Guest post written by author Juliana Goodman
Juliana Goodman was born and raised in Blue Island, Illinois. She received her B.A. in English Literature from Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois in 2014 and her MFA in Fiction Writing in 2017 from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Juliana has received several awards and scholarships for her writing and was a 2014 Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Arts Award Finalist. She’s had work published in Sigma Tau Delta’s Rectangle, Blackberry: a Magazine and Fiyah Literary Magazine. Juliana is currently a second year literary arts fellow with the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. In her free time, she enjoys watching horror films, reading the latest young adult novels and hanging out with her pit bull, Artie Partie and her cat, Pickle.
When I was first inspired to write The Black Girls Left Standing, the world was a different place than it is now. It was before the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, before the 2020 worldwide BLM protests during covid. Still, social justice was already trending in YA literature. And, mimicking real life, many of these BLM books centered around the deaths of Black men and boys.
Of course, there was no right way for me to ask, but what about us Black girls? Navigating life as a double minority, it was hard for me to ignore the feeling that I often was not seen as a capable person or as a person worthy of protection.
Malcolm X once said, “the most neglected person in America is the Black woman.” It’s scary and it’s still true. Black girls, like most girls, grow up watching movies and reading stories where a damsel in distress is saved by a knight. But no one tells you that as a Black girl, you don’t get to be a damsel. You’ll get the distress, absolutely, but there is no knight coming to save you. If you choose, you can become a knight and save others. It’s admirable. It’s honorable. But still, no one will be coming to save you.
This was a hard lesson for me to accept because who doesn’t want to be able to expect help when they might need it? A major theme in The Black Girls Left Standing is the lack of protection for Black girls in American society and the inability of the world to see us as anything but crusaders and nurturers for everyone else’s plight. If you need directions, warm food, motherly advice, comedy, creativity, love or acceptance, there’s a Black woman for that. But where do Black girls turn when our capacity has finally been depleted?
My main character, Beau, is struggling with the reality of what it means to be a Black girl in America. She understands that the world views her differently because she lives in poverty but she believes there’s a way to make the world care about the death of her older sister, Katia. If she can make the world care about her sister, she believes she can make the world care about her as well.
I decided to write a story about the death of a Black woman in order to explore the different ways in which Black girls respond and cope when the world pushes them aside. Beau and her friends Sonnet, Breon and Deja have things that in common that draw them together as friends but they also have very different upbringings. While Beau rages against the assertions in her life that Black girls aren’t important, her best friend Deja more or less accepts it as just the way things are. She has no interest in trying to change people’s minds about her value. Then there’s Beau’s other best friend Sonnet, who was raised in a home in the middle of a forest with her free-spirited mother. Because she’s not exposed to the same dangers as Beau, she doesn’t experience the same questioning of her identity as a Black girl.
What I hoped to illustrate with Beau’s friend group is that Black girls are not a monolith in the way that they respond to the racism and sexism they face within their own community and in society at large. Some of their responses might seem too pessimistic or too idealistic but in the sense of their upbringing and background, they’re not entirely surprising.
There could be a solution to the lack of protection for Black girls and women. I don’t know what it would be, what it would take, but I do know that Black girls cannot work or talk themselves into being seen as deserving of protection. The burden of trying to do is far too heavy. Beau has to deal with a lot in the fight for justice for her sister. She doesn’t know it but it’s not a mission that should be her or any other Black girl’s responsibility. What I hoped to do with this book is just place a spotlight on the issue so that people realize or remember that this is a problem and it’s still happening.
