Brown Girl, Brownstones

by Paule Marshall

  “Ah Virgie, you does talk sense. Who in the bloody hell care how many women he got. Those women ain got nothing but a man using them. But his own got to come first.” And then remembering the land, she added bitterly, “Yes, they gon be spreeing tonight over the land.”

  “Wha’? Wha’ land?” Virgie’s body slumped over her huge stomach, straightened with interest. “Wha’ land?”

  “He got piece of ground home, soul.”

  “Deighton? Who give he?”

  “The schoolteacher sister that dead left him.”

  “How much ground?”

  “Near two acres. A good piece of ground, he say.”

  “But hey-hey!” Amazement struck Virgie’s broad features. “That Deighton is a lucky something, nuh?”

  “In truth.” The same amazement scored Silla’s voice. “That’s what I was thinking when you came. How there don seem to be no plan a-tall, a-tall to this life. How things just happen and don happen for no good reason. I tell you, it’s like God is sleeping.”

  “What he gon do with it?”

  “Soul, I don know.”

  “You don know?” Virgie struggled up, incredulous, the blood surging to her face. “You don know . . . Don be a blasted idiot woman,” she roared. “Make him sell it!”

  “He already say he not selling.”

  “Don mind he!” She dismissed him with a violent gesture. “Make him! The money would be the down payment on this house.”

  “How I could make him?” Silla cried despairingly. “For years now I been trying to put little ambition in that man but he ain interested in making a head-way. He’s always half-studying some foolishness that don pan out. Years back it was the car. He was gon be all this mechanic till he lose interest. Then it was radio repairing and radio guts spill all over the house and he still cun fix one. Now he start up with figures . . . I tell you I getting so I can’t bear the sight of him. I does get a bad feel when he come muching me up ’pon a night. Virgie,” she whispered, her eyes narrowing menacingly, “I feel I could do cruel things to the man.”

  Her words hung solid and foreboding in the air and for a moment they both paused, uneasy, and then Virgie said softly, “No soul, it don does make good living like that. But you can’t tell me nothing ’bout Deighton Boyce. Don forget I raise near that man. My mother and his was like so!” She held up two fingers twisted around each other. “And he used to land it to the mother even worse. And Ianthe Boyce was a refine somebody. A seamstress, if you please. Never a curse word cross that woman mouth. But she was foolish ’cause she did think the sun rise and set ’pon Deighton one, ’cause he was the last and the only boy. That woman raise him and the two girls without a father—’cause the father did run off to Cuba the week before Deighton born. That boy had some of everything coming up. Always with shoe ’pon his foot and white shirt. Ianthe spend money she din have sending him to big Harrison College so he could be a schoolmaster like the two sisters. She used to say that if she had the money she would send him to England-self to be some big doctor and thing . . .” Her voice soared, staining the kitchen with its violent color; her fan rattled the air, and each time the child kicked her skin blanched.

  “And what she get for it? I know he land she in she grave with the lot of worry and aggravation. She cun do nothing with him. If he din had every hot-ass girl ’bout the place he din have one. He was always putting himself up in the face of the big white people in town asking for some big job—and they would chuck him out fast enough. He was always dressing up like white people. Then after the mother die he pick up and went to Cuba—just like the fatha before him—and then jump ship into this country. And now he got land.” The fan fell silent at this and she gazed across at Silla, awed again. “But Silla, what you gon do?”

  “I don know, soul. I don know. But mark muh words, I ain gon rest good till I do something.”

  They were silent after this, but her words remained, tumescent and threatening, between them.

  III

  “In the dark, it’s just you and me,

  Not a sound, there’s not one sigh;

  Just the beat of my poor heart

  In the dark . . .”

  ROMANCE IN THE DARK—A BLUES

  The summer night, starless and without a moon, was a dark cloak flung wide over Chauncey Street. Under its weight the trees met overhead to form an endless echoing arcade, and the tall lamps hidden in the leaves cast a restless design of light on the sidewalk. Under the enveloping night the brownstones reared like a fortress wall guarding a city, and the lighted windows were like flares set into its side.

  Behind one of those lighted windows Suggie and the man sat drinking rum and talking. “C’dear, there’s nothing like good Bajan rum,” she said, filling their glasses again.

