Jacqueline Woodson is another prolific writer, whose book, Brown Girl Dreaming, winner of the 2014 National Book Award, is often taught in middle schools. Although there are middle school readers who would be drawn to If You Come Softly, we’ve chosen to put it in the high school category since the main characters are fifteen and in 10th grade, and we want to leave it to families to make the call about what young adult literature they choose to let their younger kids read.

If You Come Softly was first published in 1998, with a 20th anniversary edition published in 2018 including a moving preface by Woodson that I encourage you to read. It is a love story as timely now as when she wrote it. The novel resonates with me personally because like its main character, Ellie, I am white and Jewish, and like Ellie, I fell in love with a young Black man in high school. I grew up in Poughkeepsie, NY and attended a public school that was about 50% Black. Even in the early 1980’s, there were a lot of judgments rendered about our inter-racial romance. And, as Woodson depicts in her novel set nearly twenty years later, such a romance was still judged by some people (including family members like Ellie’s sister, Anne). Today, more than twenty years after this novel was first published, there are still people who render judgments. When Woodson describes an incident in Central Park when Ellie’s sister Anne screams because she sees a Black man jogging in her direction, one cannot help but think of a much more recent event in Central Park, where a white woman felt threatened by a Black man who was simply out birdwatching (excellent interview with Chris Cooper). One of the reasons that I am so passionate about this project is my desire to see a great shift in racial consciousness in my lifetime. Even though not enough has changed in the past 40 years, I want to believe that we are in the midst of a critical moment right now – one that will have significant positive ramifications for the youth of America, most especially for those identifying as Black, Indigenous and people of color.

The book begins citing the mantra “Black is beautiful” (good video here) along with a nod towards the Black Panthers. Woodson also succinctly addresses contemporary themes like white privilege. In Chapter 17, Jeremiah’s father says, “Thing about white people, they don’t know they’re white. They know what everybody else is, but they don’t know they’re white” (134). You can watch an interview here of antiracist authors Ibram X. Kendi and Robin D’Angelo discussing what constitutes white privilege[1]. Tragically, there will be few American teenagers in school today who will find themselves surprised by the ending of Woodson’s novel. “About 1,000 civilians are killed each year by law-enforcement officers in the United States. By one estimate, Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police during their lifetime. And in another study, Black people who were fatally shot by police seemed to be twice as likely as white people to be unarmed” (June 2020 Nature article on police brutality). The Black Lives Matter movement rose in 2013 after Trayvon Martin’s killer was acquitted. For many teens today, #BlackLivesMatter is ubiquitous and seen as their generation’s civil rights movement. The Movement for Black Lives lists addressing police brutality as one of its major agenda items. Check out some of BLM’s other partner organizations. This article addresses some of the issues with viewing BLM as a monolithic organization, instead of as a decentralized movement with many local chapters, including the one near where Delia and I live, Denver’s BLM5280. (FYI - we donated books to their Freedom School as one of the first initiatives of this project).

There is an innocence to Woodson’s book, and some high school students may want to learn more about the history of interracial romance in the US. They might be surprised to learn that it wasn’t until 1967 that prohibitions against interracial marriages were deemed unconstitutional, and that in Alabama, the law prohibiting interracial marriage wasn’t repealed until 2000! You can read more here about the landmark court case Loving v. Virginia (which includes a preview of the 2016 movie “Loving”) and other “interracial relationships that changed history.”

[1] I also suggest reading this rebuttal to Robin D’Angelo’s White Fragility recently published in the Atlantic Monthly by John McWhorter.