Read Brown Girl Dreaming for Free Online

It’s Robert
    calling from a prison called Rikers Island.
    Even from my half-asleep place,
    I can hear my mother taking a heavy breath, whispering,
    I knew this was coming, Robert. I knew you weren’t
    doing right.
    In the morning, we eat our cereal in silence as
our mother tells us
    that our uncle won’t be around for a while.
    When we ask where he’s gone, she says,
Jail.
    When we ask why, she says,
    It doesn’t matter. We love him.
    That’s all we need to know and keep remembering.
    Robert walked the wide road,
she says
. And now
    he’s paying for it.
    Witnesses believe there’s a wide road and a narrow road.
    To be good in the eyes of God is to walk the narrow one,
    live a good clean life, pray, do what’s right.
    On the wide road, there is every kind of bad thing anyone
    can imagine. I imagine my uncle doing his smooth
    dance steps down the wide road,
    smiling as the music plays loud. I imagine
    him laughing, pressing quarters into our palms,
    pulling presents for us from his bag, thick gold
    bracelet flashing at his wrist.
    Where’d you get this?
my mother asked, her face tight.
    It doesn’t matter,
my uncle answered.
Y’all know I love you.
    You doing the right thing, Robert?
my mother wanted
    to know.
Yes,
my uncle said.
I promise you.
    It rains all day. We sit around the house
    waiting for the sun to come out so we can go outside.
    Dell reads in the corner of our room. I pull out
    my beat-up composition notebook
    try to write another butterfly poem.
    Nothing comes.
    The page looks like the day—wrinkled and empty
    no longer promising anyone
    anything.

moving upstate
    From Rikers Island, my uncle is sent
    to a prison upstate we can visit.
    We don’t know what he’ll look like, how
    much he’ll have changed. And because our mother
    warns us not to, I don’t tell anyone he’s in jail.
    When my friends ask, I say,
He moved upstate.
    We’re going to visit him soon.
    He lives in a big house,
I say.
With a big yard and everything.
    But the missing settles inside of me. Every time
    James Brown comes on the radio, I see Robert dancing.
    Every time the commercial for the Crissy doll comes on
    I think how I almost got one.
    He’s my favorite uncle,
I say one afternoon.
    He’s our ONLY uncle,
my sister says.
    Then goes back to reading.

on the bus to dannemora
    We board the bus when the sun is just kissing the sky.
    Darkness like a cape that we wear for hours, curled into it
    and back to sleep. From somewhere above us
    the O’Jays are singing, telling people all over the world
    to join hands and start a love train.
    The song rocks me gently into and out of dreaming
    and in the dream, a train filled with love goes on and on.
    And in the story that begins from the song, the bus
    is no longer a bus and we’re no longer going to
    Dannemora. But there is food and laughter and
    the music. The girl telling the story is me but
    not me at the same time—watching all of this,
    writing it down as fast as she can,
    singing along with the O’Jays, asking everyone
    to let this train keep on riding . . .
    “riding on through . . .”
    and it’s the story of a whole train filled
    with love and how the people on it
    aren’t in prison but are free to dance
    and sing and hug their families whenever they want.
    On the bus, some of the people are sleeping, others
    are staring out the window or talking softly.
    Even the children are quiet. Maybe each of them
is thinking
    their own dream—of daddies and uncles, brothers
and cousins
    one day being free to come on board.
    Please don’t miss this train at the station
    ‘Cause if you miss it, I feel sorry, sorry for you.

too good
    The bus moves slow out of the city until we can see
    the mountains, and above that, so much blue sky.
    Passing the mountains.
    Passing the sea
    Passing the heavens.
    That’s soon where I will be . . .
    A song comes to me quickly, the words moving through
    my brain and out of my mouth in a whisper but still
    my sister hears, asks who