Brown Girl Dreaming

This first section of the memoir covers Woodson’s birth and ancestry. Woodson is born in Columbus, Ohio, near where her paternal family lives. Her mother is from Greenville, South Carolina. Woodson has an older brother, Hope, and an older sister, Odella. Woodson is named Jacqueline as a compromise between her father and her mother: Her father had initially wanted to call her Jack, naming her after himself. 

In “the woodsons of ohio,” Woodson’s father’s side of the family traces their lineage back to “Thomas Woodson of Chillicothe, said to be / the first son / of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings” (8). They pride themselves on their worldly accomplishments, and believe that they “had a head start” because of their distinguished heritage (9).

Woodson also has a sense of her mother’s South Carolina heritage, and the larger heritage of Black people in the United States. In the poem “second daughter’s second day on earth,” Woodson evokes the Black writers and civil rights heroes who were alive on the day of her birth, February 12, 1963: Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Rosa Parks. She pictures herself as a baby, wondering which of these figures she will grow up to most resemble: “I do not know if these hands will become/ Malcolm’s—raised and fisted / or Martin’s—open and asking” (5).