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Staggerlee is used to being alone. As the granddaughter of celebrities and the daughter of an interracial couple in an all-black town, she has become adept at isolating herself from curious neighbors. But then her cousin, Trout, comes to visit. Trout is exactly like Staggerlee wishes she could be: outspoken, sure of herself, beautiful. Finally, Staggerlee has a friend, someone she can share her deepest, most private thoughts with. Someone who will teach her how to be the strong girl she longs to be. But is Trout really the girl Staggerlee thinks she is?
Review:
When I read The House You Pass on the Way, I had just returned from living abroad for six years and had landed my first job teaching remedial Reading and English to struggling high school students in a racially diverse, Title I school. Talk about a reverse culture shock. After teaching English to German speakers in tech companies and private schools, I was back in the US, in a classroom filled with eleventh graders who would not graduate if they couldn’t pass the standardized English test or get a concordant score on some other test.
After a class survey, I realized a few of things. First, they really didn’t like to read. In fact most of them hadn’t even read a novel all the way through on their own.
Second, this was a Title I school. Even if the mood struck them to read anything, finances were tight and my students had neither books nor excess money laying around to buy them. It was pretty daunting.
Third, I had a little bit of everyone in class the first year. Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and Black students made up the majority, but also, I had openly LGBTQ+ kids in my class. I knew I had to cover a lot ground in terms of race, gender and sexuality if I wanted to keep them engaged.
Remember, I’d been living in Germany for six years. They don’t have a whole lot of hangups regarding sexuality. Pride was celebrated everywhere, people of all sexes walked the streets hand in hand and no one cared. Now I found myself along the I-4 corridor of Central Florida in one of the most conservative counties in the country. I was experiencing my own culture shock, struggling to navigate a mine field with conservative colleagues and parents who were culturally different from me. Compound that with being Latinx out the gate and I might as well have been living in a new country again.
I remember walking into the school library and asking the librarian for diverse, coming of age books. The librarian was this tall, super-intimidating biker guy who came to school on a Harley-Davidson. He gave me a wry look as he went back into his office and shuffled through his boxes of books before coming back out to hand them to me.
“I’ve got class sets of these I can’t get rid of,” he said. Translation: parents had contested them.
“Sounds like the kind of books I want,” I answered.
That’s how I picked up The House You Pass on the Way by Jacqueline Woodson. The librarian, by the way, turned out to be really enthusiastic over the book, convincing me to to take it home and read it (contrary to his imposing appearance, he was an unrepentant book worm who is now one of my best friends). At barely over 100 pages, I expected a fairly quick and easy read. But it was also one of the first YA books I’d ever read featuring a biracial, lesbian lead and it was transformative for me as well.
The House You Pass on the Way is a treasure of a book written in spare, lyrical language and features remarkably well-rounded characters. Woodson packs so much emotional energy into a small space. Staggerlee is a thoughtful, introverted biracial girl in a small town where her grandparents were killed in an anti-civil rights bombing, a stature of whom graces the center of town. In her person, Staggerlee almost ascends to the level of metaphor except that she is also very much a confused young lady who struggles to understand who she is, and at the center of that struggle for understanding is her crush on her ex-best friend, Hazel. Staggerlee feels different, which isolates her even further.
Things change when her cousin, Trout comes to stay with her for the summer. They instantly understand each other in more ways than they could have anticipated. They spend that all-important summer between middle school and high school together, and they each gain from the other the strength to figure out who they really are. Staggerlee comes to terms with her bi-raciality but also with her sexuality. It’s a story of the importance of friendships in becoming, and the narrative is rendered with elegant simplicity.
Because the book is short and it was my first book of the course, I read it out loud to the students as they followed along before stopping to discuss. It was the best decision I made, because it created a bond that year between those students and opened up a safe place to talk about personal topics. For most, it was their first novel with a queer lead, and for at least three of those students, it was their permission to relax because I was not going to allow them to be judged in my class. One girl came to me at the end of the unit to tell me how happy she was that the first book she read all the way through was about a lesbian girl, like herself, and now she would be looking for more. In more ways than a test can measure, that was my sign of success. The end of year test was besides the point.
As for me, personally, I learned that I had to think of my students first, teach them to be honest with themselves and others, and respect the power of a good book to build community and understanding, especially among marginalized readers. Books can be a model for collective love but also self-love and that’s not a lesson anyone soon forgets, if the number of students who come back to visit me is any indication.
Where to buy: