Brown Girl Deaming

Family is a major theme in the memoir “Brown Girl Dreaming” by Jacqueline Woodson. Family involves mutual love, compassion, loyalty towards, and emotional, spiritual, and physical support of individuals who may or may not be blood-related, but who still behave in the fashion of the traditional family unit. In the memoir, family proves not only to be a defining force in the life of Jackie, but it has its shortcomings as well.

Jackie’s nuclear family –her siblings Dell, Hope, and later Roman, and her mother and father, Mary Ann and Jack –surrounds her during her early childhood in Ohio. The Woodson line of the family can trace its ancestry back to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and owing to such esteemed ancestry, Woodsons are expected to be hard-workers and high-achievers. The family line is full of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and various other kinds of professionals. Jackie and her siblings are expected to follow the same paths, to succeed wildly in life. It is owing to her family ancestry, and her father’s high expectations, that Jackie gets much of her ambition.