Brown Girl, Brownstones

by Paule Marshall

  But even as her body arched to meet his that afternoon and on all the other afternoons, she could sense the detachment which his eyes and his bland voice reflected. Even as his body, taut and graceful then, moved above her like a sea in which she drowned, she could sense the thoughts crowding her out in his mind. He accepted her high and eager passion as casually, it seemed, as he did her invasion of his life. But sometimes, in the calm after the crest, while their bodies were still joined, his eyes would move in a grave and wondering perusal over her face, piercing her skin, it seemed, to seek out her mystery and the wellspring of her passion, and his frown then would betray a certain helplessness and wonder. At those moments, as transitory as they were, a dim thought would stir amid her pleasure: in some way she was stronger than he, she possessed a hard center he would never have. Had Suggie ever felt this profound woman’s strength? Or the girls romping with their lovers on the slopes . . . ? But the moments would pass and he would withdraw, his detachment restored.

  Occasionally she found him seated before the half-finished painting on the easel. “Don’t look so surprised. I still like to go through the motions once in a while,” he had said the first time she had found him there. One hand was always thoughtfully caressing his knee while his hooded eyes seemed to avoid the unfinished painting as though it jeered him, and the smoke from his cigarette screened it from him. Then, sometimes, after a tense wait, he would stab up paint on his knife, touch his face, leaving a smear there, and stealthily approach the canvas.

  To Selina, he was the painting. With the sunlight slanting across his rough hair, the smoke wreathing his head and the colors streaking his dark skin, he was a warrior reclaimed from the past—the tribal symbols of war on his face.

  When dusk, moving as stealthily as his hand, crept down the ruined garden to crowd the room, he would remain at the easel, staring openly then at the painting and smiling softly, as though his eyes projected the finished perfect image in his mind onto the obscured canvas. Only when she turned on the lamp would he rouse and smile abstractly across at her. Even then, she knew, he did not really see her . . .

  “It doesn’t matter to you whether I come around or not,” she said one night, wandering with him through the blocks of brownstone rooming houses near her house. The few lighted windows were bright studs in the setting of dark unrelieved stone, their light dying as the ravaged houses seemed to pull the night quickly down around them, like old women drawing heavy veils over their ruined faces.

  She waited, her eyes narrowing with annoyance. “I said it doesn’t matter . . .”

  “I heard you,” he said and strode on, his long legs striking out in their loose careless way and his full lips folded around his cigarette. “I guess I’ve gone so long without wanting anyone around—not even a woman—that I’m in-grown. What you need is some nice, clean-living West Indian boy whose intentions are wholly . . .”

  “You’re insulting me and evading my point.”

  “All right, I’m evading it.” He shrugged. “Look, things just happen. The way you came. The way you’ll stop. Yes, you will, so don’t protest.” He placed his hand playfully over her mouth. “You will, because people like you who seize hold don’t need my type, not for long. Take that first night when you seized me in all my innocence,” and laughing suddenly, he kissed her. “For a while there I flattered myself that retirement had increased my charm and I would never want for women again. Egotist! Sap! Finessed by a virgin! It wasn’t even me you were seizing. You might have been grabbing life itself by the throat, throttling it, cursing it, ‘Look here, you dirty bastard, you got me into this mess, now do something about it! And take this while I’m at it.’ ” His fist smashed into the air. “ ‘And that!’ ” It hooked powerfully. His knee shot up. “ ‘And there’s one in the groin for good measure !’ ”

  He released her with a wild boyish laugh, which the wind caught and carried across the street, and which the shut houses there hurled back.

  She hardly heard the laugh or its wild echo. Her shocked senses were fixed on the picture he had drawn of her—as someone ruthlessly seizing a way and using, then thrusting aside, others. It recalled the mother’s argument at the Association. This was the mother’s way!—which had seemed so opposed to her own small yet undefined truth, which had so infuriated her. A heavy dread made her pause. Her face became drained suddenly, her eyes dazed with the horror of that possibility. She turned to tell him that he was wrong, then faltered, remembering how his eyes sometimes pierced her as they lay on the sofa. Perhaps he had discovered this self crouched in the dim rear of her mind and had led it shivering, naked, despicable into the light to confront her.

