Brown Girl, Brownstones

Brown Girl, Brownstones follows the life of Selina Boyce from 10 to 18. It is a bildungsroman, a novel of moral and psychological development. Selina starts as a child who fails to understand the world around her, enters adolescence at war with her family and community’s values, experiences losses that challenge her, and then learns to accommodate the world as it is.

Selina’s early life is one in which she frequently finds herself at a loss for words, fails to make sense of adults’ actions, and feels out of place when it comes to the expectations society has for little girls, particularly Barbadian-American girls. Selina has a tumultuous family life in which she becomes a pawn in an adult struggle between her mother and father. She enjoys attention from her father and his fantasies of the house in in Barbados. She feels great tension in her relationship with her mother but doesn’t understand the source of this tension. She fights with Ina, whose changing body intrigues and horrifies her. Selina’s boisterous behavior, physical fights with her sister, and unkempt hair and clothes are all indications that she cannot or will not conform to the expectation that she will be a meek, quiet girl.

Outside of her family, Selina’s social contacts provide her perspectives and information that help her to understand these struggles. Beryl’s family is relatively stable and middle-class; this Challenor family paradigm provides a contrast to show Selina that life in the Boyce house is unusual in some ways. Selina also learns from the tense conversations with Mr. Challenor that Deighton fails to meet expectations of Barbadian men, a realization that pains her and reinforces her mother’s negative perspective of Deighton.

Selina also encounters female mentors outside the family circle. Suggie Skeete’s celebration of her sexuality and desire runs counter to Silla’s rigid morality. Miss Thompson’s irreverence about the wisdom of adults, her nurturing Selina in the women’s space of the beauty shop, her explicit conversation about the impact of racism in her own life, and her willingness to have candid conversations about the changes Selina is experiencing as she goes through adolescence all allow Selina to navigate difficult moments in her life when Silla is too occupied to pay attention.

Several key events push Selina to contest her family’s values as an adolescent. Deighton’s choosing Father Peace over his family, his deportation when Silla reports him to immigration authorities, and his death end Selina’s childhood and destroy her family. Selina openly rejects and opposes her mother on the night the family receives the cable about Deighton’s death.

Selina’s discontent with the forces of conformity in her Barbadian community are also related to her reaction to her father’s death. The community’s public rejection of Deighton at the wedding is a moment when the consequences for failing to conform are brought home to Selina. Her year of grieving ends after she criticizes Beryl for conforming to expectations and after she realizes that the things her father gave her are intangibles that are not prized by her community.

For Selina, the Association of Barbadian Homeowners and Businessmen is the most potent symbol of how oppressive she finds her Barbadian community’s expectations. While she takes Miss Thompson’s advice to learn more about them, her belief in the limitations of the identity politics of the group is only confirmed by what she sees there. Her plan to subvert the scholarship funds to start a new life with Clive uses conformity as a weapon; the deceptive nature of her plan hinges on her contempt for the values of the community.

Selina’s movement into adulthood only occurs once she begins paying attention to the larger cultural context for the actions of her family and community. Miss Thompson’s story about what happened to her foot and the encounter with the racist woman after the recital forcefully call Selina’s attention to the racist system within which her mother and community operate. The racist woman’s simplistic understanding of what it is to be black or West Indian not only wounds Selina’s ego but also helps her to understand her mother’s achievements, who tolerated such slights and racism on a regular basis for the sake of her daughters. Selina also comes to understand that the Barbadian community is not so much provincial as it is isolated by a society that denies its members opportunities; their tight community connections are self-protective and examples of self-help in the face of structural racism.

Selina’s epiphanies on the night of the encounter with the racist woman are multifold. She decides to assess the psychological toll of dealing with racism, and the cost infuriates her. She recognizes that Clive, Silla, her father, and most of the important people in her life are all walking wounded who strive to overcome this cost. Her decision to face “her own dark depth” (256) is the moment when she assumes responsibility for a life that allows her to live with integrity in the face of racism and the pressure to conform.

