Brown Girl, Brownstones

by Paule Marshall

  Clive touched her. “Tell me about the club. Are you any good?”

  She raised up, laughing suddenly. “I’m very good. For a beginner.”

  His astonished laugh joined hers. “Arrogance! Oh Christ, that’s their undoing. It’ll be smoking next. Drinking soon. Pot finally!” Laughing, he swung her deftly under him. “Come, then, let’s celebrate your advent into the arts. Our way.” He turned on the lamp.

  Minutes later, holding him in the slow warm dark heave of their passion she dimly heard the telephone, its ring muffled under the sofa, but persisting until Clive, cursing it, lifted the receiver. She heard a querulous rasp, felt him stiffen and knew that it was his mother. His only answer was a listless “yes,” yet Selina detected a faint and puzzling Barbadian intonation in his voice. She slid from under him, cold suddenly, and began to dress. When he finished she was seated in the far corner of the sofa, fully dressed, her questioning eyes fixed on his worried face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “My mother’s down at the Association and doesn’t feel well and wants me to pick her up in the car.” He began dressing hastily, the muscle visibly tugging at his mouth. “I’m afraid she has developed the most esoteric of the white man’s afflictions: acute anxiety to the point where she thinks she’s getting a heart attack. Jesus, the ingenuity of that woman is fantastic. I wonder what she’ll do when I get enough money to split for good? Wait,” he called, hurrying out, “I’ll be back.”

  She waited, her legs drawn up under her skirt, her bewildered eyes reflecting the lighted room in their deep centers. She was still unnerved by his mother’s call; and his slight accent, his abrupt departure sketched another dimension of him, a new facet which troubled her. Suddenly, huddled there in the corner of the sofa, longing for him to return, she felt as abandoned as the unfinished painting on the easel.

  VII

  Spring had ended. Coming up the subway stairs onto Fulton Street Selina saw the sun lingering late above the roofs and smelled a summer redolence in the air. A sinuous breeze wound her bare legs and, laughing, she gave a small joyous leap, her body still fluid and toned from the long afternoon rehearsal with the dance group. She was on her way home to eat before going to Clive’s and she moved swiftly through the crowd—a slender dark girl with supple legs, a strong graceful lift to her head and back, and an almost irrepressible vitality in her stride, in each cutting swing of her arms. She might at any moment, it seemed, burst into a wild spin or execute another exuberant leap there on the street.

  At the beauty parlor Miss Thompson beckoned her through the smoke-hazed window, and she thought with a secret smile of Miss Thompson’s recent suspicious looks. “I can’t stop now,” she called from the doorway and then added impulsively, “I’ve got a wild date tonight,” and darted away as Miss Thompson shouted, “You-Selina, come on back here . . .” Waving to Miss Thompson over her head she hastened across the street and through the park, where the flush green hid the subtle neglect.

  As she unlocked the tall iron-grille basement gate, her sister’s tall slim figure and anxious face suddenly appeared behind the openwork of the gate and held it shut against her. “Florrie Trotman . . . Florrie Trotman . . .” Ina’s whisper was no louder than silence.

  “What about her?” Selina asked impatiently, shaking the knob.

  “She was . . . here . . . just now . . . and she said . . . Oh, she told mother that she saw you . . .” Ina shook her head in disbelief. “She . . . told her . . . she saw you and Clive Springer going into his place together! And that you stayed there . . . for hours! Is that true? Selina, is it true?” she demanded, staring hard at Selina’s expressionless face. As the silence grew, Ina’s mild eyes darkened with horror and she slowly recoiled. “What were you doing there, Selina . . . ? Oh Lord, how could you . . . ?” Her weak hands slid from the gate and she fell back.

  As Selina pushed past her shaken sister and down the hall, she was strangely relieved that the deception was over and even aware of a vague fulfillment. Somehow it was complete now that the mother knew, and Selina was almost calm. She wanted to smile entering the kitchen. For here was the mother she knew and loved despite everything. No longer penitent and subdued, but restored, resplendent in anger, her handsome angular face alive with rage, her strong body swooping down on Selina now like some giant bird.