  “How yuh mean!” the man said, and they drank, tilting their heads and throwing the rum over their tongues in a deft motion. As it seared their throats and coiled hot in their stomachs, they fell silent. The man, dull-black and stocky with slow gestures and a hesitant look that declared he had not long come from “home,” thoughtfully turned the glass in his strong stiff hands and finally said, his eyes abstracted, “I wus just thinking how different drinking here is to home. Here people does mostly take a drink ’pon an evening. But home anytime is a good time to fire one. Drinking while the sun hot-hot now!” He glanced up, smiling. “I tell yuh, sometime yuh wun know whether it was the sun or the rum or both that had yuh feeling so sweet.”

  She smiled, understanding. Her eyes wistfully sought the bottle of rum on the low table between them, seeing in it a cane field at night with the canes rising and plunging in the wind, hearing again the ecstatic moan of the lover inside her. Suddenly her eyes held the man’s in a look which confessed that they had passed beyond the talk and drinking, that it was night now and her body was warm and impatient under the red dress . . .

  They met in the narrow space between their chairs and Suggie lifted her face for his kiss with the trust of a child. They kissed deeply for a long time, searchingly, as though sounding the depth of passion in each other. Then, their mouths together still, the man carefully undid her buttons and the dress slid to a red pool at her feet. With her help, he removed the other things and his work-roughed hands closed over her breasts and wandered in a slow controlled caress over her hips and thighs. She moaned then and with a fierce shake of her head tore her mouth away and stepped out of the circle of clothes. They strolled across the room, their arms joined and leaning together like new lovers. As they passed under the dangling light, Suggie momentarily scanned the garish walls and sagging bed, the high black wall of night outside the window. Imperceptibly she shuddered; remorse flitted across her face and she quickly pulled the light cord.

  She lay on the bed, listening to the soft sounds of his clothes dropping to the floor as he undressed in the dark. Then he was groping for her. She found his hand and pressed it hard on her breasts. A tremor passed from his hand into her and like a flare bursting in the dark room their full passion broke. With a joyous cry Suggie pulled him down between her insistent thighs, striking him gently with her fists, begging him for those first measured thrusts which would nullify the long week of general housework and the lonely room in a stranger’s house.

  “Hear them? Hear the bed? They’re at it again.” Maritze almost screamed, her quivering finger pointed at Suggie’s wall. Her slack body stiffened with rage, her skin bled white. She had reached the crest of her anger by now, goaded on all during the meal, all during the evening’s slow descent into night by her mother’s unceasing recountal of the past.

  “Every Saturday night it’s the same. But what do you care?” She whirled accusingly to her mother. “You lay there all day thinking nothing’s changed. Talking about those dead people as if they ever cared about you. They’d never have left you at the mercy of that black foreign scum downstairs or that evil woman in front if they had . . .”

  All during her shrill outburst, Miss Mary had lain unperturbed on t
he high bed. Now she regarded her daughter with wizened contempt as Maritze’s voice dropped to a despairing whine. “Every decent white person’s moving away, getting out. Except us. And they’re so many nice places where we could live. I . . . I saw one in the paper the other day . . .” Hope tinged her eyes suddenly and she hurried to her room, returning with her pocketbook, and nervously drew out a newspaper clipping. “It . . . it says they’re building inexpensive houses on Long Island. Nice little houses . . .” With a pleading look she held the clipping close to her mother’s face.

  The old woman’s gaze was elsewhere. Pointing to a canary huddled in its cage like another relic of the past, she said fretfully, “That canary doesn’t even sing. It’s not like the ones we had years ago . . . They sang the whole living day . . .”

  Maritze’s eyes were almost demented now, her hand twitched. “It says anybody can afford one. I could get a loan and with what I have saved . . .”

  Miss Mary’s high cackle suddenly swept aside her voice. “A nice little house on Long Island, is it now?” And as quickly the laugh died, her eyes hardened, “Be-Jees, you just try moving me from this house. You just try! Always bothering my old head with wild talk of moving . . .” Again her mood changed and her eyes gleamed maliciously. “Girls your age should be thinking of a young man, that’s what—thinking of a ring and a fine wedding and a picture of yourself in a white gown with a young man beside you . . .” Her derisive laugh shook the motionless dust. “When you’re past thirty that’s all you should be thinking of . . .”

