Brown Girl, Brownstones

by Paule Marshall

  Offended, Selina said, “Well, I won’t go to bed with him the way you do or that girl in school did.”

  Suggie snorted. “Mark my words, soul, a time gon come when the body is willing and the mind is weak and before the cat lick it ear your legs gon be cock high.”

  Their laughter struck the air like a bold wind and died slowly like a wind and the silence flowed back. After a time Suggie said, “I bet you thinking hard ’bout the boy.”

  “Yes, but about whether I’ll ever be anything or do anything too.” She turned and felt Suggie’s breath like a warm soothing gust on her face.

  “How you mean—be anything, do anything, when you’s going to all this college and thing this fall? You got to be something after all that hard learning. But lemme tell you one thing.” Her hand groped for Selina’s and pressed it warningly. “Watch out for this so-called Barbadian Association. They gon want wunna kind that gon be professional and so. They’ll down hand on you, mahn, and when you hear the shout you wun be able to call your soul your own.”

  “I’d never go there.”

  “The Association. That’s all the talk now. The beautiful-ugly Association! What it tis anyway? Nothing but a bunch of Bajan running their clapper-mouth!” Yet beneath Suggie’s sarcasm there was longing and a tinge of envy.

  She fell silent, and Selina, detecting that envy and longing, turned away, puzzled. Soon Suggie touched her and said wonderingly, “You know something, mahn, when I was a girl coming up I never once did think about what I was gon do or be or anything so. All I ever thought about was spreeing. That’s a funny thing, nuh?” As her voice fell her laughter suddenly struck the darkness in a bright spark. “Lord-God, how I did love a spree! Did I ever tell you ’bout the time I spree so much I lost my panties?”

  “No.”

  “ ’Deed I did, faith. A pretty new pair of pink panties. I wore them to this bus excursion. Mahn, I spree so that day I near drop. Dancing—the music licking sweet—and sea-bathing and eating muh guts full. But as soon as night fall there was my downfall, some boy ask me out for a walk and licking ’bout with that wuthless brute in the sand I lost the pretty new pair of pink panties. The sea carry them off.”

  “What kind of licking about?”

  “Loving-up, nuh.”

  “How old were you?” Selina sat up, staring down at Suggie in the dark.

  “Twelve or so. You think everybody is as slow as you?” Her laugh was a murmurous summer sound. “After that I said I was gon behave. But I cun stop. I did like the boys too bad . . .”

  She bounded up and Selina heard her pouring rum. “Come, mahn,” she cried, turning on the lights, “le’s drink to Suggie Skeete. She was born in wickedness and gon dead so.” She tossed her head proudly and drank.

  Selina took the glass but did not drink. “Miss Suggie,” she said as Suggie came and lay across the bed this time, her head against Selina’s thigh, “would you go back?”

  “Go back? Where? Home, you mean?” The sagging bed thumped the floor as she sprang up, her incredulous eyes boring into Selina. “Me go back there? You think I looking to dead before my time? Do you know how bad those malicious brutes would lick their mouth on me if I went back the same way I left? Tell muh, why you think your father is at the bottom of the sea tonight?”

  And then Selina realized that she had not thought of him for the afternoon. That she had been dancing and drinking and laughing while dressed in the black. Guilt rapped her sharply and she deflected it onto Suggie. What right had she with her wild sinfulness to speak of him? She started up but Suggie held her.

  “All right, I sorry. Don swell up. Nobody’s to call his name, I know. All I meant was that he cun face those people tongue and neither could I. Besides, the bloody place wun be the way I does remember it anyway.” She sucked her teeth, dismissing it, and drank again.

  “I’m going down.”

  “You’s offended ’cause I call his name, I know . . .” Suddenly she leaped up and knelt in the middle of the bed, her hair tumbled wildly about her face and her arms extended as she pleaded, “Oh God, Selina-mahn, stop thinking ’bout death. Take off the blasted black clothes!” Her hands swept out as if to divest her of them. “Life is too strong out here, mahn. You think your father would want you walking ’bout like this? Not him. Not the way he did dress. Not the way he did love his sport! Take them off. You wun forget him if you do. Beside, you got to do the living for him. So c’dear, put on something bright and find yuhself some boy or the other out there and get little loving-up and thing.”

