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The Chicago literary tradition was built by the foot. Where Los Angeles had the glamour and New York had the grandeur, some of the most influential writers made Chicago come alive on the page through the most intimate depictions of the most intimate of landmarks, from a street in Bronzeville to a house on Mango Street. That’s what’s beautiful about a city of neighborhoods and the writing it inspires. To truly understand Chicago as a whole, we have to feel what it’s like to live corner by corner, block by block.
Dawn Turner’s memoir Three Girls from Bronzeville proudly honors the writers who called Bronzeville home, including Ida B. Wells and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in turn the lineage of Black women leading back to the Great Migration. In fact, Turner’s writing often feels like reading Brooks for the first time. Following the author, her best friend Debra, and her sister Kim, the memoir explores the different paths their lives took with a journalist’s precision and a poet’s lyricism. But like Brooks and other authors who’ve written about Chicago in the past, Turner weaves a much larger history into her heartfelt and heartbreaking account.
This is the story of a street, a neighborhood, a city. A story of promise broken and realized. And this is a story of three girls from Bronzeville, who could have been from anywhere.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Michael Welch
In addition to being a memoirist, you are also a longtime and award-winning journalist and novelist. How did your experience working in these multiple genres affect your writing process for this book?
Dawn Turner
This is a story that I’ve tried to tell—kind of surreptitiously—in different ways. At the heart of the story is “when did we lose them,” them being my sister and my best friend. And this is a question I’ve searched for answers for in my journalism and in my novels under the guise of just trying to understand. I have a passion for stories that deal with redemption and second chances, and those are the types of stories that I pursued in my journalism. So I think I’ve been working out the story of my sister and my best friend for years but hadn’t done it straight on until this memoir.
Michael Welch
I’d imagine it might be difficult at times to look at your life through that journalistic lens. What challenges or new perspectives did you discover in returning to the various moments of your life on the page?
Dawn Turner
It’s interesting because I think while I was practicing journalism, I didn’t initially understand why I chose the paths that I chose in terms of the stories I followed. I was very fortunate in that I wrote a column and also longer pieces that were kind of a meditation on the idea of second chances and redemption and the whole struggle that we all go through as human beings. In my journalism there is some overlap, so it really wasn’t until I started writing about Debra years ago when she first went to prison, and of course it was a story that I couldn’t shake from a personal perspective, but also as a writer we tend to work out our “stuff” with a pen or laptop. What I’m saying is that those two roads—my journalistic road and my personal story—seemed to be on parallel tracks for a while, but then they began to intersect.
Michael Welch
You first wrote about Debra and her trial as it was happening for the Chicago Tribune, and now you are returning to that experience years later in this book. I was wondering how you see your writing from that time now and if any of your thoughts have changed as you returned to it for this memoir.
Dawn Turner
From the very beginning, I remember telling Debra that she should keep a journal and maybe this story could be a book. But then I wrote about her in 2000 when she was first sentenced, and then I wrote about her in I believe it was 2002 when she had been three years incarcerated but two years imprisoned, because she spent the first year in jail. And then I wrote about her in 2007 about her graduation, and that story ended up being huge. But at that point I thought that I might have said all that needed to be said about her imprisonment. I mean me and her constantly wrote to each other and spoke on the telephone, so she would always be my friend. But in terms of what I had said about her story, I wasn’t certain that there was a book there.
But it wasn’t until 2010 that the author Wes Moore—who’s also running for governor of Maryland right now—published the book The Other Wes Moore. Then I realized that there was still more that could be said. But as I started to write the book proposal about Debra, the agent with whom I was working with at the time said, “Oh wait a minute, I love your story about your sister, and your mother, and grandmother.” All these people were jumping off the page and this community that was the cradle of the Great Migration here in Chicago. This is a story that is much broader than Debra, but it includes my sister and this community. So that is the kind of evolution of this story, because initially I was writing about these two childhood best friends who took spectacularly different paths. And then I really started to think about it as something emblematic, a sociological story. There is a greater story to our story that extends beyond us.
Michael Welch
One of the things that struck me as I read is that you’re not just telling the story of your own life, but also the lives of your sister, your best friend, and ultimately your matriarchal line leading back to the Great Migration. How did you approach balancing these interweaving stories and histories?
Dawn Turner
Does it flow pretty well?
Michael Welch
I would say so, yes!
Dawn Turner
I ask you that because it was grueling, it was so difficult, Michael! This was the most challenging project I’ve ever undertaken, bar none. And I only ask you that in jest because I have had the most challenging time just trying to put all those pieces together. It’s like trying to build an airplane and fly it at the same time! But my editor was fantastic in just helping me organize my thoughts. Because the voices of the older women in my life ring throughout my head. So I could not have written this book without telling their stories. And their stories are the story of the path, and they lay the foundation for my story. But also these are the stories that echo throughout various people’s lives, which form the community.
