Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood - Dawn Turner Book
Author: Dawn TurnerPublisher: Simon & Schuster Cover Type: Paperback Pages: 336 pagesLanguage: EnglishGenre: Politics, Philosophy & Social Sciences, Social SciencesGenre Class: Biography, Personal, MemoirsA New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book A Best Book of 2021 by BuzzFeed and Real Simple An unmissable (Vogue), exceptional (The Washington Post), and evocative (Chicago Tribune) memoir about three Black girls from the storied Bronzeville section of Chicago that offers a penetrating exploration of race, opportunity, friendship, sisterhood, and the powerful forces at work that allow some to flourishand others to falter.They were three Black girls. Dawn, tall and studious; her sister, Kim, younger by three years and headstrong as they come; and her best friend, Debra, already prom-queen pretty by third grade. They bondedfervently and intensely in that unique way of little girlsas they roamed the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicagos South Side, the destination of hundreds of thousands of Black folks who fled the ravages of the Jim Crow South. These third-generation daughters of the Great Migration come of age in the 1970s, in the warm glow of the recent civil rights movement. It has offered them a promise, albeit nascent and fragile, that they will have more opportunities, rights, and freedoms than any generation of Black Americans in history. Their working-class, striving parents are eager for them to realize this hard-fought potential. But the girls have much more immediate concerns: hiding under the dining room table and eavesdropping on grown folks business; collecting secret treasures; and daydreaming about their futuresDawn and Debra, doctors, Kim a teacher. For a brief, wondrous moment the girls are all giggles and dreams and promises of friends forever. And then fate intervenes, first slowly and then dramatically, sending them careening in wildly different directions. Theres heartbreak, loss, displacement, and even murder. Dawn struggles to make sense of the shocking turns that consume her sister and her best friend, all the while asking herself a simple but profound question: Why? In the vein of The Other Wes Moore and The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, Three Girls from Bronzeville is a deeply personal (Real Simple) memoir that chronicles Dawns attempt to find answers. Its at once a celebration of sisterhood and friendship, a testimony to the unique struggles of Black women, and a tour-de-force about the complex interplay of race, class, and opportunity, and how those forces shape our lives and our capacity for resilience and redemption.
P>About the Author: Dawn Turner is an award-winning journalist and novelist. A former columnist and reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Turner spent a decade and a half writing about race, politics, and people whose stories are often dismissed and ignored. Turner, who served as a 2017 and 2018 juror for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary, has written commentary for The Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, CBS Sunday Morning News show, NPRs Morning Edition show, the Chicago Tonight show, and elsewhere. She has covered national presidential conventions, as well as Barack Obamas 2008 presidential election and inauguration. Turner has been a regular commentator for several national and international news programs, and has reported from around the world in countries such as Australia, China, France, and Ghana. She spent the 20142015 school year as a Nieman Journalism fellow at Harvard University. In 2018, she served as a fellow and journalist-in-residence at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. Turner is the author of two novels, Only Twice Ive Wished for Heaven and An Eighth of August. In 2018, she established the Dawn M. Turner and Kim D. Turner Endowed Scholarship in Media at her alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One: Our Ledge chapter one Our Ledge I often think about my sister and my best friend. Not every minute. Not even every day. I mostly think of them when I am experiencing something I would have wanted to share. Some moment that would allow us to tug on a line, thin as a filament, that begins Remember when and draws a seemingly ever-present past nearer. When I imagine us, we come into focus at our beginningthree young girls walking through our neighborhood under a prickly summer sun. I am nine years old, tall and lanky with long, ropy braids. Debra, my best friend, is shorter than me and, at eight and a half, is already prom-queen pretty. And then theres my sister, Kim, three years my junior. Shes stealthily trailing us, even though Ive bribed her with our mothers secret stash of lemon drops to stay away. Mom is watching us from our eleventh-floor apartment window. She has told us to go outside and play. You two are the nosiest children God ever gave breath to, she always says. Get out from under grown folks business. Later, she will ask me why I didnt hold Kims hand, why I allowed her to hang so far behind. But right now, Debra and I are walking through our apartment complex on our way to our special place. We are Thing-Finders, two Black girls who have little in common with the popular childrens book character Pippi Longstocking, an orphaned white girl with red hair and freckles. But we admire the way she spends her day collecting castoffs for her Thing-Finders Club. We live in a neighborhood that has specialized in the broken, the halvedso in the tradition of this little white girl, we traverse our community, sifting through the past, searching for discarded items that we believe can be made new again. We call our hideout our love spot, and its a couple of blocks away. Its where weve stashed a rusty metal tin we stole from the janitors closet. Weve seeded it with the artifacts of our lives: my fathers fake gold cuff link and a knob from her fathers CB radio; a couple of dried pomegranate seeds; the obituary of our third-grade teachers daughter; a scarred flashcube from an Instamatic; the shoehorn we lifted off the grocery store bagger who has gnarled hands and likes to pat us kids on our heads. We allow him when were trying to show how brave we are. To understand Debra, Kim, and meto understand what will happen to usyou have to know the place that has begun to shape us. We live in Chicagos historic Bronzeville community. At three square miles, its the cradle of the citys Great Migration, the epicenter of Black business and culture. Over the decades, its been home to some of the countrys most esteemed Black folks: journalist and antilynching activist Ida B. Wells, cardiac surgeon Daniel Hale Williams, jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, novelist Richard Wright, Pulitzer Prizewinning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Kim and I are beginning to understand Bronzevilles storied past because our mother, grandmother, and aunt grew up here in this corner of Bronzeville