Brown Girl, Brownstones

by Paule Marshall

  VIII

  She had never seen a brownstone house like this one. There was a large flickering neon sign where the cornice should have been, which flashed: “Peace Movement” and at the door another sign: “Peace! Cigars, cigarettes and intoxicating liquors not allowed!” She hurried behind her father out of the pelting rain and the bleak Harlem street into the house. Inside there were no walls but only one long high room, garishly lighted and filled with the festal sound of voices and eating. The crowd blocked their way, but Deighton, Selina clinging to his jacket, wedged his way through until they reached a banquet table which ran the length of the room. Every seat at the table was taken, and the throng behind strained up against the diners, waiting to take their places.

  “Is this the kingdom?” she whispered, suppressing a laugh. But he did not hear. His glazed eyes were fixed on the head of the table, which she could not see. She felt deceived. She had expected an altar at least, with a fringed altar cloth and a tall cross as in Ina’s church. She had expected flowers, holy statues and stained-glass windows. There was no wine and wafer here. The body of this god was large platters of fricassee chicken, roast duck, spareribs and big bowls of clogged rice; his blood, pitchers of milk and imitation-flavored soft drinks.

  It could have been a huge communal wedding with all the women dressed in white as the brides, or a picnic that had been driven indoors by the rain—except that something somber weighed the air, as dense and palpable as the heat. She saw it in a hardened reflet on the white and colored faces down the table and in the crowd behind. A look of dark and ecstatic love.

  As she scanned those faces, a Negro woman suddenly lunged out of the crowd, her work-ruined face convulsed with this agonized love, her big body bucking under the white uniform. “Father, Father, I feel the vibrations!” she screamed and thrashed, sobbing in wild animal grief and ecstasy. A slim girl near the head of the table suddenly dropped her fork and cried in chorus with the woman, “I’m so glad, Father. Thank you, Father. I’m so glad.” Her feet beat a rapid staccato under the table, and she dropped her face in her hands.

  Through that open space Selina saw the object of their adoration.

  He was shorter, browner, stouter and more innocuous than his photograph. The same gentle smile hovered around his full lips, the same calm touched his broad face, and motes of light did a grave dance on his bald head. He wore a double-breasted business suit with a vest and quiet tie. Sitting there, pouring coffee from a silver urn, he might have been the respected head of a large family.

  Excitement surged through the room as the adulations increased. Those at the table rose to praise him with food still in their mouths. The muffled cries of love erupted among the standees while others, like Deighton, stood transfixed, their gaze quietly bent on the brown benevolent face of Father Peace. An old woman next to Selina suddenly threw out her arms. “Beautiful, beautiful Father! I knowed he’s God. I knowed it,” she shrieked above the others. “Listen to me. I was ailing. Father knowed how many years. Them doctors had done given up on me. Then one day Father came. There was a gold halo all around his sweet head and he said, ‘Rise up and walk, my sweetheart.’ And peace, sisters and brothers, I been walking ever since. Thank you, Father! So sweet, Father dear. So sweet!” She gave a sprightly leap, her gray skin flushed with happiness and then she was herself again: an old woman with a caved-in face.

  Like a cool wind riving the heat, a young white woman stood up, lifted her face, and the tumult subsided a little. “Father Peace is the perfect expression of God,” she said quietly, her face like a Madonna’s, her blond hair falling in a golden cowl on her shoulders. “Outside in the world there is immorality, and the things that come of immorality: wars and ambition, hate and carnal lust. The way people live out there is death. Here is only happiness and immortality with Father! Oh, you’re so beautiful, Father dear. Your words are beautiful. They are fit company for your beautiful little face and body . . .” She smiled sweetly at him and he gave her a pleased nod, and the others might have vanished and left them alone with their love.

  In the frail silence someone sang, “Father Peace is my father . . .” and others took up the song:

  “Father Peace is striding the land,

  Father Peace is my savior,

  Got the globe in a jug,

  And the stopper in his hand . . .”

  Beneath the song, the clapping swelled in a furious accompaniment. While they sang and clapped and the noise thickened the air, the diners and standees exchanged places and the serving women brought food from the kitchen.

