Going Softly: Behind You by Jacqueline Woodson

Author Jacqueline Woodson, whose novel Feathers received a Newbery Honor Award recently, is one who writes for all ages and whose books have earned Newbery, Caldecott, Coretta Scott King, and other notable awards. Reminded of her work by her recent awards, I've recently read some of her earlier work. Here are two related books for young adult readers.

Ellie and Jeremiah are fifteen years old, the children of well-to-do, successful New Yorkers, both students at Percy Academy, a prestigious private prep school in Manhattan. When they seem to fall in love at first sight, it would seem that the course of teen love would be smooth for them. It is not, mainly because Ellie is white and Jeremiah is biracial. There are family problems, as well: Jeremiah's parents divorce when his father falls in love with another woman, and Ellie's parents, modern and liberal though they think they are, cannot quite picture their young daughter as part of an interracial couple.

In If You Come Softly,Woodson's intimate look at first love, its depth and pain, is a sensitive story of the fleeting beauty of this beginning relationship between two beautiful young people whose feelings come up against the ugliness of society's reaction to their being together.

In her stand alone sequel, Behind You, Jeremiah is killed by police in a case of mistaken identity, and Ellie, his parents, and his close friends all find it hard to accept his death and go on without him. Jeremiah's spirit, too, is bound to the people he cannot forget and cannot really leave behind.

Woodson traces the history of grief in the separate voices of Ellie, his parents Nelia and Norman, and his friends Kennedy and Carlton, as they gradually turn from isolation and toward each other for solace and a way to go forward into a different life without Jeremiah. As Jeremiah says at the conclusion,

"When you die, you turn away from the world you've always known and begin the long, slow walk into the next place. And behind you--everyone you left is taking a step deeper into their new world. The world they're learning to live in without you.

When you die, your voice becomes the wind and whispers to the living...."

As in all of Woodson's books, there are no sudden and easy revelations, just the slow return of hope and the joy of life.

For my earlier posts on Jacqueline Woodson's Newbery Honor books Show Way (Newbery Honor Book) and Feathers, look here and here.

Show Way by Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson's 2007 Newbery Honor Book, Show Way, tells the story of eight generations of women in the author's family who "loved their baby girls up" and taught them to stitch quilts, called "show ways" picturing the route to liberty on their own personal underground railroad.

Beginning with "Soonie's great-grandma," who was sold away from her parents at the age of seven with nothing but some muslin, two needles, and red thread to remember her family by, the book traces the stories of each of the women who created their own way to freedom and passed on the gift of their courage and their art to Jacqueline Woodson and her own daughter today.

Woodson ends with

And I grew up, tall and straight-boned, writing every day.
And the words became books that told the stories of many people's Show Ways.

The "show-way" quilts become a metaphor for art itself and for the way each generation creates its own map to the future for those yet to come. Woodson continues the matrilineal tradition, not with needlework, but with her strong and sensitive novels that show her characters finding their way to work and love and joy in this world.

From Columbus, You Could Go Just About Anywhere: Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Interstate 77 could take you south
but my father said
no colored Buckeye in
his right mind
would ever want to go
there.
From Columbus, my father said,
you could go just about
anywhere.

Her father had wanted to name her Jack, after himself, but her mother chooses Jacqueline to make sure she will never ever be called Jackie.

Her mother longs to return home, to Greenville, South Carolina, to the soft summers and and warm arms of her family, and when Jacqueline is two, they move there, right into her grandparents' hugs and comfortable house. Grandpa becomes "Daddy," to her, and she and her older brother and sister settle in to the Black community there, soon losing their Buckeye way of fast talking. But times are changing even there, and her grandfather had his own ways of changing, too.

"This is the way brown
people have to fight,
my grandfather says.
You can't just put your
fist up.
You have to insist on something
gently. Walk toward a thing
slowly. But be ready to die,
my grandfather says,
for what is right.

But in time Jaqueline's mother grows restless of walking slowly and, leaving her three children behind, she follows her brother to New York City to find opportunity and a better place for her family.

How can we have both places?
How can we leave all that we've
known--
What about the
fireflies and ditches?