  Silla struck and the books Selina held crashed to the floor and the white room leaped into violence. Her hand flew up and Selina raised her face to receive that first full blow. In the pause before the hand descended she gave the mother a soft and solemn nod to confirm all that Florrie Trotman had said, to inform her also that the old threatening talk of concubines and wild-dog puppies and expulsion would be of no use. But even as she held the mother immobile with her clear hard gaze, her voice issued smooth with the lie. “It’s not what either you or Florrie Trotman think. It’s perfectly respectable. I met him at the Association. The only reason he hasn’t come by to meet you is that he knows you disapprove of him . . .” The hand quivered menacingly nearer. “I tell you he’s not even interested in me that way! He considers me a child. I just go around and sit with him and talk while he paints. Why do you always want to cut me off from everybody? Why can’t I have a friend . . . ?”

  The tearful question hung, unanswered, and the mother’s inbred distrust flared up. But something tempered it suddenly: another self—small and long suppressed—emerged, some part of the mother that yearned, indeed, needed, to believe her. Selina caught that momentary hesitation and added in an even voice, “Mother, I’m not going to spend all day in the school library or lunchroom being dull with those other West Indian girls. I’m talking these boring science courses to please you. I’m even willing to study medicine to please you, but I’ve got to have someone to talk to and be with once in a while. Please don’t order me to stop seeing him. I’m doing nothing wrong and I’ll never disgrace you!”

  The upraised hand wavered, then slowly dropped. The wrath that held off the world slowly shifted to bewilderment. “But where you come outta, nuh?” the mother whispered, peering dazed into the pleading yet adamant eyes as if Selina were a stranger. “Oh God, look how trouble does come!” Her sudden cry seared the silence and she turned from Selina, searching for her silent inquisitor, summoning him to witness this new outrage. And he came, gliding out of obscurity, mute, diaphanous, yet felt in the room. Once again they complemented each other: the mother with her voluble urgency and he with his inviolate calm.

  “Look how this deceitful girl went down to the Association only to get on like a black-hat in front the young people and to pick up with a piece of man. Oh God, I did see she coming in here all hours of the night from the so-called library, so secretive all the time but I din think. A man now! A man that wun work! That does call heself painting pictures. That’s something too? His own mother say that you would run from the beautiful-ugly pictures—that they’s like somebody pick up a can of paint and slash it so!” Her arm slashed out; her voice dropped tragically. “That’s somebody for this one to be associating with . . .

  “People say the army turn him so, but he was always wuthless. Years back he wanted to go to some art school, but I know the mother burn every last one of the so-called pictures and dash his tail in college. But then what?—he jump up and join the army . . . The only child now! And with a good mind! He could of been some big professional. I tell yuh, his own father wun speak to him. After Levis Springer pulled down two jobs for years to make a head-way! Look the poor mother! Every morning Clytie carried that boy for somebody to keep so she could do day’s work. Clytie wore one coat for years so the Great Master Clive could take piano lessons . . . And what she get for it? I know every hair ’pon she head is white-white and she does walk the streets talking to sheself, swearing somebody begrudge she the houses and work obeah on the boy.”

  She paused, her head bowed in intimate communion with the suffering of Clytie Springer. Finally she turned her pained eyes to Selina, who stood unyielding amid
her scattered books with the frightened Ina behind her in the doorway, and she reasoned softly, “Girl, that ain nobody for you to be associating with. A man that’s hiding from work with tears in his eyes! You’s only spiting yourself. Here it tis the Association is raising the money now for the scholarship fund and if you did belong you could win it. I know you would win it. If you would only join . . .” At Selina’s disdain she broke off and something of her old fine scorn scored her voice. “But she ain interested. She got a piece of man now and the head turn. But look at them! They just suit each other. Two missing links!”

