Brown Girl, Brownstones

by Paule Marshall

  “But look at he. Tha’s one man don know his own mind. He’s always looking for something big and praying hard not to find it.”

  SILLA

  Downstairs in the master bedroom, Deighton heard the rasping complaint of the pipes and muttered, “These old houses is more trouble than profit.”

  He was alone, dressing by the fragile light of a pink-shaded lamp on the dresser while the shadows loomed like silent onlookers around him. His hands, very thin but strong and very dark, caressed a new silk undershirt which he had just taken from its wrapping. Deighton loved the feel of silk next to his skin, and he smiled now as he slipped on the new shirt and the silk passed in a cool caress over his face and neck.

  Dressing for him was always a pleasurable ritual. Tonight, as usual, he carefully inspected the crease in his trousers, brushed his coarse hair till it lay flat, and puzzled over the many pairs of shoes in his closet before he chose a new pair of white and brown spectators. Occasionally he paused and cocked his head, smiling as though he heard an imperceptible song welling out of the shadows. He was through finally, and standing for that last moment in front of the mirror, he looked very young and irresponsible with his shirt opened at the neck and the triangle of dark flesh showing.

  Outside, in the hall, the smell of Suggie’s codfish hung in a dead weight, and he hurried downstairs, afraid that the smell would insinuate itself into his clothes and he would carry it with him all night as the undisputable sign that he was Barbadian and a foreigner. In the basement he paused uneasily at the kitchen door, shaken as always by the stark light there, the antiseptic white furniture and enameled white walls. The room seemed a strange unfeeling world which continually challenged him to deal with it, to impose himself somehow on its whiteness.

  His wife stood easily amid the whiteness, at the sink, in the relaxed, unself-conscious pose of someone alone. He glimpsed her face in the mirror above the sink: the resolute mouth, the broad nose, the bold yet well-molded contours of the bones under her deeply browned skin—and wished that there was not this angularity about her. Then he thought of how cool her skin would be despite the heat and his fingers suddenly ached for that touch. He thought of the narrow void between her legs which was still like a young girl’s even after the three children, and desire quickly surged in him. Perhaps, tonight, with the heat and the thick night it would be right again. He would open the door between their bedroom and the sun parlor so that they could see the sky with its low stars from the bed. He might find the words tonight to bring trust again to her eyes; his hands might arouse that full and awesome passion they once had . . .

  “I tell yuh, that girl got the house stink down with codfish,” he said.

  He saw her now as she was whenever he was near, with her clenched back and wary eyes warding him off. Yet, when she answered her voice was friendly. “Like codfish does smell that sweet! She got to let the world and it wife know she ain long off the boat. Some these Bajan does come to this man country and get on worse than they did home. And now the so-called boy friend just gone up and the bed gon be sounding bruggadung-bruggadung all night through the whole house.”

  He drew nearer, laughing. “Remember that indifferent woman next door years back in South Brooklyn who ate codfish for breakfast, lunch and supper?”

  Her laughter joined his as she flung her head back in a lovely free gesture. “And had ’nough money up in a bank. That’s a Bajan for you.”

  Feeling this softness in her tonight he wanted to tell her of the land. He hesitated and his indecision charged the room. She turned, questioning, and saw the shirt opened casually at his throat, the dapper spectator shoes—and as her eyes slowly traveled up to his face again they revealed a tangle of emotions. A helpless admiration. A burst of passion stronger than his even. A possessiveness that reached out to claim him despite all. But at the same time her resentment shaded all this from him, and he saw only her eyes hardening and her face shutting like a door slammed on him.

  He buttoned the shirt to the top. “I thought I’d catch little air on the avenue,” and the words sounded lame and incriminating in the room’s hostile whiteness. He breathed deep, “Silla . . .” and her name rushed out with his exhaled breath. This time her reply was to plunge her hand into the chicken she was cleaning and with one savage wrench lay the viscid clay-yellow entrails into the sink.

  “Silla . . . where Selina?”

  “Out playing with Beryl Challenor,” she flung at him irritably.

