Award-winning journalist Dawn Turner turns her investigative eye on her own life and upbringing in THREE GIRLS FROM BRONZEVILLE, a piercing and illuminating memoir about being Black in America, and the ways that racism intersects issues of class and opportunity. In offering her firsthand account of growing up in the historic neighborhood of Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side, along with chronicles of the lives of her childhood best friend and sister, Turner paints an unforgettable portrait of a neighborhood, a family and a country.

At only three square miles, Bronzeville is the cradle of Chicago’s Great Migration, the epicenter of Black business and culture. Once a training ground for Union Army soldiers, then a prisoner-of-war camp for Confederate troops, and finally the neighborhood where Chicago forced its influx of new Black citizens to live, Bronzeville is a study in contrasts. Throughout its lifetime, it has been home to activist Ida B. Wells, jazz musician Louis Armstrong, novelist Richard Wright, poet Gwendolyn Brooks and, finally, Turner’s family.

"...a piercing and illuminating memoir about being Black in America, and the ways that racism intersects issues of class and opportunity.... THREE GIRLS FROM BRONZEVILLE is, as its subtitle says, a truly unique and hauntingly American exploration of race, fate and sisterhood."

When we meet Dawn and her younger sister, Kim, they are fourth-generation Bronzeville residents who are finally starting to take hold of all that the country can offer them. Following a brief period of homelessness thanks to their feckless father, the girls and their mother have just moved into the privately owned Theodore K. Lawless Gardens apartment complex, three 24-story buildings meant to reflect the upward mobility of their residents. Also living in their building is Debra, a girl Dawn’s age who could not be more different from her. Debra is a precocious troublemaker, as short as Dawn is tall, and for a while they do not even realize they live only floors apart.

For the first third of the book, Turner takes great care to introduce us to her family --- the women who gossip in code, sitting pigeon-toed at the dining room table, and the men, loud-voiced and smelling of cologne and cigar smoke, who joke and flirt with their wives from separate rooms. It is immediately clear that her family is woven into every bit of Bronzeville, a tenacious group of people who took the run-down, squalid tenements left to them by the city and, as Dawn’s Granny says, “did what Black people have always done: We took a bunch of scraps and stitched together a world.” For all his flaws, Dawn’s father is the embodiment of this philosophy, a man so charming that he once convinced Dawn’s mother to marry him, and later persuaded a landlord to let him and his family rent-to-buy an entire building. Unfortunately, charm does not always equal respectability or a penchant for the truth, and Dawn’s parents eventually divorce.

Shortly after the divorce, Dawn and her family move up to the 11th floor, a place without echoes of her father or his violence. It is then that she finally meets Debra, a girl she had always noticed and even admired in school, but who was never close enough in her orbit to befriend. Before long, Dawn, Debra and Kim are inseparable. Together they become “Thing-Finders,” in the vein of their idol, Pippi Longstocking. As they collect their treasures and whisk them away to their “love spot,” the roof of a small utility building, they dream about their futures, agreeing to become doctors and buy houses next door to one another like the families they admire on sitcoms.

Dawn is already on the right track, bookish and studious, and as her nature rubs off on Debra, she too starts to think before she acts. But already the differences between the girls are becoming more obvious. When Debra’s family moves her to Indianapolis, afraid she is becoming too involved with a bad crowd, their friendship, as well as their paths, start to fracture and bend away from one another. Left with only her sister, Dawn befriends new children at school, including a boy who challenges her to give her intelligence a chance and see where it can take her. As Dawn enters advanced studies, begins to date and gets accepted into the University of Illinois, Kim follows a different path, one that involves substance abuse and a whole lot of grief.

What makes Dawn Turner --- as a character and as a writer --- so excellent to read is her willingness to explore and share the full picture, never once shaming or criticizing Debra or Kim. Although Dawn reads as the success story of the group, she too is touched by the choices of her earliest friends, and it is this sensitivity that makes her retellings of the lives of Debra and Kim so pure rather than voyeuristic. Instead, like a true journalist, Turner asks “why?” Why did three girls, all born in the same city of Black excellence and history, who dreamed of stable careers and warm houses, end up in such wildly different scenarios? As Turner shows, while the decisions were each girl’s own, the blame can be laid only on America’s racist structure and its razor-thin margin for error for girls --- people --- of color.

As much as I enjoyed Turner’s search for answers, the first third of the book was a bit dry, enough to turn away a reader who is not committed. The pacing could have been tightened, but the narrative would have been helped by a family tree. Turner describes her entire family in such detail that it was often difficult to determine who her touchstones were, or how they connected to one another. That said, the book picks up in the second and third parts. Again, it is Turner’s gaze --- compassionate but piercing, questioning but understanding --- that really propels the narrative forward and helps her arguments about sisterhood and the struggles of Black women. The complex ties between racism and opportunity come to searing, immediate life.

Perfect for fans of Jeff Hobbs’ THE SHORT AND TRAGIC LIFE OF ROBERT PEACE and Gigi Georges’ DOWNEAST, THREE GIRLS FROM BRONZEVILLE is, as its subtitle says, a truly unique and hauntingly American exploration of race, fate and sisterhood.