  “How’s your mother taking it these days?”

  “Now a word. She’s trying to believe me, but yet she’s still waiting for the worst to happen. My stomach to start bulging or morning sickness . . .” she said with a joyless laugh and kicked the sand.

  It was the last warm Sunday of the summer and they had spent it at the beach. Now, as the bright verve of the day calmed into evening, they were walking along the beach to Sheepshead Bay to watch the boats come in. The air was laden with the sea’s smell and struck through with mutable sunset colors. Flushed rose, rich golds and mauve hung in a filigree across the sky, trailed behind the sun like a resplendent robe and gilded the sea with iridescence.

  Absorbed in the day’s final radiance Selina fell behind Clive and then stopped. Her slim arm, burned a deep mahogany, lifted in wonder; her body, which held the sea’s rhythm after her long day in the water, struck a still, lovely pose. Clive turned and she motioned him to be silent as she sensed the immense pause around her: the small stirrings in the air had ceased, the gulls had dropped to their black pilings, the wine-dark sea lay still and her own heart paused—and together they marked the day’s passing with a frail fleeting silence.

  “The day’s gone,” she called softly and he nodded.

  By the time they reached the roadway that ran parallel to Sheepshead Bay dusk had closed over the land and the street was prepared for night. Colored lights hung in spangled loops from the clam bars to the hot dog stands to the fashionable restaurants and exclusive yachting clubs that lined the street, making a festive glow against the quickly darkening sky. The street was crowded as though everyone had hurried there to escape the encroaching night and, safe now under the canopy of lights, they strolled with bare arms swinging, the girls’ hair blowing in bright cowls, or milled around the various stands, their voices as gay and their laughter as high as the strung lights. In the exclusive clubs the yachting set danced on platforms cantilevered above the beach, their sunburned faces cooled by the breeze off the bay.

  Selina and Clive passed through the crowd—dark forms amid the white faces. They quickly turned off and headed down to the bay, across a barren tract of sand and rough grass which lay between the street and the bay, moving amid the beached boats to the pile of rocks at the water’s edge. Taking her hand, Clive led her down almost to where the rocks slid under the water, and they sat there, facing the mouth of the bay, where the sea spread in an ominous invitation. The water lisped in an incessant caress against the rocks at their feet, and behind them the dark sandy tract lay like a no man’s land, separating them from the gay street.

  “‘Come in under the shadow of this red rock,’” he said and drew her close beside him. As they sat in silence, the last boats came in, sculling noiselessly up the channel, their lights like struck matches in the sultry night. A big yacht strode the middle and its wake slapped the moored boats into fitful motion and washed up to Selina’s bare feet the flotsam of the bay—a sluggish oily muck of garbage, beer cans and condoms floating like dead amoeboid fish. The wind brought slanting across their faces the faint smell of the city’s incinerators near by. After the droppings of the city were burned they would be used to fill in the marshes, making land where there had been only brackish water and tall weeds. The furnaces rose stark out of the flat land, their chimneys silhouetted in phallic grandeur against the sky.

  Clive gently cupped her small breast and said jokingly, “You know, your mother should appreciate how you’ve bloomed a little under my hand.”

  She laughed absently, watching the foam charge and hiss amid the rocks. “I’m afraid she only appreciates the fact that I’m going to hell with myself. She came across my leotards the other day and received another shock. And she’s never recovered from the shock that all you do is ‘paint pictures’ as she puts it.”

  “She should have capped it by saying bad pictures.”

  She turned, suddenly serious and annoyed with him. “Why are you so sure they’re bad?”

  His hand dropped and a wan yellow light slowly filmed his heavy eyes. There was a long thoughtful pause before he answered. “Because I think there’s a kind of wonder you have to have (among other things) to be really good. To see things the way a child does almost—with freshness and excitement. Without it you can be facile, competent, but not really good. I’m very short on any kind of wonder.” He smiled ruefully. “I was probably better at nineteen than at any time since.”