  The frail hope died in Maritze’s eyes and she was a wan and broken thing again, as empty of life as the room with its dust-yellow fog. Slowly she folded the clipping and put it back in her pocketbook with the rosary and the book of prayers she read on the subway going to work. Slowly she raised her head. “Think of it? Think of it?” she whispered, choked. “And did you think of it when you had me? Do you have a picture of him and you in your fine wedding gown? Weren’t you just like them in there . . . sneaking in the dark . . . dirty . . .” she screamed and then caught herself, the scream tapering into a whimper. “Oh forgive me, forgive me, Blessed Virgin . . . forgive me . . .” she repeated in a penitent obligato to her mother’s cracked laughter.

  Unlike Chauncey Street, Fulton Street this summer Saturday night was a whirling spectrum of neon signs, movie marquees, bright-lit store windows and sweeping yellow streamers of light from the cars. It was canorous voices, hooted laughter and curses ripping the night’s warm cloak; a welter of dark faces and gold-etched teeth; children crying high among the fire escapes of the tenements; the subway rumbling below; the unrelenting wail of a blues spilling from a bar; greasy counters and fish sandwiches and barbecue and hot sauce; trays of chitterlings and hog maws and fat back in the meat stores; the trolleys’ insistent clangor; a man and woman in a hallway bedroom, sleeping like children now that the wildness had passed; a drunken woman pitching along the street; the sustained shriek of a police car and its red light stabbing nervously at faces and windows. Fulton Street on Saturday night was all beauty and desperation and sadness.

  Deighton walked slowly, loving it. The thought of his frustrating talk with Silla, the memories evoked by Ina’s silent hurt sloughed off like so much dead tissue, and another self emerged—one that was carefree and uncaring, that loved the tumult and glitter around him. He opened his collar again so that the triangle of flesh showed and a bit of the new silk undershirt. With a light step, he sauntered past the stores, beauty shops and theaters, past the ubiquitous dim-lit bars with the little islands of men standing outside as though waiting to enter and drink when those inside were finished. They grappled and boxed in rough playfulness, knocking off each other’s broad-brimmed hats, cursing tenderly, “Dirty bastard . . . sonovabitch . . .” Laughter boomed from deep in their chests, blending with the noise of the street.

  Occasionally Deighton paused and watched them at a distance, jarred always by the violence in their coarse play, yet strangely envious and respectful. For somehow, even though they were sporting like boys, there was no question that they were truly men; they could so easily prove it by flashing a knife or smashing out with their fists or tumbling one of the whores in the bar onto a bed. But what of those, then, to whom these proofs of manhood were alien? Who must find other, more sanctioned, ways? It was harder, that was all . . . None of this ever crystallized for Deighton as he stood watching them, and he would turn away thinking only that they were somehow more fortunate.

  As he passed a store marked “Yearwood’s Women’s Apparel,” a spare dry man with swift eyes darted out from its dim interior and hailed him. “Boyce, what the hurry?” Seifert Yearwood’s voice flicked out like a lasso, snaring him. “What you know good?”

  “Nothing much, mahn, just taking little air.” Deighton paused, uncomfortable suddenly. “No business tonight, Yearwood?”

  Seifert Yearwood shrugged his narrow shoulders. “It does ease off come this time. They gone now to lick out their money in the bars and whiskey stores. I tell you, these people from down South does work for the Jew all week and give the money right back to he on Sat’day night like it does burn their hand to keep it.”

  “Wha’lah, Yearwood, you like you faulting the Jew. You ain no better.”

  “Who say I faulting the Jew? I lift my hat to him. He know how to make a dollar. He own all New York! Talking ’bout owning, you start buying the house yet?”

  Deighton looked longingly down the street. “Not yet.”

  “But, Boyce, what you waiting for? You might not get the chance again to own such a swell house—with all those good furnitures the white people left. Remember,” he began, his restive eyes stilled for a moment, “when we first came here in 1920 we was all living in those cold-water dumps in South Brooklyn with the cockroaches lifting us up?” He gave a high wheezing laugh but his eyes burned with outrage. “The white people thought they was gon keep us there but they din know what a Bajan does give. We here now and when they run we gon be right behind them. That’s why, mahn, you got to start buying. Go to the loan shark if you ain got the money.”

