Brown Girl Dreaming and Past Identities

Last Thursday, I found myself walking through the halls of the Tunbridge Public Charter School with a girl named Wynter.  Working in small groups together since my first visit, we had become friends early on – I urge no one to underestimate the power of mutually struggling through long division.  As we were heading to the gym for an assembly, she began to point out all of her old classrooms that we passed along the way.  Each door was a year of her life.

I returned to my old high school only once since graduating.  I couldn’t bring myself to stomach the uneasiness that comes with noting the differences in a place that once seemed to belong to you.  It’s that strange sensation of the past existing mere moments behind you (I moved into my freshmen dorm just yesterday, didn’t I?), while in reality it exists beyond that insurmountable gulf that makes up the canyon of the past and present.  Like trying to grasp a dream, once you acknowledge the passage of time, what was once seemed as close as my shadow slips further and further away.

The doors to those old classrooms act almost as passages through time.  Most things remain remarkably unchanged, but the past the door sends you through is a faulty one.  You can return to your old desk, but it no longer feels quite right.  You’re a little bit bigger, the chair feels a little colder, and the clutter scattered throughout the room is slightly out of place.

Returning to a familiar spot after a long period of absence has the usual affect of it becoming less and less like a place and more and more like a mirror.  However, for Woodson’s mother in the cousins, time seems not to reflect an altered image, but to actually reverse as she returns to her southern home.  No longer holding onto her past by the threads of shared memory as detailed in my mother and grace, identity and time become fluid.  Her old self, her “someone else before,” regains itself in full as the memories of her childhood begin to seep into the poem.  How she identifies herself changes too: “She’s MaryAnn Irby again. Georgiana and Gunnar’s” youngest daughter,” slipping back into her old life as though it were merely a dress to be worn.

However, as evidenced by the constant theme throughout the book of time’s ability to suddenly and decisively change reality, this too changes over time.  “Everyone else has gone away,” Woodson explains in ohio behind us, “and now coming back home isn’t really coming back home at all.”  The fluidity that once seemed to dominate her mother’s identity is both denied and subverted.  The past, it is proved by the eventual alienness of what once was home, though ever-present, cannot fully exist alongside the moving future.