Brown Girl, Brownstones

by Paule Marshall

  “When?”

  “Soon as I catch my hand here. You see this?” He held up the accounting manual. “This gon do it. I gon breeze through this course ’cause I was always good in figures. I ain even gon bother my head with all this preliminary work they sending now.” He tossed aside the manual. “I gon wait till they send the real facts and study them. Then a job making decent money and we gone.”

  “Taking me?”

  “How you mean! And we gon live in style, mahn. No little board and shingle house with a shed roof to cook in. We gon have the best now.” He waved the letter he had been reading, then as quickly dropped it, turning suspiciously to the door. “Where yuh sister?”

  “Downstairs, I think.”

  “You sure? ’Cause I thought I did hear somebody outside . . . You know how she does sneak ’bout listening to what we say and then lick she mouth to your mother.”

  “She’s supposed to be sick and sleeping.”

  Reassured, he held up the letter again. “You see this? Don’t broadcast it to the Sammy-cow-and-Duppy but my sister that just dead leave me piece of ground. Now how’s that for news?” His teeth flashed in a strong smile. “Now let these bad-minded Bajan here talk my name ’cause I only leasing this house while they buying theirs. One thing I got good land home!”

  For a moment she did not understand. From his smile and the way his eyes glowed she knew that it was important. She should have leaped up and pirouetted and joined his happiness. But a strange uneasiness kept her seated with her knees drawn tight against her chest. She asked cautiously, “You mean we’re rich?”

  “We ain rich but we got land.”

  “Is it a lot?”

  “Two acres almost. I know the piece of ground good. You could throw down I-don-know-what on it and it would grow. And we gon have a house there—just like the white people own. A house to end all house!”

  “Are you gonna tell Mother?”

  His smile faltered and failed; his eyes closed in a kind of weariness. “How you mean! I got to tell she, nuh.”

  “Whaddya think she’s gonna say?”

  “How I could know? Years back I could tell but not any more.”

  She turned away from the pain darkening his eyes.

  “Ah come nuh!” he cried after a long pause. “What I frighten for? It my piece of ground, ain it? And I can do what I please with it. So come, lady-folks, let we celebrate with something from the candy store . . .”

  “Hootons!”

  He brought the coins from his pocket. “I tell you, this Hooton is the one thing you children here have that I wish we did have when we was boys coming up.”

  She laughed and shoved the coins around in his palm until she found a nickel. With her hand still in his, she suddenly sat on the bed and, leaning close, whispered, “Look, I know you told me not to tell the Sammy-cow-and-Duppy about the land, but might I tell Beryl since she’s my best friend? I’ll make her swear and hope to die not to tell anyone . . .”

  “Tell she,” he said tenderly and closed his fist tight around her hand. “Your mother will know soon and then the world and it wife gon know.” He freed her and swiftly she was gone, through the master bedroom, hurtling through the hall, her arms pumping, stopping only on the stoop to pull her socks out of the backs of her sneakers.

  Chauncey Street languished in the afternoon heat, and across from it Fulton Park rose in a cool green wall. After the house, Selina loved the park. The thick trees, the grass—shrill-green in the sun—the statue of Robert Fulton and the pavilion where the lovers met and murmured at night formed, for her, the perfect boundary for her world; the park was the fitting buffer between Chauncey Street’s gentility and Fulton Street’s raucousness.

  The sun was always loud on Fulton Street. It hung low and dead to the pavement, searing the trolley tracks and store windows, bearing down until the street spun helplessly in an eddy of cars, voices, neon signs and trolleys. Selina responded to the turbulence, rushing and leaping in a dark streak through the crowd. Passing the beauty parlor she saw the new tenant Suggie and turned in.

  Suggie Skeete’s full-fleshed legs and arms, her languorous pose, all the liquid roundness of her body under the sheer summer dress hinted that love, its rituals and its passion, was her domain. As Selina’s shadow slanted across her she looked up, greeting her with a laugh murmurous as water. “Wha’lah, wha’lah, Selina? But where you always running to with yuh head down like a goat when it ready to butt? Look the clothes in strings like you belong to some string band society. The eyes wild like a tearcat. The hair like it curse comb, damn oil and blast the hairdresser. Come, let Miss Thompson slap the hot comb in it.”

  “Not me, Miss Suggie. I’d never get my hair done in this heat.”

  “Well you best put a comb to it before your mother come and put that mouth of hers ’pon you.”

  “Selina?” A voice hurdled above the tangled voices and the angry clicking of the hot curling tongs inside the shop.

  “Yes, Miss Thompson, it’s me.”

  A tall drawn woman—a faded brown in color and no longer young—came from behind the partition, whirling a smoking curling tong in one thin hand and flicking perspiration from her face with the other. The soiled nurse’s uniform fell straight down her fleshless body, hiding the bones jutting under the skin. Her long lean shadow cut into the sunlight and brought a sudden darkness into the waiting room. Amidst the noise, she and Selina shared a quiet tender smile.

  “I’m on my way to the candy store,” she said softly. “You want me to bring you a Pepsi?”

  “No thanks, honey. Just had one. That damn Pepsi don’t do nothing but fill me with gas anyways. What I needs . . .” She thought a moment, her sunken eyes with the circles of age and weariness under them turned toward the sun in the doorway. “What I needs is to be sitting out in the park with them cool breezes blowing over me. That’s what I needs. One of them c-o-o-l breezes. Then I’d feel human instead of like some old mule. That’s all I needs,” she repeated, sighing and turning away, “and it don’t cost nothing and don’t gimme no gas . . .”

  On her way back through the park, Selina heard her name rising in a strident chant behind. Turning, she saw the girls waving their bright movie handbills and recognized her best friend Beryl. She was suddenly jealous of the others for the hours they had spent with her in the dark theater. She gave them a disinterested wave and hurried on.

  “You missed the best Tarzan chapter today, Selina,” one shouted. “Tarzan was captured and he . . .”

  “I’m bored with Tarzan,” she cried and wanted to shout that she would be leaving them soon to live in a big house in a sweet land and that they would miss her. She walked faster.

  At the park gate Beryl caught up with her. “I knew you’d be mad. I was gonna come and ask your mother if you could go but I knew she’d of said no. And I knew you’d be mad.”

  Something in Beryl always soothed her and destroyed her anger. Perhaps it was the way Beryl’s thick braids rested quietly on her shoulders or the way her tiny breasts nudged her middy blouse. They made Selina shy, those breasts, and ashamed of her own shapelessness. “I’m not mad.”

  “Yes you are. But I didn’t have any fun today without you. And Tarzan is boring because he always escapes. Today he . . .”

  As she talked Selina watched the shifting pattern of sun and shade on her face. She wished suddenly that her eyes could pierce Beryl’s skin and roam inside her. What would Beryl be like inside? Like a small well-lighted room with the furniture neatly arranged around it.

  “You’re not listening.”

  “I was too. Look, I gotta give my father these Hootons. You want one?”

  “No, it’s too hot for chocolate. Can you come out later?”

  “Maybe, if you come ask my mother. Oh, do come, I’ve got something to tell you.” She grabbed her arm, remembering, and felt Beryl’s warmth rush into her. “Something very, very special. Come later and ask,” she shouted, running up the stoop.

 
; She found her father asleep, seduced like her sister and the old woman upstairs by the siren call of the afternoon. He still held the letter, and she slipped it away and placed it on the pillow beside his face. Downstairs she put his share of the candy in the icebox, then went up to the parlor and sat in the window seat behind the curtains. She ate slowly, melting the chocolate between her hands and then carefully licking it up from each palm and finger. As it slipped warmly down, her mind filled with warm thoughts of the secret she would share with Beryl. When she finished she watched a train of ants move along the ledge and wondered whether to kill them and make it rain . . .

  She had decided to kill them when she sensed the mother, and her hand paused mid-air. It was strange how Selina always sensed her. Even before she looked up and over to the park she knew that she would see the mother there striding home under the trees.

