The House You Pass On The Way

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Woodson, Jacqueline. 1997. The house you pass on the way. Delacorte Press: New York. ISBN 0385321899

PLOT SUMMARY:
Fourteen year old Stagerlee, is the daughter of the only biracial family in town. Her mother is white and Stagerlee’s family is shunned for it, by the town and her father’s family. Her family lives in a house outside of town that used to belong to her famous grandparents. Stagerlee loves their self imposed isolation and their homes location. After kissing a girl, she has relationship and sexual identity issues. When a girl cousin, nicknamed Trout, visits from out of town, Stagerlee thinks she has found a soul mate with whom to discuss her innermost thoughts.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS:
The biracial family and focus on the mother is mentioned early in the text with “Her father had married a white woman. … The only mixed race family in Sweet Gum, maybe in all of Calmuth County.” When people asked Stagerlee “how it felt to be black and white; she shrugged and answered “fine”. The only mention of Stagerlee being gay is the kiss she shared with a classmate in the sixth grade and her affection for her girl cousin who comes to visit for the summer. There is no explicit sexual language or offensive wording in the text. In a conversation with her cousin, Stagerlee mentions she hopes there is “…someone else like me somewhere in the world.”

REVIEW EXCERPT(S):

Review from KIRKUS REVIEWS: “A newfound confidante and a breath of common sense clears away a teenager's guilt and dismay over her dawning sexual preference in this thoughtful, deceptively low-key story from Woodson (From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun, 1995, etc.). The middle child in the county's only mixed-race family, Evangeline defiantly changed her name years ago to Staggerlee, … Along comes Trout, another self-named teenager, from a branch of the family that had cut off her parents after their marriage. The attraction is quick, strong, and mutual; Trout's visit may be a short one, but it's long enough for each to open up, find the courage to say the word gay--and to remember that they're only 14, too young to close off options. Woodson takes readers another step down the road when Trout later writes to admit that she's gone head over heels for a guy, and Staggerlee, though feeling betrayed, realizes that she and Trout are both growing and going their own ways. A provocative topic, treated with wisdom and sensitivity, with a strong secondary thread exploring some of the inner and outer effects of biracialism.”

Review from BOOKLIST: “Woodson takes the gay identity story far beyond the simplistic problem novel and connects it with every outsider's coming-of-age. Staggerlee is happy in her interracial family, but she is a loner at school and in her African American community, and she longs for a friend. Somehow she knows not to talk about the kiss she shared with a girl in her class. … What many teens will relate to is the uncertainty, the sense that Staggerlee doesn't know who she is becoming and where her journey will take her.”

Review from SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL: “In this understated story set in a small, mostly African-American community in the South, Staggerlee Canan is shunned by her peers because her mother is white. This is not the sole cause of her isolation, however. She has a secret. In sixth grade, she had kissed another girl. Rejected by that friend, Staggerlee has no one to talk to about her sexual feelings until her adopted cousin, Trout, visits for the summer when both girls are 14. Both wonder if they are gay, but sexual identity is really only one of the things that troubles them. Their platonic intimacy is the intense kind shared by friends who see themselves as different from the crowd. Asked by Trout to say whether she's black or white, Staggerlee replies, "I'm me. That's all." That they seem to be taking different paths in the end adds to the story's poignancy. This richly layered novel will be appreciated for its affecting look at the anxious wonderings of presexual teens, its portrait of a complex interracial family, and its snapshot of the emotionally wrenching but inarticulate adolescent search for self. It's notable both for its quality and for the out-of-the-way places it goes.”

CONNECTIONS
Activities
*Have high school students choose and perform a piece for Readers Theatre.
*Create a diorama of Stagerlee’s life in “The House You Pass on the Way”.
*Conduct an author study of Jacqueline Woodson.