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Jacqueline Woodson, Photo Credit: Tiffany A. Bloomfield -
Cassidy Wells
Jacqueline Woodson is the recipient of the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award. She was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, and in 2015, she was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She received the 2014 National
Book Award for her New York Times bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, which also received the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, the NAACP Image Award and a Sibert Honor. She also wrote the adult books Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller, and Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist. She is the author of dozens of award-winning books for young adults, middle graders and children; among her many accolades, she is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a four-time National Book Award finalist, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner. Her books include New York Times bestsellers The Day You Begin and Harbor Me; The Other Side; Each Kindness; Caldecott Honor book Coming On Home Soon; Newbery Honor winners Feathers, Show Way, and After Tupac and D Foster; and Miracle’s Boys, which received the LA Times Book Prize and the Coretta Scott King Award. Jacqueline is also a recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement for her contributions to young adult literature and a two-time winner of the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award.
New Orleans Review
I wanted to start off by asking some questions about Red at the Bone. The novel works in many ways in parallel to the way that society expects the black narrative to be. This narrative often depicts black men as strong willed, hot-headed, fatherless and in turn not being strong father figures, however, In Red at The Bone we see this parallel of sensitive black men, who adore black women, and adore their black children which is a breath of fresh air to read. Can you talk a bit about how important it is for your readers to see black love, and men being sensitive?
Jacqueline Woodson
You know it’s a really good question. I think the first thing you have to acknowledge is when you’re saying society you’re talking about white society. You’re not talking about black society. You know, we have a different narrative for who we are as family, as parents, as people and we know the long history of what led to the disproportionate number of broken families which was enslavement. So, for me and trying to write Red at the Bone, I wanted to paint a different kind of “truth” than the one that gets put out there, because a lot of us bear witness to loving father figures, whether they are biological fathers or not. And alot of us bear witness to the loving members of an extended family whether they are chosen family or biological family. To be able to explore those many ways in which black men can be good people and are good people without having to go into that place of “magical negro” because that’s not our truth. It made sense to me that I wanted to paint Aubrey as a loving figure because everything about who he was and wanted to be from the time he was a young a boy; he wanted a family, he wanted love, he wanted to live simply and seeing as he was devoted to his mom, when Melody came along of course he was going to be a devoted father figure.
NOR
Continuing with the parallels in this novel, CathyMarie is an interesting character. A white passing black woman. Again, the expectation is that this woman is going to cheat the systematic racism of the world because of this, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t try to skirt the world as a white woman to make life easier, and we find out she’s not immune to the issues black women face. I think this touches so lightly on colorism and poverty and can you tell us a bit about that choice to make CathyMarie whitepassing, and impoverished?
Woodson
Again, the cliche of the narrative is the brown skinned welfare speaking black woman who wants to be a part of that “handout.” When the truth is, we know anyone in their right mind would not want to be a part of that. It’s only because of the poverty, often generational poverty that one reluctantly becomes a part of that system. It’s easy to rest a lazy eye on the stereotype, and I didn’t want to write about the stereotype. I wanted to explore the many ways that color exists in the black community and the many ways that poverty exists. It’s not just the brown skinned folks who are poor, not just the brown skinned folks who end up in the foster care system, it’s not just the brown skinned folks who deal with depression, and I didn’t want to erase the fact that someone who is light-skinned is black.
I think sometimes on both sides of the race narrative that they’re less black than someone who is brown skinned or can’t pass for white and we know that’s not true, and they know that’s not true. For someone like CathyMarie who truly leans into her blackness from the way she speaks, to the fact that she has this chocolate son, for her it’s not an option to try to pass for white. There’s nothing in her narrative except the color of her skin for her to be allowed to do that. In doing that, she would have to forsake her son, but for me the idea that someone who is white passing would do so, it’s never been a happy ending. When you look at the history of the “tragic Mulatto,” there’s always suicide at the end, there’s always a “no place being home” at the end and I didn’t want that for CathyMarie. I wanted her to have a sense of home and a sense of place and something that she could do in the world that could impact the greater good, which is wha happened when Iris came along pregnant.
NOR
Women in this novel appear to lack a tenderness that is also expected when it comes to motherhood. They all appear to be disconnected from one another. And you shift the narrative perspective around so that the reader feels a hereditary trauma that has caused this. Was this intentional? How did you want the reader to see the struggles of womanhood and the expectation of motherhood that comes with it?