  Silla Boyce brought the theme of winter into the park with her dark dress amid the summer green and the bright-figured house-dresses of the women lounging on the benches there. Not only that, every line of her strong-made body seemed to reprimand the women for their idleness and the park for its senseless summer display. Her lips, set in a permanent protest against life, implied that there was no time for gaiety. And the park, the women, the sun even gave way to her dark force; the flushed summer colors ran together and faded as she passed.

  There was something else today in the angle of her head that added to Selina’s uneasiness. It was as though the mother knew all that had transpired in the house since morning—her father’s idleness, her quarrel with Ina, the news of the land—and was coming to chastise them all. Selina’s eyes dropped to the mother’s legs, and with drawn breath she sought the meaning in that purposeful stride. Suddenly in one swift pure movement she was in front of the mirror, struggling out of her shorts and tugging at her matted braids.

  II

  “That concubine don know shame. Here it tis she just come to this man country and every time you look she got a different man ringing down the bell . . .”

  SILLA

  As the late summer sunset flamed above the brownstones Suggie Skeete prepared her meal of cuckoo. In the solemn pose of a priest preparing the sacrament, she stood at the stove in the cramped kitchen, slowly pouring yellow corn meal into a pot of simmering okra and water. Then with a wooden spatula she blended the meal and okra water, adding more water as the meal thickened. Soon steam flew up in little puffs from the turning meal, and her stroke quickened until perspiration broke in bright nodes on her brow and the flesh under her arm shuddered. When the corn meal was done she lopped it into a bowl lined with butter and slapped the bowl between her hands until the cuckoo—smooth and glistening with butter, studded pink and green from the okra, with steam rising from its dome—resembled a small speckled sun. Over this she poured a thin gravy of flaked, salt codfish.

  She ate sitting on the edge of the bed, and from the way she held the bowl in her palm and solemnly scooped up the food she might have been home in Barbados, eating in the doorway of the small house perched like a forlorn bird on the hillside. She could see the yam patch from there and the mango tree with its long leaves weighted down by the dusk, and beyond, all down the soft-sloping hills, a susurrant sea of sugar cane. As she ate, lizards sidled under the dry leaves and her goat knocked its dainty legs against the paling. When she finished, something openly voluptuous crept into her pose. With a languorous gaze she watched the darkness race over the cane; her hands rested on the inside of her open thighs. Her pose was so natural that it was innocent. In those moments she became more than just a peasant girl on an obscure island but every woman who gives herself without guile and with a full free passion . . .

  The empty bowl in her hand, she stared now at the harsh enamel blue walls of her crowded room—and there was no repose in her face or figure, only wistfulness. Sighing, she cleaned the dishes and dressed, then sat at a vanity table, her wide red skirt falling like red-glazed water from her hips. Dozens of perfume bottles covered the entire vanity—all shapes and sizes of bottles waited there, cool glass without, warm amber perfumes within. Their contents had never been sampled. Suggie’s hands would flit reverently over them and occasionally she would pick one up, unscrew the top a little and pass it slowly under her nose, repeating this until her eyelids drooped and the earrings under her thick hair flashed with amber tints as her body swayed.

  Every Saturday, her day off, she waited this way for a lover, knowing that she could not endure the next week without having someone tonight on the noisy bed. Tomorrow, early, she would return to the country, to the sleeping-in job and the insolence of white children, to the lonely room under the high roof . . .

  The bell rang and she rose, the dress swishing around her knees as she crossed the room. In the hall, her perfumes joined the smell of the house, that aged odor of carpets and dust, and flowers pressed for years in a book. As she stepped onto the landing she almost stumbled over Selina.

  “Hey-hey! Selina, why you always draw up in this hall frightening people?”

  Selina, with fresh braids and in a dress with a matching hair ribbon, drew up her legs and leaned away from her, disturbed by the pagan theme of her red dress and glinting earrings.

  “I’m waiting for Beryl to come ask my mother if I can go out.”

  “Well, I hope to God she come ’cause you’s like some duppy out here. You know what people gon say when they see you always draw up in some dark place . . .”

  “I don’t care what they say.”

  “. . . they gon say you love darkness ’cause your deeds is evil!”

  Slowly Selina lifted her head, and when her eyes met Suggie’s they were wide with knowing. Pointing downstairs she said, “I bet you and him be in the dark.”

  “C’dear, but look at my crosses!” Suggie’s laugh rippled the air and she bent, brushing her lips across Selina’s cheek. “You’s a wicked something, in truth.” Laughing, she continued downstairs and opened the thick door with its stained-glass panels. She greeted the man with a light laugh and led him up the stairs, past Selina, into the enameled blue room . . .

  “But look at she! She’s nothing but a living dead. She been down here since they said ‘Come let us make woman.’ She might of pass on and pass away and make room in the world for somebody else.”

  SILLA

  As Suggie’s door closed, the last remnant of the sunset faded and dusk, in a dark swollen cloud, moved across the sky. Yet, next door in Miss Mary’s rooms, the light remained a tarnished dust-yellow. It was always like this. For time, in these rooms, and the seasons had long been crowded out by furniture piled under gray sheets and cracked paintings stacked on the floor, by boxes of old clothes and delft and the drawn green shades of the past.

  In the midst of this dust and clutter Miss Mary’s bed reared like a grim rock. She lay there, surrounded by her legacies, and holding firm to the thin rotted thread of her life. Her face was as yellowed with age as the air, her eyes smeared with the same stale light. She raised up, painfully trying to pull the sheet over her legs with their broken veins, over her sere body, and fell back, unsuccessful, and her hands, warped with arthritis, struck the air. After a time, her gaze traveled the room, lingering on each relic, and the old dream began. Today, out of the heaped memories, she selected the days of dying: the master lying in state in the parlor . . . the letter announcing her lover’s death in the 1904 war even as his child swelled her stomach . . . her shame as she faced the mistress . . . the great war and the young master dying . . . the joyless years afterward and the mistress slowly wasting . . . and after her death the daughters fleeing the house as though they hated it, leaving behind the rooms of furniture downstairs, and leaving her behind with her daughter.

  Suddenly her daughter, a woman now, entered, and her voice sounded high and querulous in the room. “I wish they’d keep that brat downstairs where she belongs. She’s enough to scare you silly sitting out there on the landing.”

  The woman, Maritze, stood at
the door, her dull eyes and slack body in keeping with the room. “You sleeping, Ma?”

  The comforting past was gone and the old woman cried irritably, “And did you ever see anybody sleeping with their eyes open excepting they was dead? I was thinking, that’s what, thinking of the times I could get about and look after meself and not have to depend on the likes of you.”

  Maritze did not respond. Indeed, there seemed to be nothing inside her to respond. She was drained, it seemed, of all emotion. “I went to mass after work,” she said listlessly, unpinning her hat. “It’s so cool in church.”

  “You and mass. Oh Blessed Mother, as if that was going to help her!” she said to a statue of the Virgin on the mantel, its head shrouded in dust and the arms extended in mute invitation.

  “I’ll fix something light as it’s Saturday and so hot.”

  “Didja say it was Saturday now?” Miss Mary suddenly brightened. “I always cooked light on a Saturday too in the summer. For the mistress and the girls, that is. Not for the master though. Oh no! He’d say Mary . . .” Slowly her eyes clouded over as once again she dredged up the memories. Her voice trailed Maritze while she changed and began preparing dinner.

  “. . . after dinner they’d sit out under them pear trees in back watching the sun go down . . .” Her voice filled the kitchen, cracked and strangled and relentless. Gradually a little angry color slid under Maritze’s pallor and her hands trembled as she turned on the faucet. There was a rusty cough and the water stopped as somewhere downstairs someone also turned on a faucet.

  “Aye, there it goes again . . .” the old woman called gaily. “Turn it off till they finish. The master always said we needed new pipes. It’s like only the other day he said . . .”

  Suddenly Maritze opened the tap wider and the pipes protested with a loud and ominous vibration that shook the sink. Still she pressed, her body heaving strangely, her hair clinging in damp strands to her forehead, the blood beating visibly at her temples. As the noise rose, her mother pursued the past in an even louder voice and Maritze whispered savagely, bearing down on the tap, “I don’t want to hear about those people . . . I don’t want to hear . . .”