But their mother comes back for them and Jacqueline moves to her third place, expecting glorious things, even diamonds in the sidewalk. It's not like that in Brooklyn, but her brother learns that he can sing, her sister learns that she is brilliant, and Jacqueline has a teacher who tells her every morning

Now that Jacqueline is
here, the day can finally
begin.
And I believe her.

And it does begin. She learns to write her name, Jacqueline Amanda Woodson, on the first page of her composition book, and then she slowly fills it with stories that she imagines. Her mother worries that her made-up stories are just lies, but her uncle tells her to keep writing, and she does. She finds her first poetry, strange at first, some coded language only white people know, but as her teachers ask her to remember and recite it, it becomes her language, too.

How an award-winning author finds her own stories is the subject of Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2014), a memoir of the people and the places she loved and where she was loved as she grew up. Written in blank verse that flows as easily as her storytelling, this book is filled with vivid, memorable people and a strong sense of place, of three geographical places, but also of finding a personal place in the world. It is one of many American stories--recollections of family love, hard work, and the willingness to move on--that run through all our own narratives.

A 2014 National Book Award finalist, Brown Girl Dreaming gives middle readers an understanding of life in the second half of the twentieth century and how it brought us to where we are now. Its lyrical flow takes readers deep into that time, not so long, ago, and makes it as real as yesterday, with the sights, sounds, and scents of three places in the heart of the writer. “A memoir-in-verse so immediate that readers will feel they are experiencing the author’s childhood right along with her. . . .The poetry here sings: specific, lyrical, and full of imagery. An extraordinary—indeed brilliant—portrait of a writer as a young girl.” says Horn Book

Fences: The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson

That summer the fence that stretched through our town seemed bigger.

We lived on one side of it.

White people lived on the other.

And Mama said, "Don't climb over that fence when you play." She said it wasn't safe.

"Good fences make good neighbors," said Robert Frost, but he was a crusty New England farmer worried about footloose cows, and even that solitary poet found that good neighbors can come together in their shared humanity.

And as all kids know, fences are made for climbing.

That summer, trying to be a good girl for her mama, Clover keeps to her side, sometimes a bit lonely for a playmate and always curious about the white family just moved into the white house on the other side of that fence.

But Annie is more daring than Clover, and she dares to climb and sit on the top rail, looking curiously as Clover plays in the yard of her yellow house. Early summer brings a string of rainy days, and Clover watches longingly as that girl plays outside in the rain and even splashes in the forbidden puddles.

When at last the sun returns, Clover feels brave enough to approach the fence where that girl is sitting.

I got close to the fence and that girl asked me my name.

We stood there smiling.

"It's nice up on this fence," said Annie. "A fence like this was made for climbing."

"My mama said I shouldn't go on the other side," I said.

"My mama says the same thing. But she never said anything about sitting on it."

Fence-sitting slowly turns into a tentative friendship as the summer warms up, and one fine day, when Clover's friends come over for a game of jump-rope, Annie feels brave enough to slip down on the other side and join the game, and after some fun together, all the girls take a rest on the top rail of that fence, and for the moment, that fence is just a fence made for climbing and sitting.

"Someday sombody's going to come along an knock this old fence down," Annie said.

"Yeah," I said. "Someday."

The multi-award winning Jacqueline Woodson's The Other Side (G.P. Putnam's Sons) returns in its tenth anniversary (2011) edition, as moving and meaningful as ever. Woodson's text is perfect, telling this iconic story so simply and well that it avoids didacticism, and E. B. White's watercolor paintings are so stunning that they practically tell the story without the need for words. Humans have long felt a fear and yet an attraction for the "other," and the combination of text and art reveal this truth of trans-fence-friendship found as well as it can be told.

Hope Springs: Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson's new novel, Feathers, takes on the weightiest of human concerns--race, life, death, prejudice, selfishness, fear of the unknown other, faith, and simply making contact with other human beings--with the lightest of touches. Almost everything takes place inside the busy mind of eleven-year-old Frannie, who tries to make some sense out of human hope in the face of all that threatens it.

