Brown Girl, Brownstones

by Paule Marshall

  He might not have heard her. He stretched out on the sofa, and the disquieting stillness settled over his dark smooth-planed face, and spread the length of his big slack body. His hooded eyes closed. The only small proof of life, and of the turbulence beneath, was the tiny muscle pulling faintly at his lip. Then, as if impelled up by his thoughts, he got up and began changing his shirt, his back to her.

  “She’s not sick!”

  This time he turned and looked at her, and started, his fingers pausing on a button. “What happened?” he said and came toward her, then paused apprehensively a few steps away.

  The upheaval she had undergone was all there. In her consumed face that was streaked with traces of the heavy make-up and her tears. In her eyes that were like huge lamps whose light had been overturned and extinguished by her weeping. In her drooping figure in the black leotard which was an attenuated shadow of her self.

  “What’s wrong, Selina?” he said gently. “What happened? You weren’t any good?”

  “It wasn’t that.”

  “What was it?”

  Not knowing how to tell him, she tried to dismiss it with a weak shrug.

  His eyes narrowed shrewdly. “What is it—somebody said something?” he asked sharply. “One of those white people insulted you?”

  “This woman,” she said finally in a voice drained of all weight and color. “This girl’s mother . . . She . . . she . . . well, she just put me in my place, I guess you might say . . . Reminded me that I was only a nigger after all . . .” Her tears started up and she forced them back with an angry blink. “And I didn’t say a word. That’s what gets me now. I just sat there and took it and then ran like a scared rabbit. I feel like I’ve been running all night . . . Oh, it’s not that I didn’t know it would happen someday. I even had a little speech I used to rehearse that would cut down the first person who said anything . . . You know how you do . . .” Her dulled eyes lifted to his, and he nodded, his face, his long loose body constricting with each word.

  “And I couldn’t remember a word of it. I just sat like a dolt and took it. You see, she kept smiling all the time. If she’d been openly nasty or crude with it I could have . . . I would have . . .”

  He motioned her to stop, to spare herself—as if he knew the rest: her blind flight through the city, the hour huddled in the doorway, and her near delirium there. When he spoke his voice was low-pitched with her suffering.

  “Christ, Selina, it happens. I took that same crap all through the army . . . And every time I tried to sell a painting or get a showing somebody slapped me down with a smile . . . It happens, and whether it’s a rope or a kick in the butt, a word that slipped out or a phony smile, it’s the same damn thing. I guess when you’re in the pit you’ve got to expect a stone up side the head once in a while or a well-aimed spit in the eye. Maybe it’s about time it happened . . .” He suddenly slashed out with his hand and the lurid brightness filled his eyes. “Maybe you’ve lived in this goddamn cocoon too long anyway. Now you know that man’s greatest genius is for inflicting pain . . .” His voice receded into thoughts that excluded her, and he absently began buttoning on the clean shirt.

  “Look, don’t go this time, Clive,” she said. “I don’t want to be alone any more tonight. Besides, I’ve got to tell you . . . You see, a lot more happened. After I ran away from there I hid out, thinking—things tumbling over each other in my mind—and I don’t know any more if when we go away I can live the way we planned—or, if I can even get the money the way . . . Oh, I can’t tell you like this, standing here . . . Lay with me, please, so I can tell you. Just stay this one time. You know it’s nothing again—that she’s not really sick . . .”

  As she pleaded, his eyes eased away from her face, he stepped back and his arm slowly lifted—like a wall rising between them to shut her out, high enough, indeed, to shut out the world. “I’ve got to go!” he said irritably.

  And suddenly her resentment exploded in her eyes in a bright flare, her body stiffened with anger. “You’ll always be saying that,” she shouted up at his hidden face, “always be running there every time she cries wolf. It’s terrible what you two do to each other. Do you know that?” She bounded close and struck down his arm. “It would hurt her less, it would be far kinder of you if you did go away. Far away, and send her a postcard every once in a while telling how nice the weather is! That would be better than staying here—reminding her of what she’s done to you, and with her reminding you of what you’ve done to her . . .”

