"We Knew We Were Being Watched": Adultification and Coming of Age in Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn
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Grown women bore signs of ruined girlhood – the cold, hard eyes of having been ripened too soon.
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
August, the protagonist of Jacqueline Woodson’s autobiographical novel Another Brooklyn (2016), is an anthropologist studying death rites and rituals around the world. When her father dies, she returns to Brooklyn, where she had spent part of her youth, to attend his funeral. While she is there, a chance encounter with an old friend on the subway causes August to recall her childhood spent with her friends Angela, Gigi, and Sylvia. In this essay, I examine Woodson’s use of stock tropes of Black girls’ coming of age in August’s chronicle. Comparing Woodson’s coming-of-age story to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), I contend that whereas Morrison depicts the dangers the white gaze poses to young Black girls as they are growing up, Woodson shows the perils of the adultifying gaze, which reads Black girls as always already adults and therefore sexually available. In doing so, I borrow from Nazeera Sadiq Wright’s model of the “prematurely knowing Black girl” in nineteenth-century writing, which posits that “extreme hardship and danger hasten the maturation of youthful girls, and the move from youthful to prematurely knowing girlhood.”1 I build on these observations to show that these narrative patterns continue in twenty-first century writing. [End Page 99]
Moreover, Woodson’s novel represents an important break from much of the history of African American autobiographical writing, including both autobiographical fiction and autobiography itself, owing to its insistence on deploying the genre to narrate individual character development. Woodson reframes all autobiography as highly fictionalized in order to underscore the idea that the teleological narrative of coming into a self, a feature seemingly shared by both coming-of-age stories and autobiography, is a generic imposition rather than an accurate reflection of one’s life journey. In what follows, I argue that through the use of a nonchronological structure, Woodson employs a model of coming of age that queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton terms “growing sideways.” As Stockton argues, “‘growing up’ may be a short-sighted, limited, rendering of human growth, one that oddly would imply an end to growth when full stature (or reproduction) is achieved. By contrast, ‘growing sideways’ suggests that the width of a person’s experience or ideas, their motives or their motions, may pertain at any age.”2 By using this model of adolescent development, Woodson renounces the straightforward teleological linearity of standard coming-of-age narratives, positioning August’s coming of age instead as that which can only be understood through retrospective encounters with her life. That is to say, it is the narrativization of her youth that creates links between the events of the past and August’s contemporary sense of self. The seemingly coherent subject position at the time of writing, then, is a product of this retrospective narrativization.
Autobiography in Reverse
While Another Brooklyn functions as the autobiography of its protagonist, August, the novel does not start at the beginning of August’s life, nor is the narrative told in chronological order. By structuring the text this way, Woodson rejects the linear, teleological narrative of self-development apparent in both the autobiography and the coming-of-age genre. Such an understanding of the narration of the human life narrative can be seen in Philippe Lejeune’s definition of autobiography. Lejeune writes that autobiography is “a retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is on his individual life, in particular the story of his personality.”3 There are clearly many problems with this definition of autobiographical writing. The use of prose excludes poetry. Lejeune refers to self in the singular, as if it is unchanging. And the exclusive use of male pronouns excludes writing by women.4 Lejeune’s definition also implies that the story of a personality is inherent in the story of a life, which is to say that one’s personality exists prior to the...