  His laugh failed at the fear her eyes reflected. “What’s wrong?” He bent anxiously. “It’s a compliment. I’m envious. When I was eighteen I was too damn cowed and callow to try or do anything . . . And, I suppose—though I don’t know for certain—it’s only when you do something, commit yourself in some way, that you begin to feel around for what you are and what you want . . .” His eyes were weary suddenly and the smooth muscle at his mouth gave a sad tug. “Yes . . . even if nothing makes sense you still have to be doing something. That’s a bitch, isn’t it?” Laughing softly, he bent closer to her. “Forgive me, I mangled what I was saying before by trying to be funny but it was a compliment.”

  His hand reached for her, but she held it off, whispering incredulously, “But is that the way you see me? That’s the way my mother is, not me!”

  “Then I guess it proves that you are truly your mother’s child.”

  She struck him on the chest and the hollow thud resounded in the night stillness. Her voice was sibilant with rage. “Do you know what my mother is like? The things she’s done? What she did to my father?” Pushing angrily past him, she began walking.

  He joined her and said quietly, “No, I don’t know.”

  “Then don’t be so free with your analysis.”

  “All right, but tell me anyway.”

  When they had walked some distance and she had calmed a little, she told him—dredging up the memories and then fumbling for the words to shape them, her hesitant whisper sometimes lost in the mild spring wind which swept her face and lifted the coat around her slender body. After a time she forgot him as her eyes, huge in the narrow darkness of her face, saw those scenes and those dead lost faces projected vividly on each darkened house they passed. When the pain became too great her loafer shoes scraped angrily on the pavement and her hand flew up. Gradually these small fierce gestures ceased and her words came easier as the leaden weight of the memories lessened. Finally she paused and, leaning tiredly against an iron fence and smiling wistfully, she added, “It’s childish, I know, but sometimes I think that he outwitted us all and really swam ashore, and is home now living like a lord and glad to be rid of this place and of us.”

  She was unaware of Clive until his head dropped lightly to her shoulder in the same odd gesture of obeisance as on their first night. They remained like this for some time, his head bowed to her shoulder and her remote eyes reaching beyond him. Around them the dark houses lowered down in disapproval and the spaced lamps defined the long reach of the street.

  “Forget what I said and come back with me.”

  “Now? I can’t.” And suddenly she laughed, a clear burst that seemed to dispel the night. She held him tightly around the waist. “I want to but it’s too late. You see, my mother thinks I’m in school all these nights—studying in the library—and she knows that closes at ten o’clock.”

  “Please, it will prove you’ve forgotten what I said. Come on.”

  Later, stretched luxuriously beside him within the bright circle of the lamp they always kept burning, she said, “This was all one elaborate ruse to evade my point.”

  Laughing, he rubbed his face between her breasts. “What was it now? If it mattered to me whether you came around or not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh Christ, Selina, don’t reduce me to the banal! I’m g
lad to see you when you come. How’s that? Is that enough?”

  It was enough! she told herself each night, lying alone with the loud sounding of her heart and her body still holding the warm impress of his. If he would not give, she would! and she used her allowance to buy him paints, a new easel and a silk shirt, which he never wore. Alone at night with her heart’s sound she knew that in his own way he gave her much. For wasn’t life tolerable because of him? School had even moved into focus, and her mind, freed of those hollowed faces and dark thoughts, eagerly swept in all she heard and read.

  In the spring term her program adviser suggested that she take a course in the modern dance. She did, found that she liked it and was good, and met Rachel Fine.

  She came over to Selina in the school cafeteria one day late in the semester—a small-boned girl with wiry legs, moving with jaunty grace in her careless attire; dead-black hair piled in hacked swatches above a small tense face which was unnaturally pale because of the black weight of hair, blue eyes set elusively behind surprisingly tawny lashes and a small adamant mouth.