  Selina laughed helplessly, disarmed by her violent earnestness. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  Suggie sat back on her heels, suspicious yet pleased. “Well, that’s something at least.” She rose and stood shyly against the unused bottles of perfume on her vanity with her robe in a motionless swirl at her feet and her glass raised.

  “I propose a toast to Miss Selina Boyce.” She bowed to Selina. “May she grow to a fine-looking woman. May she find somebody decent to marry she and treat she right. May she have plenty money and houses but not have it turn she foolish. May she have ’nough friends . . .” Her voice dropped. “’Cause she’s the only one I can call friend in this man New York. She don know what it tis to have she come and sit with me ’pon an afternoon, to have she listen. It ain no joke having things burning inside you and not a soul to say ‘yuh-cat, yuh-dog.’ So the best to Miss Selina, the only one in this New York that ever treat me like I was people too.”

  The rum flashed, her body lifted in a lovely feline pose and she drank. “Come, girl, have the rest.” She tipped the glass to Selina’s lips.

  The liquor traced a stinging line down Selina’s throat, and closing her eyes she imagined it lighting up inside her, so that she could see her heart leaping in its socket and the blood coupling with the air in her lungs and all the intricate workings of her body. For the first time she was vividly aware of the small but sturdy life she contained. She rose, reaching for Suggie, and felt the same life pulsing there. “I think I’m a little drunk,” she said, clinging to her.

  “Drunk what! Yuh’s just beginning to feel like yourself again, that’s all.”

  “Maybe I could take off some of the black now, y’know?”

  “Now yuh talking, mahn.” Suggie embraced her, and then slapped her lightly on the behind. Together, laughing, their arms circling each other’s waists, they crossed the room and opened the door. A wide bar of light from the hall made a path for them and the rich colors of their laughter painted the darkness.

  IV

  The month Selina started college the mother evicted Suggie as an undesirable tenant, without once breaking the disdainful silence she had always maintained with her. She did it by securing affidavits from the new roomers, in which they swore that they saw men visiting Suggie all day and night. Thus, the petition asserted, Suggie was obviously a prostitute since she did not work. It claimed that she was giving the house an unsavory reputation and thus lowering its property value. It cited the harmful influence of a person of such low morals on the landlady’s two daughters. . . .

  The petition was granted and the date set for Suggie’s removal.

  On that day, with her trunk packed and the vanity cleared of her perfumes, Suggie strode the room, her hair waving in a black plume and her red chenille robe—faded now and the tufts gone—snapping angrily around her feet.

  “Oh the bitches! The malicious bitches! I’s a prostitute? Is that what the bad-minded bitches swear to? Is that what they put in the bloody affidavit? That I’s a harmful influence. Tell me how I harm you?” She suddenly whirled angrily to Selina, who was lying face down on the stripped bed, her long, thin form inert. “Tell me! All I ever did was to give you little rum and make little joke about loving-up and so. That’s all. How’s that a harmful influence? Is you a drunkard now? Is you a whore? Tell me?” she demanded, her eyes almost demented and her hand lifted threateningly.

  Painfully Selina raised up, her eyes dry in
her drawn face, as though the source of her tears was exhausted. She leaned toward Suggie’s raised hand, willing to accept the blow, and said in a broken whisper, “No, I’m not a whore and I’m not a drunkard and neither are you. It’s not you, Miss Suggie. It’s just that I’m to have no one, that’s all. Look how she practically frightened the old lady to death . . . And now she’s got this crazy idea about filling the house with roomers to make more money for me to be something I don’t want to be. But you just wait”—a dry malevolent light splintered her eyes—“I’m going to show her.”

  Suggie’s hand dropped and she sat heavily beside Selina. “Don mind me, mahn, I know that’s what it tis. She did stay downstairs and hear we laughing up here ’pon an afternoon and it did cut she to the quick.”

