Identity Close reading: fate & faith & reasons (brown girl dreaming)

Everything happens for a reason, my mother/ says. The tells me how Kay believed/ in fate and destiny— everything/ that happened or was going to happen/ couldn’t ever be avoided. The marchers/ down south didn’t just up and start/ their marching— it was part of a longer, bigger/ plan, that, maybe belonged to God.

                In this stanza, we see several aspects of identity tying themselves together, most notably family, race, and religion. The invocation of fate and religion ties into the civil rights movement, thus turning it into something both personal and spiritual. The marches are not something done by people alone, but rather something planned by either a god or by destiny. The event having to happen is not seen as a limiting of freedom, but rather as an arbiter of justice that will allow them to finally be treated fairly in American society.

My mother tells me this as we fold laundry, white towels/ separated from the colored ones. Each/ a threat to the other and I remember the time/ I spilled bleach on a blue towel, dotting it forever./ the pale pink towel, a memory/ of when it was washed with a red one. Maybe/ there is something, after all, to the way/ some people want to remain— each to his own kind/ but in time/ maybe/ everything will fade to gray.

                Now the poem moves to the image of towels to symbolize segregation. The towels cannot be washed together or their colors fade and change or the white ones become tinted. It is important to note that in this image both the colored towels and the white ones can be damaged by mixing them together, and even the narrator says she understands why people would want to keep to their own race, but there is the added inevitability that everything will have to become mixed together one day, and that everything will turn gray.

Even all of us coming to Brooklyn,/ my mother says wasn’t some accident. And I can’t help/ thinking of the birds here— how they disappear/ in the wintertime,/ heading south for food and warmth and shelter./ Heading south/ to stay alive… passing us on the way

                First off the accident of mixing white and colored towels is undermined by this statement. You can act to prevent the mixing, but eventually it will slip together and spread to all of them. With the migrating bird image, the idea of the civil rights movement is brought up again, particularly in northerners that went south to protest the injustices. They and the birds are portrayed as going south because they all need to.  The birds pass them the same way the activists do. They head south to do what they need to do.

No accidents, my mother says, just fate and faith/ and reasons.

When I ask my mother what she believes in,/ she stops, midfold, and looks back out the window.

Autumn

it is full on here and the sky is bright blue.

I guess I believe in right now, she says, And the resurrection./ And Brooklyn. And the four of you.

The idea that nothing happens accidentally is reinforced here at the beginning section. This relates to the towels section, to show that the mixing of the colors is a matter of fate. The season her mother says she believes in is also important, since it is the time when (at least in the temperate climate they live in) the leaves all change color, extending the metaphor to nature now.  The poem ends with her mother telling her that she believes in both religious and the worldly things. And among the worldly are her children.