  “Hello, can I sit here? I’m Rachel Fine. I’m in your dance class.”

  “I know. You’re very good,” Selina said, shifting her books to make room for her.

  “Thanks. I should really be in the advance class since I’ve been studying the dance for years on my own, but these rigid jackasses here insist that I take all the prerequisite courses first . . .” While she talked her hands were busy preparing her coffee, wielding a cigarette and plowing through her hair.

  Selina suppressed a smile at her flurried motions, intrigued by the small white fingers constantly plunging into that forest of hair. “Why don’t you talk to your program adviser about it?” she said.

  “That’s the jackass I’m referring to.”

  Their laughter created a sudden bond and the girl said, “What I really want to say is that I’ve been watching you all term and you’re very good and I wondered if you might like to join the Modern Dance Club. You see I’m president and I’m trying to put the damn club on its feet. Right now it’s just a bunch of dead beats who can’t dance and we desperately need some talent and I was hoping maybe you . . .”

  Selina’s smile stanched the flood of words. “Well, I’m not much of a joiner but I’d like to try. Just so long as I can get away by six o’clock.”

  Bounding up, the girl executed a graceful turn in the narrow space between the crowded tables, then held out her hand to Selina. “Everybody calls me Fine.”

  “You can call me Boyce,” she said, taking the small warm hand in hers.

  The next week Selina went with her to the club and became so absorbed that she forgot the time and had to rush to the subway wearing the long black tights under her clothes. When she reached Clive’s it was nearly dark. He was sitting thoughtfully at the easel, the fading light picking out the white crescents of his eyes and the canvas. For a time he peered at her in the black tights, then throwing back his head, he laughed; his long arms lifted dramatically. “All is lost!” he intoned. “She’s gone arty.”

  She started to laugh with him but became annoyed and, throwing her books on the sofa, began taking off the tights. “I haven’t gone anything. I told you this girl asked me to join the dance club.”

  “And I told you beware Bohemia. She’s probably some Prog from the Village hootenanny set who just loves Negroes.”

  “She lives in Flatbush.” Laughing now, she threw the tights at him.

  He wound them around his neck. “I guess they welcomed you with open arms.”

  “Well . . .” She hesitated and sat down, her taut brown hands falling limp in her lap.

  “Well, what?” He leaned forward insistently.

  “Well, there was a funny silence when Rachel first introduced me. You know the kind I mean . . .” She stopped, unable to describe the abrupt drop in their animated talk when she entered, the subtle disturbance in their eyes before they said hello. Nor could she describe her own feelings standing there: the sudden awareness of danger that made her hastily scan the room, a momentary desire to leave and thus spare them her unsettling dark presence; then, just as strong, the determination to remain . . .

  Her hand struck out and she shouted at him across the room, “What am I supposed to do—curl up and die because I’m colored? Do nothing, try nothing because of it?”

  Her question was an angry spark in the darkening room. She heard his light step, and when he sat beside her, she moved away, hating him suddenly and herself and the afternoon which he had ruined. “I’m not going to do that!” she cried, her eyes cutting across his.

  In the glow of his cigarette she caught his tired expression and the small muscle pulling at his mouth and turned back, her anger gone, and whispered, “I don’t want to do that, Clive.”

  He stretched out on the sofa and drew her down so that she lay in the warm valley between his bent legs, her face on his chest.

  “No,” he said gently, “you can’t do that because then you admit what some white people would have you admit and what some Negroes do admit—that you are only Negro, some flat, one-dimensional, bas-relief figure which iis supposed to explain everything about you. You commit an injustice against yourself by admitting that, because, first, you rule out your humanity, and second, your complexity as a human being. Oh hell, I’m not saying that being black in this goddamn white world isn’t crucial. No one but us knows how corrosive it is, how it maims us all, how it rings our lives. But at some point you have to break through to the larger ring which encompasses us all—our humanity. To understand that much about us can be simply explained by the fact that we’re men, caught with all men within the common ring.”

