As I age, I wonder more about the paths I didn’t take in life. What decisions that I took or didn’t take would have led to being a wholly different person if reversed? If I hadn’t been depressed that I couldn’t be a fighter pilot, would I have joined the Air Force? If I hadn’t taken an interest in martial arts, would I have avoided the eye poke that led to a tear in my retina? If I had signed up for an undergraduate creative writing class, would I have changed majors? These are the types of things I wonder about my life. At essence, I’m wondering about what it would be like to be a different person. I’ll never know, but memoir and autobiography let me get as close as possible to experiencing a wholly different life that exists in reality. George R.R. Martin said that a reader gets to live a thousand lives, and this is true. But, when reading memoir, I get to read about a new reality from the person that experienced it. In fiction, I’m reading an author creating emotions and decisions. In history, I read about the events that led to decisions. In memoir, I read an author ruminating on the decisions, the emotions, and the outcomes that led that person to the point where they wrote the memoir. It’s as close to experiencing a different life than my own as I can get. In Three Girls from Bronzeville by Dawn Turner, I get as close to experiencing life as a black woman who grew up in Chicago in the aftermath of the civil rights movements as possible. At face value, she and I – a white male from rural Illinois – seem to have little in common. This is why I picked up this book. I wanted to know what her experience was, and Turner excels at putting the reader in her thoughts, emotions, and motivations during the times chronicled in this book. I wanted to experiences the differences, but Turner’s story had a lot of similarities to my own. The strength of a good memoir, like Three Girls from Bronzeville, is that it allows us to find commonplace with those lives different from our own. And, believe me, Three Girls from Bronzeville is a great memoir. It’s moving, enlightening, frustrating, and beautiful. In short, it’s a life.
Disclaimer: The publisher provided a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Any and all opinions that follow are mine alone.
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TL;DR
Three Girls from Bronzeville by Dawn Turner moved me. This memoir about sticking together through the ups and downs of life struck a number of emotional chords. Lives that begin together can diverge in many ways, but with love and patience, they can also converge again. Thank you, Ms. Turner for writing this. Highly Recommended.
From the Publisher
A “beautiful, tragic, and inspiring” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) 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 flourish…and 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 bonded—fervently and intensely in that unique way of little girls—as they roamed the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicago’s 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 futures—Dawn 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. There’s 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 piercing memoir that chronicles Dawn’s attempt to find answers. It’s 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.
Review: Three Girls from Bronzeville by Dawn Turner
Dawn, her sister Kim, and her best friend, Debra, are the three girls from the title. This memoir follows Dawns life as she interacts, or doesn’t, with Kim and Debra. The beginning of the book opens with Dawn’s childhood on the south side of Chicago. She introduces us to a number of her family members and takes us through the family’s move to Bronzeville. Turner highlights her close relationship to her sister, and as she attends school, she meets and befriend Debra Trice. To her surprise, Debra lives in the apartment above theirs. The three grow closer and closer as a group. They dream big of their futures, but for three black girls on the south side of Chicago, opportunity is harder to come by. Debra moves to Indianapolis, but she and Dawn write letters, talk on the phone, and keep their friendship going. Challenged by a different friend at school, Dawn enter advanced studies. She meets a boyfriend, gets accepted into the University of Illinois, and she finds a passion. Kim, meanwhile, has been skipping school and hanging around some of the rougher types from the neighborhood. Debra tried to join the Air Force but ended up back in Indianapolis. Dawn wonders what happened to those dreams they had as girls and tries to steer her friends back into a path towards their childhood dreams. But she learns that as we grow, our lives diverge from the path we set as children. And what we think is best, what we want for those we love, may not be the life our loved ones want.
Three Girls from Bronzeville is a first person memoir from childhood to adult life. While the focus is Dawn Turner’s life, the author sticks to the premise of three girls. So, despite the fact that we only get Ms. Turner’s thoughts and emotions, the book still feels as if it is telling the story of three lives. Turner sets us into her life and builds a narrative of hope and potential that all kids seem to have. Then she takes us through the inevitable process of growing up. The three lives focused on by this book are triumphant, tragic, and tumultuous. And the reader is better for having known these women.
Choices and Second Chances
At the end of the book, Turner writes that she think this story is about three girls who made different choices, but then she changes her mind and says it’s a story about second chances. I can see that. But most of the book is her trying to understand how three close knit girls could make such drastically different choices. And she acknowledges that if not for her competitiveness and another friend who pushed her, maybe she would have made similar choices. Who knows? I applaud her for this type of introspection because it’s one thing to show that people make decisions that lead them down dark paths. It’s another to wonder if we had made similar decisions, would we have also gone down those dark paths. Turner has put a lot of effort into showing us the human side of Kim and Debra. These two women would be, at best, ignored by the majority of America if not written off as cautionary tales about the use of drugs and alcohol. At worst, they’d be held up by racists as examples of whatever horrible things racists have inside their twisted hearts. But Turner shows us there’s more to the story. She shows us that good people can and do make decisions that lead down dark paths. But she also shows that just because we go down a dark path doesn’t mean we have to stay on that path.
What Three Girls from Bronzeville told me is that society likes to define us by decisions we make and to reduce an entire life to its worst moments. That is unfair. Criminals have loved ones and best friends. Addicts have families that love them. So, why do we shorthand their entire lives by referring to them as addicts or criminals? Because it lets us feel superior? Because it lets us rationalize away that person’s humanity? I think because it protects us from seeing that with a few different decisions in our lives, that person could be us. Turner shows us that three girls with so much potential end up in three different spots, but we should still see those three girls. We should still see the love they have for each other and the bonds they’ve maintained. Turner takes us beyond the labels to show us the humans. It’s a wake up call that I need to look for the humanity in everyone.
Funerals
Dawn Turner can write a funeral scene like no one else I’ve read. I felt a connection with her in her grief and her loss that was so real it took me back to the moments I lost my parents. Reading these passages hurt because they were so real, so detailed, and so exquisitely crafted. This was some of the best writing I’ve read all year. (And if you look at the reviews I’ve done, you’ll know that saying something.) I wished I could have hugged Turner to console her. These moments are a reminder that grief and loss from the death of a loved one never really go away. That pain is there forever, and we learn to live with it.
But reading these scenes also made me feel a connections because all humans will go through loss of some sort or another. As terrible as that loss is, it is one thing that connects people no matter what their background or station in life. Reading these scenes are the exact reason that I read memoir.
Conclusion
Dawn Turner’s Three Girls from Bronzeville is a must read memoir. Turner lets us see into her family and her life; she helps us look beyond labels to see the people for their good and their bad. Three Girls from Bronzeville touched this small town boy’s heart.
Three Girls from Bronzeville by Dawn Turner is available from Simon & Schuster now.
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