Jacqueline Woodson

Even though the laws have changed my grandmother still takes us to the back of the bus when we go downtown in the rain.It's easier, my grandmother says, than having white folks look at me like I'm dirt. But we aren't dirt. We are people paying the same fare as other people. When I say this to my grandmother, she nods, says,Easier to stay where you belong. I look around and see the ones who walk straight to the back. See the ones who take a seat up front, daring anyone to make them move. And know this is who I want to be. Not scared like that. Brave like that. Still, my grandmother takes my hand downtown pulls me right past the restaurants that have to let us sit wherever we want now.No need in making trouble, she says.You all go back to New York City but I have to live here.

The first time my brother says ain't my mother pulls a branch from the willow tree growing down the hill at the edge of our backyard. As she slips her closed hand over it, removes the leaves, my brother begins to cry because the branch is a switch now no longer beautifully weeping at the bottom of the hill. It whirs as my mother whips it through the air and down against my brother's legs. You will never, my mother says, say ain't in this house. You will never say ain't anywhere. Each switching is a warning to us our words are to remain crisp and clear. We are never to say huh? ain't

When people ask how, I say a fire took them. And then they look at me like I'm the most pitiful thing in the world. So sometimes I just shrug and say They just died, that's all. A fire took their bodies. That's all. I can still feel their voices and hugs and laughing. Sometimes. Sometimes I can hear my daddy calling my name. Lonnie sometimes. And sometimes Locomotion come on over here a minute. I want to show you something.

The first time I write my full name Jacqueline Amanda Woodson without anybody's help on a clean white page in my composition notebook, I know if I wanted to I could write anything. Letters becoming words, words gathering meaning, becoming thoughts outside my head becoming sentences written by Jacqueline Amanda Woodson

Ms. Marcus says that an occasional poem is a poem written about something important or special that's gonna happen or already did. Think of a specific occasion, she says — and write about it. Like what?! Lamont asks. He's all slouched down in his seat. I don't feel like writing about no occasion. How about your birthday?

My mother says: When Mama tried to teach me to make collards and potato salad I didn't want to learn. She opens the box of pancake mix, adds milk and eggs, stirs. I watch grateful for the food we have now —syrup waiting in the cabinet, bananas to slice on top. It's Saturday morning. Five days a week, she leaves us to work at an office back in Brownsville. Saturday we have her to ourselves, all day long. Me and Kay didn't want to be inside cooking. She stirs the lumps from the batter, pours it into the buttered, hissing pan. Wanted to be with our friends running wild through Greenville. There was a man with a peach tree down the road. One day Robert climbed over that fence, filled a bucket with peaches. Wouldn't share them with any of us but told us where the peach three was. And that's where we wanted to be sneaking peaches from that man's tree, throwing the rotten ones at your uncles! Mama wanted us to learn to cook. Ask the boys, we said. And Mama knew that wasn't fair girls inside and the boys going off to steal peaches! So she let all of us stay outside until suppertime. And by then,

The monsters that come at night don't breathe fire, have two heads or long claws. The monsters that come at night don't come bloody and half-dead and calling your name. They come looking like regular boys going through your drawers and pockets saying You better not tell Counselor else I'll beat you down. The monsters that come at night snatch the covers off your bed, take your pillow and in the morning steal your bacon when the cook's back is turned call themselves The Throwaway Boys, say You one of us now. When the relatives stop coming When you don't know where your sister is anymore When every sign around you says Group Home Rules: Don't do this and don't do that until it sinks in one rainy Saturday afternoon while you're sitting at the Group Home window reading a beat-up Group Home book, wearing a Group Home hand-me-down shirt hearing all the Group Home loudness, that you are a Throwaway Boy. And the news just sits in your stomach hard and heavy as Group Home food.

Good enough name for me, my father said the day I was born. Don't see why she can't have it, too. But the women said no. My mother first. Then each aunt, pulling my pink blanket back patting the crop of thick curls tugging at my new toes touching my cheeks. We won't have a girl named Jack, my mother said. And my father's sisters whispered, A boy named Jack was bad enough. But only so my mother could hear. Name a girl Jack, my father said, and she can't help but grow up strong. Raise her right, my father said, and she'll make that name her own. Name a girl Jack and people will look at her twice, my father said. For no good reason but to ask if her parents were crazy, my mother said. And back and forth it went until I was Jackie and my father left the hospital mad. My mother said to my aunts, Hand me that pen, wrote Jacqueline where it asked for a name. Jacqueline, just in case someone thought to drop the ie. Jacqueline,  just in case I grew up and wanted something a little bit longer and further away from Jack.

My mother has a gap between her two front teeth. So does Daddy Gunnar. Each child in this family has the same space connecting us. Our baby brother, Roman, was born pale as dust. His soft brown curls and eyelashes stop people on the street. Whose angel child is this? they want to know. When I say,My brother, the people wear doubt thick as a cape until we smile and the cape falls.

No one was faster than my father on the football field. No one could keep him from crossing the line. Then touching down again. Coaches were watching the way he moved, his easy stride, his long arms reaching up, snatching the ball from its soft pockets of air. My father dreamed football dreams, and woke up to a scholarship at Ohio State University. Grown now living the big-city life in Columbus just sixty miles from Nelsonville and from there Interstate 70 could get you on your way west to Chicago 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