Brown Girl Dreaming

Woodson and her family move from Greenville, South Carolina, to New York City. Woodson’s first sight of New York City, in the Port Authority bus terminal, is disillusioning. In “new York city,” she experiences it as a cold and unfriendly place, and wonders if “it’s another New York City / the southerners talk about. Maybe that’s where / there is money falling from the sky” (143).

Woodson and her family gradually settle in to the city. When the bathroom ceiling collapses in their Brooklyn apartment, Woodson’s mother moves her family to a new apartment, with the help of her older sister Caroline (known to the children as Aunt Kay) and Caroline’s boyfriend, Bernie. In this new apartment building, Caroline and Bernie live on the top floor and a Greenville acquaintance named Peaches lives on the bottom floor. The family is therefore able to sustain their old South Carolina community.in a strange new place, which Woodson describes in “herzl street”: “and all of them talked / like our grandparents talked / […] They were family” (146).

In “moving again,” once their Aunt Kay dies after falling down a flight of stairs, Woodson and her family move again, this time to “a pink house / on Madison Street” (152).