Brown Girl, Brownstones

“The West Indians, especially the Barbadians who had never owned anything perhaps but a few poor acres in a poor land, loved the houses with the same fierce idolatry as they had the land on their obscure islands.”

For the Barbadian immigrants, the houses are symbols of success for which many of them are willing to do anything. The reference to “idolatry” indicates that this pursuit leads them down paths that are ultimately harmful.

“She could never think of the mother alone. It was always the mother and the others, for they were alike—those watchful, wrathful women whose eyes seared and searched and laid bare, whose tongues lashed the world in unremitting distrust. Each morning they took the train to Flatbush and Sheepshead Bay to scrub floors.”

For Selina, Silla represents her connection to Barbadian culture. As a Barbadian mother, Silla is hardworking but also brusque. Her brusqueness is one of the reasons why her relationship with her daughters is so contentious. As a girl, Selina does not stop to consider the relationship between her mother’s work in the white world and her unforgiving attitude toward the world.

“After the house, Selina loved the park. The thick trees, the grass—shrill-green in the sun—the statue of Robert Fulton and the pavilion where the lovers met and murmured at night formed, for her, the perfect boundary for her world; the park was the fitting buffer between Chauncey Street’s gentility and Fulton Street’s raucousness.”

The geographic boundary between Selina’s neighborhood and the world outside determines her identity as the American child of Barbadian immigrants. Fulton Street has a more diverse population (including African Americans), so Selina sees these spaces as an escape from the expectations of her Barbadian community.

“‘He was always putting himself up in the face of the big white people in town asking for some big job—and they would chuck him out fast enough. He was always dressing up like white people. Then after the mother die he pick up and went to Cuba—just like the fatha before him—and then jump ship into this country. And now he got land.”

Virgie Farnum describes Deighton as a boy in this quote. Her judgmental tone, disapproval of how Deighton carries himself, and criticism of how he arrived in the United States encapsulate the community’s feelings about Deighton. In short, they do not believe he is an exemplary Barbadian man.

“‘I don owe tiger nothing that I got to break loose my inside buying these old houses.’ Seifert Yearwood stared unbelievingly at him and asked quietly, ‘How else a man your color gon get ahead?’ ‘You got to get training and get out here with them!’ Deighton said, but somehow his voice was too loud, too strained.”

Deighton attempts to explain to one of his peers why he refuses to buy a house. Deighton believes that white-collar, intellectual work will give him a path to financial success. His focus on education and intellectual work instead of property ownership and manual labor put him out of step with his community’s values.

“For always the mother’s voice was a net flung wide, ensnaring all within its reach. She swayed helpless now within its hold, loving its rich color, loving and hating the mother for the pain of her childhood. The image of her father swaggering through the town as a boy and bounding on the waves in some rough game slanted across that of the small girl hurrying from the dawn ghosts with the basket on her head. It seemed to Selina that her father carried those gay days in his irresponsible smile, while the mother’s formidable aspect was the culmination of all that she had suffered.”

Unlike Deighton, Silla grew up in a working-class family in Barbados. This class distinction accounts for her refusal to tell nostalgic stories about returning. The difference between each parent’s vision of Barbados makes Selina feel ambivalent about the country. In addition, this passage shows the important impact that Silla’s facility with language and storytelling has on Selina’s development as an artist.

“Listening to those voices raging in the dark, Selina often thought of the family who had lived there before them. The nights had been safe and quiet then with the children asleep in the nursery upstairs, the pale mother and father lying in each other’s arms below and the heavy door locked against the chaos outside. As those voices soared, Selina, the sheet wrapped tight around her head, imagined that she was one of those children, secure in sleep.”

Selina has an idealized notion of the white family that previously lived in her house. For Selina, the family and the house represent an idyllic exemplar of the nuclear family, security, and loving parents. This vision of whole, peaceful family life in a brownstone is the child’s version of Silla’s American Dream.

“‘Selina know full-well everybody in Brooklyn talking ’bout she fatha and his piece of ground. I tell you those men from Bridgetown home is all the same. They don know a thing ’bout handling money and property and thing so. They’s spree boys. Every last one them…There ain nothing wrong with wanting piece of ground home but only when you got a sufficient back-prop here. I tell you, he’s a disgrace!’”