Woodson
I have to disagree about the tenderness. It’s a tenderness that we’re not used to seeing. Sabe is very tender towards Melody and Iris is tender toward Jam and towards Aubrey in the early days. There’s a tenderness between Iris and Sabe that’s not the ‘we’re gonna love each others and hug each other everyday,’ but I always think about Fences when then son says “do you like me” and James Earl Jones in the later version gives that long monologue about what he does for his son and how hard his life has been to give his son a good life he says, “Don’t ever ask ‘do you like me.’” I think that is something in the black community, that people are grinding too hard to take a moment of tenderness.Tenderness is sometimes a very privileged thing, like when you’re leaving for work at 6 in the morning and coming home at 10 at night, for me as I child I don’t remember my mom hugging me alot, but I remember her kissing me everytime she left for work and everytime she returned she’d come into each of our rooms and kiss us goodnight just to show us she’d been there. For me that was the tenderness. There is a way that the characters connect to each other. Sabe raises a whole child and really takes care of Iris so that she is able to go to college. Cathymarie’s relationship with Aubrey is very emotionally tender. Then there’s Sabe and Po’boys’ relationship. Then we have Iris’ decision to leave her child to go to college. To me, I don’t want to have an angry, resentful mom living at home with me. So I think that was a decision that probably saved Melody a lot of grief.
What I would love is for people to look hard to see the way we have to be in the world differently, than someone who is at home cooking and making three meals a day for their family. Not to negate what it means to be a stay-at-home mom, but our jobs have historically been motherhood and full time employers. Even though Sabe has the means as an upper middle class family, there are families that have come through trauma and know that at any moment it can be gone. So what does that mean to live in a world where you know your means can be literally bombed out from beneath you. So there’s a desperation to keep on moving forward and for Sabe it’s to keep the eye on the prize of getting people launched and loved. So I think everyone is pretty beloved and it’s just shown differently.
NOR
At its core, Red at The Bone shows a series of class differences within the black community, but at the end of the day the goal is to keep surviving and the struggle to survive. I love how the histories of Black Wall Street stream into black wealth to support this. When writing this did you originally want to show the complexities of black wealth? How there is a trauma and a danger associated with gaining wealth?
Woodson
Yeah, definitely. I really wanted to show how again and again it gets erased to the point of being about survival. We look at the Chicago Race Riots, the 1918 Tulsa Race Massacre, we look at the end of enslavement and the broken promise of 40 acres and a mule, and we look at Red Lining. There’s so many ways again and again America has told Black folk that ‘this is not for you and we’re going to find a way to show that’. You look at the riots of the KKK after reconstruction, they’re going to find a way for that not to happen. When Black middle class families rise up, it’s kind of a miracle. I think as much a miracle as gold beneath the stairs, it’s a very hard thing to have generational wealth. I always think about the Veteran Rights Acts where people were given mortgages, black veterans not so much, but when they were they could only buy houses in segregated neighborhoods and the property value drops. Whereas white folks were able to buy houses where the property value rose, and they were able to leave those houses to their children. There’s so many ways that we have to consider what didn’t happen and what did, like the bombing of Tulsa, so that black people didn’t gain wealth and I really wanted to show that history of that they were able to hold onto wealth in spite of everything.
NOR
The writing in the novel is very sex positive. The way you craft the views of sexuality as an individual experience in a lot of ways parallel to the black community. Without shying away from the consequences of exploring sexuality, you’re able to show sexuality as a beautiful and normal experience. What did you want the reader to see when dropping into the intimate details of these characters’ lives?
Woodson
I wanted them to see exactly that. That it can be positive. I don’t like the idea of trauma porn when it comes to sex. I wanted it to be something that’s celebrated. When you think of the sexuality of people it starts very young. We like to disregard it and make believe that it doesn’t happen, talk about abstinence and all the ways of which it’s almost ‘unnatural’ to exist, what their bodies are doing physiologically. I was intentional about making sure that when I did talk about it that it was something positive or thoughtful, no matter what kind of sex they had, no matter what their age. Of course I wanted it to be consensual when the people were younger. I wasn’t gonna try to have some intergenerational thing happen there. I’m not into that. But in terms of other stuff, definitely.
NOR
(Spoiler alert) A shocking twist in the story is how Aubrey meets his end. I was saddened and hurt, and then I realized how easy it is to forget that black people lost their lives during 9/11 too. That day we forgot race, and just became Americans. Why did you decide to have Aubrey’s fate end this way?
Woodson
For that reason, you know so many essential workers, so many people of color, latin folks lost their lives in 9/11 and we do forget the guys in the mailroom. We forget the janitors. We forget the people working in the restaurants, the busboys, the dishwashers, and the secretaries, and all those people who lost their lives. As well as all the people who were told to stay, who probably didn’t even question not staying, because how dare you question someone in a position of power. So, it made total sense for Aubrey who had this great job in the mailroom that he loved, and was able to provide for his family, and was so satisfied with his life in this way that I wanted to celebrate. There’s plenty of us who are constantly reaching for more, and it’s like how is this enough for you? We have Sabe and Po’boy and his daughter Melody and he’s in this beautiful house and he has this great job and he’s able to provide. He’s able to come home at night and have meals with them. He has his boys in the mailroom. So, when we think of the things that get snatched from people’s lives especially when thinking about 9/11 we don’t hold it under a microscope and see the many individual people and the many lives that were shattered in communities of color.
NOR
I wanted to shift from Red at the Bone into Brown Girl Dreaming and ask a couple of questions. What is the difference between writing for different age groups? Specifically, in Brown Girl Dreaming, how did you manage to write poetry that can be read by both adults AND ten-year-olds?
Woodson
I don’t know. It’s so funny. When I was writing Brown Girl Dreaming I didn’t know what that book was going to be. I just knew I had to write it to figure out how I became the writer I am today. I started writing it and had to investigate my life on so many levels, and it became Brown Girl Dreaming. When I’m writing I don’t think about my readers, I think about myself, what do I need to hear, what questions do I need to figure out. It was really surprising to me when it became this book that I was getting fan mail from women my age, which of course makes sense now, because they lived these same experiences and 10-year-old white boys, and of course lots and lots of brown girls that had never seen themselves in the title let alone in the pages of a book. By brown I mean, Lantinx, African American, Indian, and so it was a book that constantly surprised me and I really had no idea that it was going to be that.
NOR
While writing Brown Girl Dreaming were there any particular struggles you face while writing in verse?
Woodson
It’s in verse because that’s how memory comes to us. It comes to us in these small moments with all of this white space around it. I wanted it to reflect that without being reductive of the experiences I was writing about. I think that the rewriting, the rewriting, the excessive rewriting of it really can get to the essence of what that moment was trying to talk about was definitely a struggle. I think I struggled in terms of what stories to tell, like the story of my younger brother’s dad I ended up not telling because that’s his story, that’s not my story. His story of lead poisoning isn’t my story. We struggled through that with him being a sick child, so that kind of stuff I went back and forth on, but I was pretty clear eyed in the end about what I wanted to say.
NOR
Can I ask how long you took while writing to feel like the story you wanted to tell was finished?
Woodson
Brown Girl Dreaming took me about 3.5-4 years and you know I’m usually writing another book at the same time. I’m usually writing a couple books. Cause I was researching. I was trying to figure out how to tell the story in the middle of writing it. My mom died suddenly so I was dealing with that grief, then that totally reshaped the story. Then it became a story about my mom, and how she got us to the space to be who we eventually became. It was definitely an emotional journey that I think slowed down the process. Cause there was a lot of thinking about what are the stories that shaped me and are those my stories to tell and how do I tell them in a way that’s loving. I did make choices about the stories I tell in that book. There are much harder stories to tell that took place in Brownsville and Bushwick, and later in life but I knew I wanted to stop it at 10. Because at 10-11 that’s when I knew I was definitely going to be a writer.
NOR
My final question: What do you hope to tell the future black women writers through your stories? What advice can you give us?
Woodson
I would say just remember that we were always here. Telling our stories isn’t anything new. Because of that we shouldn’t be scared to do it. We were always here and we need to continue to be here. You know Sabe says that ‘if a bodies to be remembered, someone has to tell its story.’ It’s very easy to be forgotten as black women. It’s really important to keep telling our stories.
Cassidy Wells (Loyola ’19) graduated with honors from Loyola University New Orleans with a B.A. in Criminology & Justice. She is pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College while working as the Housing Coordinator for the Residence Life department in the Office of Student Affairs. She plans to pursue a doctoral degree in English and African American Studies in order to fulfill a career in teaching in higher education.
