Another Brooklyn

“I had been home for a month watching my father die. Death didn’t frighten me. Not now. Not anymore. But Brooklyn felt like a stone in my throat.” 

August compares the difficulty of mourning her father with the difficulty of coping with her past in Brooklyn. As an anthropologist studying death, she feels prepared for her father’s passing. However, back in Brooklyn, she is haunted by the less-certain end to some of her friendships, as well as the imprint that time in her life made on her. She will wrestle with this in the pages to come.

“Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, and August. We were four girls together, amazingly beautiful and terrifyingly alone.” 

August stresses the paradoxes in her friendships. The girls are at once together and alone; it is their shared sense of loneliness that binds them together. Neither that togetherness nor their beauty can protect them from the loneliness inherent in their difficult family situations.

“The man looked at me, his eyes moving slowly over my bare legs. You’re a black queen, he said. Your body is a temple. It should be covered. I held tighter to my father’s hand. In the short summer dress, my legs seemed too long and too bare. An unlocked temple.” 

August narrates her family’s first encounter with the Nation of Islam. A man approaches her father and then makes a remark about her lack of clothing that makes August feel insecure. From this point on, she thinks back to this moment and contemplates whether or not she is treating her body as a “temple.” 

“The sadness and strangeness I felt was deeper than any feeling I’d ever known. I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking. The girls must have felt this.” 

August discusses the pain of girlhood and of growing up. Although August has left her home in Tennessee and lives without her mother, three years later, her greatest sadness comes from the idea of being 11 years old. This shared experience of loneliness and the pain of growing up is what binds her to her friends.

“[M]y brother and I were never hungry, our faces never ashy, and we were always dressed adequately for whatever the weather brought us. We had seen the truly poor kids, the hard bones of their knees and ankles, the raggedness of their clothes.” 

August compares her economic situation to that of her peers. Although she is poor, she is somewhat shielded from that reality by her father. In addition, thinking of the “truly poor” keeps her from lamenting her station in life.

“The government owns the pecan trees now. What had once been my family’s had been taken. By the government.” 

The novel traces a history of black migration, and this quote succinctly demonstrates one of the reasons for it. In the post-Jim Crow south, governments are still acting to disenfranchise black residents. Her family falls victim to this. After losing the family land in SweetGrove, Tennessee, and her father is essentially forced farther north.

“We came by way of our mother’s memories.” 

This quote demonstrates the generational legacy that August and her friends must navigate. Their mothers’ memories of their own past hopes and dreams are passed down to their daughters, although at times to the detriment of the children.

“But when the soldier finally emerged from behind Gigi’s stairs, it was not with a single-edged blade protruding from his neck but with a needle clenched and dripping from his left hand.” 

After a homeless veteran living underneath her building assaults Gigi, her friends offer to kill him, hiding razor blades in their hair. However, he meets his demise through heroin. Heroin use is an epidemic in 1970s Bushwick; in this one case, it spares the girls further pain.

“We were learning to walk the Brooklyn streets as though we had always belonged to them—our voices loud, our laughter even louder. But Brooklyn had longer nails and sharper blades.” 

Although August and her friends are mostly transplants, they learn to integrate themselves into Bushwick: to act bold and protect themselves. However, they know that this boldness is to a certain extent an act. While the girls have long fingernails and still carry their razor blades, they are always aware that threats are present. This quote personifies Brooklyn as the biggest threat, always possessed of weapons.

“When boys called our names, we said, Don’t even say my name. Don’t even put it in your mouth. When they said, You ugly anyway, we knew they were lying. When they hollered, Conceited! we said, No—convinced!” 

August provides further detail on the girls’ boasts. As they reach adolescence and find themselves the object of catcalls, they respond with confidence. Together, they are stronger than they are individually. They are able to affirm each other’s beauty, even in the face of insults. 

“Everywhere we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn.” 

The title of the book comes from this quote. As August and her brother look out the window, they observe their neighbors seeking various escapes, including escapes into heroin and dreams. Even as young children, they know that there is no choice but to acknowledge the reality of the Brooklyn that surrounds them. 

“We knew that financing meant watching neighbors throw broken couches and torn mattresses into the alley between houses long before they were paid off. So as we watched the looters move through the neighborhood […] my brother and I longed to be part of the free stuff spilling out along Broadway.” 