  “Yes, but she won’t stop me from seeing you. Tell me where you’ll be.”

  Suggie swung away, suddenly angry. “No, I ain able for she to find out and come and kill me too . . . Oh, it’s not that, Selina-mahn.” Her anger fell away. “It’s that where I’m going ain gon be much. No place for you to come. So don ask. Come help me dress before the piece of man come.”

  Later, waiting in the vestibule while the man with whom Suggie would live brought down her trunk, Selina still pressed her for the address and Suggie still refused it. When they heard him coming, she forced a bottle of perfume into Selina’s hand.

  “I don’t want perfume, just tell me were you’ll be!”

  “Take it.” Suggie closed her fingers around it. “You don even have to use it. Just open it sometimes and pass it across your face. It does smell too sweet.”

  The chill feel of utter desertion she had watching Suggie leave persisted through her first year of college. This was real while everything that happened at school had the unreality of a play viewed from a high balcony. She sensed being surrounded by white faces but few ever came into focus. She sat in class, mechanically taking notes, and all the voices—the professors, students, even her own when she recited—seemed like distant echoes. She crowded into the high-speed elevators that soared and plunged through the towering steel structure of the city college and was only vaguely aware of the bodies crushing hers and their odd milk smell. In the huge stainless-steel lunchroom, she avoided Beryl Challenor and the others, and, eating quickly, fled the unremitting shrill of female voices, the dense cigarette fog, the clatter of dishes and the strident bridge games, for the library.

  Every afternoon she walked from the college to the center of the city, and only during these long reckless walks did she rouse a little. Holding her books like a shield, she weaved down through the East Side, past the sedate brownstones and the tall apartment houses thrusting into the sky, glancing, in her swift walk, into the richly appointed lobbies. At Fifth Avenue she walked almost cautiously past the luxurious displays in the tall windows and covertly watched those to whom the street belonged: the meticulously groomed, mink-draped women, who tapped out their right of possession with their high heels, who moved secure in an aura of wealth, with ennui like a subtle blue shading under their cold eyes and a faint famished touch to their pallid cheeks. They made her rage inside, for she knew, walking amid them in her worn coat and tam, that she was nonexistent—a dark intruder in their glittering inaccessible world.

  Evenings always found her striding, head up, tam askew, through Times Square, that bejeweled navel in the city’s long sinuous form. To Selina it was a new constellation, the myriad lights hot stars bursting from chaos into their own vivid life, shooting, streaking, wheeling in the night void, then expiring, but only to burst again—and the concatenation of traffic and voices like the roar from the depth of a maelstrom—an irresistible call to destruction.

  She loved it, for its chaos echoed her inner chaos; each bedizened window, each gaudy empty display evoked something in her that loved and understood the gaudy, the emptiness defined her own emptiness and that in the faces flitting past her. She walked with a swagger here, gazing boldly into those faces, always hoping to happen upon some violence, or to be involved in some spectacular brawl. For hours she stood outside the Metropole, listening to the jazz that poured through the open doors in a thick guttural flow that churned the air into a pulsating mass; sometimes the music was thin and reedy, sometimes brassy and jarring, yet often soulful, and always expressing the chaos in the street. She would shift amid the crowd for a glimpse of the sailors strung along the bar, the brilliant streak of a woman’s blond hair in the dimness and smoke, a gleam of silver on the drums, the pomaded head of a Negro musician. Standing there with her books stacked on the ground between her legs, her fists plunged in her pockets and her lean body absorbing each note, she would feel sucked into that roaring center, the lights exploding inside her, and she would be free of the numbness.

  “Fulton Street is nothing compared to Times Square. Nothing!”

