Brown Girl, Brownstones

by Paule Marshall

  “Selina getting big,” he said, and it was like the pronouncement of an oracle.

  “In truth,” Gert Challenor agreed hurriedly, “these New York children does shoot up fast enough. How old you is, girl?”

  “Eleven.”

  “How things at the house?” he commanded.

  “All right.”

  “Silla and yuh fatha?”

  “Fine.”

  “And Ina there? I guess she’s a half a woman by now.”

  “She’s okay.”

  “Yuh fatha still studying figures?”

  “It’s accounting. Yes.”

  “These white people ain gon hire him.”

  “Selina mussa get she smartness from Deighton,” Gert Challenor added quickly.

  He excluded this with a blunt gesture. “How his piece of ground home?”

  “All right, I guess,” she murmured and her stomach tightened.

  “He done anything about it?”

  “Like what?”

  “Sell it?”

  “No.”

  “Percy . . .”

  He silenced his wife with a hard look. “He ain renting it either?”

  “I dunno.”

  “But c’dear, how the child could know that?” his wife said.

  “How yuh mean? 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!”

  And for Selina, listening with lowered eyes, Percy Challenor had established irrevocably that her father was a disgrace. She felt the hate uncoil and tears prick her eyes. She waited eagerly for his next question, ready to meet his eyes with venom.

  But Beryl rose between them, asking, “Can I go to Prospect Park with Selina, Daddy?” and his eyes swept across to her.

  “Where wunna getting the money?”

  “We’ve been saving what people gave us . . .”

  Even the smaller children stopped eating while he deliberated. Finally he declared, “All right then. But make haste back here.”

  Outside, under the poised sun, they stood apart, suddenly shy. Then glancing up, they smiled secretly, and Selina hooted loud and began to spin. Beryl, laughing, rushed around her, snatching at her dress to stop her. Their hands met and Selina separated Beryl’s fingers and meshed them with hers. Together, their hands closed into one fist, their bodies joined in a single rhythm, they skipped the three blocks to the Tompkins Avenue trolley.

  They took separate window seats on the trolley so that they could watch the panorama of Sunday in Brooklyn strung out under the sun. To Selina the colors, the people seemed to run together. Dark, lovely little girls in straw bonnets flowed into little boys with their rough hair parted neatly on the side; into women in sheer dresses which whipped around their brown legs; into a bevy of church sisters swathed in black as though mourning their own imminent deaths; into the vacant, sun-grazed windows of the closed stores; into endless colonnades of trees down the side streets; into a blue sweep of sky; into dark little girls in straw bonnets . . . Life suddenly was nothing but this change and return. . . .

  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.”

  In Prospect Park, with her hand in Beryl’s and the sun shimmering before her eyes, she was drunk with freedom. She swaggered, Beryl in tow, into the zoo; she breathed deep the rank animal smells even as Beryl held her nose; she stopped at every vendor stand and bought ices, popcorn and peanuts and scattered the wrappers and shells behind her. At the seals’ pond she leaped as they leaped into the sun and cried loud with them as they crashed sobbing into the water. Holding Beryl’s waist she watched a lioness with her cubs sucking savagely at her teats.

  “It looks just like Virgie Farnum,” she said.

  Beryl nodded. “It does a little. I’m only having two children when I get married. A boy and a girl. The boy first.”

  “I’m not having any. I’d never let them chop loose my stomach.”

  “Whaddya talking about—chop loose your stomach?”

  “Don’t you know yet that’s what they do when you have a baby?”

  “That’s not so. They don’t chop anything. It just pops out.”

  “Pops out?” she laughed. “Pops outta where?”

  “Underneath,” Beryl cried, angering.

  “Underneath, where? Who told you that lie?”

  “A girl in school. And it’s not a lie.” Beryl pushed Selina’s arm from around her waist.

  “Ya see. Somebody in school. A kid. When I heard Virgie Farnum telling my mother how they chopped loose her stomach and took out the baby. Grown-up people now who have children and should know.”

  Beryl glowered across at her, “I’m a year older than you, Selina Boyce, and I know too. You might be smart in school but you don’t know anything else. You’re a kid, a silly little kid still. Besides, I saw my mother naked once and she didn’t have any scars on her stomach.”

  “They had healed.”

  Beryl turned away in disgust. “You think you know everything.”

  Silent, not touching, they walked out of the zoo into the picnic grounds, where families ate a Sunday dinner of potato salad and fried chicken out of paper plates and small children screamed and raced across the scarred grass. On the slopes, amid the rocks and trees there, lovers lay in each other’s arms, their faces close and murmuring. Selina gazed at them and slowly her lips parted, blindly her hand groped for Beryl as she was shaken by something she sensed in them. It seemed that they—those laughing girls with grass in their hair, those bold boys with daring hands—had attained the fullest freedom. Back on the trolley she had had the merest glimpse of it; it had charged her blood like a stimulant when she was walking in the zoo. But their freedom was richer, fuller and denied her.