  “I never told you,” she said carefully, “but I heard how your mother burned your paintings once.”

  He was silent for a time and then his laugh struck, loud but empty. “She used them to start the fire. Did you hear that too? That was when she was in her violent period. Poor thing”—he sobered—“she was so desperate, I remember. She just couldn’t understand how I could want to go to some art school even if they had given me a scholarship instead of to Columbia to study law. Well, one thing, they made a damn good fire.”

  Tears dimmed her eyes and she stared at the black wavering void of the sea, shaking her head. “How could she have done that? Why didn’t she just disown you and throw you out?”

  “Mothers? Hell, they seldom say die! Fathers perhaps. Like my poor father. He just acts like I don’t exist. But not mothers. They form you in that dark place inside them and you’re theirs. For giving life they exact life. The cord remains uncut, the blood joined, and all that that implies. They hold you by their weakness, their whining, their sickness, their long-suffering, their tears and their money . . . We’re all caught within a circle of women, I’m afraid, and we move from one to the next in a kind of blind dance.”

  His words swirled like brown sand around them, stinging her, and she wondered briefly if he had included her in that ruinous circle. She said, “I guess your mother considers it a crime to paint.”

  “Amen!” he said. “To her, to your sainted mother, to the whole damn country, as a matter of fact, people who paint pictures are criminals. We don’t rob banks or commit murders but we do something worse. We get in the way, we confuse things and we make them uncomfortable. Take the Barbadian Association. They’ve got plans, haven’t they? Good, sound plans. They’re going to have their own little credit system and bank. They’re going to play the white man’s game in their small way. Now tell me, what can they do with aesthetes with paintbrushes in this kind of plan? They simply cannot afford us.”

  “Why, then, don’t they just leave you alone?”

  For a time he did not answer, and when he did speak his voice was low-pitched with understanding, and the small muscle pulsed with compassion. “Because it’s a long haul and they need all of us. Because there are so few of us and so many of the whites, and they are so strong and contemptuous . . .”

  He lit a cigarette and the match spun in a tiny red hoop into the water. “And then there’s something else,” he added in the same quiet tone, “something more frightening. When we snub their way they begin to ask themselves: ‘Can we possibly be wrong and they right?—those fools with brushes?’ Oh, it’s never conscious, but they’ve still got to get rid of that hidden doubt. And the way they do it is to make you embrace their way. So they hound the frisky sheep back into the fold, and lure the foot-loose son back into his father’s house with feasts.”

  His voice dropped into the immense silence and the cigarette burned unheeded between his fingers. Out in the bay a motor sputtered and a boat slipped among the
others on its way to spend the night or the time needed to make love in some secluded inlet. It glided past their silent forms, and gay voices reached a cross the water to them.

  “They’ve no right to stifle you,” Selina shouted and she might have been shouting at the gay party aboard the cruiser. “Do you know my mother is still, almost blindly, going ahead with her plans, even though she knows about us, still saving feverishly so I can study medicine when I want none of it!”

  He stirred uneasily, his gashed eyes shifting over the sky, as if he saw there a vision of Silla and his own mother with disillusionment seeping into their strong-visaged faces even as their voices soared with their ambitious plans. Suddenly he cried savagely, “Christ, we are what they call us—ungrateful whelps! They break their balls buying those gloomy barns to make it easier for us and we throw it back in their teeth. Who are we to scorn them?”

  “I don’t care, I won’t be like them!” she replied as savagely, and angrily struck the water with her foot so that the spray burst in a white design before them and then dropped. “I won’t be cut out of the same piece of cloth.”

  “And most people want just that,” he offered, his eyes shrouded and aloof again, his voice bland. “Because who wants to be out here alone? Who can take it? Most people want to be one with the lowing herd, to be told, to be led. They gladly hand over themselves to something . . .”

  “Like Father Peace,” she whispered, remembering with the old ache her father’s head bent in ecstasy and immolation on the huge banquet table.