On January 6, 1971, the day after her teacher Mrs. Johnson reads Emily Dickinson's poem, "Hope Is a Thing with Feathers," a new boy comes to the class, a white boy with long blond hair, so clearly different from the rest of the students that class tough guy Trevor names him "Jesus boy." Frannie is drawn to the boy's calm and his acceptance of Trevor's attempted put down, and her religious friend Samanatha wonders if the boy really is Jesus, coming back in her own time. Thoughts swirl through Frannie's mind, thoughts about her mother's pregnancy and the three babies that didn't live, her deaf brother and the hearing girls who reject him despite his good looks, thoughts about religion and fear and how everyone seems to keep on hoping when life seems as fragile as a feather.

When Trevor forces a showdown with "Jesus boy" on the playground, the boy unexpectedly encourages Trevor to fight, taunting him with the rejection of his white father whose fatherhood only shows in Trevor's pale eyes and light skin. "Jesus boy" is no more a savior than the rest of the people in Frannie's life, but after all her thinking and watching, Frannie takes this moment of confrontation to act.

I went to Trevor. The minute I saw him falling, I went toward him. It was automatic. Something inside of me just said, 'Go!' And I did. Because Trevor was falling and then he was in the snow. And in the snow he looked smaller and weaker and more human than any of us. When I looked up, the Jesus Boy was on the other side of me. And we were both lifting Trevor even as he tried to shake us off him and keep from crying.

Woodson's quiet novel teems with the stuff of real life as experienced through the eyes of a young character with an old soul, for whom sorrow's springs are all too real and yet for whom hope is a sweet song "that never stops at all."

Harmonic Convergence: Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson

"Do you have late pass for me, Esteban?" Mrs. Laverne asked. "Is everything okay?"

Esteban shook his head. "I don't have a pass," he said, his voice breaking. "We think they took my papi. Nobody knows where he's at."

While Ms. Laverne talked to Esteban, I thought about mine. I thought about handcuffs. I thought about fathers being taken way and uncles coming to the rescue and mothers gone.

Then that Friday afternoon Ms. Laverne does something unexpected. She takes the six kids in her special fifth-sixth grade class down the hall to an deserted old art room and gives them a strange assignment: they're to spend the last hour of class on every Friday there--talking.

"But I don't know what we're even supposed to talk about," Tiago said. "And to who?"

"Schoolwork, toys, TV, me, yourselves--anything. To each other. And it's 'to whom,' Tiago."

Amari said, "You trying to change the art room into the A.R.T.T. room--A Room to Talk."

Mrs. Laverne pointed to Amari. "You. Are. Brilliant."

Haley brings a recorder so they can remember what they talk about. And talk they do, little by little, about ordinary pre-adolescent feelings--Holly's embarrassment after she shows off her new sneakers--shoes the others point out are way too expensive for anyone else in the group to even think about wanting. But then Esteben talks about fears no child should face--his fears that his mother will also disappear and both parents will be deported back to the Dominican Republic. Amari talks about his sadness that he and his friends can't play with their Nerf guns outside because he's black and could be killed by police who think he's a shooter. Ashton is shocked but sad when he realizes that he can do things because he's white that Amari can't do. And it is only on the last Friday that Haley can talk about her memory, about how as the driver, her father was jailed when her mother was killed in an auto accident.

So much can change in a minute, an hour, a year.

And change they do. Esteben leaves with his whole family, and the remaining five realize how much they learned about each other and about themselves. The A.R.T.T. has been what Haley's uncle calls a harmonic convergence. And they will never be the same.

In her latest, Jacqueline Woodson's Harbor Me (Nancy Paulsen/Random House Books, 2018) plumbs the story of six young people who are given the time to bridge the distance between them in the gift of time and privacy to share their lives with each other. The multi-award-winning Woodson's easy, colloquial, but poetic prose shines here, as always, in a story that is both personal and global in its portrayal of young lives shared--and the strength they learn from each other. In their starred review, Kirkus summarizes, "This story, told with exquisite language and clarity of narrative, is both heartbreaking and hopeful. An extraordinary and timely piece of writing."

2009 Newbery Honor Award: After Tupac & D Foster by Jacqueline Woodson

We loved D because she was our girl and because she'd been to places and seen things me and Neeka probably weren't ever gonna see. Even though Flo had her on lockdown at night, D also had all this freedom in the daytime. Mostly I was the quiet one in our group, the Brain. Mostly I watched and listened. But I could watch until I was ninety-nine and I'd never be able to see what D saw.