  He paused, seeking words in the dark air and in her barely visible face, then he relinquished the search and burst out irritably, “Look, I don’t want to get started on this tired race theme.”

  But Selina was eager to define her first uneasiness at the club and, struggling for each word, said, “The funny feeling you get is that they don’t really see you. It’s very eerie and infuriating. For a moment there until everybody suddenly got friendly I felt like I didn’t exist but was only the projection of someone or something else in their mind’s eye. Oh, maybe I was just being oversensitive, I dunno . . .”

  “I don’t either, dear Selina.” He reached up and stroked her troubled face. “Who knows what they see looking at us? The whole damn thing is so twisted now, so deep-seated; the color black is such a hell of a powerful symbol, who can tell.” His voice, though still flat, had a bitter edge to it now. “Some of them probably still see in each of us the black moor tupping their white ewe, or some legendary beast coming out of the night and the fens to maraud and rape. Caliban. Hester’s Black Man in the woods. The Devil. Evil. Sin. The whole long list of their race’s fears . . .”

  He gave a short laugh that was hollow at its center. “Maybe our dark faces remind them of all that is dark and unknown and terrifying within themselves and, as Jimmy Baldwin says, they’re seeking absolution through poor us, either in their beneficence or in their cruelty. I don’t know”—his limp voice trailed into a disgusted silence, then—“But I’m afraid we have to disappoint them by confronting them always with the full and awesome weight of our humanity, until they begin to see us and not some unreal image they’ve super-imposed . . . This is the unpleasant and perhaps impossible job and this is where I bow out, leaving the field to you, my dear sweet odd puritan Selina”—he prodded her playfully—“and to the more robust among us. Me, I can’t be so bothered. To hell with them. I’m assured of my humanity lying here alone in this goddamn room each day seeing things in my mind that I can’t get down right on canvas.”

  His voice dropped, and the silence, crouched like some hungry animal in the darkness, snapped it up. She sensed him drifting away, his body as well as his thoughts this time, even though his breath was on her face and his long loose form under hers. But then his hands were groping for her face again and he was saying sof
tly, “You see I tried once. You want to hear, or am I talking too much?” He leaned up solicitously.

  “No,” she said, kissing his hand. “I love you.”

  “I know, but you’ll still leave me.” He gave an abrupt laugh. “Anyway, I had this friend, some poor sick cat with a blond beard and a gutful of trouble who used to come around and drink up my whiskey and keep me up until dawn talking—but he was my friend. The only thing wrong was that he was always asking me how it felt to be colored. I just used to shrug it off, until once he told me about awakening from a nightmare with the feeling that he had suffered some irrecoverable loss, and that then he knew how I must feel all the time . . . We were both high that night but I realized finally that I had never really proved to him that I was anything other than a Negro. I told him off, I’m afraid. We even exchanged a few drunken blows before he got the hell out . . .” His body shook with a sad soundless laugh and he caught her face and pressed it into the curve of his shoulder as though fearful she could see him despite the darkness.

  “I sat there for a long time after he left, I remember. No longer high. The slime of everything I had said to him on my tongue. Cursing myself now! For why lash out at him? Poor bastard with his fat beard and scared eyes who paints worse than I do. He was trying. And why hurt people when they’re so damn fragile inside . . . ?”

  As his words dissolved around them, he eased his hold on her. When she raised up to speak, he gently placed his finger on her mouth. “Don’t make me go on ad nauseam, please.” He kissed her. “And forgive me for maligning your friend. It’s just that you rushed in here so wide-eyed with trust, having forgotten what they can’t ever seem to forget, and I started remembering.”

  Silent, holding each other, they watched the lighted windows in the houses beyond his wasted garden. Families were sitting down to dinner, she knew, the children playfully kicking each other under the table as they waited, their small stomachs weak and warm with expectancy as the steam flew up from the pots. Watching those bright windows, she feared for the children and wished suddenly that time would drop away, now, and leave them safe in those warm rooms, with the eager smiles fixed on their dark faces.