  Selina was embarrassed for them. She felt suddenly old and terribly wise, while they seemed to her like children being led by the piper into the sea. Impatiently she tugged at her father’s sleeve to rouse him, but his eyes were fixed, worshipfully, on Father Peace. Now he stared not at the benign face of Father Peace but at his forefinger. It was crooked invitingly in his direction, beckoning Deighton with a slow hypnotic motion. But only the finger was concerned with Deighton it seemed, for the eyes of Father Peace were moving with gentle interest over the faces of those testifying.

  The old woman next to Selina suddenly gasped. Her blurred eyes shuttled back and forth from the beckoning finger to Deighton. Gradually all around the room people paused in their testifying, the singing lost its jubilance as other eyes traced that finger to him. They stared curiously at him, and a great envious sigh ruffled the air. Suddenly the old woman shoved past Selina and grabbed Deighton’s sleeve. “Brother, Father’s recognizing you!” she shrieked in a brittle breaking voice. “Go on, Brother, Father’s recognizing you tonight. He’s chosen to recognize you tonight! Go on!” She gave him a little push.

  Deighton pitched forward, trembling, and Father Peace suddenly turned his head Deighton’s way and smiled and pointed casually to a vacant chair at his right side. Groping his way with his good hand, Deighton stumbled forward amid the heat and crush of bodies, through the suddenly tumid silence, drawn it seemed by an invisible thread pulled by Father’s finger. At each step the crowd parted deferentially and then quickly fused behind him. Everywhere eyes followed him with wondering envy.

  “Daddy!” Selina called softly, immobilized by shock. “Daddy,” she cried in a sharp warning as he sank in complete surrender into the chair close to Father Peace. As she started after him, the old woman grasped her shoulder. “Father hasn’t recognized you,” she hissed. “And there ain’t no daddy in the kingdom but Father Peace.”

  Selina struggled, crying, but the old woman held her back and the fused bodies blocked her way. All over the room the silence erupted into shouts of “wonderful, wonderful,” and the renewed singing stifled her cries.

  The singing, clapping, testifying and eating continued. The walls, hung with huge portraits of Father Peace, expanded at each crescendo of sound and shrank whenever the tumult dropped. And then suddenly it ceased, as if a huge hand had pressed it into silence, and Father Peace rose in the heat and glare in the room.

  “Peace, everybody.”

  “Peace, Father, peace!” They shouted the answer.

  “Peace, everyone, righteousness, justice and truth be with you tonight and always. Your hearts are filled with merriment, your bodies exude enthusiasms for you are the chosen! You have recognized and realized that God’s presence is a living reality. Because of this I came!”

  “So true, Father dear,” a man shouted and shook his body as though to free it of his clothes.

  “The cosmic forces of the world obey me and work in harmony for all who are aware of my vital presence on the earth, and work destructively against those who choose to dismiss my presence and lightly value me . . .”

  For a long time he tossed the meaningless words into the rapt silence, all the while smiling genially. Then suddenly his plump hands gripped the table and he shouted, “God flows through my personal body. Don’t ever have limitations in your awarenesses. If you live after the things of the flesh you shall perish but if you do condemn the deeds of the body
you shall have eternal life . . .” The short arms described eloquent arcs; he strode up and down in a kind of dance.

  And the call came, “So true, Father. So true, sweet Father.”

  “Individual freedom is something glorious to attain for only then can you be truly one with God. Be wholly independent. God’s conception and nobody else’s.”

  “I love you, Father!” A young woman stretched her white arms to him. “I love you.”

  “God is your father, your mother, your sister, your brother, your wife, your child, and you will never have another! The mother of creation is the mother of defilement. The word mother is a filthy word. When a person reaches God he cannot permit an earthly wife or so-called children to lead him away. God is all!”

  Deighton leaped up from his seat of recognition, trembling, the perspiration coursing past his blind eyes. “So true!” he cried. “So true. I am nothing!” And his arms flew out in a gesture that did, indeed, cancel his entire self. “God is everything. Need you, Father, need you.”