"The way I figure it," D said, "we all just out in the world trying to figure out our Big Purpose.

I know I got this Big Purpose. And when I know what it is exactly, I'm coming right to y'all with the news."

Eleven years old, the unnamed narrator and her best friend Neeka dress alike and spend all their time together on their close knit Queens block, where their watchful moms keep them firmly under their thumbs. Into this circumscribed world D Foster suddenly appears one day, a girl who lives with her foster mother Flo and is free to roam until her curfew at nine each night. The three become close, and the narrator and Neeka slowly learn bits of D's very different personal history--her mother who alternately abandoned her and reappeared, a long drab time in a crowded group home, and her terrifying experience with a foster mother who locked her in a closet and starved her for days at a time. The two sheltered girls envy D's freedom to visit any part of New York she chooses, but it is obvious that D longs to have her mother back and to be lovingly protected as her friends are. The music of Tupac Shakur forms the background of their growing friendship as the three become young teenagers, but D feels a special bond to his songs:

"It's like I look at him and I see myself. It's like I'm looking in a mirror.

It's like he sees stuff, you know? And he knows stuff. And he be thinking stuff that only somebody who knows that kinda living deep and true could know and think."

And then as the girls begin to look forward to high school and the rest of their lives, Tupac is shot and dies and D Foster's mom suddenly reappears and takes her upstate to live. The two old friends still have each other, but they are growing up, too, and no one now takes them for sisters even in their new matching outfits. Their Big Purpose, like D's, is still somewhere out there before them; but they see their own families differently now and somehow feel that the time of their friendship with D has changed them forever.

Jacqueline Woodson's 2009 Newbery Honor book, After Tupac and D Foster (Newbery Honor Book), (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2008) is a quiet, spare, but intimate account of three girls who, despite their differences, form a permanent bond with each other. Although the setting in a stable African American neighborhood in Queens forms the matrix of the characters' lives, the theme of a maturing friendship is universal.

Woodson is one of the most honored of current young adult writers, having won the Newbery Honor Award for Feathers (Newbery Honor Book) in 2008 and for Show Way (Newbery Honor Book) in 2006, a Caldecott Honor Award for Coming On Home Soon set during World War II, National Book Award nominations for Hush and Locomotion, and, among others, the Coretta Scott King Award for Miracle's Boys. For reviews of her work, see my several posts here.

First Day: The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson

There will be a day when you walk into a room and no one there is quite like you.

Maybe it will be your skin, your clothes, or the curl of your hair.

The first day in a new class is hard. No one wants to be the odd one out, and when the teacher does the "what I did this summer" round robin. When Angelina listens to all the summer stories of flying  to other states and other continents, she feels like the only one who stayed home and looked after her little sister  and read lots of books. The teacher calls on a new boy to introduce himself.

"I'm Rigoberto from Venezuela," he says.

The class laughs, until the teacher repeats it softly and his name sounds almost like music.

And when Angelina says her long name, the kids stare at her until Rigoberto speaks right up.

"Your name is like my sister's. Her name is also Angelina."

And all at once in the room where on one else is quite like you, the world opens up a little wider to make some space for you.

And all at once Angelina feels comfortable telling how in her summer she read books to her little sister and to herself long after bedtime and realizes that like them, she, too, took flight to many places, and she begins to tell her class about what she read.

Feeling like the stranger in the room is an almost universal experience at some time in life. It may be a classroom, a college, an office, or a new town, but finding some connection with strangers makes it easier to see the things we may have in common. In her best-selling The Day You Begin (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2018) the Newbery Medalist and National Book Award winning Jacqueline Woodsen's first-day story, illustrated by award-winning artist Rafael Lopez, is a sort of parable for children in dealing with new situations, finding what you have in common and valuing what you may not share at first. This is a fine book for the first day of school; as Publisher's Weekly said, "Woodsen's gentle, lilting story and Lopez's artistry create a stirring portrait of the courage it takes to be yourself."

