I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This

I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This: A Novel

Jacqueline Woodson

Paperback: Puffin Books, 1994

Jacqueline Woodson’s novel, I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This, is a story about loss of the most heart wrenching kind. And it is also the story about gain. Two girls still reeling from the loss of their mothers find each other and become friends. But their friendship is problematic from the start. Marie, the main character, is black and rich while her new friend, Lena, is white and poor. Can this special friendship survive their families’ prejudice? Or is there something far more horrible that will force them apart?

Lena is new to the school that Marie attends, and Marie is asked to show her to her classes. For a white girl in a predominantly black school, Lena is brash and outspoken. Marie is awed at how easily Lena proclaims herself “whitetrash.” At other times though, Lena is aloof and dispirited and slouchy. And she is always dirty. It isn’t long before Marie invites Lena and her younger sister, Dion, over to her house. After a few visits, her father, a bit grudgingly, accepts their presence.

All this time, Marie wants nothing more than for her absentee mother to come home. She wants her father to stop being so sad. She misses her father’s affection. Since she turned twelve, her father is suddenly keeping his physical distance from her, and she doesn’t understand why. Meanwhile her new best friend is an enigma, but they can talk about their moms and feel safe doing so.

Postcards come to Marie from her mother in different parts of the world. The writing is like a strange poem. Her mother signs them, “Love, me,” never once “Love, mom.” And never once does she ask after her daughter. Love me becomes something of a mantra in this story. Everyone in Marie’s family needs and wants to be loved, it seems. But in Lena’s family, things are very different and very dark. There’s not much talk of love there.

As if missing her mother and lost family life isn’t enough of a burden, Marie begins to worry for her new friend, ever since Lena shares with her a little about her homelife. At first Lena’s news is hard to accept, but Marie soon believes it is the terrible truth. And then Lena takes her sister and runs away. Love for her new friend is not enough to keep her close. You’d expect that this fresh loss of a new friend would be devastating to Marie, but no. In facing this one, Marie is happy that they’ve gotten away.

Chauncey, Ohio where this story takes place is a sleeping central character, important enough that Woodson devotes an entire chapter to its history and geography. Pronounced “Chancey” it has lived up to its name. It has been subject to unpredictable changes and circumstances, being first a white town of coal miners who left after the coal did, to be replaced by black folk with a few poor white people who live on its fringes. Perhaps only in such a place can a black girl take a chance and befriend a white girl and a white girl befriend a black one.

In one lovely scene, Marie reads to her friend while Lena takes a bubble bath in Marie’s home. She reads from Audre Lorde’s book, The Cancer Journals. (Lena’ mother has died of breast cancer.) Lorde’s words are strong, encouraging, determined, and her message is exactly what both girls need to hear at that precise moment in their lives:

“I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It means teaching, surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle.”

That’s what the girls have been doing all along, only they didn’t know it.

For being such a slender book, it packs one huge emotional wallop. It’s the kind of book adults should read too because underneath such a poignant story, it has lessons for all of us.