  “’Course it ain’t.” Miss Thompson agreed and drew the hot comb through her thick hair. They were alone in the booth with the one dangling light staving off the darkness. Miss Thompson’s thin haunches rested on the high stool with a kind of permanence, her fleshless thighs held Selina’s chair steady between them, and the foot with the ulcer gave off its faint but unmistakable odor of putrefaction. “Ain’t nothing but bars and storefront churches—poor colored peoples losing religion and getting religion. That’s all it is. But there’s one place that’s got all of ’em beat. One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street on Saturday night! Lord, all them colored peoples dressed back, honey, and falling in and out of the Apollo Theater. Colored peoples sitting up in Frank’s Restaurant being served by white waiters! All them good-timing niggers riding in Cadillacs . . . Honey, I seen it just once and I got all choked up inside I was so proud to see my peoples living so swell!”

  “It can’t compare to Times Square. And Crown Heights is certainly nothing compared to those apartment houses on the East Side. Perhaps if my mother and them could see them they’d stop taking on so about a few old musty brownstones.”

  “They seen ’em,” Miss Thompson said sharply, “because they worked in ’em, and lemme tell you something, Crown Heights still looks just as good. Seems to me that anybody going to college could understand that.”

  “I’m sorry.” Selina patted Miss Thompson’s leg. “I do understand that. What it is, I guess, is that I’ll never understand how anything is worth what my mother has done to get that house. You know,” she said, shame gathering in her eyes, “now that the house is crawling with roomers she’s taken to hiding in the hall to watch them. If they ring the bell too loud, or run down the stairs, she springs out of the dark and shouts, ‘Don ring down the bell!’ or ‘What, you gon break down my stairs!’ or ‘Turn down the blasted radio, this ain Fulton Street!’ ”

  They shared a helpless laugh and she said, “It is kind of funny to hear her, but it’s terrible too. I shudder each time she does it. Oh, she’s not the only one. And what right have they? And over what? A few moth-eaten houses!”

  Miss Thompson cupped her hands gently over Selina’s bowed head. “Honey, I know. West Indian peoples are sure peculiar, but you got to hand it to them, they knows how to get ahead. I don’t know, maybe someday you’ll understand your momma and then you’ll see why she does some of these things.”

  “I never want to understand her, Miss Thompson.” Her voice was hard.

  They were silent. Soon Miss Thompson was finished, and while she gave herself a manicure, Selina cleaned the booth. Then Miss Thompson reached for a cane and, leaning on it, eased down from the stool.

  “How come you’re using a cane now?” Selina asked, coming over to her. “Is the foot worse?”

  “Now don’t start fussing.” She waved Selina off with the cane. “Peoples see you with a cane and right away you’s about to step down into the grave. I’m just taking some weight off this old foot.”

  “Why is it you never told me how you got that sore?” Selina helped her change into the shapeless black dress.

  “ ’Cause it ain’t nothing for
a child to hear.”

  “I’m not a child any more, Miss Thompson,” she said quietly. “Can’t even you see that?”

  Miss Thompson gave her a quick, penetrating look, then sat down abruptly. With her fine long hands on the cane handle and the black dress falling to her feet, she lifted her aged sunken face into the harsh light and began talking, quickly, in a voice without emotion.

  “All right, I’ll tell you. Went down home one summer to visit my folks. I was a little older than you maybe and had done been up North a couple of years so I had me a little New York style. Well, I guess I had too much style for them crackers down home. Every time I went to the store them mens sitting outside would come looking at me kinda funny, especially one big red cracker with a shovel. One time he come saying: ‘Lord, this here is one of them uppity niggers. Done been up North and got herself a white boy friend.’ They just whooped and hollered at that. But they laughing was ugly. I knew what crackers give so I went on in that store quick, got what I wanted and then lit through the back. But that cracker with the shovel must of been thinking for me ’cause there he was up the road apiece, smiling and making dirty signs . . .” She paused and looked meditatively at Selina, then shifted, sighed and said flatly, “He didn’t get to do nothing with me wrassling and hollering, but he did take a piece clean outta my foot with that rusty shovel.” She tapped the foot lightly with her cane, her gaunt face impassive. “For years it wouldn’t give me no trouble. Then it would act up, like now. So I figure I’ll use this here cane awhile.” She rose with a final movement that precluded all comment.