  “Don’t get analytical!” he said impatiently. “Besides, I know all . . .”

  She swept him into silence with a look. “I don’t think you even mean to go away with me,” she said. “You can’t.”

  He winced but said with an attempt at lightness, “Perhaps, dear Selina, I’m simply a lost cause.”

  At the sadness beneath his flippancy, her anger dissolved. She turned a little away, defeat pulling down her thin shoulders. Her eyes slowly filled up with a wistful thought. “Maybe if I had been older and knew more,” she murmured, “you could have loved me . . .”

  “Oh, Christ!” His arm shot up again and, after a strained moment, dropped to reveal a rueful half-smile and a pained light seeping under his shrouded eyes. “I do,” he said, very soberly, “in my own messed-up way I do, believe me—but it isn’t what you need or would want after living with it for a time. But I do.”

  “Then stay with me. Just this one time. Because I need you more than she does tonight. Stay, and no matter how often the phone rings don’t answer it.”

  For a moment she thought he hesitated, she thought she even glimpsed his hand start toward her, but the effort died in his eyes and a cry—wrested from the hollow of his despair, rising up the wall encrusted with his defeats and fear—beat through the room, driving her back, “What in the hell am I supposed to do? I’m the one who has her walking the streets talking to herself and people laughing at her!”

  She said nothing more after this, and above the slight promontory of her nose, her eyes became very dry, black, knowing and resigned. Nor did she respond in any way when he paused on his way out and bent over her with a wry smile. “I guess you know we’ve been quarreling like two winos on Fulton Street. Anyway, wait for me. I’ll be right back if it’s nothing again. And we’ll be together, inside each other, quietly, and that will help.” He kissed her parched lips. “Wait.”

  But this time she did not wait. When the gate swung shut behind him she detached his key from her key-ring—fumbling like someone blind—and placed it beside the telephone; then turning off the lamp near the sofa, she left. At home she slipped in unnoticed through the parlor floor and, later that night, the mother and Ina found her on the cot in the sun parlor, still dressed in the black leotard and her coat, her body shaken by sobs even though she slept.

  XI

  A week later the Barbadian Association presented its first scholarship award, and up until then Selina did not leave the house. She lay during the day on the cot in the sun parlor watching—with numb eyes—the sun wheel slowly across the sky, while the same numbness moiled like smoke around her bruised mind. Rachel Fine telephoned every day, but Selina could not talk to her. When Ina, in her tweed suit and her hair rolled neatly on her neck, came in to ask what was wrong, she murmured, “I’m tired, that’s all.” She gave the mother the same explanation—and Silla, to hide her anxiety, shouted, “It’s the lot of running, that’s what. All the lot of studying and breaking your neck down to the Association all the time and coming in here all hours. You does have to overdo everything . . .” Then, at Selina’s drawn face, she added gently, “What it tis troubling yuh, nuh?” And when Selina did not reply, she withdrew.

  Every night that week Selina had the same dream. It awaited her near the end of her sleep and ushered her into a parlor where she wandered familiarly amid the ornate Victorian furnishings until footsteps sounded outside. Terror seized her then, for she realized that she was only an intruder. Frantically, she search
ed for a window, but found none; nor was there a second door or a closet. In desperation she plunged into the open grand piano, tearing a way through the wires until she reached the street.

  But at the piano’s jangling alarm, the others followed, pursuing her through narrow streets where huge factories eclipsed the stars, and filling the low-humming night silence with their execrations. Finally, they gave over the chase to a beast—and he came, huge, silent, swift—a low-slung, dark-furred animal with eyes as innocent as a child’s. She could hear his deep growl and feel his breath on her legs. And there was something appealing in that warm breath. Some perverse part of her suddenly wanted surrender more than escape, and thought with pleasure of the claws ripping the last breath from her throat . . .

  She had almost stopped and turned, almost surrendered, when an empty bus loomed in front of her. The folding doors opened. She stumbled in—just as the beast caught her leg, slashing a deep furrow in the calf. The bus door closed on his bloody paw, and sent him tumbling—howling and snapping—into the gutter.