  And others leaped up, shouting their happiness and their need; their feet pounded out their joy.

  Selina’s head ached and she felt the tears rising. She did not understand. She was no longer wise or old, but confounded by life still. She thought suddenly of Percy Challenor presiding like a threatening god at the head of his table on Sundays. They were alike, he and Father Peace. They ruled. What was it that made her father unfit to do the same? Why was he the seduced follower and not the god . . . ?

  At last the frenzy of Father Peace subsided and he was the smiling patriarch again. He ended with a resigned sigh, his arms open. “So here I stand with everybody adoring, adoring me. So much adoration is worth more than two hundred million dollars. So much adoration you cannot put a price on it.” He sketched a vague benediction, “Father is always here, always there and everywhere. Universally!” He left the room.

  A song followed him.

  “Father is on the hilltop; Father is walking the sea;

  Father is working in the valley, redeeming humanity.

  Father is always present; Father is all divine;

  Father is God Eternal, Father-mother sublime.

  Praise be, Father!”

  When the song died there were only the anguished cries of love and the heat and a certain calm. Reluctantly the followers began to file out, and Selina made her way to her father.

  Standing behind his chair she gazed at his bowed head, at the limp hand hanging at his side. Fleetingly she wanted to leave him—to deny him. For his crushed pose somehow offended her. “Let’s go home,” she cried. She shook him hard, realizing as she did the weakness of her arms and voice against his inertia. But still she shouted and struck until there was no more strength in her arms and she sank, exhausted, in a chair beside him.

  They sat together, yet apart, and gradually the noise moved further away, leaving only the small sounds of the women gathering up the dishes. Soon even this ceased, and when she lifted her tear-streaked face the hall was empty, the lights dimmed, and the cleared table was like a huge altar upon which some monstrous sacrifice had taken place. She looked again at her father and this time she was filled with a sad acceptance. She would have nothing now but his shadow. His substance was irretrievably lost . . . Gently she touched his sleeve. “Daddy, wake up,” she whispered. “It’s over. He’s gone. Everybody’s gone. C’mon, let’s go home . . .”

  This time he raised his head and turned his dulled eyes to her.

  “C’mon, let’s go. It’s late and I’ve got to go to school tomorrow.”

  He rose painfully, pulling himself up by the table edge. She slipped her arm through his, and as Antigone led her blind father into Colonus, Selina led Deighton from the kingdom into Harlem.

  IX

  They ate breakfast together on Sundays now that Deighton had found God. In the dining room with the second best china on the oak table. And only the soft scrape and tap of their forks on the plates—a sound of triangles struck and quickly held—tempered the harsh chord of silence. Deighton read The New Light, Ina hid behind the fashion page of the Sunday paper, eager to leave for church; Silla held her set brooding face low to her plate, and Selina sat tense and vigilant beside her father, nudging him when he forgot to eat but eating little herself.

  This morning the silence was somewhat pleasant, for a shaft of sunlight from the kitchen roved amid the crystal in the china closet, lit the stained-glass wisteria lamp over the table and evoked the faces in the brown-faded family photograph on the buffet. Deceived by this false ease, Selina gaily waved a biscuit at her father and said, “Pass the butter, Daddy.”

  He absently reached for it, and then jerked back, bursting out petulantly, “You mustn’t call me ‘Daddy.’ Din you hear Father-self say there ain no father or mother in the kingdom? I’m Brother Boyce. Wunna must call me that!”

  In the clenched silence his words circled the room, touching Ina, whose eyes flitted fearfully to the mother and then dropped behind the paper, sweeping across Selina so that the biscuit shook in her hand and her sudden dread was like a piece of it lodged in her throat. They pressed around Silla and her head drooped under their crush. Her hand twitched and the angry outburst leaped to her lips but she restrained it. She seemed unwilling to speak, almost afraid to break the long months’ wary silence—but when the words persisted, she reluctantly laid aside her fork.

  She gave him a quiet look and her voice held no anger as she asked, “Who should they call ‘Daddy’ then?”

  Out of his emptiness a hollow voice spoke. “Father says there’s no marrying. No children. He is the only Father and we’s all his children and brothers and sisters to one another. Father says . . .”

