I Think This Key is Right

Reading Frankie Lennon’s, “Woman Dreams: Going Against the Grain”, in The Mee Street Chronicles: Straight Up Stories of a Black Woman’s Life, the narrator has taken me on ride into her world of her darkness. The narrator becomes intrigued and captured by the many desirable woman of Hollywood and questioned if she was the only girl on the playground dreaming about them.

During this story the narrator, as a six year old young girl living in Knoxville, Tennessee, is the protagonist, falling in lust for Hollywood starlets. These woman being Rita Hayworth, Susa Hayward, Ava Gardener, and Dorothy Dandridge to just name a couple. These women cause conflict within the narrator herself. She states on page 53 that “At some point, [she doesn’t] remember when, [she] began to wonder if other girls dreamed like [she] did, not of men, but of women.” Hollywood is the antagonist in which it left her in the dark as she realized on page 53 that “Hollywood whetted and teased [her] appetite about sex,” straying her away from the desires of men onto those of woman on screen which she considered taboo. This taboo brings up another conflict between the narrator and the inner force of society. Having the curiosity and urge to ask her friend about her dreams are not fulfilled due to the fear of not being accepted and being viewed differently. As a result, “going against the grain” is understood to be going against what is considered normal and accepted in society back then.

Though the story explains itself better as a whole, it is on page 57 that I f ound closure with the narrator during this small journey. She states that the movie starring Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte, or their screen names Carmen and Joe, she “[remembers] that both became prisoners of their wanting… because later on, [she] became a prisoner, too, required to hide, required to put aside [her] own desires, unable to pursue and resolve them… as time passed, somehow, in [her] mind, that movie became a signal event for [her], defining thing taboo… defining limits and boundaries that you cross at your peril.” I understood that she was lost with what to believe until the next passage I read which states “[she is] there in the dark waiting anxiously… waiting for the camera to show [her] the next woman that will inhabit [her] dreams.” Here I grew in excitement because, I took this as her telling her readers that she understands the taboo of her dreaming about women. She understood that her dreams were not normal back then however, she does not care because this is who she is, take it or leave it.

While reading this story I thought of a friend close to me, she would always be different from the other girls at school but no one really could put their finger on it. It was not until high school when she told us about her bisexuality. She told us she noticed it herself back in fifth grade but, she never told us because she thought that we would treat her differently. This made me understand why the narrator did not want to ask her mother or friends about her thoughts of woman. This fear that some people have are understandable but, the reason to why people would treat them different has yet to be explained to me.