  The pain in her leg was real as she drifted, moaning and exhausted, away from the dream, and discerned through its shifting haze, the illusory shapes of the bedroom furniture. And she moaned again, hating the dawn sitting palely at the foot of her bed, for it brought only the memory of disaster, a dulling anguish and desolation.

  “Selina.” Her name came faintly to her across the valley between the beds which Ina had bought after finding out about Clive. “You’re having a bad dream.”

  To Selina, her sister embodied the dawn with her blurred face and filmy nightgown—an ephemeral figure that would vanish with the sun.

  “You’ve been moaning in your sleep all week,” Ina said. “Look, did something happen that night we found you sleeping in your clothes?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I thought maybe something had happened. You’re probably just nervous about the presentation tonight, though.”

  “Yes, that must be it,” she said, and dread, like the dawn chill, suffused her. For a moment she wanted to retreat into sleep, and then remembered what awaited her there. There was no retreat. The only brief sanctuary was here, she realized, lying in the dawn lull with her sister, and she turned and said kindly, “Did I wake you with my moaning?”

  “No, I wasn’t sleeping. I’ve been so nervous all night. You see, I’m getting married.”

  “Oh . . .” and the shock fully awakened her. Somehow she had thought that Ina’s life was permanently fixed in its quiet round of the telephone company, night school, the Saturday visits from Edgar Innis and church. “Edgar’s very nice,” she said lamely.

  “Yes.” Ina’s slim brown hands absently smoothed her covers.

  Selina wondered at her flat tone and her abstraction. “Have you told Mother?”

  “Last night.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t know what to say so she said the usual.” Ina smiled thinly. “‘Be-Jesus-Christ, you make up wunna bed hard yuh lie ’pon it hard . . .’ et cetera.”

  “You’ll have to have a blowout of a wedding.”

  “I know. I don’t want to but I’ve decided to let her go ahead.” Suddenly Ina’s face strained toward Selina in the amorphous light. “You see, I want to do something she’d like,” she said with sudden intensity. “I mean I’ve never done anything to please her. I’ve been thinking about that all night. At least you joined the Association . . . but I’ve never done one thing really. So I’ll let her give me the wedding. Oh, and Edgar’s joining the Association. She’ll like that. He’s been thinking about it ever since he read that membership circular you wrote, and now that they’re more liberal and admitting other colored people he decided . . .”

  Remembering the circular, Selina wanted to draw the covers tight around her head, as her sins, in all their hideous forms, gathered at the bedside.

  “You see, we might buy a house later on,” Ina was saying and she might have been talking about strangers whose lives did not concern her, “and we might need a second mortgage from the Association. Oh, not a brownstone. I couldn’t take this whole business of renting rooms and gouging people. Just a small place on Long Island. That’s enough for us . . .”

  Why her disinterest, Selina puzzled, her joylessness? Wasn’t Edgar Innis what she wanted: neat, cautious, Barbadian, light-skinned, so that the women at the wedding couldn’t accuse her of not trying to lighten up the family? Why this apathy, when marrying Edgar would mean a mild happiness and a retreat? Did Ina glimpse the sad tinge to that happiness—in the sanctioned embrace two nights a week, the burgeoning stomach, the neat dark children, the modest home on Long Island, the piano lessons to the neighbors’ children and church each Sunday—the slow blurring of the self, the steady attrition of the soul over all those long complacent years?

  Was life, no matter what, tinged with this sadness? And if Ina sensed it—she whose happiness was assured—what of Selina, who had no one now and no idea of what the years held? Oh, Christ, she swore angrily, to be a child again running in a blur under the trees to meet her father on a summer Saturday night!

  “I guess you won’t be getting married for a while yet,” Ina said.

  “No.” She turned, wondering suddenly as she gazed at her sister’s graceful form and the soft eyes which expressed her immanent mildness if she was still a virgin.

  “For a time there I thought you might run away and marry Clive Springer.”

  She started. “No.” And her body, her mind ached at the thought of him sleeping now on the broken sofa.

