Brown Girl, Brownstones

by Paule Marshall

  Selina waited in the vestibule until Miss Thompson disappeared, then put on galoshes, gloves and a hat, carefully tucking in the new curls, and slipped out of the house again. Chauncey Street was deserted. Everyone might have fled indoors as she came out, leaving the night world to her and furtively watching now from behind their closed blinds. She hurried, veiled in snow, wondering how it could fall so gently—like white doves descending—while she was in turmoil and, beyond, the world was in war. The snow should be whipping across the world, castigating it for its wickedness, lashing her for having abused Ina. But instead it was spreading its white and soothing mantle over everything, and even brushing her lips in a cold but gentle kiss. To delight her it was swirling in a golden dust around the street lamps. To guide her it was laying a white path that could lead only to the mother. Waiting for the trolley she was calm, for the snow lighted the vast night and the huddled houses seemed smaller and more frightened than she.

  But once she was on the trolley, terror hummed in her chest, growing louder as the car clanged nearer to Williamsburg scattering the traffic out of its narrow track—and the sound of steel grounding on steel penetrated her. The trolley swerved onto Broadway, where the elevator trestle stretched overhead and the ominous rumble of the trains up there in the darkness joined with the trolley’s din to make the night more forbidding. Selina felt it pushing against the window and her panic flared higher. She longed to return home, but it was too late, for suddenly the conductor was calling her stop and she was hurrying down the aisle, down the steps into the night.

  She had never seen streets like these. The trolley might have taken her to another city, some barren waste land gripped by a cold more intense than winter’s and raw with wind, a place where even the falling snow was a soiled brown. Factories stretched unending down the streets, towered blackly into the sky, their countless lighted windows offering no promise of warmth inside. Obscene drawings and words decorated the walls; the war had added its swastika and slogans, lovers their hearts pierced with arrows. Each factory was bedecked with “Help Wanted” signs, making it look like one of the shabby men who walk the city’s streets with advertisements strapped to their shoulders.

  Selina walked wonderingly through the curtain of brown-sullied snow, and around her the street performed a pantomime. Dark figures hurried past; silent men loaded long trailer trucks, huge tomcats crouched in somnolent wariness in all the shadows and a dog clawed at a box, its stomach sucked in with hunger and frustration. And then a cat, its belly sagging with young, ambled over and brushed her leg with its tail—the one warm gesture in a cold country.

  The factory where the mother worked was another bleak building leaning black against the black sky. The hall reminded her of school—the same gray walls and steel stairs, the same damp feel of exhumed places. With unsteady steps she approached the door marked “Office.”

  The air in the little cramped office was rife with the brassy smell and feel of metal. The walls, the one window, the notices tacked on the bulletin board, the pinup girls on the calendars were streaked with black industrial oil. Only the blond girl at the desk, a yellow pencil stuck in her dyed-yellow hair, had been spared.

  Selina paused, staring at the girl’s high waved pompadour. It would be warm to the touch, she thought.

  “Whaddya want?” The girl put aside the movie magazine she was reading.

  “I’m looking for my mother.”

  “Yeah? What’s her name?”

  “Silla Boyce. Missus.”

  The girl took the pencil from her hair, patted the wave back in place and shuffled through a file on the desk. “Yeah, she’s here. Her shift’ll be through in a little while. Sit down.” She waved Selina to a bench and picked up her magazine, then put it down. “How come a kid like you is out so late?”

  “I might look like a kid but I’m not. I’m sixteen,” she lied.

  “Yeah? It stop snowing yet?”

  “No.”

  “Crummy weather!” A little color slid under the girl’s pale skin. “March a’ready and it’s still snowing. Every time my boy friend gets a pass it snows. And he don’t like to go out in no snow. So we sit home.” She rammed the pencil into her hair. “You watch, as soon as he gets sent overseas it’ll be spring and I won’t have nobody to take me no place.”

  Selina shook her head sympathetically and looked at the long-limbed women on the calendars and their skimpy fur stoles smeared with oil. “Whadda they make here?”

  “Stuff for the war. Shells and cores and crap like that. I never go near the stinking machines and still the stinking oil gets all in my hair and I go home stinking. And the noise! Jees, it’s enough to drive ya batty.”

  “My mother smells of oil when she comes home.”

  “Ugh.” The girl smoothed her pompadour and Selina shifted on the bench.

  “Could I peek in where the machines are?” she asked.

  “Sure. Nobody’ll say anything.” She pointed to a door marked “Private” behind her. “Just walk down that long hall to the end.”

  Cautiously Selina walked down the long corridor, her footsteps accompanying her until they merged with an ominous current of sound. Timidly she pushed open a heavy metal door and almost slammed it back in fright as an enraged bellow tore past her. She was drowned suddenly in a deluge of noise: belts slapping on giant pulleys, long shafts rearing and plunging, whirling parts plying the air, the metal whine of steel being cut, steam hissing from a twisting network of pipes on the ceilings and walls, the nervous, high-strung hum of the smaller machines and finally the relentless frightening stamp of the larger ones, which made the floor shudder. It was a controlled, mechanical hysteria, welling up like a seething volcano to the point of eruption, only to veer off at the climax and start again.

