For years, many authors have neglected, minimized, or created one-dimensional black girls in African American literature, often including their stories as mere context or backdrops for adult characters. Likewise, critics commonly overlook African American female children and adolescents in their scholarship and loosely use the designation “black girl” to describe adult black women and children alike. This project attempts to shift this trend by locating and emphasizing complex black female children and adolescents in African American literature, particularly characters whose innocence and childhoods are denied and whose maturities have been expedited for familial, laboring, and/or sexual purposes. To enhance the emerging interdisciplinary field of black girlhood studies, I present a new conceptual approach—the black girl-woman, a female character whose mental development is or has been interrupted or stagnated by traumatic experiences suffered during her formative years, forcing her to behave as a woman or to perform various duties associated with womanhood despite her chronological age. I apply this theoretical approach to a broad swath of African American literature, including Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, Delores Phillips’s The Darkest Child, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body, A. J. Verdelle’s The Good Negress, and Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever.