The New Chicago Renaissance: Alex Kotlowitz on Dawn Turner’s “Three Girls from Bronzeville”

In honor of the 10th anniversary of the Chicago Review of Books, The New Chicago Renaissance series revisits exemplary works of literature about Chicago from the last 10 years and explores their continued relevance. Join us all year long as 12 leading writers and artists explore books that they love and why they’re meaningful to our understanding of modern Chicago.

For 15 years, Dawn Turner wrote a weekly column for The Chicago Tribune, what were then congenially called “human interest stories.” I never quite knew what that meant. In Dawn’s case, she was writing about the shades of humanity we encounter in various out-of-the-way pockets of our country: in a public housing complex, in a gay bar, at a food pantry, in public school classrooms, in neglected neighborhoods. The columns felt like they were written with a smile, with a glint in her eyes, each about individuals persevering in a world that’s slumping around them. But they were more than just individual stories. They were about our shortcomings as a nation, the places we had failed, the places we had let down ourselves and others. Her reporting was anchored in a deep empathy, her storytelling so compelling. In 2007, she wrote about her best friend, Debra, who had ended up in prison and was about to receive her college diploma.

I used to believe that the hardest thing you could do is watch, even from afar, as a friend destroyed herself. But it’s equally hard watching that friend rebuild, especially if the process is occurring behind bars.

This is Debra’s story. But it’s mine as well. We all make mistakes. We all make good good and bad choices. Life can change in an instant and sometimes we avoid peril not because of any series of thing we’ve done perfectly but by a grace far bigger than our own steps and missteps….

The response was overwhelming, unlike anything she’d experienced before. She received hundreds of letters and emails. Teachers wrote to tell Dawn that they planned to use her column in their classrooms. Some wrote to tell her it felt like she was writing their story. It’s what ultimately led Dawn to turn her journalistic chops on herself. And so she eventually left The Tribune and wrote two novels before setting out to understand what happened to lead her and her young sister, Kim, and her best friend, Debra, to take such divergent paths. Her resulting memoir, Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate and Sisterhood is both heartbreaking and stirring. It’s this beautiful ode to friendship and family, an openhearted story of the unique journeys of Black women in post-Civil Rights America. It was a time – the 1970s – when the parents of young Black girls like Dawn believed the country was ready to offer what had long been promised, that they’d go to college, get well-paying jobs and become homeowners. That they’d partake in every aspect of the American dream. “For Kim and Debra those dreams would prove to be elusive,” Dawn told an interviewer. “They were the loves of my life. I set out to understand what happened. When did we lose them?”

But this is a tale not only about these three girls, it’s also this poignant, revealing story about place. As Dawn writes early on, “To understand Debra, Kim and me – to understand what will happen to us – you have to know the place that has begun to shape us.” That community is Bronzeville the cradle of the Great Black Migration. Dawn’s grandparents settled here early in the last century, fleeing the brutality of the Jim Crow South. It was a neighborhood where promise smacked right up against the corrosion of utter neglect. On the one hand it produced the likes of Gwendolyn Brooks, Ida B. Wells, Louis Armstrong and Tommy Dorsey. But it also became a testament to the cruelty of the racism of the North. Because of redlining and restrictive housing covenants, Black people were constricted where they could live, and so it meant that places like Bronzeville became overcrowded, tenements chopped up into cramped single room apartments which came to be known as kitchenettes. It was a community pushed aside by the city. Irregular garbage pick-up. Darkened street lights left unreplaced. Overcrowded schools. But, again, it wasn’t without resistance, without people whose pride and sheer pluck would overcome the burdens heaped on them. As Dawn’s grandmother told her, “We did what Black people have always done. We took a bunch of scraps and stitched together a world.”

When Dawn came of age, her mother had moved them into a new housing development, the Lawless Homes, which sat across the street from the already decaying Ida B. Wells pubic housing complex. And as it happens in the apartment just above hers resided a girl of the same age. Dawn writes, with such grace and lyricism, of the sounds she hears that will come to shape her childhood.

“Before I knew Debra, I knew the sound of her. The sound of her tapping against the window crank. The sound of her feet hitting the floor as she jumped down from her sister’s top bunk. The sound of her mother yelling at her to hurry up and get ready for school. The sound of Debra protesting, trying, as always to bend the universe to her will. Now I felt a voice.”

Debra, who is headstrong and turn-heads pretty, soon becomes Dawn’s best friend. They’re in the same class and spend afternoons on their building’s rooftop writing in their diaries. They confide in each other. They go ice skating and hang out with boys and together explore the neighborhood. Often along with Dawn’s sister, Kim. They’re her two confidantes, two people for whom her love is vast and deep and unconditional. And then she loses them, her sister to alcoholism and then a heart attack, Debra to prison after killing a man. In lesser hands, it would feel like a dark, bleak story, but Dawn has written something so much more, a love letter, not only to Kim and Debra but to all Black women. There is so much life in these pages. So much joy. Her mother and her grandmother spout these poetic, sometimes laugh-out-loud aphorisms. Her grandmother on growing up poor: “Low-income people don’t have to be low-ceilinged people.” Her mother on Kim’s “jiggly butt”: “Girl, you need to get some law and order about your ass.” Her mother describing their family nibbling on leftovers and reminiscing about the past: “They’re pinching off pieces of time.”

About her mother, grandmother and aunt, Dawn once said, “The women radiated a different something and I would just listen to them.” This is a book in many ways about just that, about listening, listening to a past that won’t leave you.

I’ve read this book twice, and got choked up both times. Each time, I marveled at the luminous prose. Each time, I was in awe of its fearless honesty. Each time, I celebrated Debra’s second act, reveled in her redemptive journey. Each time, I thought, this is the story of my city.

Chicago has produced an acclaimed group of authors who, with daring and frankness, have written about coming of age in this messy, complicated, sometimes cruel place. They’re authors who tell stories that are both deeply intimate and yet universal in their reach for humanity. They’re writers who touch the soul. I think of Gwendolyn Brooks, of Stuart Dybek, of Richard Wright, of Sandra Cisneros. Dawn Turner’s Three Girls from Bronzeville deserves a place on the shelf right alongside them.