This description of Deighton by Mr. Challenor, Beryl’s father, sums up the community’s disapproval of Deighton. Deighton’s luck in receiving the land offends his community not only because the land was not achieved through hard work but also because his plans for it prioritize life in Barbados over life in the United States.

“Those colors, those changing forms were the shape of her freedom, Selina knew. She had finally passed the narrow boundary of herself and her world. She could no longer be measured by Chauncey Street or the park or the nearby school. ‘Lord,’ she whispered behind her hand, ‘I’m free.’”

Outside of the confines of her neighborhood and neighbors’ expectations, Selina feels a sense of freedom. Her connection to Prospect Park and nature make her an urban, American child as opposed to the child of immigrants. Her parents and their immigrant neighbors are unable to understand this connection.

“‘What does your father want you to be?’ ‘He never said I had to be anything.’ ‘Doesn’t he care?’ ‘Of course he cares,’ she shouted. ‘Maybe he’ll let you be a poet.’ ‘A poetess.’”

This quote is a conversation between Beryl and Selina at the park. The quote captures the difference between the expectations that Beryl’s middle-class parents have and those that Selina’s less affluent parents have. Selina’s desire to be a poet shows that she has artistic aspirations early in life as well and an awareness that those dreams run counter to her community’s expectations.

“Not until later that winter when the war seemed to reach out and claim her. For her body was in sudden upheaval—her dark blood flowing as it flowed in the war, the pain at each shudder of her womb as sharp as the thrust of a bayonet.”

Marshall uses the war as a metaphor for Selina’s understanding that the physical changes associated with adolescence can be difficult for the growing child to navigate. Selina’s ambivalence about the changes to her body are rooted in growing ambivalence about the traditional models of femininity presented to her by her mother and her mother’s peers.

“‘But in truth these New York children don like work. They soft.’”

Florrie Trotman, one of the Barbadian immigrants who gather in Silla’s kitchen, expresses the puzzlement and disappointment some immigrants feel about their children’s differences from them. A willingness to work hard is one of the hallmarks of Barbadian immigrant identity in the United States for this generation, so they tend to interpret their children’s interest in youth culture and leisure activities as laziness.

“It was the rite which made her one with Florrie’s weighty bosom and Virgie Farnum’s perennially burgeoning stomach. It meant that she would always have vestiges of Iris Hurley’s malice and the mother’s gorgeous rage. Although she did not understand this, she was often seized by a frenzy of rejection and would rush to the bathroom and there, behind the locked door, rub her breasts until pain coursed through her body. But no matter how hard she rubbed, the imprint remained, for it was indelible.”

Virgie Farnum touches Selina’s breast in Silla’s kitchen in order to call attention to Selina’s maturation and to point out that Selina is old enough to keep her mother’s plot to sell Deighton’s land a secret. Being in on the secret and the sense that her physical maturation is out of her control cause Selina to feel that she has no choice but to be a woman in the same way that the women in the kitchen are.

“‘Look, lemme tell you something, Selina. Don’t pay much attention to grown folks, ’cause half the time they don’t make no kinda sense.’”

Miss Thompson’s irreverent attitude toward adults is part of the mentoring she gives Selina during their long conversations. The thought that the adults in her life don’t always know best gives Selina confidence to engage in one of her first acts of rebellion—going to the factory to confront Silla about her plan to sell the land.

“For there was a part of her that always wanted the mother to win, that loved her dark strength and the tenacious lift of her body.”

Silla is completely undone when Deighton comes home with the gifts on which he has spent the entire $900 from the sale of the land. As Selina watches her mother’s defeat, she feels ambivalent because of her loyalty to her father and her sense that her mother is engaged in a struggle to support the family. Silla’s strength and determination eventually become important parts of Selina’s character as she matures, however.

“From all over the hall those dark contemptuous faces charged him. Those eyes condemned him and their voices rushed full tilt at him, scourging him and finally driving him from their presence with their song, ‘Small Island, go back where you really come from!’”

