As a school-age child, the protagonist of Jacqueline Woodson's memoir Brown Girl Dreaming struggles with being compared to her "gifted" older sister, especially when it comes to reading.

Too slow
The teacher says.
Read faster.
Too babyish, the teacher says.
Read older.
But I don't want to read faster or older or
any way else that might
make the story disappear too quickly from where
it's settling
inside my brain,
slowly becoming
a part of me.

However, when Woodson's mother takes her to the library every Monday afternoon, she has the freedom to read as she pleases, and she credits that Monday afternoon liberty with leading her to Stevie, a picture book published in 1969 that brought its 19-year-old author John Steptoe national fame (Steptoe would go on to write Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters, a Caldecott Honor Book and Coretta Scott King Award winner).

If someone had been fussing with me
to read like my sister, I might have missed
the picture book filled with brown people, more
brown people than I'd ever seen
in a book before.
…
If someone had taken
that book out of my hand
said, You're too old for this
maybe
I'd never have believed
that someone who looked like me
could be in the pages of the book
that someone who looked like me
had a story.

If somebody is fussing with you to read like an adult, saying that you're too old to read YA or—even worse!—"middle grade" books, you might miss the richly layered portrait of identity in Woodson's poetic memoir. Brown Girl Dreaming recently won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, and Woodson has long been established as a children's and young adult author, but one of the most notable things about the book is the way in which it suggests that we are all multiple ages at once. As the protagonist of Sandra Cisneros's short story "Eleven" complains, "What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one."

Not only can we have multiple ages jostling around in us at the same time, but our identities are made up of multiple voices. Unlike in some children's and adolescent—and, to be fair, some adult—books, in Brown Girl Dreaming, identity isn't just a matter of finding some true, individual self buried under the layers of social conditioning; rather, the words that others say become a part of "you." Jacqueline's freedom from age restrictions allows her to find her "own" voice, but your voice, as Woodson astutely suggests throughout Brown Girl Dreaming, is never entirely your own. It is formed by all sorts of voices—voices of family, voices of the radio, voices of civil rights leaders, voices of writers who look like you and writers who don't (Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant is the other work given credit for shaping the young Jacqueline's voice, and she lets the book become a part of her by memorizing every single word in it).

Woodson's portrayal of Jacqueline's debt to Steptoe and Wilde places her within an African American literary tradition in which the acquisition of literacy prompts the dawning of a new sense of identity. Brown Girl Dreaming belongs on the shelf not only in the company of children's books like Stevie but also alongside adult works like W. E. B. Du Bois' 1903 classic The Souls of Black Folk. If Du Bois' work is especially memorable for its concept of African American double-consciousness—the "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity"—then Woodson's work is notable for exploring other forms of double-selfhood, forms that aren't necessarily a direct result of racism. Racism manifests in Woodson's world—she mentions restaurants and stores in Greenville, South Carolina, that treated African American customers with suspicion and hostility—but her protagonist Jacqueline's identity emerges in the context of her family and of their neighborhoods, not primarily in response to white-dominated society. Jacqueline's experiences of a doubled or conflicted identity result more from moving from Ohio to South Carolina to New York (though, in the 1960s and 1970s, these places have different assumptions about what it means to be "brown"), and her sense of being excluded or "other" is primarily due to her childhood religious identity as a Jehovah's Witness.

In depicting the family's moves and her Witness upbringing, Woodson draws on both the child's perspective and the adult's perspective, without calling explicit attention to differences between them. With an outlook probably attained through maturity, Woodson gives tribute to her mother's courage in forging a new life for them at the tail end of the Great Migration; as a child, though, Jacqueline and her siblings feel torn between the "home" they knew with their South Carolina grandparents and the "home" their mother has established for them in Brooklyn. Woodson, like Toni Morrison, explores what was left behind, as well as what was gained, in the Great Migration, and she challenges any simple equation of the South with restraint and the North with liberty. Her mother deems it prudent to move with the children to the back of the bus on the way from South Carolina to Ohio in 1963, but she also punishes the children for any lapse into what she views as "southern" or "subservient" speech—"ain't," "y'all," and "ma'am."

"As the switch raises dark welts on my brother's legs
Dell and I look on
afraid to open our mouths. Fearing the South
will slip out or
into them.

The ambiguity with which Woodson shades the mother's actions in this scene is one of the particular strengths of Brown Girl Dreaming. She manages to pay tribute to her mother's fierce need to give her children the language of self-respect, but she also shows how the mother's desire for "northern" ways had a silencing effect on the children.

