Darlene is a novel about teaching, Black girlhood, shame, language, care, failure, and the difficulty of giving young people freedom without leaving them unprotected. It is set in Camden, New Jersey, in the 1980s, and centres on Darlene LeJay, an older Black teacher who takes a substitute position at the Shipman School for Girls after losing her longtime job at Wendell. The novel is framed by a later educational booklet or manifesto called Do You Follow: Lessons for Students and Other Folks, written by “Miss Darlene” in 1987. That opening document makes clear from the start that Darlene eventually turns her experience with the Shipman girls into a radical kind of teaching manual: one that rejects respectability, sterile standard English, obedience for its own sake, and schooling that asks Black children to leave parts of themselves outside the classroom.
At the beginning, Darlene is already unsettled. Her mother has recently moved back to Georgia to die, and Darlene has not followed as promised. Her brother Zeek is angry because he is now caring for their elderly mother after Darlene spent decades being the one nearby. Darlene has also been fired from Wendell, though the full truth of that firing emerges only later. She arrives at Shipman, a small, gloomy school for “troublesome” girls, and meets Principal Ames, who is polite, elusive and uselessly charming, and Sister Gerda, the severe vice-principal, who lectures Darlene about discipline, sex, welfare, ambition and the collapse of order in Camden.
Darlene’s first class is hostile, funny and suspicious. The girls include Lashae, a former Wendell student with a reputation for chaos; Brianna, who has green hair and loudly claims she cannot read; Terese, who wears a clothespin on her nose and talks big; Pookie, big, intellectual, elegant and fatalistic; Beau, smart, poetic and observant; Evie or Everline Webster, nervous and churchy; and others. Darlene immediately changes the room by getting Sister Gerda out and rearranging the desks into a circle. Instead of demanding obedience, she demonstrates what it feels like to enter a room and be attacked with questions before anyone says hello. The girls understand. This becomes the basis of her teaching: she is strict, but she explains herself.