Michael Welch
A number of famous Bronzeville writers such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Ida B. Wells loom large over this book. How did their legacies influence you as you wrote?
Dawn Turner
Oh absolutely. When I was about ten years old, I had been reading so many books about little white girls. And one day I came home from school and there was Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha on my pillow, and my mother was like “read this.” In the beginning, I didn’t fully appreciate Brooks, the beauty of her language, and the cadence of her voice, but I did get to chapter three and saw a street called Cottage Grove. I ran to my mother and said, “Oh my God, Mom, look at this, we live near Cottage Grove.” And my mother said, “Yes, this book is set in our community.” So my mother’s original intent of having me read a book about people that look like me kind of spilled over into me reading a book about people that lived like me. That really set the foundation for me pursuing stories as a journalist in communities that were kind of overlooked or dismissed and writing about people that had also been overlooked or had been relegated to a stereotype. That is Gwendolyn Brooks’s imprint on my life.
Michael Welch
I have to say there were a lot of moments in this book where I thought this feels and reads like Gwendolyn Brooks. And it’s really wonderful to be able to see how important she was to your writing and then to know that other people are going to be able to pick this book up and have a similar experience.
Dawn Turner
Oh thank you! I was about to say going off of that is that thing about my neighborhood, our section of Bronzeville, it’s replicated throughout the country and world. There are these communities as you well know that are walled off. There’s this great distance between these communities and the various institutions, whether it be policing or the simple act of changing a street light or garbage pickup. They’re walled off in this way, and then we ask “why are things dysfunctional?” Well, there are various institutions and people and agencies that are complicit.
Michael Welch
You talk in-depth about how when it comes to Debra, Kim, and your collective story, you’ve gone from viewing it as one of “choices” to one of “second chances…Who gets them, Who doesn’t, who makes the most of them.” I’d love to hear you talk a bit about that evolution and how you view second chances and that inherent privilege now.
Dawn Turner
I think that’s a big point of the book, because when we say that people have a choice, we are assuming a certain degree of agency and condition that they’re working in. That’s fine if we want to go that way, but I don’t think that’s inherently true. It’s a framing of the conversation that only implicates the person that we’re talking about, but it doesn’t implicate the rest of us. That framing makes people feel good, but I think the proper framing is to look at the condition that may limit one’s choices. Then we get to talk about who’s responsible for those conditions and what we should do about it.
This is stepping away from my sister and Debra for a second, because they really did have family structures that were very strong and they had safety nets, though not perfect. From the very beginning we knew that we were loved and protected, and there are so many people that don’t have that. But for people that don’t have that, we have to ask ourselves what is our responsibility to help provide some of the basics. Because we are losing people who are so incredibly talented, and so incredibly gifted in different ways. And we’re losing the impact that they can have on our culture or society. And people do bad things, yes, and once they’ve done something bad they have to be held responsible for that, but how do we get to them before they get to that point of desperation? Because with aberrant behavior, we don’t look at the conditions that got people to that place.
It all comes back to how we feel about a situation, whether we look at someone who’s addicted to opioids and then say “oh there’s needs to be a medical intervention,” or we look at someone who’s addicted to crack and say “oh there needs to be a criminal justice intervention.” It’s how you view the situation, the degree of empathy we bring to it, and how we frame a person’s life that goes into how we solve the problem.
Michael Welch
You write so beautifully and honestly about Bronzeville and your relationship to it throughout the years. I want to give you some open space to talk about Bronzeville in all the ways it shows up in your book—as a community in Chicago, as a literary destination and legacy, and as a home.
Dawn Turner
Our given world is our given world. My mother and my grandmother often mentioned the people they would see walking through the community, and they would also show us different landmarks in the community. But it wasn’t until I got older that I realized that my community has so much history. I knew it had history, but I didn’t realize the importance of the place. It’s said that Chicago had a renaissance similar to Harlem, and some of that happened right there in Bronzeville. So as you get older you start to appreciate it more and you understand your place in the world having started there. As a writer how could I not pick up on some of those themes and the work that people before me had done? I think that’s something that’s super important, to some degree carry on the legacy of people who were strivers and people that believed in the American Dream, even though their country ultimately failed them in so many ways. Yet they continued to believe and work hard.
All of that sounds kind of lofty, but I do know that I come from an important community. People arrived in Chicago in what would become Bronzeville, and they believed it was the promised land. It was freedom. It turned out to sometimes be a perverse version of that, but people continued to work hard and strive and do the best that they could do to make it what it was supposed to be. That’s part of the American fabric, where you have people who believe and continue to work hard on so many fronts.
MEMOIR
Three Girls from Bronzeville
By Dawn Turner
Simon & Schuster
Published September 7, 2021
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