  “I might of think that when Ina’s sick you could let her go to the movies with Beryl.”

  “Not two foot without Ina. Who knows what to happen to she out there and she like a tearcat. You does think she’s a boy”—she turned accusingly—“always filling her head with foolishness and her guts with Hooton. You like you does forget the boy dead and she ain he.”

  “Oh Christ-Jesus, woman, why reef up that?” He flung up his hand and turned from the room.

  “Wait!” Her voice impaled him. “You put aside anything this week toward the down payment on the house?”

  “Not penny one!” he cried and wanted to wind his arms tight around his head to shut out her voice, wanted suddenly to strike her into silence.

  Silla’s wrath broke and she whirled from the sink, her voice flailing across the kitchen. “You mean it all gone on fancy silk shirt and shoes and caterwauling with your concubine.”

  He shrugged at the old accusation. “You’s God; you must know.”

  Suddenly her anger was tempered by bewilderment. “But be-Jesus-Christ, what kind of man is you, nuh?” She jerked her head away and seemed to address someone else in the room, “But what kind of man he is, nuh? Here every Bajan is saving if it’s only a dollar a week and buying house and he wun save a penny. He ain got nothing and ain looking to get nothing . . .”

  “How you mean I ain got nothing,” he flared, “I got plenty. I ain like wunna Bajan that come here hungry from down some gully or up some hill behind God back and desperate now . . . I got plenty!”

  “You ain got a pot to piss in.”

  “I got land.”

  “Land?”

  “Land.”

  “What you talking ’bout?”

  “Piece of ground home.”

  “You lie.”

  “I hear today self. Piece of ground muh sister that dead left me.”

  “You lie.”

  “I lie then.” He turned to leave.

  “Wait, nuh. Land, in truth?” she whispered.

  “The letter in my pocket.” And in the awed silence he slowly took it out and ceremoniously spread it on the table. “Come,” he beckoned her, smiling. “Come look Silla-gal, since you’s such a doubting Thomas.”

  She drew near, treading cautiously, chicken feathers clenched in her hand. She did not come up to the table but leaned in and read it from a distance.

  As she read Deighton expounded, “Yes, a good piece of ground that you can throw down I-don-know-what and it would grow . . .”

  “How much ground?” She lifted incredulous eyes to him.

  “Two acres almost. A lot in a place that’s only 166 square miles—and a lot for a colored man to own in a place where the white man own everything.”

  “What it worth?”

  “What I care—I ain selling. Eight hundred, I guess.”

  “Eight hundred . . . ?” Her voice was a choked whisper, her mouth parted in bewilderment. “It can’t be true. Eight hundred . . .”

  “Land, Silla-gal, not money, and mine to do what I please with,” he shouted and rapped his chest.

  Still she remained dazed and disbelieving. “It can’t be true. This is all some forge up something.”

  “All right, I lying then,” he cried, suddenly angry, and snatched up the letter, shouting over his shoulder as he left her stunned and open-mouthed in the glaring white kitchen, “You’s God; you must know.”

  After he had slammed the heavy iron-grille door he stood there, breathing angrily, his elation gone, his trium
ph undermined. She had ruined it all with her doubting. For what was the land, what did it mean if she did not believe him? He wanted to return and, gripping her arm, force her to read it until she believed . . .

  Then, as though to mock him further, he heard Ina and her friends laughing from the stoop above, and he turned, peering through the stone balusters. “Miss Ina, what you getting on so foolish for?” he cried.

  The laughter ceased and Ina started. Quickly she drew apart from the other girls and smoothed her dress down over her knees. She said nothing but hurt filmed her eyes.

