Williams-Garcia’s Girls by KaaVonia Hinton

KaaVonia Hinton has been involved in YA scholarship for a long time. I am thrilled with her first post on Dr. Bickmore’s YA Wednesday. I remember meeting her when she was an ALAN  board member and we have since had the chance to do some work together.  She wrote one of the chapters in the second volume or the series on African America authors of YA Literature that will be out this Fall. Her impact in the field is evident in her work with Katherine T. Bucher in Young Adult Literature: Exploration, Evaluation and Appreciation. 

Williams-Garcia’s Girls by KaaVonia Hinton

In an interview with Shirley M. Jordan in 1993, Rita Williams-Garcia said, “Well, I’ve already told my editor, ‘I will not be winning any Corettas.”  Of course, that prediction fortunately did not pan out. To date, she has actually won four “Corettas,” and several other major citations.

Williams-Garcia is probably best known for her Gaither Sisters Trilogy which was bound together in Gaither Sisters Trilogy Collection: One Crazy Summer, P.S. Be Eleven, Gone Crazy in Alabama (2018). One Crazy Summer, a New York Times bestseller, won several awards, including a Newbery Honor and the Scott O’Dell Award. It was also named a National Book Award finalist and a NAACP Image Award nominee. Its two Coretta Scott King Author Award winning companion novels, PS. Be Eleven (2013) and Gone Crazy in Alabama (2015), are equally lauded. With all of the excitement about these books and the publication of her latest books, A Sitting in St. James (2021), a 2021 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner set during slavery, and She Persisted: Florence Griffith Joyner (2021), a biography, it is easy to forget that Rita Williams-Garcia has been writing for young adults for over thirty years.

 With all of the excitement about these books and the publication of her latest books, A Sitting in St. James (2021), a 2021 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner set during slavery, and She Persisted: Florence Griffith Joyner (2021), a biography, it is easy to forget that Rita Williams-Garcia has been writing for young adults for over thirty years.

In 1993, while talking to Jordan, the critical reception of her earlier novels was not as enthusiastic as it has been for her recent work, but I think critics missed the significance of Williams-Garcia’s contributions to YA at that time. Two of her earlier novels in particular deserve a fresh look: Blue Tights (1988) and Like Sisters on the Homefront (1995), which did garner accolades (i.e., It was named a Coretta Scott King Honor book, and it was chosen as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and a Best of the Year book by ALA Booklist, School Library Journal, Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, Horn Book, and Publishers Weekly.). 

Both novels stress Williams-Garcia’s concern for the adultification of black girls, and they depict the loss associated with the deprivation of black girlhood. In the interview with Jordan, Williams-Garcia explains that she is influenced by Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rain­bow Is Enuf (1977): “See, people really missed For Colored Girls, entirely. Really missed the point. Shange tells you right from the start, ‘Visions of never having been a girl… scattered half notes.’ Why do you think it’s For Colored Girls and not For Black Women? One is whole and one is missing something. Girlhood” (309). Williams-Garcia is one of only a few writers who were exploring lost black girlhood in urban America in the late eighties and nineties.

Williams-Garcia says Blue Tights was originally titled Blue Tights, Big Butt and took nearly ten years to publish. The novel features fifteen-year-old Joyce Collins, who both seems in a hurry to grow up and pressured by society, including family members, to do so.  It doesn’t help that Joyce is unsure of herself despite being smart and a talented aspiring dancer. When her dance teacher points out that her voluptuous body type is not typical for ballet dancers, Joyce’s self-esteem plummets even further, and she begins to look for acceptance in relationships with her peers and older men before discovering her own worth, especially through her friendship with Gayle, the protagonist of Like Sisters on the Homefront, and through her participation in an Afrocentric dance troupe.

Like Sisters on the Homefront is 26 years old, but it is still timely, funny, and important. Protagonist, Gayle Whitaker has an abridged girlhood. At fourteen years old, she is a mother pregnant with her second child and forced to get an abortion. Hoping extended family will offer Gayle support and an understanding of who she is and where she comes from, her mother sends her to live with her aunt and uncle in Georgia. While there, she slowly changes, learns responsibility, and embraces her family, culture, and history.

​I like to think of Joyce and Gayle as precursors to Delphine, whose own childhood is shortened in a less severe way, as she tries to help take care of her younger sisters after their mother leaves the family. In Williams-Garcia’s capable hands, each girl whether, Joyce, Gayle, or Delphine, leans on family and community to find their way-- and to try to cling to the little bit of girlhood they have left. 

​References:
Jordan, S. M. Rita Williams-Garcia. (1993). In S. M. Jordan (Ed.), Broken silences: Interviews
with Black and White women writers (pp. 303-322). Rutgers. 

KaaVonia Hinton is a professor in the Teaching & Learning Department at Old Dominion University and the author of articles and several books, including Angela Johnson: Poetic Prose (2006), Integrating Multicultural Literature in Libraries and Classrooms in Secondary Schools (2007) (with Gail K. Dickinson), Sharon M. Draper: Embracing Literacy (2009), and Young Adult Literature: Exploration, Evaluation and Appreciation, 3rd ed. (2013) (with Katherine T. Bucher).

Until next time.