  “Look, two of them are kissing,” Beryl said, clinging to her arm.

  It was more than just kissing, Selina wanted to say, watching their mouths open into each other and their bodies slowly sink into the grass. They were pouring themselves into each other. Suddenly she could not look any more. Tears stung her eyes. Pushing Beryl away she raced into a small wood near by and bounded up a low ridge there. Yelping, she plunged up and down the rise, the shrubbery cracking loud and the twigs whipping her legs, while Beryl stared open-mouthed below. Finally she paused on the crest, her wild shouts died and she stared, rapt, down onto a field where boys were playing baseball. From this height, she felt a profound detachment from them, from everyone, even Beryl. She was no longer human, she told herself, but a bit of pollen floating over the field and circling the world on a wind.

  “Wait till your mother sees your dress,” Beryl said when she climbed down.

  “I don’t give one damn.”

  “You’re mad again,” Beryl said helplessly. “Well come on let’s get outta this sun. My mother says I’m getting black running around with you in the sun.”

  They searched until they found a shaded place within the shadow of a high rock. Beryl sat on her handkerchief and modestly tucked her dress under her knees while Selina sprawled flat on the ground, her face pressed to the earth, which was fecund with the oncoming summer; her lips brushed the grass, which was still cool and a little damp from the dew.

  “I’m sorry I cursed,” she said gently, touching Beryl’s silver bangles. “You got new bangles?”

  “Uh-huh. My grandmother sent them from home.”

  “I’ve still got the ones I wore as a baby.”

  “Me too. In a drawer someplace.”

  “Mine turn black when I’m sick.”


  “So do mine. My father says they know what goes on inside your body.”

  “It’s funny,” she began musingly, thinking of Percy Challenor presiding at the table. “I can’t imagine your father ever being small. Or my mother either . . .”

  “Well they were and my father was smart in school too. Maybe that’s why he beats us so when we get bad marks.”

  “My father only beat me once. Long ago. I can’t even remember why now.” What she could remember was that after the first blow she had been strangely numb to the others. Instead she had been aware only of his body against hers, his muscles moving smoothly under his skin as he flailed her, and his heaving chest crushed against hers. She had been fused with him; not only had he breathed for her but his heart had beaten for them both.

  She slapped at a fly on her leg and killed it.

  “My mother never beats me,” Beryl was saying.

  “See, I killed it.” Selina showed her the squashed fly and then wiped her hand on the grass. “Ugh, they’ve got blood like people.” Then in the ample silence of rock and sky she said, “I imagine sometimes that I don’t belong to them.”

  “Them who?”

  “My family.”

  “What makes you imagine that?”

  “I dunno. I saw a dead girl once. Ina took me.” She ran her hand hard over the grass, still cleaning it.

  “What’d she die from?”

  “I dunno, but she was pretty. I think of her a lot and think of me instead of her in the box and everybody crying.”

  “Those aren’t good thoughts, Selina.”

  “I know. And then maybe being dead is like before you was born, not knowing what’s going on and not being able to see. Then I wouldn’t know who was crying and who wasn’t.”

  “My father wants me to be a lawyer since I’m the oldest. He told me the other day,” Beryl said brightly after a long silence. “My father says you can always make money at that among your own people. What does your father want you to be?”

  Selina still wiped her hand on the grass.

  “Selina!”

  “What?”

  “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.”

  “If I get good marks this term I’m getting ice skates.”

  “Doris has some.”

  “Doris, I can’t stand her!” Beryl said venomously. “She thinks she’s cute because she’s light and has good hair and all the boys like her. D’ya know she’s got boys coming to see her already?”

  “I hate boys,” Selina cried.

  After a hesitant silence, Beryl said, “So do I.”

  They lay in the ample silence of rock and trees, staring into the enormous blue expanse of sky and at the rock shutting out the sun. They heard a sharp crack and shouts from the baseball field and Beryl said, her eyes averted, “Remember what we were talking bout in the zoo when you got so mad?”

  “You got mad, not me.”

  “Okay. Well anyway what I was saying is true. I can prove it. I bleed sometimes,” she said quietly.

  “What?”

  “I bleed sometimes.”

  “So what. Everybody does.”

  “Not from a cut or anything but from below. Where the baby pops out. Ina does too. That’s why she gets pains every once in a while. I’ll tell you, if you want to hear . . .”

  “Tell me.” And beneath her eagerness there was dread.

  Beryl raised up, gathered her dress neatly under her. Her eyes flitted nervously across Selina’s intense face. Then, with her head bowed and a squeamish look she explained it all. “That’s why I’m getting these things,” she concluded, jabbing her small breasts. “It happens to all girls.”

  Selina stared very quietly at her and, for that moment, she was quiet inside, her whole self suspended in disbelief. Then an inexplicable revulsion gripped her and her face screwed with disgust. “It’s never gonna happen to me,” she said proudly.

  “If it doesn’t happen by the time you’re twenty you die.”

  “Well then I’ll just die.”

