Brown Girl, Brownstones

by Paule Marshall

  The words rang hollow throughout the hall as she hurried down the platform and through the perplexed and unforgiving silence. The loud rustle of her gown, the staccato tap of her heels in the stiff silence bespoke her final alienation. And as the familiar faces fell away behind her, she was aware of the loneliness coiled fast around her freedom.

  “Yuh lie!”

  Selina unpinned the order of the Association, placed it on a shelf and said evenly, her back to the mother, “I was not lying.”

  “Yuh lie!” Silla slammed the door of the coatroom underneath the main hall and the explosion, reverberating through the cavernous silence, gave violent emphasis to her accusation.

  Selina turned, and her body instinctively braced. She was confronting, she felt, not only the mother but all the others. They had charged downstairs to crowd the room behind her; she sensed them wedged into the corners and secreted among the coats on the racks. Not only the mother’s pitched anger, but their collective abuse, swelled the air.

  “Lies! Getting up in front people talking a lot of who-struck-John about how much you like them and then throwing their money back at them. Talking in parables! Using a lot of big words and still not saying why you refuse good money. Disgracing me before the world! Oh Jesus-God, an ungrateful, conniving, wuthless whelp! If I had the will of you . . .”

  Silla’s rage lit the air like a dazzling pyrotechnic display, and heightened the dark handsomeness of her face, and her fine eyes. Selina felt the old admiration, but none of the old weakening—she was no longer the child who used to succumb, without will, to that powerful onslaught.

  “Poor-great!” Silla hurled at her. “Poor-great—that’s why you refused the money. Poor-great like the father before you.”

  Finally, breathing the angered air which sparked her anger, Selina silenced her with a single vehement gesture. “All right, Mother, I’ll tell you even though I shouldn’t.” Her voice was in sober counterpoint to Silla’s. “Last week I intended to take the money. But not for what you thought. Not to save for any exalted plan you had for me. I wanted it for one reason: to go away with Clive. Yes,” she nodded as the mother lurched back as though shoved. “I never stopped seeing him even though I promised. That’s why I became so devoted to the Association . . . Why did I change my mind? I just couldn’t . . . Something happened and I couldn’t any more . . .”

  Silla stared at her as she would at a stranger who had accosted her on the street with some improbable story. Once, her hand tried to fend her off, to make her vanish. Once, she glanced at the coats as if seeking their help. Her incredulity, her helplessness was that of a child almost and, as the light ebbed in her eyes and the strong dark flush drained from her skin, she seemed to be quietly dying inside.

  “Oh Christ-God,” she cried weakly, and a dull light stirred in her eyes like the last vestige of life. “All along I did feel something was wrong. All of a sudden acting so interested in everything . . . But I din think. I din think . . .” A strangled word stained the air. “Spitework! Spitework, that’s what it tis. Because of what I did to yuh father. All these years you been waiting to get at me. Ever since the night you did call me Hitler you been waiting. You did always think I killed him. Yes. But I din do it out of hate . . .”

  For a time she pursued her tortured thoughts, unable to stop, or to wake into the world again until she had confessed. “I . . . I din mean to send him to his death—it’s just that I cun bear to see him suffering . . .”

  Remembering his ignominious death, an uncontrollable cruelty seized Selina. “You did it because you knew he was never coming back to you.”

  Silla’s eyes passed over her face to search the room, as though this were her invisible presence speaking and not Selina. After a silence filled with her guilt, she whispered, “Yes—and that’s why you did all this—lying so and licking ’bout with the crazy boy, disgracing me tonight. Spitework, ’cause you never had no uses for me, but did think the sun rose and set ’pon yuh father alone.”

  “Yes, I blamed you,” Selina said quietly. “Maybe you’re even right about why I did all this. I don’t know . . . But it’s no use talking or thinking about him any more.”

  The mother sprang forward at her irreverence. “Not think about him? How, when he was like Christ to you?”

