Brown Girl, Brownstones

by Paule Marshall

  Prim, pious, pretentious pack! She noted the girls’ tightly closed legs, the skirts dropping well over their knees, the hands folded decorously in their laps. No boy’s hand had ever gained access to those breasts or succeeded in prying apart those clenched knees. Her cold glance swept the young men: Queers!

  “. . . the older people will naturally resist it, but what Mr. Sealy proposed is inevitable . . .” Dudley Risbrook, the president of the Young Associates, was saying. He had already graduated from college and worked as a probation officer and took business courses at night. He had neat hands and eyes that had never lost the shocked and shattered look of some terrifying experience of his childhood. “. . . The board will just have to work out some scheme whereby real control remains in their hands . . .”

  Their voices crisscrossed around her like wires, but somehow held no meaning. What was it that made them so unreal? Why should she feel such loneliness and alienation among them when, after all, they were her people? Where was her place if not with them? The question clung like a lesion to her mind and a dull throbbing began behind her eyes, nausea churned her stomach and threatened to erupt as she suddenly heard her name and saw Julian Hurley’s sly eye on her.

  “Selina!” he was saying, his effeminate hand hailing her. “You haven’t contributed a syllable to the discussion. At least tell us your impression of our Association.”

  All around, the eyes reached, as if they were strong arms, to hold her there until she answered. She barely noticed them—only Julian held her eye and mind: his handsome face and sardonic smile. She was glad suddenly that he had called her, grateful for his small viciousness, for the evening’s ferment now coalesced into a single loathing. She almost smiled at him.

  Then, with her hands relaxed on her crossed knees and her eyes like deep pits which hid her venom, she said very quietly, “I think it stinks,” and exulted at Julian’s congealing smile and the others’ stricken eyes. She wished that her father could witness it. And Suggie. “And why does it stink? Because it’s the result of living by the most shameful codes possible—dog eat dog, exploitation, the strong over the weak, the end justifies the means—the whole kit and caboodle. Your Association? It’s a band of small frightened people. Clannish. Narrow-minded. Selfish . . .” With each word she slid forward until her small folding chair tilted precariously. Her hands, her hissing voice beckoned them closer—and as though robbed of their will, hypnotized, they leaned closer. “Prejudiced. Pitiful—because who out there in that white world you’re so feverishly courting gives one damn whether you change the word Barbadian to Negro? Provincial! That’s your Assocation.”

  As she jumped up, the chair tipped forward, fell and folded with a crash. Their eyes, still glazed hypnotically, stared at it and did not even see her rush from the room.

  In her flight through the dim-lit lobby outside she passed a figure in the shadows, glimpsing only the metal clasps on his galoshes. Then, at the door she hesitated, suddenly afraid to leave the lighted warmth of the meeting room for the cold night and the stale glitter of Fulton Street. Her trembling fingers could not turn the doorknob. She rested her face against the cold glass panel in the door and that cold sting on her face was less cold than the self-loathing that gripped her. For they had done nothing to deserve her insults, nor had she come any closer to her own truth by maligning theirs. Why had she promised to come? Confused, aching, she rubbed her forehead on the glass, sucking back her tears, then remembering the shadowy figure behind her, she asked softly, “Would you mind opening the door for me?”

  She started to find his hand almost immediately on the doorknob, a long loose hand, very dark in the dim light, which somehow gave the impression he was long and loose all over.

  “What is it? Are you feeling sick?” His voice was kind but flat.

  Oh, he’s young, she thought, and for no reason was disappointed. She had thought he was an old man standing very still and patient in the shadows. “No, it’s the doorknob,” she said, “I can’t turn it.”

  “Look, if you’re sick I’ll get someone inside to take you home.”