  And just as the noise of each machine had been welded into a single howl, so did the machines themselves seem forged into one sprawling, colossal machine. This machine-mass, this machine-force was ugly, yet it had grandeur. It was a new creative force, the heart of another, larger, form of life that had submerged all others, and the roar was its heartbeat—not the ordered systole and diastole of the human heart but a frenetic lifebeat all its own.

  The workers, white and colored, clustered and scurried around the machine-mass, trying, it seemed, to stave off the destruction it threatened. They had built it but, ironically, it had overreached them, so that now they were only small insignificant shapes against its overwhelming complexity. Their movements mimicked its mechanical gestures. They pulled levers, turned wheels, scooped up the metal droppings of the machines as if somewhere in that huge building someone controlled their every motion by pushing a button. And no one talked. Like the men loading the trailer trucks in the streets, they performed a pantomime role in a drama in which only the machines had a voice.

  Selina’s mind spun without control within the noisy vortex. Fleetingly she saw herself in relation to the machine-force: a thin dark girl in galoshes without any power with words, and the boldness that had brought her here collapsed. The machines’ howling seemed to announce the futility of her mission. She wanted the streets, as forbidding as they were, and the trolley that would take her back to her world. But even as she turned she saw the mother, and curiosity fixed her there.

  Silla worked at an old-fashioned lathe which resembled an oversize cookstove, and her face held the same transient calm which often touched it when she stood at the stove at home. Like the others, her movements were attuned to the mechanical rhythms of the machine-mass. She fitted the lump of metal over the lathe center and, with a deft motion, secured it into the headstock and moved the tailstock into position. The whine of her lathe lifted thinly above the roar as the metal whirled into shape. Then she released the tailstock and held the shell up for a swift scrutinizing glance before placing it with the other finished shells. Quickly she moved into the first phase of the cycle again.

  Watching her, Selina felt the familiar grudging affection seep under her amazement. Only t
he mother’s own formidable force could match that of the machines; only the mother could remain indifferent to the brutal noise. How, then, could Selina hope to intimidate her with a few mild threats? Selina almost laughed at her own effrontery. She thought of escape again, but as she turned, the door opened and the next shift entered, blocking her way. One woman went and stood beside Silla and, as Silla scooped up the finished shell, took her place without interrupting the cycle.

  Selina barely had time to dash down to the office before the mother’s shift surged out behind her. Their sound—a carousal of laughter and voices—filled the corridor and swirled into the office. Each worker, as she passed that metal door, had regained the power of speech, it seemed, and revealed in it, talking boldly as the machines’ roar dimmed in her ears, letting the laughter spill over her parched lips.

  They crowded into the office, bringing with them the brassy odor of metal and oil and perspiration. Silla entered with them and, with a vigorous stride, took her place in line. Their teeth and eyes shone with an unnatural brightness in their oil-smudged faces, and as they closed around the desk for their pay, the blond girl’s face tightened squeamishly.

  She handed Silla her pay envelope and said, “Hey, didja see ya kid over there?”

  The mother turned, frowning, and as she saw Selina, her body stiffened with shock, some word of exclamation died on her lips. Cautiously she stepped toward Selina, her hand clutching the pay envelope and raised as though to stave off the bad news.

  As the mother bore down on Selina, the room and the pleasant confusion of voices glided into an indistinct backdrop. It was only she and the mother alone together, Selina knew, and cringed in her seat. The mother was standing over her now, a strong angular figure in her somber dress, with her rough-carved features and set mouth, with the dark skin that suggested her mystery.

  Selina glanced up and away. A feeling nudged her and fled: the mother was like the machines, some larger form of life with an awesome beauty all her own.

  “What happen?” Silla whispered hoarsely.

  “Nothing.”

  “Ina . . .”

  “Nothing wrong. I just came . . .”

  “Oh Jesus-God, the piece of old house burn . . .”

  “No. It’s nothing.”

  “Something with your father. He got hurt on the job . . .”

  “It’s nothing, I said. I just came to meet you.”

  “Just came to meet me!” She shouted and caught herself. Her voice dropped to a menacing whisper. “You mean to say that you came through these dark streets alone, as much murder and rape as goes on in this place?”

  “I came when it was still light,” she lied. “It was just that I finished my homework and had nothing to do so I decided to come and meet you . . .”

  “Oh God, you want licks. How you find this place?”

  “I asked Miss Thompson.”

  “But look at that busy-lickum! Instead of she looking after that life-sore ’pon she foot she sending a child . . .”

  “She didn’t send me, I came on my own.”

  The mother staggered back and a silence formed between them that had the quality of sound—it was more charged with sound than the factory and rose swiftly to a point of eruption. As the mother’s hand raised high, Selina pulled off her hat and murmured, “See, I’ve got curls.”

  The mother’s hand dropped, and underneath her stunned rage, there was an odd softness. She muttered in shy anger, “I guess you think you’s a full woman now with yuh few curls and can walk streets ’pon a night.”

  “I came when it was still light,” she said, slowly turning her head so that the mother could see the back.