  “He’s dead!” The piercing cry was an admission long withheld and now finally wrenched from its secret place. “And I want to forget him, so that when I go away . . .”

  “Going ’way?” And before Silla could recover Selina added with finality, “Yes, even though I didn’t take the money. I’ll find a way. And I’ll be going alone.”

  Silla—her body thrust forward as though it, as well as her mind, sought to understand this—stared at Selina’s set face. Then, groping past her, Silla found a chair, and sat numb, silent, the life shattered in her eyes and the hanging coats gathered behind her like sympathetic spectators. Finally she said, but her eyes did not clear, “Going ’way. One call sheself getting married and the other going ’way. Gone so! They ain got no more uses for me and they gone. Oh God, is this what you does get for the nine months and the pain and the long years putting bread in their mouth . . . ?”

  And although Selina listened and felt all the mother’s anguish she remained sure.

  Silla was saying numbly, “Here it tis just when I start making plans to buy a house in Crown Heights she . . .”

  “I’m not interested in houses!” Her scream burst the room and soared up to the main hall.

  The mother nodded bitterly. “Yes, you did always scorn me for trying to get little property.”

  “I don’t scorn you. Oh, I used to. But not any more. That’s what I tried to say tonight. It’s just not what I want.”

  “What it tis you want?”

  “I don’t know.” Her reply was a frail lost sound and, strangely, it seemed to assuage Silla. She scrutinized Selina’s pensive face, beginning dimly, it appeared, to understand. Her arms half lifted in a protective gesture, and her warning sounded. “Girl, do you know what it tis out there? How those white people does do yuh?”

  At her solemn nod, at the sad knowing in her eyes, Silla’s head slowly bowed.

  Quickly Selina found her coat and, putting it on, stared at the mother’s bowed face, seeing there the finely creased flesh around her eyes, the hair graying at her temples and, on her brow, the final frightening loneliness that was to be her penance. “Mother,” she said gently, “I have to disappoint you. Maybe it’s as you once said: that in making your way you always hurt someone. I don’t know . . .” Then remembering something Clive had said, she added with a thin smile, “Everybody used to call me Deighton’s Selina but they were wrong. Because you see I’m truly your child. Remember how you used to talk about how you left home and came here alone as a girl of eighteen and was your own woman? I used to love hearing that. And that’s what I want. I want it!”

  Silla’s pained eyes searched her adamant face, and after a long time a wistfulness softened her mouth. It was as if she somehow glimpsed in Selina the girl she had once been. For that moment, as the softness pervaded her and her hands lay open like a girl’s on her lap, she became the girl who had stood, alone and innocent, at the ship’s rail, watching the city rise glittering with promise from the sea.

  “G’long,” she said finally with a brusque motion. “G’long! You was always too much woman for me anyway, soul. And my own mother did say two head-bulls can’t reign in a flock. G’long!” her hand sketched a sign that was both a dismissal and a benediction. “If I din dead yet, you and your foolishness can’t kill muh now!

  Faces hung like portraits in her mind as she walked down Fulton Street: Suggie and her violated body, Miss Mary living posthumously amid her soiled sheets, Miss Thompson bearing the life-sore and enduring, Clive and his benign despair, her father beguiled by dreams even as he drowned in them, the mother hacking a way through life like a man lost in the bush.

  Those faces, those voices, those lives touching hers
had ruined her, yet, she sensed—letting her gown trail on the sidewalk—they had bequeathed her a small strength. She had only this to sustain her all the years. And it did not seem enough. It might be quickly spent and she might fall, broken before her time and still far from the center of life. For that was the quest. And a question flickered in her mind like a reflection of the lights flickering along the street: What was at the center?—the neon drake over the White Drake Bar floating, glittering, and went out——Peace, perhaps, as fleeting as that was, and the things that shaped it: love, a clearer vision, a place . . . The expectation made her shiver in the early spring night, and the nipples rose on her breasts as she emerged out of the dim thought into the Saturday-night hoot and call of the bars, into the dark faces and voices swirling through her: “Hey baby, where you going all dressed back?” a man called from the doorway of the White Drake, and suddenly remembering, she stopped in a candy store and called Rachel. As soon as she reached her Rachel said, her voice thin and a little aggrieved over the distance, “I’ve been calling you all week.”