  “I’m glad. He’s so odd, he always frightens me.”

  Yes, she’s a virgin, Selina thought.

  That was the last they said for a time. They lay in the small beds, separated by a valley, and it was as if they had always held these muted talks in the dark and known this lovely silence. As the sun invaded the room, Ina mused aloud, “I want Miss Thompson to do my hair for the wedding.”

  “She’s gone South, y’know,” Selina said. “To take a rest from the shop.”

  “Won’t she be back?”

  “I don’t know. She said so, but I don’t know.” For hadn’t she seen death stalking Miss Thompson down Fulton Street each time they parted, and smelled it in the life-sore?

  “Well I hope so. Oh, not because of my hair, but because you two are such good friends,” Ina said and suddenly came and sat hesitantly at the foot of Selina’s bed. Her cologne was a spring morning smell as she bent toward Selina and paused, her arms a little outstretched as if to embrace her; just as Selina, turning shyly away, longed to tell her that she too sensed the subtle sadness in all of life and was also afraid. But they did not touch or speak, and after a time Ina said, “Think you’ll win the scholarship tonight?”

  And numb with dread, she could only shrug.

  The presentation was held in the Association’s impressive new hall, which was filled tonight. All across its wide sweep the watchful eyes converged on the speaker, and now, after a long evening of speakers, their anticipation weighed ominously on the air.

  Selina sat among the Young Associates at the back, her body clenched under her evening gown and her breathing constricted by an order of the Association pinned across her chest. Cecil Osborne was making the presentation speech, and his bruised hands and slight body, the gold-etched teeth and incongruous high nose made her love him. He was almost finished now. She saw him fit the glasses on his high nose, saw the black hands fumbling with an envelope. During this pause, the silence surged angrily through the hall, as though their patience had been finally outraged and they would rush en masse onto the platform and snatch the envelope from him. He lifted his face, the glasses sparked, the gold teeth glinted and he spoke Selina’s name.

  It was a clear sound across the distance and she steeled herself as the faces swung round. Above the sudden applause she heard the loud dissonance of her heart and, amid those smiling faces, saw the mother, who was not smiling, whose blunt hands lay quietly o
n her lap, whose face was that of the mother in the photograph at home who gazed with shy love at the child on her lap.

  Selina moved, unaware that she moved, down the aisle, scanning those myriad reflections and variations of her own dark face. And suddenly she admired their mystery. No, not mystery—she lifted the gown to mount the platform—but the mysterious source of endurance in them, and it was not only admiration but love she felt. A thought glanced her mind as Cecil Osborne held her face between his ruined hands and kissed her: love was the greater burden than hate.

  The applause burst afresh and she gazed wonderingly over the smiling faces, which resembled a dark sea—alive under the sun with endless mutations of the one color. They no longer puzzled or offended her. Instead, their purposefulness—charging the air like a strong current—suddenly charged her strength and underpinned her purpose. The tightness in her chest eased and her heart calmed.

  She picked up the check and, without glancing at it, said, “In one way I wish I could accept the award and use it as you would like. Because I know that’s how I could best express my respect and affection. But I can’t accept it—which means probably that I’ll never be able to convince you of how I feel now . . .” She laid down the check and a bewildered silence surged up. She stiffened as the mother’s face congested with fear. “I can’t accept it,” she said intimately to her, “because I don’t deserve it. And the reasons are despicable . . .” She paused, then added with a futile gesture, “but no longer even important enough to mention. Let’s just say that my dedication was false and the outstanding contributions Mr. Osborne spoke of were all pretenses . . .

  “Even my apology was phony.” Her pained eyes met Beryl Challenor’s. “But I offer it again, for the last, and mean it. Forgive me. My trouble maybe was that I wanted everything to be simple—the good clearly separated from the bad—the way a child sees things. But it’s not simple or separate and children can’t understand it. Now that I’m less of a child I’m beginning to understand . . . But still I can’t accept the award,” she cried across those rigid faces to the mother. “Oh, not only because I don’t deserve it, but because it also means something I don’t want for myself . . .”