Brown Girl, Brownstones

by Paule Marshall

  “Hitler.”

  “You’s saying I’s the worse person in the world? You think I did want to do it? It was the man made me—the foolish half-crazy man . . .”

  “Hitler!” The scream severed her voice.

  Helplessly Silla stumbled across the room like someone old and infirm, drawn, by Selina’s envenomed eyes and her frenzied shout, into the dangerous orbit around the bed. As she reached the bed, as her hands hesitantly sought the footboard, Selina sprang. It was a sure deft charge that sent the sheet billowing and whacking the air like a sail. She tottered up, her nightgown and the sheet twisted around her quivering body, her thin arms reaching out to grasp the mother’s dress. “Hitler.” She spat the name in the mother’s face and brought her small fist down on Silla’s shoulder. “Hitler,” she cried and struck again. This time her bangles glanced sharply across the mother’s chin.

  After the first shocked cry, Silla did not utter another sound. She could have easily tumbled Selina back on the bed with a blow, but she did not even ward off the fist flailing her shoulders. Nor did she move away. Her only gesture of protection was to lift her grieved face out of the way.

  For a long time there was only the sodden sound of struck flesh and the shouted name. At each blow Ina quivered under the sheet as though she were being beaten and outside the cars hurtled through the silent night streets. Selina struck until her arms were too heavy to lift. Her shout tapered to a moan then, and she sagged helplessly against the mother. Her rage died reluctantly. Her loose fists still made little angry motions even as she clung for support to the mother’s neck; her lips still shaped the name even as her eyes glazed with sleep and her face sank into the curve of Silla’s neck. Clinging to the mother, she slept.

  Slowly Silla lowered her face and gingerly touched the sore places on her shoulders and arms. She stared down, with a strange awe and respect, at the limp figure huddled against her and the thin arms wound loosely around her neck. Carefully she lifted Selina’s legs over the footboard, and with the sheet trailing behind them she carried her out of the room, up through the dim hall to the parlor, and turned on the chandelier. For a long while she sat quietly holding her on the sofa under the brilliant light. Then, almost reverently, she touched the tears that had dried white on her dark skin, traced with her finger the fragile outline of her face and rested her hand soothingly on her brow. She smoothed her snarled hair. Yet, despite the tenderness and wonder and admiration of her touch, there was a frightening possessiveness. Each caress declared that she was touching something which was finally hers alone.

  On the day the war ended, a cable arrived saying that Deighton Boyce had either jumped or fallen overboard and drowned at a point within sight of the Barbados coast and that a posthumous burial service had been read at sea.

  While Silla read them the cable, the radio announced the war’s end, and all down the sun-swept streets windows were raised and the news was shouted. Strangers embraced on Chauncey Street. And the dark soldiers whiling away their leaves in the bars on Fulton Street grabbed the whores and spun them in a wild dance out into the street and kissed their laughing mouths; one shouted, “C’mon, baby, this is one time I’ll buy you a drink. The goddamn war’s over.”

  Book 4

  Selina

  I

  Selina carried what seemed the weight of winter in her body, which felt sear, numb and as though laid in some chill place until spring would come. But she knew that the inert heaviness inside her had nothing to do with winter, nor would the spring deliver her. It was simply the burden of her year-long grief. That was what had thinned her face and, like a cancer, fed on her breasts (which, in that last year before her father’s death, had suddenly burgeoned) and on the flesh that had begun to soften her frame.

  But it was not the same neuter body of years ago. For often at night it sent up an importunate plea for a boy, and his face, whose every feature she had shaped and reshaped endlessly, would sweep across her mind, stronger than her grief sometimes, until she could almost see him in the darkness beyond her bed. She would ease up so as not to frighten him away and, hugging her cold shoulders, her eyes vast and disembodied in the dark, she would search for him, just as, she believed, he was searching for her. But even as she thought she spied him, her father would intervene, his face wavering with reproach behind its watery veil, and the scene she had fashioned from the cable’s cryptic message would rise, luminous:

  Dawn at sea with a tropic mist moiling over the ship in smoky gusts and her father alone at the rail, the salt mist on his sunken face and soaking his shirt until it was like silk on his skin. The dawn hour was all peace, his peace merged with that of the sea, his body sharing the rhythm of the ship’s meditative rise and fall. Gradually the mist thickened until his body seemed to buckle under its weight. But oddly, as his body drooped, his mind soared, roaming free in a vast emptiness. For a long time there was only this nothingness, this pure peace, until a light burst in the void and bizarre shapes spiraled up. It was the sun rising in a brilliant coin behind the pale form of a distant island. When he saw the island, he emitted a low frightened cry, his hand rose to blot it out. For that low mound, resting on the sea like a woman’s breast when she is supine, was Barbados. Time fled as the mist fled and he was a boy again, diving for the coins the tourists tossed into the sea, and he saw the one he wanted most in the bright disk of the sun . . .

  It would never have happened if she had loved him more.

  Standing now, a year later, in the bedroom, with a brilliant but cold winter sun gilding the walls, she believed this and slipped on the black dress, which fell to the black stockings at her knees. The black was not parading her grief as Ina called it, but simply, for her, the outward and visible sign of her inward and spiritual desolation. If there had been stigmata which she could have had incised on her hands or forehead to mark her loss, she would have had them done, and not cared what the world said.

  “You can’t go to a party in black.”

  “It’s not a party.” She snatched up Beryl Challenor’s fussily printed invitation and read aloud, “ ‘Please come to a pre-evening soiree and housewarming of my new room,’ whatever that is!” She tossed it back on the dresser.

  “You still can’t go in that black.”

  “There won’t be any boys.”

  “You still . . .”

  “All right, I heard you,” she cried and swung to her sister standing disapprovingly in the doorway. “Do you think I want to go to the damn silly pre-evening whatever it is? It’s just that she called and insisted I come. Besides, I won’t be there long, since it ends at four and it’s almost that now.”

  Turning back, she regretted having yelled, for the quick hurt had brushed Ina’s eyes. Glancing up at her sister’s blurred reflection behind hers in the mirror, she was truly sorry, for Ina also had been drained by the year’s mourning. Her tall, graceful form under the trim suits she wore now that she was working for the telephone company was almost thin, her face, with the delicate sweep of bone under the smooth dark skin, was drawn. Selina sometimes saw her start and scan the room for their father’s spectral presence. She had brought down his rose-shaded lamp and kept it lighted on her dresser. This evening, as on every Saturday evening, she would pensively dress by the lamp and Edgar Innis would come, the boy who had danced with her at ’Gatha Steed’s daughter’s wedding and who was as mild-mannered as she. They would talk softly in the parlor with the doors open, and Ina would sometimes play the piano for him, while the mother sat in the next room breathing her distrust through the wall.

  “But where you find him, nuh?” Silla would start as soon as he left. “He does give me a bad feel, he’s so softy-soft. But you still best watch yourself with him, because I ain having no concubines round here and I ain supporting no wild-dog puppies. Out you’ll go!”

  But Edgar Innis was only a spoke in the small wheel that was Ina’s life, while its hub was the church. Each Sunday at dawn she and the other choristers glided behind the
dull glittering gold cross, through the chill marble gloom of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, singing—their voices as ephemeral as the strands of incense in the air.

  “Oh Lamb of God,

  Oh Lamb of God,

  That takest away the sins of the world,

  Grant us thy peace . . .”

  Ina would sing, her mild eyes fixed on a stained-glass window of Christ holding three lambs. When the sacring bell rang and the priest elevated the Host Ina would raise her soft face to the mosaic of Christ with an expression at once trusting as a child’s and ardent as a woman’s. When the priest placed the wafer on her tongue and the chalice of wine to her lips her eyes would seek the Christ over his shoulder.

  “But who put you so that you must sit up in a church morning, noon and night, nuh?” the mother would rave. Ina never answered, and her silence became like a deep moat, beyond which she remained cowed but inaccessible . . .