Woodson's description of being raised, according to her maternal grandmother's wishes, as a Jehovah's Witness, is similarly nuanced. (This nuance was regrettably lost in Woodson's reading at the National Book Awards in November, during which she told the audience, "I was raised Jehovah's Witness. [pause] I'm not anymore," followed by titters from the crowd. In Brown Girl Dreaming, Woodson seems far less certain that one can call an old identity over and done with.) She writes of the children's enthrallment to her grandmother's rendering of Bible stories—

Our questions come fast but we want
the stories more than we want the answers
so when my grandmother says,
Hush, so I can tell it!
We do.

—but also of how women aren't allowed to speak onstage alone at church. After a section on how she and her Jehovah's Witness classmates have to leave the room during the pledge of allegiance, she reflects on other Witness prohibitions: "We will never taste the sweetness of a classroom / birthday cupcake / We will never taste the bitterness of a battle." Even a religious identity centered, from the perspective of a child, around "what we don't do" isn't as simple as it initially seems: the legacy is both freeing and restrictive at the same time.

Similarly, the last section of Brown Girl Dreaming, "each world," begins as an ode to an expansive and hopeful version of double-consciousness, a sense that being two things at once is an opportunity rather than a burden:

Each day a new world
opens itself up to you. And all the worlds you are—
Ohio and Greenville
Woodson and Irby
Gunnar's child and Jack's daughter
Jehovah's Witness and nonbeliever
listener and writer
Jackie and Jacqueline—

gather into one world

called You

But then the lines take a turn toward a more simplistic self-empowerment anthem:

where You decide

what each word
and each story
and each ending

will finally be.

Declarations of self-determined identity are always going to ring hollow to a reader who prefers a notion of identity centered in Christ, but these last few words collapse the richer, polyphonic "you" that readers have followed throughout the book.

And, in truth, sometimes you don't entirely get to decide how your words will be framed. Brown Girl Dreaming received publicity for winning the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, but even more attention due to the deplorable conduct of M.C. Daniel Handler (best known as children's author Lemony Snicket), who, after Woodson won the award, made light of her achievement by invoking racial caricature. Handler "joked" to the audience: "I told Jackie she was gonna win, and I said that if she won, I would tell all of you something I learned about her this summer, which is that Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon. Just let that sink in your mind."

These are words that sink in the mind indeed, words that leave one despairing about whether much progress has really been made since 1903 or 1963. In response to Handler, Woodson wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, in which she recounted another childhood reading experience, one not mentioned in Brown Girl Dreaming: "In a book I found at the library, a camp song about a watermelon vine was illustrated with caricatures of sleepy-looking black people sitting by trees, grinning and eating watermelon. Slowly, the hideousness of the stereotype began to sink in. In the eyes of those who told and repeated the jokes, we were shuffling, googly-eyed and lesser than." Woodson here establishes her identity as a writer who can replace these images with better ones: "This mission is what's been passed down to me—to write stories that have been historically absent in this country's body of literature, to create mirrors for the people who so rarely see themselves inside contemporary fiction, and windows for those who think we are no more than the stereotypes they're so afraid of. To give young people—and all people—a sense of this country's brilliant and brutal history, so that no one ever thinks they can walk onto a stage one evening and laugh at another's too often painful past."

Important words, yet Woodson's op-ed almost rewrites Brown Girl Dreaming as if it were written in response to Handler's insensitivity. I find myself applauding Woodson's response at the same time that I wonder if she cedes too much power to Handler by allowing his words to frame even her own discussion of her work. It's as if her post-Du Boisian double-consciousness is suddenly forced back into the old Du Boisian struggle.

Handler, to his credit, apologized with tongue removed from cheek, gave a lot of money to the grassroots campaign We Need More Diverse Books, and said on Twitter, "It would be heartbreaking for the #NBAwards conversation to focus on my behavior instead of great books." In one sense, I think he's right, which is why I've saved any mention of his words until the end of this review.

In another sense, though, the ways that Handler's comments have shaped our conversations about Brown Girl Dreaming shine a light on another trick of memory, the ways that Americans are especially prone to pretend that the past is past, that the troubling history of American racism is part of a national childhood that may be left behind now that we have achieved enlightened adulthood. As Woodson suggests in Brown Girl Dreaming, though, "past" selves can coexist with present ones, and that's as painfully true for the nation as it is for the individual. We can be the America Du Bois described at the same time that we are the nation Woodson described. When it's 2015, it's also 1963 and 1903. Sometimes it takes a children's book and the kerfuffle surrounding it to force us to acknowledge that.

Carissa Turner Smith is associate professor of English at Charleston Southern University. She has published articles in the journals African American Review, Literature and Belief, and Renascence, as well as in a couple of collections of academic essays on children's and young adult fantasy literature. She's also written for Christ and Pop Culture.

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