Another Brooklyn

After returning home to Brooklyn to care for her dying father, the narrator August reflects on her childhood and her present in a series of short, fragmentary passages. The novel begins with “for a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet” (1), suggesting that her story, although sad, could have been worse. She wonders if jazz and blues would have helped her and her friends cope with their realities. August things back to her life at 15: she lacked such outlets, so her father referred her to Sister Sonja, a fellow member of the Nation of Islam. However, August indicates that she took more solace in her friendships than in Sister Sonja’s counseling.

Now, twenty years later, August meets her younger brother after their father’s death. He is still a devout Muslim and invites August to stay with him and his pregnant wife, Alafia. August declines the offer. She is an anthropologist who studies the rituals around death and takes solace in her knowledge rather than in Allah. What troubles her is not her father’s death, but rather the memories of her youth that her trip home has stirred up. As she heads back to her father’s apartment, she runs into her old friend Sylvia, who she had last seen pregnant at 15. August get offs the train before her stop to avoid talking and reflects on the end of the friendships that helped her survive her childhood loneliness and her mother’s absence from her life: “Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, and August. We were four girls together, amazingly beautiful and terrifyingly alone” (16). She implies that something awful happened to Gigi, while her other two friendships came to a gradual end.

August thinks back to her family’s departure from SweetGrove, Tennessee. After her mother began to hear the voice of her dead brother Clyde, August’s father brought her and her father to his native Brooklyn. At 8 and 4, August and her brother spent most of their time staring out the window at unfamiliar sights: black residents dressed in the flamboyant styles of the 1970s, and white residents packing their cars and leaving. August kept telling herself that her mother was “coming tomorrow” (18). Although her mother had warned her not to trust women, August found herself fascinated with local girls Angela, Gigi, and Sylvia, who were always together. One day, on the street, a member of the Nation of Islam approached August’s father, and then, the white Jesus in their church began to seem irrelevant.

After months of looking out the sealed apartment window, August’s brother broke through it, injuring his arm. In the hospital, she was reminded of her mother’s delusions about Clyde. As an adult, August makes an equivalence between her waiting and the Benguet people’s practice of sitting their dead blindfolded outside their homes. She remembers that, after her brother’s hospitalization, she began to lose hope: surely, if her mother were coming, she would have come then. She reveals that after this incident, she temporarily lost interest in the three girls outside her window.

August remembers the events after her brother’s injury: her father finally let her wander Bushwick, and she began to attend school. In school, she continued to admire Angela, Gigi, and Sylvia, until Sylvia finally asked August why she always stared at them. Sylvia also asked her if she was motherless. When she denied this characterization, Sylvia told her, “you belong to us now” (37). The girls recognized each other as “home” from that moment on. August relates what she knew about the girls’ backgrounds at that time: Sylvia was a recent immigrant from Martinique with an intellectual father; Gigi was a recent transplant from South Carolina; and Angela’s history was a question mark: “I don’t have any history” (40), she told the girls.