Remember us, p.1
Remember Us, page 1
Also by Jacqueline Woodson
After Tupac and D Foster
Before the Ever After
Behind You
Beneath a Meth Moon
Between Madison and Palmetto
Brown Girl Dreaming
The Dear One
Feathers
From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun
Harbor Me
The House You Pass on the Way
Hush
If You Come Softly
I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This
Last Summer with Maizon
Lena
Locomotion
Maizon at Blue Hill
Miracle’s Boys
Peace, Locomotion
NANCY PAULSEN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
First published in the United States of America by Nancy Paulsen Books,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2023
Copyright © 2023 by Jacqueline Woodson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Woodson, Jacqueline, author.
Title: Remember us / Jacqueline Woodson.
Description: New York: Nancy Paulsen Books, 2023. | Summary: “The summer before seventh grade, as the constant threat of housefires looms over her Brooklyn neighborhood, basketball-loving Sage is trying to figure out her place in her circle of friends, when a new kid named Freddy moves in”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023009347 | ISBN 9780399545467 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780399545481 (ebook)
Subjects: CYAC: Friendship—Fiction. | Basketball—Fiction. | Bushwick (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. | African Americans—Fiction. | LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PZ7.W868 Re 2023 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023009347
Ebook ISBN 9780399545481
Cover art and design by Theresa Evangelista and Kaitlin Yang
Edited by Nancy Paulsen
Design by Marikka Tamura, adapted for ebook by Andrew Wheatley
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility or author or third-party websites or their content.
pid_prh_6.1_145128864_c0_r0
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Jacqueline Woodson
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
About the Matchbox
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_145128864_
For Kwame & Jason,
brothers from other mothers
After the year of fire
vines rise up
through the rest of our lives
of smoke
of flame
of memory.
As if to say
We’re still here.
As if to say
Remember us.
1
THE MOON IS BRIGHT TONIGHT. And full. Hanging low above the house across the street where an orange curtain blows in and out of my neighbors’ window. Out and in. And past the curtain there’s the golden light of their living room lamps. Beyond that, there is the pulsing blue of their television screen. I see this all now. I see a world continuing.
And in the orange and gold and blue I’m reminded again of the year when sirens screamed through my old neighborhood and smoke always seemed to be billowing. Somewhere.
That year, from the moment we stepped out of our houses in the morning till late into the night, we heard the sirens. Down Knickerbocker. Up Madison. Across Cornelia. Both ways on Gates Avenue. Down Ridgewood Place. Rounding the corners of Putnam, Wilson, Evergreen . . .
Evergreen. Sometimes a word comes to you after time has passed. And it catches you off guard. Evergreen. The name of a family of trees. And the name of a block in Brooklyn. Evergreen. Another way of saying forever.
That year, nothing felt evergreen.
Palmetto. A word that has never left me. A word that in my mind is evergreen. Palmetto. The name for both a stunning tree and an oversize cockroach. Palmetto was also the name of a street in my old neighborhood. And that year, Palmetto Street was burning.
2
THAT WAS THE YEAR WHEN, one by one, the buildings on Palmetto melted into a mass of rock and ash and crumbled plaster until just a few walls were left standing. Walls that we threw our balls against and chased each other around. And at the end of the day, when we were too tired to play anymore, they were the walls we simply sat down by and pressed our backs into, staring out over a block that was already, even as we stared at it with our lips slightly parted and our hands shielding the last of the sun from our eyes, almost gone.
We said Well, nothing lasts for always, right?
We said One day even the whole earth will disappear.
We were just some kids making believe we understood.
But we didn’t. Not yet.
We didn’t understand the fires. Or life. Or the world.
But we knew that neighborhood was our world.
And we knew . . . our world was burning.
3
THAT WAS THE YEAR OF Freddy too.
4
FREDDY MOVED INTO THE CORNER building on Palmetto Street right where it was sliced through by a small block called Ridgewood Place. The brick houses on Ridgewood Place felt like they came from another time. Each house was just as perfect as the one beside it. The cars parked out in front of the houses were undented and shining. We didn’t understand how the people who lived on Ridgewood Place got such nice houses and fancy cars. But we understood why their brick houses remained standing long after the wooden houses of Palmetto Street had burned to the ground. So we slitted our eyes as we walked past the houses on Ridgewood Place, jealous because the kids who lived inside that brick didn’t have to worry about how quickly flames flew. And we slitted our eyes because we knew they didn’t have to sleep with their robes and shoes at the foot of their beds. We knew if those kids woke up in the middle of the night, it was only to go to the bathroom or climb into their parents’ bed during a thunderstorm.
5
HEY, GIRL!
Hey, yourself, I yelled back.
Where’s the park at?
What park?
My dad said there was a park around here somewhere. With hoops.
I shrugged. I don’t know anything about some park, I said.
But you got a ball.
So?
A hot wind came out of nowhere and trembled the leaves. I didn’t want to be yelling in the street up at some kid’s window, and something about that wind made me feel a way. So I gave a little wave and then broke into a jog toward the park.
6
FREDDY SHOWED UP AT THE basketball courts the next day anyway. We eyed each other. He was a little shorter than me and skinny. He was light-skinned, with a short messy afro that needed an afro pick, and his eyes kept changing colors depending on how the sun hit them—first the darkest blue I’d ever seen, then gray, then that darkest blue again.
Thought you didn’t know where the park was at, he said.
I shrugged. You found it anyway, so no big deal.
Who got next? he asked.
I said What’s your name?
Freddy, he said. I just moved to Palmetto Street.
You got next now, I guess, Freddy from Palmetto Street.
