"You are young, gifted, and black
We must begin to tell our young,
There's a world waiting for you.
Yours is the quest that's just begun."
PROJECT GIRL is Janet McDonald's tense and moving memoir. It gives us a hard look at exactly what it means to make it "out of the Projects." The book is a very real look at what it takes to be a role model --- and what it takes out of you. The book chronicles McDonald's journey from the projects in Brooklyn through Vassar College, and ultimately to a law office in Paris.
The middle child of seven children, McDonald's route was anything but direct: wasting her talents in the crumbling public school system, she finds a supportive program at Harlem Prep where she makes friends and gets accepted to Vassar. She's the pride and joy of the family, the one who "made it" and was going to college. But at Vassar she finds herself isolated and lonely, the WASP world of the Seven Sisters school is a universe away from the Brooklyn projects. She grows depressed, ends up using heroin, and is sent home to Brooklyn. After getting herself clean she returns to Vassar and spends her junior year in Paris, which is eye-opening for her:
"The French saw me as just another American, though I didn't see myself that way at all. I viewed Americans as white patriots...who didn't want me in school with their children. I was black, period. The French drew no such distinctions, which meant I no longer had to make African Americans look good. Or bad. Whatever I did was attributed to Americanness, not Blackness. What a switch --- a black person with the power to make white people look bad."
McDonald goes on to law school at Cornell University, but things again take a turn for the worse: she is raped and has a nervous breakdown. Later she transfers to NYU, where she's arrested for arson. She ends up at the Columbia School of Journalism. After stints in Paris and in Manhattan, she ends up back at Columbia and graduates from law school at the age of 32. Working and living in Manhattan, McDonald can't shake the feeling of being an outsider and ends up spending her weekends back at the projects in Brooklyn. "I no longer belong in the projects, but still to them." Eventually McDonald moves back to Paris, giving up the struggle for the American-defined version of success.
Although the writing in PROJECT GIRL is sometimes disorganized, the book is a moving, intense, and, often very, very angry look at the life of one who was "young, gifted, and black." McDonald's unflinching gaze looks at racism in all its forms, and at the pressure put on African Americans and women to succeed often-insurmountable obstacles without sufficient support. McDonald shows us that brains and opportunity are not always enough to go the distance, and her remarkable resilience makes her story an inspiring read.
--- Reviewed by Jordan Baker