  “I know. I just couldn’t talk to anybody.”

  “What happened in there that night?”

  “Let’s just say for now that Margaret’s mother was unpleasant.”

  “The bitch. I thought it was something like that. The bitch—spoiling everything. I ran after you but you were too fast for me.”

  “Fine, you’ve got to do something for me. Remember telling me how I could get down to the islands? Well, you’ve got to fix it for me.”

  “Just you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, I won’t ask questions. We’ll go see my aunt tomorrow. Once she sees you dance you’ll get it. And I’ll buy the champagne. Pink.”

  “What for?”

  “That’s what you’re supposed to drink before you sail. To wash the bad taste of everything out of your mouth, and to give you strength.”

  “Give us strength in our time, oh Lord,” she said, laughing sadly.

  “Amen,” Rachel said. “Amen.”

  She walked through Fulton Park. Before, on a spring night, the mothers would have been sitting there, their ample thighs spread easy under their housedresses, gossiping, while around them spring rose from the pyre of winter. Tonighth the moon discovered a ruined park which belonged to the winos who sat red-eyed and bickering all day, to the dope addicts huddled in their safe worlds and to the young bops clashing under the trees and warming the cold ground with their blood. But despite the ruin, spring stirred and, undaunted, arrayed the trees, hung its mist curtain high and, despite the wine-stench, sweetened the air. Selina strolled, unafraid, through the mist and lamplight, pausing at the pavilion to listen, with a dull desolation—to the lovers murmuring in the shadows.

  Spread wide beyond were the ravaged brownstones, and she wandered there, remembering how, in the past, those houses would have been drawn within the darkness of themselves by this time, and the streets empty and echoing like streets at dawn. Now, the roomers’ tangled lives spilled out the open windows, and the staccato beat of Spanish voices, the frenzied sensuous music joined the warm canorous Negro sounds to glut the air. As she passed, a man—silhouetted against a room where everything seemed poised for flight—burst into a fiercely sad song in Spanish.

  The song led her to a vast waste—an area where blocks of brownstones had been blasted to make way for a city project. A solitary wall stood perversely amid the rubble, a stoop still imposed its massive grandeur, a carved oak staircase led only to the night sky. The spring wind, moaning over the emptiness, shifted the dust and bore up the odor of crushed brick and plaster, the dank exhalations from the cellars, while the moonlight played over the heaped rubble in a fretwork of light and shadow, and glinted with cold iridescence on the splintered glass.

  On the far perimeter of the plain, the new city houses were already up and occupied. As Selina stared at those monolithic shapes they seemed to draw near, the lighted windows spangling the sky like a new constellation. She imagined she heard footsteps ringing hollow in the concrete halls, the garbled symphony of radios and televisions, children crying in close rooms: life moving in an oppressive round within those uniformly painted walls.

  The project receded and she was again the sole survivor amid the wreckage. And suddenly she turned away, unable to look any longer. For it was like seeing the bodies of all the people she had ever known broken, all the familiar voices that had ever sounded in those high-ceilinged rooms shattered—and the pieces piled into this giant cairn of stone and silence. She wanted, suddenly, to leave something with them. But she had nothing. She had left the mother and the meeting hall wearing only the gown and her spring coat. Then she remembered the two silver bangles she had always worn. She pushed up her coat sleeve and stretched one until it passed over her wrist, and, without turning, hurled it high over her shoulder. The bangle rose behind her, a bit of silver against the moon, then curved swiftly downward and struck a stone. A frail sound in that utter silence.