  He looked off, ashamed, disturbed too by something he always sensed in his daughter but could not define. She had been conceived in love, coming swiftly in the first year of their marriage, and she seemed to reflect the love they had lost. It had endowed her with a graceful body and quiet eyes and a mild manner. She was lovely as it had been lovely, and fragile as it had been found to be fragile. And there was something else in her that puzzled him. In those eyes that were so quick to widen with hurt, in the submissive drop of her head he could trace his mother. She had passed on that look through him to Ina to remind him of what he had done to her. How often had he stood before her, the Singer sewing machine between them and the golden word “Singer” gleaming in the small dark house, and seen that same wide hurt in her eyes, seen her head bow in that same quiet willingness to suffer. Peering at Ina through the stone balusters he remembered his mother and guilt almost choked him, then Silla and love lost over the years and regret dried his mouth.

  “Come, Miss Ina, here’s some change for candy. And yuh best get off the cold stone before it give you more cold,” he said tenderly.

  “It’s summer and the stone isn’t cold,” she said, taking a nickel. “Besides, I wasn’t sick with a cold.”

  She did not laugh but the others did, and the girlish laughter rose like a shrill coda in the dusk, driving him toward Fulton Street . . .

  “Poor Thompson. Somebody mussa put she so that she does break down work to support somebody else’s wild-dog puppies, instead of taking care of that life-sore ’pon she foot.”

  SILLA

  Through the smoke-blurred windows of the beauty shop, Miss Thompson glimpsed him passing and noted, “There goes Selina’s daddy,” and remembered Selina standing in the doorway that afternoon with the sun skimming her uncombed hair. Her last customer was gone and she sat on a high stool in her booth, painting her nails an almost fulgent red and watching the street above the low partition, her followed face serene beneath her graying hair, her sere, elongated body poised solemnly on the stool like an ancient wood statue. Around her the talk and laughter spiraled up with the smoke, water gushed in the basins, the electric driers rasped loud—and these sounds along with the smell of singed hair set the rhythm and tone of the shop. Finished, Miss Thompson blew dry her nails, admiring them coquettishly. She eased down from the stool, and as she put her frail weight on her legs, the left one buckled and she crashed against the table.

  “Who you fighting in there, Miss Thompson?” someone called.

  “Ain’t no fight, honey,” she said, her pale brown skin suddenly gray with pain. “Just this old foot. I gotta go see about this old foot soon . . .” She fussed as she walked, dragging the foot slightly, through the tumult and smoke to the bathroom.

  It was no more than a closet, and ducking down, Miss Thompson squeezed her lean frame between the basin and toilet and sat on the covered bowl, propping her long left leg against the door. Very carefully she eased off her stocking and then the bandage. There was an ugly unhealed ulcer, yawning like a small crater on the instep of her foot, with a hard crust, pale center and slightly fetid odor. She sighed as she dressed it. This done, she leaned back and, for the first time in the twenty-four hours since she had been up, permitted herself to feel tired. Fatigue suddenly hummed in her ears and seeped like a narcotic through her blood.

  Her work day had begun at nine o’clock last night in the office building where she worked as a cleaning woman. At dawn she had eaten in an all-night diner, dozing over her coffee; then, as the morning cleared, she had come to the beauty parlor. Time, there, was measured by the customers filing in and out the booth who, shielded in its semi-privacy, confessed their troubles. Miss Thompson’s gaunt face would become almost distorted with compassion as they spoke; she murmured always: “It’s the truth, honey ... ,” “You telling me . . . ,” and all the while her deft hands wielded the smoking comb, transforming their coarse hair into shiny-black limpness. Time was the fried-fish sandwiches and Pepsi-Colas throughout the day, the number runner sauntering in:

  “What’s good today, Long John?”

  “Everything’s good, Miss Thompson,” and the white salesmen with their battered suitcases and wet eyes who always paused as they entered, momentarily overcome by the smoke and noise and gleaming dark faces. Every Saturday Miss Thompson bought something for the three small girls of the woman with whom she had roomed for years, her dull eyes becoming luminous as she chose the skirt or dress.

  Now that the day was almost over it seemed unreal—as though not she but someone with more endurance had lived it. Only her total tiredness convinced her. Slowly she struggled up and changed from the soiled uniform into a dark shapeless dress that fell to her ankles.

  “Going home already, Miss Thompson?” one of the beauticians called as she passed.

