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Three Girls from Bronzeville
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About This Book
They were three Black girls. Dawn, tall and studious; her sister, Kim, younger by three years and headstrong; and her best friend, Debra, already prom-queen pretty by third grade. They bonded 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 that they will have more opportunities, rights, and freedoms than any generation of Black Americans in history. 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. And then fate intervenes, sending them careening in wildly different directions. There's heartbreak, loss, displacement, and even murder. Three Girls from Bronzeville is a memoir that chronicles Dawn's attempt to find answers. It's a celebration of sisterhood, 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.
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Reviews
"Turner's candid memoir of entwined yet divergent lives is a probing inquiry into fate, frailty, tenacity, and ultimately, redemption."
"Turner is a natural born storyteller and a sponge for knowledge, trivia, memories, gossip and urban folk lore (many Black women readers may be particularly shocked at the origins of a common anatomical nickname)."
"With sensitivity, Turner examines all three of their lives in an attempt to understand how three girls starting in a similar place ended up on varying life paths."
"She vividly describes the community's deteriorating conditions, including crowded schools, escalating drug and gang violence, and crumbling buildings, as well as more intimate matters, including her discovery of her journalistic vocation, Kim's teenage pregnancy and descent into alcoholism, and Debra's path into drug use, which resulted in her incarceration for murder."
"Rather than judge her friend and sister for their choices, she holds fast to her through line: 'There but for the grace of God go I' ..."
"Turner's vivid recollections of her girlhood in Bronzeville ground Three Girls from Bronzeville in the experiences of those in the Chicago neighborhood, as Turner expertly combines memoir and social history in her analysis of the many systems that made Bronzeville into the place it is today--and how those same oppressive systems shape the lives of even society's youngest neighbors."
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