  “But look at my crosses! Curls and all now. And taking trolley this time of night by sheself. Oh God, a force-ripe woman!”

  On the trolley the mother’s rage joined the wheels’ clatter and the trains’ rumble overhead. “I din want to show my colors in front those white people in the office,” she was saying, “that’s why I din lick you down right there and then. But I got a mind to do it now. You’s too own-way. You’s too womanish!” She almost screamed; her hand shot up and Selina shrank against the window. “Patrolling the streets this time of night. Taking trolley out to this hell-hole. Making my heart turn over thinking something happen. I tell yuh, I wun dare strike you now ’cause I’d forget my strength and kill you.”

  Selina hid her relief behind her glare, and her eyes remained fixed on the mother’s face. Silla stirred uncomfortably under the look and finally cried, “But look at you. You like you living your old days first. But where you come outta, nuh?” She bent, questioning. “Yuh’s just like my mother. A woman that did think the world put here for she. But the world ain here for a blast!” she whispered, and her eyes moved from Selina’s face to the darkness outside the window. “That’s the first thing you got to understand. Second, you got to know what you about before putting yourself up in things. Take me on this job, for instance. When I first came they wun put me to work on the lathe. Just because your skin black some these white people does think you can’t function like them. But when they finally decide to try me out I had already learn it by watching the others.”

  “It’s so noisy in there . . .”

  “Noisy?” The mother started indignantly. “If you let little noise and dirt ’pon your hand keep you from making a dollar you should starve. I tell yuh, to make your way in this world you got to dirty more than yuh hands sometime . . .” She paused, reflecting, “I read someplace that this is the machine age and it’s the God truth. You got to learn to run these machine to live. But some these Bajan here still don understand that—that Suggie and yuh father and them so that still ain got a penny to their name . . .” She broke off suddenly, pointing out the window. “Wha’lah, look the beautiful things they does have in this man country!”

  The trolley was passing through a shopping area and the dazzling window displays flashed by like stage settings. In one window a manikin bride gazed pietistically into the night, the white gown foaming around her like a white sea.

  For a moment Selina saw someone other than the mother she knew leaning over her excitedly—and remembered with a start the photograph on the buffet: the young woman with the soft smile and the pearls draping her breast. Helplessly she loved her for that moment and unnoticed reached up and stroked the bit of fur on her coat collar. Then she remembered her father trembling that afternoon as the dream of the land died in his eyes, and she snatched away her hand.

  “You wun think I pass these same stores every night the way I does get on.” The mother sat down, the shy delight still in her face. “I see two dresses I want for you and Ina to wear to ’Gatha Steed daughter wedding. I tell you, there’s one thing ’bout money. It can buy anything you see there in those store windows.” She shook her head, awed, and stared down at her oil-stained hands.

  Selina also looked at those strong, square hands and could not remember how they felt or the last time they had touched her. All she knew about them was that they were always dark and determined, that the same deft way they shaped the dough for the coconut bread each Saturday they also scooped up the finished shell from the lathe. They offended her suddenly and she said with quiet venom, “Some people don’t care about those things in the store windows.”

  The mother folded in her hands. “What you saying?”

  “I said some people don’t care for things in stores.”

  “But what you talking? What kind of people is they?”

  “Ordinary people.”

  “What they does care ’bout then?”

  “Other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “I dunno. Things they don’t get in stores. I dunno.”

  “I bet you don know.” The mother turned away, then swung back. “What kind of things is they, Miss Know-it-all?”

  “I said I didn’t know.” Selina tried to avoid the mother’s eyes, but there was no place to hide and finally she blurted out, “Well, take ’Gatha
Steed. She could buy her daughter that pretty gown in the store window but she can’t buy any love there so her daughter would marry the boy from home and stop all the fuss.”

  “But look at my crosses! Look who talking ’bout love! What you know ’bout it? You might go hide yourself! Love! Curls! Taking trolley by sheself! I tell you, the heat from the hot comb must be sending you off. Love what!”

  “Well, that’s not in the stores, is it? And some people want it bad . . . Or breath,” she said, spreading her hand on her chest and breathing deeply, “that’s not in the stores either, and everybody wants that.”

  They stared at each other, the mother boring into Selina’s triumphant face with an equivocal look. Suddenly she drew up, laughing, but it was a frightened empty outburst. “You think you smart, nuh? You think . . .”

  “You asked me what I meant.”

  “Well I asking you to shut your foolish mouth now,” she cried and something terrible and inarticulate struggled in her face. Her fingers twisted tight around the straps of her pocketbook. “Love! Give me a dollar in my hand any day!” she cried in a voice that was too loud to be convincing. “Oh, I can see what you gon give, soul. I can see from the way you think now that you ain gon amount to much. Scorning work and money like the father before you.”

  “I’m not scorning it. I’d just like it for one thing,” she said with a meaningful look, “so we could leave soon and go to live on Daddy’s land.”

  Silla’s eyes darted away. “What you bringing up that for?”

  “I just thought of it.”

  “Well you can stop thinking ’bout it.”

  “Why?”

  “Who it is you cross-questioning?”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “You does ask too much.”