When A Southern Town Broke A Heart By Jacqueline Woodson

When a Southern Town Broke a Heart
In the short story When a Southern Town Broke a Heart by Jacqueline Woodson, the reader learns about Woodson’s memories of being a young black girl in the early 70’s who travels to the south every summer and she feels that even though she lives in Brooklyn, her real home is there in the southern town of Greenville, South Carolina where her grandmother lives. A central theme of the short story is that the innocence of youth protects us from reality.
One way Woodson starts to convey the theme is when early in the story she brings up what “home” was to her when she was young. How Woodson thinks about what her home is to her changes when the reality that has been hidden from her while being a little kid is revealed at age 9. According to the author when talking about “home” she says, “Because for me South Carolina had always been home. Even years after my family joined the Great Migration and my mother moved us from Greenville to Brooklyn, each summer we returned to the southern town of my mother’s childhood.” (1). The quote is saying that

Woodson notices that “for so many summers, we’d been warned to stay away from the small patch of poison ivy that grew around the base of the one tree in my grandparent’s backyard. But until that year, the consequence had been as theoretical as the segregation surrounding us.” (2-3). The quote is explaining that when Woodson was younger, she didn’t ever think she or anyone else would touch the ivy, just like how she didn’t think that she would ever be subject to racism in Greenville. This quote includes an example of an analogy between racism and the itchy poison ivy rash from touching it. This is further emphasized later in the story when she realizes that both exist in Greenville, her special place. She realizes that being young has protected her from this