  “I’m not sick and I don’t need anyone in there to take me home,” she said petulantly and, looking up, was trapped in a pair of somber, somnolent eyes gashed deep under the man’s brow. They revealed an unnerving detachment and disdainful amusement beneath their heavy lids, a weariness and withdrawal. His tall slack body, under a worn bulky coat, gave the impression that it had once been full-fleshed and powerful—and this, along with his hooded eyes, made him somehow like an athlete who had been permanently injured in the heat of a rough game and now sat watching it without enthusiasm from the side lines. His gaze, distant yet piercing, transfixed Selina now, baring her every defect, it seemed, but offering no comment, passing no judgment. She chafed under the look, knowing how exposed she was with her tears and distraught hands, with the wildness and anger still in her face. She wanted to ask him savagely what he was looking at, to shout at him to open the door, but then she saw that, unlike his eyes, his full mouth was expressive—as if there lay the true index of his feelings—and that his flared nose and high facial bones had been sensitively molded. His body—long bones strung loosely within the integument of skin—seemed to jar easily. She thought of how his skin resembled a rich dark-brown cut of silk and forgave him. She looked away.

  His dry laugh was knowing. “Suddenly you look better. You can probably open the door yourself now. Or are you going back inside?”

  “I’m not going back in there.” She gripped the knob but did not turn it.

  “Did something happen?”

  She paused suspiciously. “Are you a member?”

  “No, aren’t you though?”

  “Me? Never. I only came tonight because I foolishly promised . . .” She forgot him as her anger stirred again and her self-disgust and anguish.

  “I could tell something had happened from the way you came flying out of in there,” he was saying, a speculative eye on her. “Tell me.”

  “I blew up!” she finally cried under his insistent look. “Told off the young people. I was just gonna sit there and not say a word and leave quietly as soon as my mother took her eye off me—but then that Julian Hurley, that fairy . . .”

  His laugh was weightless and she wondered fleetingly what had drained his strength. At her inquiring glance he said, “I’ve always thought so myself.”

  His laugh and conspiratorial whisper, their breath falling together in a white mist on the glass panel created an intimacy that both warmed and disturbed her. “Go on, tell me what you said,” he urged, regarding her with a detached amusement.

  Again his stare drew the words from her and she talked easily, forgetting that he was a stranger. Her hands, which had the mother’s same strong gestures, struck out now in emphasis, then dropped as she finished, and added sadly, “I was cruel and childish and cowardly—and I don’t even know what I was trying to prove.”

  “Perhaps that you’re not a joiner.”

  She uttered a small laugh and murmured vaguely, “I don’t know what I am.”

  He bent swiftly, startling her, and she felt his eyes moving in a slow and shrouded dance over her face. “What do you do that you like?” And there was an imperative note in his voice.

  She could give no answer and suddenly wanted to leave, sensing some inexplicable danger in his question and annoyed with herself for talking so openly with a stranger. She drew on her worn tam, pulling it low on her brow, reached for the doorknob and found his hand there.

  “What do you do that you like?”

  There was no evading him. Her hands finally shaped a negative sign; her eyes, swiftly crossing his, confessed her emptiness. “Nothing,” she said softly. “Not a thing, which, I suppose, makes me nothing.”

  She wondered at his sudden relieved sign as he raised up, and at the interest darting briefly across his eyes. Puzzled, she asked, What’re you doing here if you’re not a member?”

  “My mother,” he said casual
ly, his indifference restored. “She’s not well and she wheedled me into picking her up in the car. I looked in but she’s not there. She must have gotten a lift home. God.” He shuddered, even though he laughed. “In there looked like the GOP convention. All they needed was some cigar smoke.”

  “Well, they’re pretty worked up. Claremont Sealy harangued them about excluding other West Indians and American Negroes and then flounced out.”

  “Heresy!”

  “Worse than that. They’re calling him a communist.”

  He laughed. “Lord, between you and Claremont they got their licks tonight.”

  “My mother’s going to be furious,” she whispered with sudden dread.

  “Are you going to wait for her now?”

  “No, I’m going home and to bed. I can always take her lectures better lying down.”

