Dawn Turner

A riveting, coming-of-age memoir about three Black girls from the storied Bronzeville section of Chicago that offers a penetrating exploration of race, opportunity, friendship, sisterhood, and the powerful forces at work that allow some to flourish…and others to falter.When her sister was born, fiery and willful from the start, three-year-old Dawn Turner understood that Kim would always be both an ally and adversary. She had a similar feeling when she became friends with pretty Debra Trice in third grade. Dawn was instantly captivated by Debra’s bold and rambunctious spirit, so opposite to her own. The three girls formed an indelible bond as they spent their years growing up together daydreaming about their futures: Dawn, a writer, Debra a doctor, and Kim, a teacher. Then they came to the precipice, a fraught rite of passage for all girls when the dangers and harsh realities of the world burst the innocent bubble of childhood, when the choices they made could—and would—have devastating consequences. There was a razor-thin margin of error—especially for brown girls. With a keen investigative eye and intimate detail, Dawn chronicles the dramatic turns that send their lives careening in very different—and shocking—directions over the decades. The result is a powerful tour de force on the complex interplay of race and opportunity, class and womanhood, and how those forces shape our lives and our capacity for resilience and redemption.

They were three Black girls. Dawn, tall and studious; her sister, Kim, younger by three years and headstrong; and her best friend, Debra, already prom-queen pretty by third grade. They bonded as they roamed the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, the destination of hundreds of thousands of Black folks who fled the ravages of the Jim Crow South. These third-generation daughters of the Great Migration come of age in the 1970s, in the warm glow of the recent civil rights movement. It has offered them a promise that they will have more opportunities, rights, and freedoms than any generation of Black Americans in history. But the girls have much more immediate concerns: hiding under the dining room table and eavesdropping on grown folks’ business; collecting secret treasures; and daydreaming about their futures. And then fate intervenes, sending them careening in wildly different directions. There’s heartbreak, loss, displacement, and even murder. Three Girls from Bronzeville is a memoir that chronicles Dawn’s attempt to find answers. It’s a celebration of sisterhood, a testimony to the unique struggles of Black women, and a tour-de-force about the complex interplay of race, class, and opportunity, and how those forces shape our lives and our capacity for resilience and redemption.