that hugs the lakefront. Kim and I are the fourth generation of our family to live here. Anything you can imagine, or want, or hope for is here. The good life, made evident by Black politicians, doctors, lawyers, judges, and professors. A good time, as offered by prostitutes, street vendors, and drug dealers. Its all here, not on the other side of the tracks or the other side of a river or even the next L stop. Its just across the street. For generations, Bronzeville has been a place where all that was good and bad is simultaneously at your fingertips yet a walled-off world away. We girls are coming of age at a time when the country is just beyond the civil rights movement and at the threshold of what our parents hope is a new, postracial era for Blacks. A country that finally seems amenable to giving us the opportunities it has denied generations. But that dream will soon be dashed. Debras family and mine have just moved into the privately owned Theodore K. Lawless Gardens apartment complex. Like us, it is still young and unblemished, brimming with promise. The twenty-four-story buildings, three of them in a row, are gleaming concrete monuments to upward mobility and are still pristine. A tall chain-link fence encases the property, forming a barrier along Rhodes Avenue from the Ida B. Wells Homes, a once-idyllic public housing project where my mother grew up. But by the 1970s its crumbling from misbegotten policies and abandonment, the despair of drugs and gangs. Two decades later, an adjacent housing project will draw national attention after two boys, ages ten and eleven, dangle and then drop five-year-old Eric Morse from a fourteenth-floor window for refusing to steal candy. The country will think it knows everything about our neighborhood and us, but it wont. It cant possibly know. On this summer afternoon, all of that is far in the distance. As we walksometimes skipping, sometimes joggingI am acutely aware that my sister is gaining on us. I can feel Kim without even turning around. That will never change. But Debra is unaware. Shes too busy talking, planning todays adventure, gesturing vigorously. We reach the main street and wait for an opening in the traffic. When the coast is clear, Debra grabs my hand and we run as fast as we can across four lanes to the other side. No, Don. No! my sister yells. Mom says Kim sometimes speaks out of spite. Calls me Don instead of Dawn, says Duperman instead of Superman. Shes little and scrappy, scuffed about the knees like a footstool and unafraid of most thingsexcept speeding cars. Ever since she almost got hit by one. Dont leave me! I pretend not to hear her. I pretend not to know that she will cross if I go back and hold her hand. Im tired of being the big sister. Im tired of her always sidling so close to me. Im tired of sharing. Let her come, please, Debra says, clasping her hands. Im not surprised by her insistence. Like Kim, Debra is the younger of two siblings, two sisters. Though Debra and I are best friends, she and Kim are the true soul mates. Both hear but dont hear. Both see the world through their wants. Mom says, Kind takes to kind. No, I say. And now Im the one walking ahead. Maybe tomorrow. Reluctantly, Debra gives in. We leave Kim behind and continue to walk about a block. Im thinking, We have the whole summer. We have a lifetime. Debra and I are unencumbered when we pass the sign that reads, Welcome to Lake Meadows. Its a high-rise apartment development neighboring ours, designed for Chicagos Black elite. We play tennis and ice skate in Lake Meadows. Theres no fence, but clearly a divide. Even the air feels lighter as we make our way to a small utility building thats built into a hill. We hike the short but steep incline to the roof, about twelve feet above an asphalt driveway, and walk out onto the ledge of the love spot. We settle amid pigeon droppings as, beneath us, the buildings gigantic boilers hum and breathe. We sit astride our world. Weekend after weekend, summer after summer, we return to this place, later riding our ten-speeds. Kim joins us when shes lost her fear of speeding cars. Conversations graduate from Debras growing brood of toy dinosaurs to training bras and tampons. We talk about how we plan to be doctors and live next door to each other in houses like the white folks have on the black-and-white television shows. Although we are easily seen by passersby, we feel invisible to everyone but ourselves. Every once in a while a security guard demands that we come down, and I get ready to run. But Debra doesnt budge. Neither does Kim when shes with us. Debra yells, You cant tell us what to do! Kim follows with, Try to make us! I remain quiet, chock-full of enough anxiety for the three of us. By the time Debra and I are in the eighth grade and Kim is in the fifth, we have begun to go our separate ways. Debra is hanging out with a faster crowd. Kim is ditching school. My teachers are increasingly telling me how smart I am. The three of us growing up scares me, but not nearly as much as us growing apart. As children, we had moved freely around our world of low-slung public housing and gated high-rise developments. But right around adolescence we have to start making a choice. If we choose right, a promising future lies within our grasp. If we choose wrong, the path is unforgiving. The ground has already begun to harden around each of us, and soon it will be impossible to undo who we have become. The summer before Debra and I start high school, we return to our ledge, not knowing it will be our last time. We should jump, she says, out of nowhere. You double dare me? The drop is only about twelve feet, but weve never talked about jumping before. Not when we were younger and used to go sockless in our high-top All Stars. The ones whose shoelaces we soaked in vinegar to make white. So, why now when it is our sandaled feet that hang over the ledge and gravity isnt at all kind to tube tops? Im not jumping, I say and lean away from her. Ill hold your hand if youre scared, Debra says. She spits down onto the asphalt to shush her own fear. And before another word is spoken, she scoots forward on the ledge, extending arms straight out in front of her like Frankenstein, and jumps, landing on her feet, then falling backward. We are both shocked by the way she takes flight and then more surprised by the fall. After a few seconds, I see her trying to laugh away the sting that travels up through the soles of her sandals. I realize that I have Frankenstein arms, too. Not because Im going to jump. I am reaching for her. My instinct is to save her the same way she has saved me. Debra stands and brushes off her shorts. She looks up at me and says it isnt so badto jump, then to fall and then hit the ground hard. Ill do it again next time, she says. Only there is no next time. Not long after, she moves away. Years later, when we are separated by much more than miles, I will think of our ledge and that jump. In my dreams, I will see Kim standing at that intersection, waving goodbye. And I will be haunted by the paths we each took.