  Selina turned now and, pulling on her coat, murmured, “I’m sorry I yelled, Ina,” and passing her at the door, she wished that she could summon more eloquent words to ask forgiveness for all her abuse.

  The sun had gone, leaving the sky like a sullen gray wash strung above the roofs. A wind, equally as sullen, snarled the shorn branches of the trees, and the city’s snow—begrimed, stained tobacco color in places with dog urine—stretched in a hard crust along the curbs.

  The snow in front of the Challenor house in Crown Heights had been cleared to make room for a patrician-black Packard car. The car was consonant with the house, a regal brownstone with arched windows and elaborate stonework. Only Gert Challenor, who opened the door for Selina, seemed alien to the setting. She was as disheveled and flustered as ever, and still unsure of what to do with her hands.

  “Is this Selina? Wha’lah, wha’lah, look how the lot of grief has drag down this girl!” She drew Selina into the paneled hall, her plump face squeezed tight with sympathy and making soft clicking noises with her tongue. “Percy, come. Deighton Selina here!”

  He appeared like a genie conjured up by his wife’s shout. His dark three-piece suit, the gold watch chain draped across his corpulent middle, his shrewd eye declared that he moved now in a world of business.

  “Selina girl, how? You been through more than some grown people.”

  “And look, Percy, she wearing black and all like some woman.”

  The powerful head nodded. “It only right a child should mourn it father, no matter how he die . . .”

  Selina tensed and Gert Challenor quickly shouted in the lovely hall that had been meant for quiet voices, “Beryl, come down, nuh. Selina here.”

  A door slammed upstairs and they heard quick muffled steps; then, in a flurry of petticoats, Beryl descended, shouting Selina’s name. Confronted by those full legs and Beryl’s fully developed, almost plump body, by the breasts jogging slightly under her sweater as she ran down, Selina saw herself with sudden and painful clarity. She was nothing—a mere stick that could barely support the black clothes or Gert Challenor’s comforting arm on her shoulder—while Beryl was a bright burst of health in the dim hall. She might have spent all her seventeen years curled and cushioned in a warm nest and now, for the first time, taken flight down those stairs. Caught in her rushing embrace, Selina smelled health like a sweet musk on Beryl’s flesh; her breath as she kissed Selina was redolent with it.

  “Selina, the invitation said pre-evening, not five o’clock. Nearly everybody’s gone. You did it on purpose.”

  “Yes,” she said, returning the kiss. “I didn’t want to spoil the fun.”

  “You wouldn’t have spoiled anything. Everybody understands. And why wouldn’t you let me come and see you? For a whole year! Why’re you like that?” and chiding Selina, Beryl led her upstairs.

  The room was as Selina had pictured it from the invitation, all pale pink and frilled virginal white, with Beryl’s old dolls arrayed on the bed. Four girls were there: Florrie Trotman’s thin diffident daughter, Una; one of Virgie Farnum’s gray-eyed daughters and Seifert Yearwood’s two dark tense girls.

  “Look who finally got here.” Beryl presented her.

  Their eyes converged on her, encountered the black clothes and her wasted face, and fled. She took a rancorous delight in their discomfort, yet she was also sorry for them, and said, too loudly perhaps, “Well hello. Isn’t anybody gonna speak to me because I’m late?” Then handing her coat to Beryl, she added pleasantly, “Una, you’re putting on some weight. You look good.”

  “You think so, Selina?” Una said, pleased.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Una’s helpless smile brought tentative smiles to the other faces and then, relieved, they rushed Selina with a loud and clamorous greeting. When she was finally seated with a slice of cake and glass of soda, Virgie Farnum’s daughter Rita said, “I asked everybody else, Selina, so it’s your turn. Do you have your own room?”

  “No, I’m still cooped up with Ina,” she said. Then, “No, wait. In the summers now I do. I move into the sun parlor.”

  “You see.” Rita’s skin, paler than her mother’s, flushed angrily. “Out of everybody I know, I’m the only one still without my own room.”

