this way, they soon learn that there’s a drug-addicted veteran who sleeps beneath the stairwell in her apartment building. Apparently, he recently pulled Gigi into the dark and raped her. The girls are only 12 and they don’t know what to do about this, but Gigi says she can’t tell her mother what happened because her mother would only blame her. Acting on their own, then, the girls collect razor blades and instruct Gigi to slash the man the next time he grabs her. However, the soldier is soon found dead beneath the stairs, having overdosed on heroin.

Angela, for her part, has a mysterious relationship with her own mother and she won’t tell the others anything about her, except that Angela’s mother used to be a dancer. When the girls ask for more information, Angela closes up, so her friends simply remind her that they love her and tell her to keep dancing. Sylvia, on the other hand, has a completely different family dynamic; when the girls visit her house, they can tell that her parents are judging them. Sylvia’s father asks about their home lives and if they understand “the Negro problem,” adding that it’s up to them to “rise above” racism and discrimination. To that end, he insists that Sylvia become a lawyer, and she accepts this even though it’s clear she really wants to become a singer.

As the girls get older, men pay more attention to their bodies. They find that they have to be careful in certain situations so they warn each other about which older men to avoid. When they’re together, though, they feel powerful and capable of telling off boys they’re uninterested in. Around this time, August asks her father what’s inside a jar he keeps in the apartment, and he replies by saying that she already knows what’s inside. When she admits that she knows there are ashes inside but she doesn’t know whose ashes, he says, “You know whose.” Still, August tells herself that she doesn’t know where her mother is and continues to wait for her return. Meanwhile, her brother takes a liking to math, enjoying the certainty it provides him. While talking about how much he likes math, he tells August that—like the certainty of square roots—it’s clear that their mother isn’t coming back. “It’s absolute,” he says, but August doesn’t listen.

After entertaining a rotating cast of women at night, August’s father meets Sister Loretta, who establishes a relationship with both August and her brother. She also cleans the house and teaches them to stop eating food that the “white devils” use to “poison” black people. Speaking this way, Sister Loretta convinces August’s father and brother to join the Nation of Islam, though August herself remains unwilling to devote herself to religion. Still, she promises Sister Loretta that she won’t engage in sexual activity before she’s married, but this is a lie. By this point, she has a boyfriend named Jerome whom she kisses each night, letting him explore her body with his hands. Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi are the only people August can talk to about this, and she feels especially connected to Sylvia because Sylvia knows what it’s like to defy her parents, since her family is so strict. One day, Sylvia’s older sister hears her laughing loudly and smacks her across the face, telling her not to be a “dusty, dirty black American.”

Although August and her friends are close, their lives begin to diverge. First, Gigi goes to a performing arts school, though she still spends time with the others. Shortly thereafter, Sylvia’s father forbids her from seeing her friends and sends her to an elite private high school, forcing the four friends to meet secretly in the parks at night, where they smoke marijuana and attend summertime dances. Though their lives are beginning to go in different directions, they remain friends. As time passes, each of the girls gets a boyfriend, and they disappear with these boys into the dark corners of the park, where they become more and more physically intimate. In line with this, they hear about a girl their age who got pregnant and was sent to live with relatives in the South, so they temporarily slow down with their boyfriends.

That winter, a dead woman is found on the roof of the Marcy Houses, a nearby public housing development. Angela soon tells her friends that her mother has been missing for the past several days, and though they say that they’re sure her mother is all right, they learn that her mother truly was the woman found atop the Marcy Houses. Shortly thereafter, they lose track of Angela because they’ve never been to her apartment and they don’t know how to contact her, and they later hear that she was put into a foster home in Queens or Long Island. In the aftermath of this, August and Gigi stop seeing Sylvia because she becomes increasingly preoccupied by private school. One night during this period, August’s brother—who has devoted himself to the Nation of Islam—wakes August up and says that she’s wrong to think that their mother is coming back, adding that she “won’t be coming back until the resurrection.” After he says this, August can’t help but remember her father saying that her mother “troubled the water,” though she doesn’t let herself think any further about this. Still, she has an image of her mother walking through SweetGrove and not stopping once she reached the property’s waterline.

Soon, Jerome stops dating August because August doesn’t want to have sex yet. Then, while walking through the park one night, August sees Jerome holding hands with Sylvia. In response, August cuts Sylvia out of her life. Not long after this, Sylvia gets pregnant with Jerome’s child. Gigi tries to keep the group together but she can’t convince August to forget about what happened. One night, though, Gigi invites August to come see her in a musical, saying that she’s going to set aside seats for her and Sylvia. Gigi is even going to leave a seat open for Angela, hoping that perhaps she’ll return. That evening, though, August can’t bring herself to leave the house, instead sitting with her coat on and thinking about the urn containing her mother’s ashes, knowing that her mother committed suicide by walking into the water at SweetGrove. She later learns that Sylvia never showed up to Gigi’s performance either, and that Gigi’s voice cracked while singing, causing everyone in the audience to laugh. That night, Gigi went to the cast’s afterparty and jumped out a window, plunging to her death.

August leaves Brooklyn behind to attend a prestigious university in Rhode Island. One of the only African American students, she tells everyone to call her Auggie. Throughout her college career, she sleeps with boys she knows her brother and father would think of as “white devils.” While watching TV one night with one of these lovers, August sees Angela onscreen and learns that her old friend has made it as a dancer. Over the next two decades, August spends her life traveling the world and studying death, having multiple relationships and constantly thinking about her time in Brooklyn. When one lover asks August why she clenches her fists when she sleeps, she considers saying, “For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet,” but instead she says nothing at all.

Another Brooklyn Summary