The entire Barbadian community publicly repudiates Deighton at a wedding. This public humiliation is one of the reasons why Selina later rejects the community, and it is one of the first times Selina begins to understand the cost of rejecting her community’s expectations.

“‘But why? Why would you want me to go there?’ ‘To understand, that’s why. So when you start talking so big and smart against people, you’ll be talking from understanding. That’s the only time you have the right to say whether you like them or not, or whether what they done was right or not. But you got to understand why first. So I dares you to go. Just once.’”

In this conversation, Miss Thompson uses reverse psychology to convince Selina that she needs to learn more about her mother’s motivations and those of her immigrant community before rejecting their choices. This conversation is just one of many instances in which Miss Thompson acts a mentor to Selina.

“Then she said—and each word seemed to wrench her deeply, ‘No, nobody wun admit it, but people got a right to claw their way to the top and those on top got a right to scuffle to stay there. Take this world. It wun always be white. No, mahn. It gon be somebody else turn soon—maybe even people looking near like us. But plenty gon have to suffer to bring it about. And when they get up top they might not be so nice either, ’cause power is a thing that don make you nice. But it’s the way of this Christ world best-proof!’”

Silla articulates her sense of unease about the exploitative aspects of the version of the American Dream that she pursues. Her public acknowledgement of the downsides of her quest is a moment of self-awareness that leads Selina to question her harsh judgment of her mother and to consider what the alternatives are.

“If only the wind would rise strong enough to sweep them all like scraps of paper down Fulton Street, past the White Drake, through the park to the pavilion—so that they might witness how utterly she renounced their way, and have the full proof that she was indeed Deighton’s Selina!”

Selina is reveling in the rebelliousness of her secret sexual relationship with Clive in this quote. Her thoughts reveal that she has not yet learned to forge her own way but still defines herself in contrast to her mother and in solidarity with her father.

“‘To her, to your sainted mother, to the whole damn country, as a matter of fact, people who paint pictures are criminals. We don’t rob banks or commit murders but we do something worse. We get in the way, we confuse things and we make them uncomfortable.’”

Clive is a failed artist, but he is also a person who has thought deeply about the role of the artist in a capitalist society. His perspective of artist-as-rule-breaker is part of Selina’s motivation for claiming an identity that borrows aspects of her upbringing but that honors her desire to be an individual.

“In the moment’s stillness she knew that she had been good. And when the applause rushed her like a high wind, it was as if the audience was offering her something of itself in exchange for what she had given it. She bowed to that thunderous sound, exultant but a little shaken, and as she turned and leaped offstage it was as if she was bearing something of them all away with her.”

Selina has her first moment of public triumph as an artist when she dances in front of an audience at a recital. This scene is her entrée into true artistry and individual identity.

“She cried because, like all her kinsmen, she must somehow prevent it from destroying her inside and find a way for her real face to emerge. Rubbing her face against the ravaged image in the glass, she cried in outrage: that along with the fierce struggle of her humanity she must also battle illusions!”

Selina’s sense of triumph is short-lived when an encounter with a racist white woman reminds Selina that she will be forced to contend with dehumanizing racist words and acts. She also has an epiphany that taking the scholarship under false pretenses will demonstrate a lack of integrity and damage her newfound sense of identity. Selina’s commitment to rejecting both racism and the expectations of her parents and community marks her entrance into adulthood.

“And she was one with them: the mother and the Bajan women, who had lived each day what she had come to know. How had the mother endured, she who had not chosen death by water? She remembered the mother striding home through Fulton Park each late afternoon, bearing the throw-offs under her arm as she must have borne the day’s humiliations inside. How had the mother contained her swift rage?—and then she remembered those sudden, uncalled-for outbursts that would so stun them and split the serenity of the house. The mother might have killed them.”

The second impact of the encounter with the racist white woman is that Selina comes to a more sympathetic understanding of her mother’s anger and how love motivates the sacrifices of the other women she knows. Her reference to “she who had not chosen death by water” also marks a shift in her belief that her father was a victim and her mother a villain. Selina comes to understand that her mother’s perseverance in the face of a racist world is an act of supreme sacrifice and love.