The Non-Absolute Definition of You

“You’re a writer.”  I think this was the moment. The moment when Jackie officially became Jacqueline to herself. She had finally achieved what she has been pursuing for a long time. Always in her sister’s shadow, her intelligence was under appreciated. Her mind was taken for granted. Was she a liar or a storyteller? Was she brilliant or not? People kept trying to categorize her, put her in a place where she knew that she did not belong. I think that is why she had such a good relationship with her grandpa. She was like him. He understood her to an extent that nobody else could. In one part of the book he says something along the lines of, he cannot believe in a God that wouldn’t let him smoke his cigarettes or drink his beer. Yet, his wife, an upright faithful follower of the Jehovah practice, thought different. Jacqueline’s grandfather had to discover that about himself. Just as Jacqueline came to her conclusion of who she was and what she wanted to do with her life.

In the poem, what I believe, she summarizes all of her youth. She is every single experience she had ever had. She is every journey, every laugh, tear, and adventure. In each world, she says she is Jackie and Jacqueline. She is the child born in Ohio, that ran barefoot through the reddish dirt of South Carolina. She is the child that sat on the porch with her grandpa and the same one that shared her plate of food with Maria. She is not just one thing, but a collective of things. She is everything she thought and everything she thinks now. In a world where you must become one thing or the other, JacquelineWoodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming reveals the non-absolute definition of you.