  “It’ll happen. It hurts sometimes and it makes you miserable in the summer and you can’t jump rope when you have it but it gives you a nice figure after a time.”

  Her eyes searched Beryl’s face. “How come?”

  “I dunno. It just does. Look what’s happening to Ina.”

  “Well if it ever happens to me nobody’ll ever know. They’ll see me change and think it’s magic.”

  “Besides, it makes you feel important.”

  “How could anyone walking around dripping blood feel important?”

  “It’s funny but you do. Almost as if you were grown-up. It’s like . . . oh, it’s hard to explain to a kid . . .”

  “Who’s a kid?”

  “You, because you haven’t started yet.”

  “I’ll never start!” And beneath her violent denial there was despair.

  “Oh yes, you’ll start.” Beryl nodded wisely. “Wait, lemme try to explain how it makes you feel. The first time I was scared. Then I began to feel different. That’s it. Even though nothing’s changed and I still play kid games and go around with kids, even though my best friend’s a kid”—she bowed to Selina—“I feel different. Like I’m carrying something secret and special inside . . . Oh, you can’t really explain it to a kid . . .”

  “Who’s a kid? I was drinking rum today with Miss Suggie and I didn’t bat an eye.” “Oh, Selina, nothing will help till you start.”

  Selina drew aside in a sullen despairing anger. A bit of the sun edged around the rock as though it had been hiding there listening and was coming now to upbraid them. As she squinted through her tears at the sun’s bright fringe, the promise of the day was lost. The mother had deceived her, saying that she was more of a woman than Ina yet never telling her the one important condition. She had deceived herself on the trolley and on the rise in the park. She was not free but still trapped within a hard flat body. She closed her eyes to hide the tears and was safe momentarily from Beryl and Ina and all the others joined against her in their cult of blood and breasts.

  After a time Beryl came and lay close to her. She placed her arm comfortingly around her. “What was that poem you wrote about the sky?” she asked. And always her voice calmed Selina. Her disappointment, her anguish tapered slowly until finally her tears were gone and she turned to Beryl and held her so that they were like the lovers on the slope. “It wasn’t about this kind of sky,” she said and began to recite, her thin voice striking the rock and veering off into the sky, her eyes closed. When she finished and opened her eyes Beryl’s were closed, her face serene in sleep. Whispering, Selina recited then to the rock, to the dome of sky, to the light wind, all the poems she had scribbled in class, that came bright and vivid at night.

  Beryl stirred in her sleep and pressed Selina closer. Just then the sun rose above the rock. The strong light seemed to smooth the grass, to set the earth steaming richly. They were all joined it seemed: Beryl with the blood bursting each month inside her, the sun, the seared grass and earth—even she, though barren of breasts, was part of the mosaic. With a cry she buried her face between Beryl’s small breasts, and suddenly her happiness was like pain and a long leap into space.

  On their way home a summer rain fell even as the sun shone. Holding each other close, they laughed and, pointing to the sunlit rain, chanted softly, “The devil’s beating his wife. The devil’s beating his wife . . .”

  Book 3

  The War

  I

  If I wus a grasshopper

  I woulda hop about in de grass

  And when Adolf Hitler pass along

  I would dash a lash in his . . .

  as’ no question.

  Yuh come fuh to kill muh

  Yuh come fuh to k
ill muh

  Yuh come fuh to kill muh

  I would dash a lash in yuh . . .

  as’ no question.

  BARBADIAN FOLK SONG

  The war came later that year. On the cold December afternoon Selina, Ina and the mother made a stunned tableau as the announcer—a leashed hysteria running swiftly under his urgent voice—shattered Sunday’s tedium with news of the bombing. Each word built a picture of disaster and added new tension to the still unresolved tension over the land. When he finished the children turned to Silla, waiting for her to define this in some way, to fit the war somehow into their lives. She stared at them with a kind of hopelessness for a moment, then burst out, “Nineteen fourteen again. Thank God I ain got neither one to send to die in another white-man war.”

  Moments later Selina burst into the sun parlor, where her father lay on the cot bundled in a heavy sweater and socks. He was napping, his breath coming in white wisps in the cold and the latest accounting manual lying neglected on his chest.

  “We’re in the war,” she shouted.

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes closed, and it was as though he were still sleeping. “If it din come today it would of come tomorrow. How it happen?”

  As she told him she sensed him shrinking from the news as from some ugly sight. “Are they gonna draft you?”

  “Draft what? I’s something to draft too?” He laughed bitterly. “As far as the record goes I ain even in this country since I did enter illegally. Y’know that’s a funny thing when you think of it. I don even exist as far as these people here go.”

  “Howdya mean?” she asked, uneasy, wishing that he would open his eyes.

  “I mean if they don have some kind of record or something so on you, you don exist. You can be walking ’bout like other men, breathing like everybody else but not existing fuh true. That’s a funny thing, nuh?”

  “Yes,” she said, not understanding, and then remembering the war, said, “Lordy, I hope they don’t bomb Barbados.”