  “Yes indeed, honey,” she nodded absently, “I done worked round the clock, did more work in twenty-four hours than these good-timing niggers out here on Fulton Street done for the year, and I’m headed for my bed . . .”

  “Of all things upon the earth that bleed and grow, a herb most bruised is woman.”

  As Miss Thompson trudged down Fulton Street looking, in her severe black dress, like one of the saved sisters who gathered in the store-front churches each night sobbing and shouting for Jesus, Silla sat in the grave house beyond the park, her stunned eyes encountering nothing, her hands still clutching the chicken feathers.

  “But look how trouble does come,” she whispered, straining forward as though addressing some specter-shape. “Look how it does come . . . What is it,” she demanded with sudden fierceness, “that does give what little luck there is to fools . . . ? Not a soul ever give me nothing a-tall, a-tall. I always had to make my own luck. And look at he! Somebody dead so and he got ground so. Got land now!” She broke off and slowly lapsed into a dull bewilderment. Her entire body gave way to it so that she seemed either drunk or drugged or so tired that she had fallen into a sodden sleep. After a long time, the chicken feathers slowly wafted from her limp hand, and the silence when they settled was like the kitchen, sterile and rigid and splintered with white light.

  She remained ike this until a voice blustered through the hall and a round, almost white face emerged from the darkness there like a moon from behind a rack of dark clouds. Virgie Farnum entered the kitchen, bearing her swollen stomach with a slightly startled expression—as though it was an enormous ball which someone had shoved in her hands and left her holding.

  “Silla-gal, you still cleaning chicken and night near falling?” her voice boomed in the quietness. “How?”

  “I here, soul,” Silla said listlessly. “Sitting and thinking hard-hard.” She surveyed Virgie with amusement and concern, “But how, Virgie?”

  “Suffering.”

  “No doubt. You like you gon bring the child before the night out. But look at you,” she said with tender disapproval. “You’s a disgrace to come tumbling big so soon after the last one.”

  “C’dear, what I must do? It’s the Lord will.”

  “What Lord will?” Silla sucked her teeth in disgust. “Woman, you might go hide yourself. These ain ancient days. This ain home that you got to be always breeding like a sow. Go to some doctor and get something ’cause these Bajan men will wear you out making children and the blasted children ain nothing but a keepback. You don see the white people having no lot.”

  “I know, soul.” Virgie’s pale
skin flushed. “And this one’s the worse. The little demon does get on inside me like it got nettle.”

  “It’s a girl-child. They does do so. Both these I got did kick like horses inside me. But the boy, God rest him in his grave, did lay easy-easy inside me. Y’know,” she said wistfully, her hand groping for Virgie’s as the memory of him softened her face, “he was a child who look like he never knew a sick day. But the heart wasn’t good.” Her hand trailed from Virgie’s. “The heart wasn’t good.”

  “I know, soul. A boy-child is a hard thing to raise.”

  “And then the wuthless father had to take him out in a piece of old car and shake up his insides so it near kill him . . .”

  “Silla, hush. It don do no good to reef up.”

  “Reef up? Virgie, I has never forgot,” she said solemnly. Virgie’s gray eyes flitted uneasily over Silla’s numb face. A pain struck and she clutched her stomach, the blood draining from her thin lips and the broad nose spread across her face as the one sign of her scant Negro blood. “Oh there it go, the little whelp lan’ing me hell inside and gon land me more outside.”

  There was no response from Silla, but although her eyes remained abstracted she took up a newspaper from the table and carefully fashioned two fans and handed one to Virgie. Slowly the blood filtered back to Virgie’s skin as she fanned. She tucked the dress under her stomach and called loudly, “Where he is?”

  “Who?” Silla lifted remote eyes.

  “The beautiful-ugly Deighton. Upstairs?”

  “Upstairs, what! You know every Sat’day he does run birdspeed to the concubine to lick out what’s left from his pay.”

  “But Deighton oughta stop.” Virgie roared her disapproval. “Nobody din say he can’t have the hot-ass woman but, c’dear, his own got to come first.”