  Silla gazed with an angry pity and bewilderment at him, and strangely her love—that web of passions that both claimed and disclaimed him—crept beneath her perplexity and her hand began to shape some tender comforting sign. But it faltered down without hope as she saw his limp arm on the table. For the first time since his accident she looked openly at it. A tremor struck her shoulders and, like someone dying, her eyes set with horror, as if she had been presented with the condemning evidence of a crime she alone had committed. Suddenly she had to know if she was really guilty, and she sought the answer in the children’s faces. But Ina raised her paper, shutting the mother out, and Selina, understanding that mute question, withheld her answer by turning aside. Desperately Silla leaned toward Deighton, who chanted still: “There’s rebirth in Father . . .” and whispered, “Deighton, who put you so?”

  “. . . and freedom . . .”

  “Who put you so, I ask.”

  “Life is Father!”

  “Life . . .” she said cautiously as though testing a new word. “Life? Lemme tell you, life ain up in no Father Peace kingdom,” she said gently. “It out here scuffling to get by. And having little something so you can keep your head up and not have these white people push you ’bout like you’s cattle. That’s what it tis . . .” Her open hands offered him the meaning.

  “Peace in Father . . .”

  “Peace . . .” She smiled wistfully and shook her head. “It ain that easy to come by, mahn.”

  But he nodded firmly, confident that he had found it.

  His certainty made Silla doubt. Perhaps he had found peace. An unreasonable envy seized her—for did she not yearn for peace lying alone in the wide bed each night?—peace with him sleeping beyond her locked door, peace from the ache in her loins . . . ? And a new fear welled, for his bland peace might become a wall which she could never hope to penetrate. This dread suddenly swept aside her tenderness and twisted her love into wrath. She leaped up, the chair tumbling behind her, and hurled at him across the table, “But be-damn you, don you know you’s flying in the face of God with this foolishness?”

  At her shout the shaft of sunlight thinned and fled and the shadows resumed their old places. She strained toward him, her splayed fingers pushing the tablecloth into ridges. “But where you come out
ta, nuh? You ain no real-real Bajan man. What Bajan man would have his head turn by some bogus god? Tell me!” For a time she pressed him for an answer but Deighton only shied from her loudness and stared emptily at her from behind the protective film over his eyes. Finally in disgust she turned and addressed her silent listener. “No . . . he ain no Bajan. Look Percy Challenor who was working the said-same job as him is a real estate broker now and just open a big office on Fulton Street. More Bajan than you can shake a stick at opening stores or starting up some little business. They got this Business Association going good now and ’nough people joining. Even I gon join. Every West Indian out here taking a lesson from the Jew landlord and converting these old houses into rooming houses—making the closets-self into rooms some them!—and pulling down plenty-plenty money by the week. And now that the place is near overrun with roomers the Bajans getting out. They going! Every jack-man buying a swell house in dichty Crown Heights. Percy Challenor and them so gone! Iris Hurley in a house with more wall-to-wall carpeting than the law allow. Even Virgie, with that regiment of children, gone!”

  The weight of their successes weakened her and she fumbled blindly for the overturned chair and sat down with her head bowed and the lines of her face down-curved in a bitter design. “It’s not that I’s avaricious, or money-mad,” she whispered to herself, her thick child’s fingers tracing the pattern of her fork. “Or that I’s a follow-pattern so that everything they do I must do. But c’dear, if you got a piece of man you want to see him make out like the rest. You want to see yourself improve. Isn’t that why people does come to this place?” She put the question to his blank stare. When he said nothing, she stated simply, “You don belong here, mahn. Oh, it’s not this Father Peace.” She dismissed him with a contemptuous wave. “It’s that you was always looking for something big and praying hard not to find it.”

  Her knowing look pierced him until The New Light gradually slipped from his hand and the shielding veil slid from his eyes. Selina saw that veil rising, felt him stirring into awareness against his will and quickly slid forward in her seat, blocking his view of the mother. Very gently he drew her back. “It’s all right, lady-folks,” he said. “Let she say what she must . . .”