  “Yearwood, what the rush?” Deighton laughed, for his land was a high wall against Seifert’s rebuke. “I don owe tiger nothing that I got to break loose my inside buying these old houses.”

  Seifert Yearwood stared unbelievingly at him and asked quietly, “How else a man your color gon get ahead?”

  “You got to get training and get out here with them!” Deighton said, but somehow his voice was too loud, too strained. “Like I starting up this course in accounting. When I finish I can qualify for a job making good money.”

  Seifert Yearwood fixed him with a look of tragic concern and shook his arm as if to rouse him. “Boyce, mahn,” he began softly, “you can know all the accounting there is, these people still not gon have you up in their fancy office and pulling down the same money as them . . .”

  Seifert’s hand might have penetrated Deighton’s shirt to rest hot and offensive on his flesh, for acute physical distaste gripped him. That touch recalled things thrust deep into forgottenness: those white English faces mottled red by the sun in the big stores in Bridgetown and himself as a young man, facing them in his first pair of long pants and his coarse hair brushed flat, asking them for a job as a clerk—the incredulity, the disdain and indignation that flushed their faces as they said no . . . He broke from Seifert Yearwood’s hold and before Seifert could recover he was hurrying away, calling back, “I gone.”

  He almost ran now, desperation in each step, his eyes blind to everything. Turning off Fulton Street he walked southeast, into mean streets of tenement houses with fire escapes scrawled across their ravaged fronts. He entered one, unlocked the front door and climbed through the dimness and smell of stale urine and garbage to the top floor. The room he entered was cluttered but comfortable. An old-fashioned Victrola stood in one corner with a record on the turntable, but the machine needed winding so that the sound was indistinguishable. Quickly Deigh
ton went and gently turned the handle until the song took shape. Then he knelt and pressed his ear against the speaker.

  “Is that you, baby?” a woman called and entered. She was as careless and comfortable as the room, with tan skin and thick features and big gold cartwheel earrings that swung dangerously each time she moved. “How come you so late?” When he did not answer she came and stood over him. “Aincha even got no hello for me tonight?”

  He did not look up or answer. The woman said, “I thought you’d go for that record. I know you like your music sweet like your women. Huh, baby?” She laughed and lifted his face between her ringed hands. “Honey, you looks beat,” she said quietly. “C’mon, what you need is a drink.”

  When she returned with the whiskey he drank it with closed eyes. Then, still kneeling, he reached up. His fingers spread over her breasts, tearing at their softness, and slowly slid down her body. With a deep moan he flung his arms around her hips, kneading her buttocks, burrowing his face into the warm oblivion of her stomach.

  Three blocks away in a similar tenement apartment Miss Thompson stood laughing in the kitchen as three small girls, their bodies sweaty from play and dried tears on their dark faces, rushed her. “Big Momma. Big Momma,” they squealed, hooking their knees into her bones, their small hands caressing her. “Big Momma, what you brought?”

  “Hush it. I ain’t been gone a year,” she said, straining them close and examining their soiled and sleepy faces. “Where’s your momma?”

  They hung back, not answering, then reached for her again.

  She held them off. “Ain’t nobody talking, ain’t nobody hugging. Ain’t no presents sharing either.”

  “She’s gone out, since yesterday,” one said timidly.

  “Since yesterday! Where?”

  “She din say where.”

  Suddenly her anger burst. “Gone good-timing with the rest of them loud, good-timing fools out there on Fulton Street, that’s where. Gone to sit up in some low-down bar like some damn bar-fly. Gone screwing. . . . I know it ain’t none of my business but it ain’t right. If she keeps on doin like she’s doin I’m gonna get me a room someplace else. I’m gonna move . . .” The familiar complaints, her rage soared unbounded, until after a time they seemed to encompass not only the woman but the accumulated abuse of her long day, the pain that occasionally blazed up from her foot; they reached out to all of life. The children hovered near, quietly submitting to her bitter outpouring. Their resignation was frightening. It was as if, even before they had begun to live, they were defeated by life and knew it.