Brown Girl Dreaming: Part 3 Summary & Analysis

The idealized version of New York City that Southerners peddle to each other turns out to be totally unlike the city that Jacqueline encounters. This shows again the negative side of Jacqueline’s overactive imagination and her tendency to believe the fantastic stories she hears—it sometimes results in Jacqueline feeling misled and disappointed. Jacqueline’s insistence that she will never call New York home shows Jacqueline’s discomfort in the North.

The apartment into which the family first moves, which is so decrepit and disgusting that they must move out, only further exacerbates Jacqueline’s disillusionment with New York City.

Jacqueline’s sense of alienation in New York is lessened somewhat when they move in with Aunt Kay and Bernie. Her aunt’s circles include many people from the Greenville area, who come together at her house to chat while Kay cooks southern food. This sense of community makes Jacqueline feel more at home in New York City, and Jacqueline feels immediately close to other people from the South who share the same memories.

Despite the community of Southerners that Jacqueline and her family have found, Jacqueline still misses the landscape of South Carolina, represented by her longing for the red dirt. The streets of New York seem inhospitable to her, as they are hot and covered in glass. Still, the city is not hopeless for her, and when she plays in the water of the opened fire hydrant, Jacqueline is joyous. Even Mama, who seems extremely stressed after the move, enjoys herself.

Jacqueline notices the way that people react to her brother’s complexion versus the way they react to hers. She is puzzled by the difference in their skin color, and by the fact that people can’t imagine that she and Roman are related because of the difference in their skin colors. The limits of other people’s imaginations in this respect seem to bother her.

Jacqueline begins to process Aunt Kay’s death by listing memories of her, thinking of the various moments of love and affection that they had together. Although Kay’s death clearly is painful, Jacqueline uses the memories as a way of processing her grief. Jacqueline states that she has no more memories of Aunt Kay after her funeral, and clearly the inability to make more memories with her pains Jacqueline.

Although the memories of Aunt Kay seem to help Jacqueline process her death, the family also seems to find the stairs, which recall Kay’s memory, extremely painful. Bernie and Peaches clearly find the memories painful as well, and they move away. This shows that memory can be both helpful and harmful in a time of grief.

The family’s apartment is much too painful to stay in, because it recalls Kay so strongly. In their new apartment, Mama is amused by the landlord’s reference to the religious statues out front, as she is skeptical about religion in general. Still, Jacqueline senses that the statues bring Mama some comfort, which suggests that religion might provide healing possibilities for Mama.

Jacqueline’s excitement about her composition notebook shows her intense love of anything related to writing and storytelling, even before she can write herself. Jacqueline thinks the book is aesthetically beautiful. Odella, herself a big reader, cannot understand Jacqueline’s excitement, which marks their different relationships to writing.

This moment marks an important step in Jacqueline’s linguistic abilities, and it is also a profound moment of self-actualization— after much discussion of naming in the memoir, Jacqueline finally writes her own name.

Jacqueline continues to miss Greenville and the south, as Woodson shows when Jacqueline wishes for the food that Georgiana made in Greenville. The food seems to stand in, at least in part, for missing Georgiana herself. But the children sense Mama’s stress, and so they don’t complain.

Despite Jacqueline’s discomfort in New York City, she loves her new school. Odella lies to Jacqueline and tells her it used to be a castle, appealing to Jacqueline’s imagination. Jacqueline’s love of learning becomes even clearer.

Religion comes back into the children’s lives at Georgiana’s insistence. Although Jacqueline does not seem especially drawn to the services, they do comfort her in that they remind her of Greenville. Mama, who generally expresses skepticism towards religion, does not attend the services with the children. When Jacqueline mentions that she and Odella iron their own dresses, she gives the reader a sense of the intense stress Mama is under as a single working mother raising four children.

Like in South Carolina, Jacqueline finds the constraints of her religion frustrating and alienating. She also feels acutely aware of the fact that she does not genuinely believe in the teaching of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and is only doing what she’s told. When Jacqueline must leave the room during the pledge of allegiance, Gina’s devotion makes Jacqueline feel judged because she does not share it. Again, rather than providing support and guidance for Jacqueline, Jacqueline portrays her religious duties as a burden that she does not know why she must carry.

Jacqueline’s religion separates her from her peers during birthdays, when she is not allowed to eat cupcakes with the class. Jacqueline lists the other things she is not allowed to do, seeming to sense that these prohibitions prevent her from experiencing the depth and breadth of experience that the people around her are allowed to have.

Jacqueline continues to miss her home in Greenville, especially because in New York she is not allowed to play outside in the rain. Bored and homesick, Jacqueline imagines stories that take place in Greenville to relieve her sorrows, remembering or imagining catching raindrops on her tongue there and thinking of Gunnar’s garden. Jacqueline’s imagination allows her to escape her despair in New York.

Here, Jacqueline experiences the limits of imagination— she wants to be able to invent her own rules and imagine the conditions of the chess game, but the others refuse to let her. Although imagination and storytelling often helps Jacqueline, sometimes she cannot imagine her way out of following the rules that are set for her.

Odella continues to serve as a contrasting character to Jacqueline. Odella’s success in school makes Jacqueline feel even worse about her struggles with reading, a skill that, despite her love of storytelling, Jacqueline has been unable to master.

When people ask Jacqueline where her father is, Jacqueline starts to lie, saying that he is dead or elsewhere, in order to make her family seem more like the other families on the street. Lying makes Jacqueline feel less self-conscious about her situation. This shows, again, how Jacqueline uses storytelling to relieve her sorrows and make herself more comfortable in the world.