  “Then come, I’ll drive you.”

  “Oh, no thanks.”

  He tapped her hand, smiling with surprising gentleness. “You’ve been well trained, I see. I mean I’ll walk you home by way of a bright busy street. How’s that?”

  She withdrew her hand, but his touch echoed over her skin, releasing something exquisitely pleasurable inside her.

  “I’ll keep my distance, I promise.” He raised his hand. “I’m harmless. Here, I’ll prove it.” He started for the meeting room. “I’ll get a character witness . . .”

  Laughing, she caught his sleeve. “Okay, I’ll go with you.”

  All of Fulton Street was fleeing the wind, the refuse of overturned garbage cans joining the driven snow and scudding pell-mell down the street, the few people hurrying close to the buildings, their bowed heads butting the wind. The only sanctuaries were the bars with their light falling in bright squares on the sidewalk and the music and laughter drowning the wind’s roar whenever the doors opened.

  The man kept his distance as he had promised, striding unconcernedly a little ahead of her, his shabby coat open and billowing up in the wind and his coarse hair covering his head like a warm cap. She studied his long unstrung steps, suppressing a laugh at his looseness. It was all-pervading, it seemed, affecting his speech and gestures; his thoughts, even, must be loose.

  “We could have avoided all this cold in the car,” he said, slowing down and taking her arm.

  “I wasn’t afraid of going in the car. I just wanted to walk,” she said and steeled herself against a stinging onslaught of snow and an inner eruption at his touch. She knew that she should politely draw away her arm, but she didn’t want to. His hand was warming, a buffer against the impetuous wind. Then, he might be offended if she did and simply walk away from her, returning to his shadows and leaving her alone on this violent street. Rather than pull away, she would have liked to return his touch. To confess that something inside her which had always been closed was slowly opening like a fan, shimmering with color, and that his touch was the long-awaited signal.

  She pointed to the neon drake projecting over the White Drake Bar. “Even the drake’s floating tonight!” she cried. Indeed, as the wind swung the huge sign, the white drake did seem to be floating on the night sky. “Come”—she led him—“let’s look inside. Just for a minute.”

  They stood in the doorway of the bar, out of the wind’s hurtling path, and while she peered in, he stood to one side, smoking, his heavy gaze wandering with guarded interest over her clumsy overshoes, her slender form under the fitted coat, up to the tam pulled defiantly low on her forehead. Snow rimed her lashes, so that it seemed she couldn’t see, but the eyes beneath were clear, swept clean by the wind, it seemed. They reflected her excitement and the rose-lighted scene in the bar; a mote of snow was magnified in their black depths—the entire crystal filigree displayed there like a jewel.

  “All of Fulton Street must be inside . . .” she whispered to herself, watching the men brawling and drinking at the bar and the rose light scattered like bright mica over their whiskey glasses and over their teeth as they laughed. The way they were laughing it could have been summer with the leaves in Fulton Park and the lovers murmuring in the pavilion. The whores were there, perched like painted birds on the high stools, their paste jewels glinting rose in the rose light, and the men in their brutal innocence lurched around them and, for the price of a drink, laid bold hands on their ravaged bodies.

  “Y’know,” she said, awed, “after school I go hang around outside the Metropole near the Roxy in New York.” She heard him suppress a little surprised laugh and was pleased. “But it’s not as good as the White Drake. Here, everybody is really having a good time. Lord, look.” She reached out to him as a spotlight suddenly singled out a short rotund man—his hair meticulously marcelled—lounging against the bar. She saw him suddenly stiffen, heard his abrupt anguished shout,

  “Got up early this morning

  But didn’t have no place to go . . .”

  and his hoarse voice rising, wailing in the blues. His round face and stout body slowly became transformed by its sad passion. His eyes squeezed shut as he sought the words in the darkness and pain of himself and then opened; his dark distorted face lifted, quivering, into the downpouring light and his plump hands, studded with rings, now opened, now closed in ecstasy, as he lamented to the gods for them all . . .

