Set in Brooklyn during the 1930s and 1940s, Brown Girl, Brownstones is Paule Marshall’s first novel. Following the classic structure of a bildungsroman, it recounts the story of Selina Boyce, the daughter of Barbadian immigrants, from age 11 to 20.
Told mainly from Selina’s point of view, the story reveals the frustration and pain of growing up in a violent family. Selina is caught between her hard-working and determined mother, Silla, and her frustrated and passive father, Deighton. The novel opens with the image of the “unbroken line of brownstone houses down the long Brooklyn street” (3), and depicts a predominantly oppressive atmosphere of poverty and lack of possibilities, with the drama of World War II in the background. These houses are multilayered symbols: they are a silent and disturbing presence that represents the color of the protagonist’s skin, the racial problems of the community, and a pessimistic vision of these characters’ tragic lives. Most important, they signal Silla’s obsession to “buy house,” or own property, a desire that permeates the community’s life. Silla manages to sell her husband’s property in Barbados, only to have him squander the money. However, nothing stops her from buying her house: she visits a loan shark, rents out rooms, and denounces the amoral life of her neighbor Suggie. Selina’s preference for her father marks her childhood profoundly. A weak dreamer who never worked, Deighton wanted to live like a white man, return to Barbados, and build a house. An accident at a job leaves him crippled and depressed. His frustration and growing sense of alienation lead him to leave his family to join Father Peace’s sect. Silla, unable to bear this abandonment, denounces him to the police, who then deport him; Deighton throws himself overboard before arriving at Barbados. Selina mourns her father deeply, dressing in black for more than a year. Her efforts to understand her mother characterize the different stages of her life; she rejects her mother’s ambition and hates her for what she did to her father.
At the end of the novel, however, she realizes that she is like her mother, willing to transgress norms in order to fulfill her dreams. Confident about her possibilities, she plans carefully and earns the money to leave Brooklyn. Just as her mother lied to sell her father’s land, Selina lies to acquire the Barbadian Homeowners Association’s grant so she can run away with her lover, Clive. In this relationship, Selina, like her mother before her, is the active partner, studying, working, planning. Successful at everything she sets her mind to, Selina is gradually disillusioned by Clive who, frustrated by her superiority, becomes more and more passive, leading her to leave him. As she begins to engage in American society again, Selina becomes aware of the different barriers that mainstream society builds against black immigrants; she realizes that white people do not look at her, seeing only her color. Her frustration leads her back to Barbados. Returning to her family roots, she seeks a redefinition and reassessment of her cultural identity, a difficult position between her American identity and her Afro-Caribbean background.
Though considered an African-American novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones is more accurately an immigrant novel of the Caribbean diaspora, stemming from a tradition different from that of Richard Wright, for instance, or Gwendolyn Brooks. The Boyce family represents the Barbadians who immigrated to New York during the first half of the 20th century, pursuing their American dream of prosperity and wealth, and the hardships of many Caribbean-American families during the Great Depression and World War II.
The novel also celebrates female heroism. With a prominently feminist perspective, Marshall establishes women as centers of power, rather than as victims. Women are, in fact, the economic and emotional protagonists of the social life of Bajuns—the Barbadians’ nickname for themselves—in Brooklyn; their work and determination allow them to prosper, while the men remain in the background, in passive and secondary roles. Silla’s endurance, her rage, her devotion to the dollar and property, and her determination to survive in “this man country” make her a symbol of this struggle. Selina speaks with the authentic voice of the Bajun community, and her insights on poverty, race, politics, the war, and colonialism offer a coherent portrait of the social process being enacted by the immigrants. She also symbolizes the anguish of second-generation immigrants who must adapt not only to America but to their parents’ dreams: Selina has to fight to fulfill her own destiny in life, clashing brutally with her mother’s expectations of her college career and medical school. Significantly, in the context of ethnic writing, the novel emphasizes the positive value of roots and suggests a cyclical nature to the immigrant process.
Sources
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Delamotte, Eugenia C. Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.
Denniston, Dorothy Hamer. The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995.
Hathaway, Heather. Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Japtok, Martin. “Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones: Reconciling Ethnicity and Individualism.” African American Review 32, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 305–315.
MacPherson, Heidi S. “Perceptions of Place: Geopolitical and Cultural Positioning in Paule Marshall’s Novels.” In Caribbean Women Writers: Fiction in English, edited by Mary Condé and Thorunn Londsdale, 75–96. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. 1959. Reprint, New York: Feminist Press, 1981.
Pettis, Joyce. Toward a Wholeness in Paule Marshall’s Fiction. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996.
Rose, Toby. “Crossroads Are Our Roads: Paule Marshall’s Portrayal of Immigrant Identity Themes.” In The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving Out a Niche, edited by Katherine B. Payan and Toby Rose, 109–121. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.