Brown Girl Dreaming

Hope is Jacqueline’s older brother, and the oldest child in the family. He is a background character in this memoir, and comes across as focused, quiet, and sensitive. Perhaps because he is both the oldest child and a boy, he is the most adversely affected by the move from Ohio to South Carolina. He misses his father, and the climate of the South does not agree with him; formerly an athletic, restless boy, he now takes shelter in comic books.

Once the family moves to New York City, Hope’s interests evolve. He becomes interested in science rather than comic books, and also reveals an unexpected gift for singing at a school performance. He comes across as an unpredictable character, as well as a quiet one. His sudden new enthusiasms seem to surprise him and his family equally. 

Odella is Jacqueline’s older sister. She is academically brilliant, and Jacqueline perceives her as a hard act to follow. Jacqueline is aware of her New York City teachers expecting her to be like her older sister; this expectation is a particular burden on Jacqueline, who is coping with a learning disability. In “gifted,” she senses her teachers’ disappointment in her failure to be gifted like Odella: “I am not gifted. When I read, the words twist / twirl across the page” (169).

However, Jacqueline is gifted in other, less traditional ways. She is imaginative and unconventional, less of a student than a writer. While she continues to admire her older sister, she comes to realize that she has some strengths that Odella lacks. While Odella’s traditional brilliance can sometimes make her narrow and unimaginative, Jacqueline’s academic struggles make her resilient and creative. 

Roman is Jacqueline’s younger brother, and the youngest child in the family. Much about Roman is alien to Jacqueline at first. He is born in New York City, and the identity of his father is not made clear in the memoir. He seems to Jacqueline to have come out of nowhere. In “roman,” when she first meets him, she wants him to return to this nowhere: “But I don’t like the new baby of the family / I want to send it back to wherever / babies live before they get here” (138)

Once Jacqueline grows used to Roman and gets over her jealousy of him, Roman is then hospitalized for lead paint poisoning. In “one place,” he recuperates from this illness, but the illness has once again made him a stranger in the family: “He is four now, curls long gone, his dark brown hair / straight as a bone, strange to us but / our little brother […]” (208). Roman remains a fragile and alien character, but also a beloved one. 

Jack Woodson is Jacqueline’s father. He is a strong and opinionated presence in the first section of this memoir, which is set in Ohio, on his family turf. He later drops out of his children’s lives, and subsequently appears in the book only as a memory.

Jack Woodson comes across as a proud and determined character. He is proud of his family heritage and long line of accomplished ancestors, and he expects his children to make their own mark on the world. He is opposed to their moving down South, near their mother’s family, for he associates the South with racist bigotry and does not want anyone condescending to his children: In “journey,” Woodson tackles her father’s sentiment: “All you kids are stronger than that, my father says /All you Woodson kids deserve to be /as good as you already are” (29). 

When his children leave with their mother for South Carolina, Woodson loses touch with them. This suggests that he is a proud, forceful character, but also a somewhat stubborn and inflexible one, who has difficulty making the compromises necessary for family life. In “leaving columbus,” when Woodson imagines her father and mother taking their final leave of one another, she sees her father in a passive, defeated posture: “in the yard, one hand / on the black metal railing, the other lifting / into a weak goodbye” (41)  

MaryAnn Irby is Jacqueline Woodson’s mother. She is strong-willed and complicated, driven by conflicting loyalties and impulses. After first leaving her husband to move, together with her children, back to her South Carolina hometown, she becomes restless and frustrated in the South. She begins to make regular solo trips up to New York City, where her older sister Caroline has already moved. She ultimately has a child, Roman, alone in New York City, and decides to move the rest of her family there.

While MaryAnn is a rebellious and unconventional character in some ways, she is also an accommodating and flexible one. She is not a strict Jehovah’s Witness in the same way that her mother is, but she does allow her mother to give her grandchildren a religious education. She militates for Black civil rights, but also knows how to hide her activism when she is down South. She also comes across as broadminded and resilient, qualities that her daughter Jacqueline inherits. 

Gunnar Irby is Jacqueline Woodson’s maternal grandfather. In many ways he is a father figure in her life, and she and her siblings learn to call him Daddy. Jacqueline spends the earliest part of her life in his house. He makes a strong impression on her, as a charismatic, larger-than-life figure. His gradual diminishment from lung cancer devastates Woodson, and his death marks the final severing of her ties to the South.

Although Gunnar Irby has spent his life in the South, he has a restlessness about him. In “south carolina at war,” he dislikes the situation of Black people in the South, and counsels Jacqueline and her siblings to “[b]e ready to die […] / for everything you believe in” (73). He is different in this way from Jacqueline’s mother and grandmother; both women advise Jacqueline to fit in and to not call attention to herself.