  His lament ended and Selina turned away, her arms falling limp at her side and the excitement dying in her eyes as an ineffable sadness welled. Greater than the singer’s. For he, at least, was part of that rough carousal in the bar, drinking and jiving the hostile night into oblivion with them. She remembered how remote the dark wind, the cold streets had seemed at the Association and how afraid she had been to leave once at the door . . . She turned, wanting to tell the man how it was to be outside peering in at that intense life, but, for the first time, his eyes fled hers. He had been regarding her with a benign amusement, but now his eyes shifted and his big loose body, propped against the door, flinched as though he knew what she would say and felt the pain of it already. She sensed this and was not hurt.

  For a long time they walked apart and in silence, their boots slurring the snow, until finally he paused and laughed. “I’m very disappointed in myself. I was so sure standing behind you in the lobby that I could guess everything about you . . .”

  “Such as what?” Smiling, she turned to him.

  He took her arm. “Such as you went to one of these factories called city colleges, desperately trying to be the dark counterpart of the American coed and studying to be a teacher or social worker—or if your parents were more ambitious, a doctor or lawyer. If you were the oldest you played the piano badly, the second-born, the violin worse. Worn those ugly silver bangles since you were born practically. Religiously went to the hairdresser every two weeks. Belonged to the Episcopal Church, a Negro sorority and of course the Association. That you were already looking around for a nice, ambitious West Indian boy, lighter than you preferably, whose life you could order. Dreaming already of the wedding that would end all weddings and settling down to the house, the car, the two clean well-behaved children. And, of course, you were still a virgin.”

  The wind, bursting over the roofs, stripped their laughter apart. “Isn’t it grim?” she said. “How do you know so well?”

  “I’ve made an exhaustive and exhausting study of my subject.” He pressed her arm. “You must fit some of the categories.”

  “Only one or two, thank God. Hey, we go through the park. I live on Chauncey.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, no Crown Heights yet. We’re always a little behind. But my mother’s working on it.”

  “What does your father say? I know as a rule they don’t have much to say but . . .”

  “He’s dead,” she said and tumbled from her high excitement. A memory sloughed off and she freed her arm. She saw her father suddenly striding with his taut slim grace through the park, headed for Fulton Street and his women. What had Suggie said kneeling in the rumpled bed—that she must live for him . . . ? Well then, let it be summer and Saturday nig
ht and she some bold woman with a warm laugh and the man her father!

  Giving her a sharp look, the man said, pointing to the statue of Robert Fulton, “I used to pride myself on being able to run around the ledge without falling as a boy.”

  “Me too, and I never met you here?”

  “You were far too young.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “Were you in the war?”

  “In a way. I never killed anyone, that is. My outfit always managed to get there when all the gore was over and everybody blown to bits. We just picked up the pieces, shoveled them out of sight and pushed on. We called ourselves the clean-up detail.” His voice was light, almost gay, and as he lit a cigarette his eyes in the small flame were expressionless. “The only thing that bothered me was the setting. If it had been Europe I wouldn’t have minded. The snow can cover a lot and then you don’t get the smell. But where I was, in the Pacific, you’d see the goddamn bodies strewn all over the place and everything blooming. That used to get me. Birds singing and some bastard’s smashed face staring up at you out of the grass. No, I didn’t like the setting . . .” His voice dropped and his eyes narrowed to mere crescents, smarting from the smoke of his cigarette and the wind.

  She said cautiously, “Well, at least you didn’t have to kill anybody.”

  “I’m not sure whether that wouldn’t have been easier than what I was doing. Besides, killing is supposed to have a very therapeutic effect. It might have been a good purgative to have plunged my bayonet into somebody’s gut . . .” and suddenly laughing, he lunged, charging with his cigarette. His slack body became fused, powerful, lithe with grace; there was an almost lurid brightness in his hooded eyes.