When Uncle Robert gives Odella a pair of earrings for her intelligence, it strikes a nerve in Jacqueline, who feels inferior to her older sister due to her academic struggles. Jacqueline tells Robert she knows someone much smarter than Odella. When Robert calls out Jacqueline’s spiteful lie, Woodson shows us that Jacqueline’s storytelling is more like an alternative reality than an intentional undermining of the truth. The moment ends happily, with the family dancing.

Contrasting with the preceding poem, where Jacqueline’s own lying is called out, Woodson shows how adults often lie innocently to children. This poem suggests that this kind of lying might be partially responsible for Jacqueline’s wild imagination.

Jacqueline continues to experiment with storytelling and fictionalizing life, which Robert encourages and finds endearing. Mama, however, gets angry at her, because she is concerned with what a lying child will imply about her own parenting and she thinks lying will lead to stealing. The difference in these perspectives confuses Jacqueline, and she begins to see that her storytelling sets her apart from other people, though she isn’t sure whether this is a good or bad thing. She is unsure of how her storytelling relates to her identity, due to the mixed messages she receives.

Jacqueline’s love of music, first noted when she listens to Gunnar singing on his way home from work, recurs in this poem, as Jacqueline and her siblings sing in church. Again, Jacqueline’s enjoyment of music, despite the fact that she is off-key, reflects her interest in sound and musicality, which influences her desire to write poetry rather than prose.

Jacqueline continues to question her religion as she wonders why women are not allowed to preach at Kingdom Hall. She interprets the Sunday sermon her own way, further asserting her own will and vision in a religion that contradicts it. Jacqueline sees attending Kingdom Hall explicitly as a punishment for Eve’s actions, rather than worship in which she happily partakes. As Jacqueline wishes for another chance, she imagines the possibility of deliverance from her boredom in the service.

Jacqueline’s memory of her family in Ohio has dimmed significantly. Though Jacqueline was, according to the memoir, close to her family there as a child, the time and distance between Jack’s family and the Woodson children have severely diminished these bonds. For Hope, the family is “out of sight out of mind,” but Jacqueline, who has such a rich inner life of memory and imagination, thinks this might not be so true. The idea of her father fading out of her memory disturbs Jacqueline.

Jacqueline’s increasing comfort in New York City is reflected in her speech; her accent, which has consistently plagued her and marked her difference throughout the memoir, has become assimilated to Brooklyn. Though this accent makes her more at home in Brooklyn, it alienates her from Greenville, which she still longs for. Georgiana’s accent is the focal point of Jacqueline’s nostalgia for Greenville, which is appropriate, since Jacqueline has such a love of sound.

This poem serves primarily to forward the plot, as Roman’s paint-eating becomes a problem later. Jacqueline’s rich description suggests that she is imagining this scene.

Hope has been withdrawn and shy since they first moved to South Carolina, but he develops a love of science that piques his interest and gets him talking. Mama tries to encourage this interest, but it eventually becomes a nuisance that, with her busy schedule, she can’t handle. Jacqueline sees Hope’s interest in science as a kind of escapism, like what she herself does with storytelling. Jacqueline indicates this when she says that science is Hope’s way of looking for something “way past Brooklyn.”

When Roman’s sickness results in a hospital stay, Jacqueline reflects on how, before she met Roman and in the early days of knowing him, she worried about no longer being the baby of the family. Now, Jacqueline, having adjusted to Roman’s presence, loves him and wishes he were back home. This shows Jacqueline’s growing maturity and her acceptance of the baby that she once dismissed based on his connection to New York.

With Roman extremely sick with lead poisoning, he and Mama cannot join the other siblings in Greenville for the summer. The children’s visit back South, long awaited and exciting, is saddened by the fact that Roman is ill. Though returning to the South will be a kind of homecoming for the children, it is an incomplete one, as they have to leave Mama and Roman behind.

Greenville seems to be just as it was when they left, with Georgiana cooking good food and Hope making a ruckus. Jacqueline takes comfort in the routine of life in the South, feeling at home there in a way that she does not yet feel at home in the North.

Gunnar is still sick with the same cough he had when the children left for New York, which Jacqueline still worries about. This is a way in which Greenville has remained the same, but Georgiana’s new full time work schedule results in major changes, including nursery school. Although the children feel safe, welcome, and at home in their grandparents’ house, the time in the nursery school shows them that they have changed since leaving Greenville. Their northern accents, which help them blend in in New York, cause them to be bullied in the South. Again, Jacqueline’s language prevents her from being totally at home in either the North or the South.

Odella’s sense of superiority over the children who mock them recalls how Georgiana’s pride led her to forbid the children to play with the other children on their street.

Jacqueline, evangelizing to neighbors on her own for the first time, is saddened when an old woman can’t afford the pamphlets. This injustice makes Jacqueline question her religion. Woodson shows how Jacqueline’s own moral compass at times conflicts with her religion’s teachings; to Jacqueline, denying someone spiritual guidance because they do not have enough money to pay for the materials feels wrong and marks a greater uncertainty about the foundation of her religion as a whole.

Although many of the neighborhood happenings are the same as ever, Gunnar continues to get sicker and sicker. Though he still gardens, it is now much harder for him. Gunnar represents how, although Jacqueline didn’t want it to, her life in the South continues to change.

In this poem, Jacqueline takes stock of her life in Greenville, from her vexed relationship with her religion, to her deep love of her grandparents. She also thinks about the things she misses in New York, like Roman and her mother. Jacqueline, as she prays both for Roman and for her grandparents, seems in this moment to attempt to bring all these things together, expressing her deep desire to reconcile her life in New York with her life in the South.

Jacqueline understands clearly now that Greenville has changed while she was away, and her changing relationship to the swings also confirms the changes within herself. When Gunnar promises to cement the swing set while the children are gone, it gives Jacqueline a change to look forward to, one that contrasts with the other changes that she dreads.