  “Well you know what I had to do to get this, doncha?” Beryl said, lying carefully on her bed, with her skirt tucked neatly under her. “I had to get an eighty average for a term. My father’s orders. Did I work! Studying every night because that school is so hard. Selina, you should have gone to Bergen High, not me. It’s full of Jewish kids and every one of them is a brain. One girl writes love letters all during geometry class and still gets a hundred on every exam.”

  Amid their laughter, she added, “When I graduate this summer I’m going to demand a Lady Elgin watch as a present. I’ll have deserved it. And hey,” she whispered, “my father says I might get a car . . .”

  Their astonished gasps tugged at the air. “Oh, not for years yet,” she said, “when I finish college.”

  “You know what’s a good graduating present from college,” Una said, “going to Europe the summer you graduate, just like the rich white girls. Or Mexico.”

  “We’re getting a trip to Barbados if we finish college,” one of the Yearwood girls said.

  Beryl sat up, waving all this aside. “No trips. Not me. I’ll take the car. When the trip’s over you’ve got nothing to show for it.”

  For a long time they argued this, then Beryl said, “Which would you prefer, Selina?”

  She started, for sitting there with the untouched cake and soda in her hands, she had, in her mind, withdrawn from them to stand—invisible and critical—in a shadowy area outside their warm pink circle. For some reason she wanted only to be an onlooker.

  “Come on, Selina. I’ll go along with whatever you say.”

  “Both.”

  “Both then! The trip right after graduation and then, when I go to med school, or, if I’m not smart enough to get in, to law school, I’ll ask for the car. Please, dear Lord, let these next four and a half years fly!”

  “Which one do you want to be?” Selina quietly asked.

  Beryl shifted uneasily on the bed. “Either, I guess. My father says both are the oldest and most respected professions in the world, and since I’m the oldest . . .”

  “I thought of medicine too,” Una said as Beryl’s voice trailed into uncertainty, “but all that blood, ugh! So I’m gonna be a social worker. What’re you gonna take up, Selina?”

  “I don’t have the vaguest idea.”

  Beryl suddenly laughed and leaned over the bed to her. “Remember when you wanted to be a poetess?”

  “Yes and would recite those crummy poems to you.” But although she laughed and felt the old intimacy spark between them she was troubled by Beryl. Beryl’s face had somehow lost its individual mold, that soft pleasing form that she used to gaze at, rapt, as they lay together in the grass of Prospect Park. Now, some trace of Gert Challenor’s evasiveness and docility lay aslant it.

  “No more school for me after this,�
� Rita Farnum was saying. “I want a job so I can start making money right away and get whatever I want.”

  Beryl, her eyes abstracted, said suddenly, “I think I prefer law, Selina. Because my father says then I could help him in the business and with the rooming houses we have over your way. He says he’s getting tired of yelling at the roomers for the rent. And he says maybe I could even be the attorney for the Association some day.”

  “What Association?” Selina asked scathingly, overcome by sadness and envy. Sadness for Beryl, whose father, like a priest at confirmation, had placed his huge, pink-palmed hands on her head and transferred his acquisitive spirit to her. Envy, because all that Beryl said would come true. Beryl’s life was planned, ordered, while hers was as vague and formless as mist. “What Association?” she repeated brutally.

  Beryl drew back a little. “The Association of Barbadian Homeowners and Businessmen. Haven’t you heard about it? Your mother belongs. My father says it’s going to be the biggest thing since Marcus Garvey. He says they’re even starting up a young people’s division. It’s gonna be called the Young Associates and we’ll be eligible when we’re in college.”

  Slowly Selina put aside the cake and soda and stood up, a drawn figure in black amid the room’s flushed pink. She felt their sudden uneasiness. “What do you say, Beryl?” Her voice, though low, cut the silence.

  “What d’ya mean? I say the same thing. We need something like the Association.”

  Selina went and knelt on the edge of the bed, her face as close to Beryl’s as when they had lain in each other’s arms behind the black rock—and the pain of those lost days and of those lost selves fired her cruelty. “I mean what do you say about anything? You begin everything with ‘My father says this or that’ or ‘My father’s gonna give me this or that’—but what do you say, what do you want?”