During the New York blackout, August and her brother observe widespread looting. They know about the exploitive practice of financing—selling furniture on a payment plan—so they view the outpouring of goods as “free stuff” rather than as stolen items. They want to participate, but their father warns them off.

“We knew the sticks for stickball games weren’t weapons. We knew the spikes at the bottom of the wooden spinning tops weren’t meant to hurt anything other than other spinning tops. We knew the songs the boys sang Ungawa, Black Power. Destroy! White boy! Were just songs […] Still, they fled.” 

During the blackout, white families begin to flee Bushwick. August and her friends know that her peers are not violent, nor are they seeking to drive white families out of the neighborhood. Their white neighbors, however, view young black boys’ games as threats and leave en masse. 

“In Uganda, the Baganda people prepare a grave for each person when they are still children.” 

Throughout the text, August shares anecdotes of cultural rites and rituals around death from around the world. In light of this novel’s events, this one seems especially pertinent: in Uganda, the inevitability that children will die is addressed head-on. In Brooklyn, children sense the omnipresence of danger, in a sense participating in a similar cultural practice.

“The parents questioned us. Who were or people? What did they do? […] did we understand […] the Negro problem in America? Did we understand it was up to us to rise above?” 

Sylvia’s parents interrogate her friends. They suddenly seem to believe that Gigi, Angela, and August are not of good enough quality to spend time with their daughter. Here, they reference Nobel Prize winner Gunnar Myrdal, and reveal they hold the belief that black Americans have a personal responsibility to overcome racism.

“We turned away from Sylvia’s door, said goodbye to each other at the corner, each of us sinking into an embarrassed silence, ashamed of our skin, our hair, the way we said our own names. We saw what he saw when we looked at each other.” 

When Sylvia’s father turns her friends away, August and the girls feel a sudden sense of shame. While they mostly live in a neighborhood that accepts them, Sylvia’s intellectual father makes them feel “ghetto” and unworthy of the educated, graceful Sylvia.

“When Jerome asked where I’d learned what I learned I said, Don’t worry about it because he was eighteen and I was nearly fourteen and nothing mattered but hearing I love you and believing he meant it.” 

August practices the kissing techniques she’s learned from her girlfriends with Jerome. He is surprised by her obvious experience. She is not concerned with his suspicions, only with making him love her. Although she hears the words “I love you” from her friends, they have a greater value coming from a teenage boy.

“We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico. The threat of a place we could end back up in to be raised by a crusted-over auntie or strict grandmother.” 

The girls’ pregnant classmate, Charlesetta, is sent “Down South.” This reverse-migration is familiar to August and her friends. Despite the dangers of Brooklyn, they are horrified at the idea of returning to the South, where morals are stricter and social isolation is inevitable. 

“Our land moved in grassy waves toward the water. The land ended at the water. Maybe my mother had forgotten this.” 

August provides a possible rationale for her mother’s suicide. Although she is finally beginning to accept that her mother has died, she wonders if she might have wandered into the water by accident.

“Obra […] the Latin word for orphaned, parentless, childless, widowed. There was a time when I believed there was loss that could not be defined, that language had not caught up to death’s enormity. But it has.” 

As August immerses herself in the study of death, she learns a Latin word that demonstrates she is not alone. In fact, the conjugations of this Latin adjective show that anyone can be left alone. 

“When you’re fifteen, the world collapses in a moment, different from when you’re eight and you learn that your mother walked into water—and kept on walking.” 

August confronts Sylvia’s betrayal in dating Jerome. Her world suddenly seems to collapse. While she was able to repress her mother’s death at a younger age, at 15, she cannot deny the reality of her pain.

“This earth is seventy percent water. Hard not to walk into it.” 

Thinking back to Gigi’s and her mother’s deaths, August contemplates the difficulty of staying alive in a world full of danger. The reference to water alludes to her mother’s death via drowning.

“How had my own father, so deep inside his grief, not known there were men who had lived this, who knew how to tell his story?” 

August wonders how the people from her childhood got bye without Jazz. In Brooklyn, each person’s loneliness seemed unspeakable, impossible to give shape to. Jazz music, however, gives pain a shape and lets the listeners know that they are not alone.