Selina’s speech to the Association and private conversation with her mother are moments of accommodation. She acknowledges the rationality of some of the decisions the Barbadians make, given their situation in the United States, when she declines the scholarship money and apologizes. In her conversation afterward with Silla, she claims a part of her mother’s heritage by announcing that she is indeed her mother’s daughter because she wishes to launch her adulthood by traveling back “home” to Barbados, thus reversing the trip her mother took when she was eighteen. Selina departs the frame of the novel free of the baggage of conformity to Barbadian identity politics and the demands of womanhood as defined by her mother.

Travel through specific geographic spaces shapes the identities of all the central characters in the novel. For Selina, her movement through the urban space of New York City and her decision to go to the Caribbean are key factors in determining who she is as a little girl and a woman. For Silla, migration from Barbados to New York centers around her efforts to create a home that shelters her daughters and supports her aspirations to live the American Dream. For Deighton, migration and his forced repatriation center on his inability to re-create his real and imagined home in Barbados.

Selina is one of the first-generation Americans whose difference from their migrant parents so puzzle the adults in the Barbadian community. While Selina’s parents both grew up in the circumscribed space of the island of Barbados and its beaches, where they sometimes encountered tourists, Selina grows up in urban spaces where she has free range in parks like Fulton Park and Prospect Park and in which she has the opportunity to encounter many kinds of people. As a girl, Selina calls the flow of life through Brooklyn “the shape of her freedom.” (51) Her wanderings in Manhattan and Harlem allow her to see the world as a much bigger place than the restricted world her Barbadian community’s brownstones present.

When Selina finally makes a bid to take ownership of her own identity, it is by setting out on a trip to the Caribbean, which she will at last be able to claim as her own. Going to the Caribbean shows that for Selina, claiming an identity is not about attaching herself to a specific geography, as her parents have by landing in and staying in New York as long as possible. She claims her identity by embracing migration and movement instead of seeing it as a means to an end.

Movement and migration mean something different for Silla Boyce. Like her daughter, Silla set out in the world at 18, but she did so out of a sense of desperation. Barbados as home for Silla is a place where she worked grueling hours with no opportunities to better herself. The stories she tells Selina about her past are designed to inoculate her daughter against nostalgia for Barbados.

Silla builds her identity around having successfully left the island and claimed a place among Barbadian immigrants. Yet once she has landed in New York, her movement through geographic spaces becomes relatively limited. She goes back and forth to work, mostly socializes with neighbors in her immediate vicinity, and by the end of the novel, spends her insomniac nights studying or cleaning the brownstone. Silla made one great migration from Barbados, but got stuck in place once she arrived in America. To Silla’s mind, however, she is not so much stuck as rooted. Her pursuit of the brownstone represents her efforts to achieve the American Dream.

Deighton Boyce has a substantially different perspective on migration and identity. For him, Barbados is always home. It is the place of an idyllic childhood, funded by an adoring mother, where his exploits with women confirmed his sense of himself as an exemplary man. The sticking point for Deighton is the same as it is for Silla, however: lack of class mobility. In Barbados, Deighton’s aspirations for white-collar work as a teacher or an accountant were impossible to fulfill because of class, race, and the lasting impact of colonialism.

Deighton comes to America looking to fulfill his dreams but finds that racism is as insurmountable a force in the United States as it is in Barbados. He works in a mattress factory but is unable to fulfill the breadwinner/homeowner role expected of men in his community. Therefore, he is constantly searching for home and tries to create one in the fantastical stories he tells Selina about the big, colonial house he will build on his triumphant return to Barbados. By joining Father Peace’s cult, Deighton tries to create a different sort of home; the small room in which he lives “could have been a monk’s cell, a place for meditation and penance”(159). “Home” has become a psychological space in which Deighton hopes to be at peace with who he is by abandoning his connections to his past and Barbados. His suicide when faced with forced deportation and repatriation shows that Barbados has ceased to be home to him in the end.

At the novel’s conclusion, Selina is on the move, Silla is bound in place, and Deighton is dead. Marshall presents Selina’s end as daunting but hopeful, with the implication that it is only through movement and a willingness to constantly recreate home that people can find themselves.