Jacqueline Woodson has won the American Library Association's John Newbery Award for Brown Girl Dreaming, After Tupac and D Foster (Newbery Honor Book), Feathers, and Show Way. (See reviews here)

And the Winner Is.... 2014 National Book Award For Young People's Literature

... Jacqueline Woodson, three-time finalist and first time winner) for her free verse novel Brown Girl Dreaming (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2014), winner of the 2014 National Book Foundation Award for Young People's Literature.  (See my review October 27 review here.)

Woodson was also a 2009 Newbery Honor Medal winner for After Tupac and D Foster.

Other short-listed finalists of books for young adults were Eliot Schrefer, for Threatened (Scholastic Press), Deborah Wiles, for Revolution (The Sixties Trilogy), (Scholastic Press), John Corey Whaley, for Noggin. (Atheneum Press), and Steve Sheinkin, for The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights (Roaring Brook Press).

The Envelope, Please! 2013 Newbery and Caldecott Awards

The American Library Association is announcing their prestigious Youth Media Awards, including their most-famous medals for youth fiction and picture books, today. This year's Caldecott Award, given to the best-illustrated book, is the seventy-fifth annual such award. I'll be live-blogging the winners as they are made public.

The winning titles were announced and livestreamed beginning at 8:00 a.m. PST (11:00 a.m. EST).

And here they are!

The 2013 Caldecott Medal goes to Jon Klassen for his This Is Not My Hat.(See my recent review here:)

Caldecott Honor Awards go to illustrator Aaron Reynolds for his Creepy Carrots!, Jon Klassen for his work on Extra Yarn, Laura Vaccaro Seeger for her Green, (see review here:)  David Smalls for his pictures for One Cool Friend, (review here) and Pamela Zagarenki for her illustrations in Sleep Like a Tiger.

The prestigious Newbery Medal goes to Katherine Applegate's The One and Only Ivan.

Newbery Honor Awards go to Laura Amy Schlitz for Splendors and Glooms, Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin, and Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage.

The Theodor Seuss Geisel Medal for the best beginning reader's book was awarded to Ethan Long's Up, Tall and High.

Geisel Honor Awards  were given to Mo Willem's Let's Go for a Drive! (An Elephant and Piggie Book), (see review here) Eric Litwin's Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons, (my review here) and Cece Ball's Rabbit and Robot: The Sleepover.

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Katherine Paterson, perhaps best known for her Bridge to Terabithia.

The Andrew Carnegie Medal for the most outstanding children's video goes to Video Productions' film, Anna. Emma and the Condors.

The Michael Printz Award for young adult fiction goes to Nick Lake's In Darkness.

The Pura Belpre' Awards for Latino children's literature go to illustrator David Diaz for Martin de Porres: The Rose in the Desert, (review here) and author Benjamin Sienz for Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (also the winner of the 2013 Stonewall Award.)

Taking the Siebert Award for the best informational book for children was Steve Sheinkin's Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon. The Batchelder Medal for the best foreign book for children translated to English went to My Family for the War by Anne Voorhoeve.

Receiving the Coretta Scott King Medals were Brian Collier for  his illustrations for Langston Hughes' I, Too, Am America.   and author Andrea Davis Pinkney for her Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America: Coretta Scott King Honor Awards went to illustrators Kadir Nelson for I Have a Dream (Book and CD),  Daniel Minter for Ellen's Broom, and Chris Myers' H.O.R.S.E.: A Game of Basketball and Imagination. King Fiction Honor Medals went to Vaunda Nelson's No Crystal Stair (Carolrhoda Ya) and to novelist Jacqueline Woodson's Each Kindness.

The 2013 Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Achievement Medal was presented to Demetria Tucker.

The YALSA Medal  was awarded to Andrea Davis Pinkney for her Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America.  Andrea Pinkney was also  named  to present  the  2013 Arbuthnot Lecture. YALSA's nonfiction honors went to Steve Sheinkin's Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon. making Sheinkin the informal 2013 triple crown winner

The Odyssey Award went to the audio book version of John Green's novel, The Fault in Our Stars produced by Brilliance Audio.

The Margaret A Edwards Medal for lifetime contributions of young adult literature was given to Tamora Pierce, and the William C. Morris new author award went to Rachel Hartman for her first novel, Seraphina.

The 2013 Alex Awards, given to ten adult books with special appeal to young adult readers, includes the National Book Award Youth Fiction winner, Louise Erdrich's The Round House. The complete list may be found here.