A guy from the other team said That block is burning down, son.
Who’s doing it? Freddy asked.
Who knows? the guy said back. Something. Or somebody.
Well, not my house, Freddy said.
Everywhere, I said. The whole neighborhood. But mostly your block.
Not my house, Freddy said again. He looked off then. Toward the sound of the sirens. Toward Palmetto Street.
We were playing two-on-two. Me and this guy named Randy and two guys from Putnam Avenue who thought they had game but didn’t. Me and Randy were winning. I had been playing ball since I was a little kid. My mother said the minute I could hold a ball with two hands, I was looking for a game. Most days the only place I wanted to be was on the basketball court.
I dribbled the ball. Shot it. Watched it sink into the basket. A guy on the other team cursed. Randy slapped my hand. Said Nice shot, Sage.
I was the only girl on the court. Always. The only girl in a basketball shirt and high-tops. The only girl who pulled her hair back into a braid every day of every year no matter what. And one of the best players in the park. The guys who played there regularly knew me and always chose me first when they were putting teams together. Basketball was the thing I loved most in the world. More than candy or cartoons. More than roller-skating or roller coasters. I felt ball in every part of my body—my feet, my knees, my hands and arms. My head too. How many times had I gotten into trouble for sitting in class imagining a slam dunk or a stutter-step dribble around a player to the basket, score! Too many.
All I wanted was to be around anybody who wanted to talk about Bob McAdoo joining the Knicks and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar leaving the Bucks for the Lakers or who had the most points in a game in history.
Wilt Chamberlain, Freddy said that afternoon. A hundred points in 1962.
Yeah, but against what team? I asked.
Knicks, he said. Of course. Who else would let a brother score on them like that?
Watch out, Randy said. Sage is a Knicks fan!
Me too, Freddy said. Wilt still put a beating on them, though. Warriors were hot that year.
Randy shot a jumper that ended the game. He slapped my palm, and Freddy asked the two guys we’d just beat if either of them wanted to be on his team.
I’m hungry. I’m out, one of the guys said. We all held out our hands for him to slap, and then he was jogging across the park.
I’m in, the other guy said.
Then we were back to playing. Freddy took an outside shot and missed. I grabbed the rebound. Passed it to Randy. Randy was thirteen but not that tall and was about to head off on a full ride to a boarding school in Massachusetts. He’d be leaving in the fall.
You ever been to a real game? I asked Freddy when we took a water break.
He shook his head. You?
Nah.
That day, I didn’t tell Freddy the rest. That my dad had planned to take me to a real game when I was older. That he said Keep playing. Maybe I’ll be coming to see you on the court someday.
That was a long time ago.
I took a long gulp of water, blinking back memories of my dad while my head was down. Then I picked up the ball and started dribbling hard—around the back, through my legs. I spun it up on my pointer, jumped it to my middle finger, then back again.
Y’all ready? I asked.
The others nodded. Randy grabbed the ball, sprinted back over to the hoop, took a layup, and sunk it.
Like always, a group of little kids and some old neighborhood dudes had gathered to watch us. Every time I sank a shot, the little kids cheered.
You got your own fan club, Freddy said.
I’m that good, I said back.
We were still playing when the sun went down.
7
FOR A WHILE I HAD been best friends with a girl named Angie. Felt like one day we were all playing on the block together, letting our knees get scraped and clothes get dirty, next day, Angie was hanging with a group of girls who greased their hair into swirls against their foreheads, polished their nails, and brushed invisible dirt from their jeans.
We were all turning twelve that year, and everybody around me seemed to be noticing my clothes, my dirty sneakers, my messy braid and bitten-down nails.
Angie and I weren’t enemies. But we weren’t friends anymore either. She and the other girls had formed a small, tight circle.
With me on the outside of it.
8
EVERY MORNING, MY MOTHER LAID the Daily News out on our kitchen table and made me read it. I turned the pages slowly while I ate my bowl of cereal. One Saturday, as I was rushing through the paper so that I could head to the park to play ball, I saw the words the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.
We’re in here! I said, my mouth filled with Frosted Flakes. Bushwick’s in the paper!
I know, my mother said. Keep reading. She went over to the window and stared out at the green tops of the newly planted trees. Maybe she sighed, I don’t remember now.
Because of the record number of buildings that have burned in this section of Brooklyn, I read out loud, some have begun referring to Bushwick as The Matchbox. I looked up from the paper.
The Matchbox?
My mother nodded. I’m thinking it’s time to move out of this neighborhood, Sage.
But this was Daddy’s house, I said. He was a little boy here.
I know.
He loved this place.
He did, my mother said. But the neighborhood wasn’t The Matchbox then.
I looked down at the paper again.
They don’t know anything, I said. They don’t live here. And how come they don’t write about the good stuff? Like when we’re having block parties and things like that? Or that time when Greg from down the block hit a baseball right out of the park and couldn’t walk down the street without people coming out of their houses to pat him on the back. Remember how everyone was telling him he had a gift? You too. You said it.
I was talking too fast. I knew it but couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to imagine living anywhere else. Yeah, I wanted to be safe. But I wanted to be safe here.
The fires are real, Sage.
They don’t know us, I said again, and went back to the paper.
The story jumped to the next page, where there was a picture of a building on Palmetto Street in flames. Black smoke billowed out from the top-floor windows. I remembered that fire. I woke up to the sounds of sirens and my mother grabbing old blankets just as the sun was rising. I had wanted to go with her, to help whoever was getting burnt out. But it had been a weekday, just hours before I’d have to get up for school. My mother told me Go back to sleep, Sage. I’ll be home in a little while.
