Reading Journal 2024: My Selma: True Stories of a Southern Childhood at the Height of the Civil Rights Movement

Reading Journal 2024: My Selma: True Stories of a Southern Childhood at the Height of the Civil Rights Movement
Author: Willie Mae Brown

There are qualities that make this book compelling, and qualities that act as a deterrent. Beginning, perhaps, with the choice of perspective. This is a Memoir, and it is mostly told through the eyes of a young, 11-12 year old Willie Mae Brown growing up in Selma at the height of its racial tensions and the famous march. She writes as an adult, but it captures her perspective as a child, creating a bit of a rift between the two vantage points gjven the limitations of that childhood perspective. That perspective is true, of course, to what she saw and experienced, but the book is not intended to function as a studied examination of that perspective. She is not looking to impose things on to that childhood perspective that she wouldn’t have understood or seen at the time. It is meant to put us in her shoes, to see things from that limited vantage point. Which has its merits and its obstacles, especially where the adult voice does break through.

It should be said, if the subtitle of the book suggests “stories”, the chapters are all sequentially connected In a way that reads as a singular story. At the same time, each chapter retains its own distinctiveness, so as to stand apart. This does create a bit of dissonance, and at times it’s hard to follow, which subsequently makes me wonder if this might struggle to land for the younger readers that represent its primary demographic.

As a portrait of a single, authentic  childhood, growing up as a young black girl coming of age into womanhood during a volatile time in Selma (which she sees more at a distance rather than as a participant) the book does work, and it’s on this level that the prose proves endearing. When I was able to fully resist placing any external demands on the authors approach, I found that’s when it was most able to speak, content to simply take us inside the inner workings of a world that existed within the conflict unfolding around it, both in its normalcy and in its particularities.