Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959). Content and Description

As a coming-of-age tale, or bildungsroman, Marshall’s first novel belongs beside Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye as an American exemplar of the form. Each of these works charts a young person’s path from innocence to experience, but unlike Twain and Salinger’s protagonists, Marshall’s main character must make sense of not just the world but several worlds. Contributing to its lack of popular success when first published in 1959, Brown Girl, Brownstones appeared at a time when African-American literature more often told the journey from boyhood to manhood, and well-developed female characters were all but absent. Now, along with Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953), Marshall’s novel is considered one of the first works of American literature to explore the maturation of a young black woman realistically.

As its title suggests, Brown Girl, Brownstones tells the story of Selina Boyce, a young girl of Barbadian descent living with her family in one of Brooklyn’s many brownstone apartments. These apartments are symbolic of the American dream that lured many immigrants to New York, many from the Caribbean. Most of these residents desire to “buy house,” and it is this materialistic ideal more than any other that generates the novel’s conflict. In a reversal of Barbadian and American gender roles, Selina’s mother, Silla, works long hours in a munitions factory so that one day they can purchase their rented brownstone, while her father, Deighton, who dreams of his homeland, desires only to make enough money to return to Barbados and build a house on his newly inherited property. Sharing Silla’s dreams of upward mobility is the Barbadian Homeowners Association, of which she and many other Barbadian immigrants are members.

Although the novel is not set in Barbados, the island country functions as a character; it shapes Selina and her family, who dream of returning to the island while so many other Barbadian immigrants, after losing touch with their homeland, desire only a brownstone home in the multiethnic community of Brooklyn. The brownstones the immigrants strive to own represent materialism and American capitalism. They instill in the Barbadian community thoughts of homeownership and wealth, and these principles elicit opposing reactions within the Boyce family: Silla struggles to achieve the American dream, Deighton rejects these priorities, and young Selina tries to glean from her parents the values most significant to her.

On her journey to womanhood, Selina’s identity is also shaped by the racism and sexism she encounters growing up as a young black woman in America. Her attempts at identifying with others are further complicated by her Barbadian heritage: Though the other immigrants and members of the Barbadian Homeowners Association share her heritage, they desire to assimilate into the American way of life, unlike Deighton, who detests the avaricious materialism of America and wishes to return to Barbados.

As a child, Selina sides with her father, whose eyes gleam every time he speaks of Barbados. An idealistic young girl, Selina shares her father’s enthusiasm for returning to Barbados and sees her mother as an enemy, a threat to her father. Yet as she blossoms into a young woman, Selina notices how much she resembles her mother. She tries to control a later lover, Clive Springer (a failed Barbadian artist not unlike Deighton Boyce), in the same way her mother attempted to control her father.

Both are strong-willed women upon whom men depend, and both will take any measures to achieve their goals. When Deighton foolishly spends the money from selling his property, Silla has him deported back to Barbados, where, within sight of his homeland, he either jumps or is pushed off the boat and drowns. Similarly, Selina manipulates the Barbadian Homeowners Association so as to win one of their scholarships through her dancing and with this money leave Brooklyn.

Women hold the power in Brown Girl, Brown- stones. This is in marked contrast to earlier African- American literature, which focused almost exclusively on black men. When female characters appeared in these earlier works, they rarely transcended the stereotype of an African-American woman at the time. Marshall is one of the first novelists to empower her female characters with the autonomy and independence typically granted to men. Though Silla and Selina’s determination is not always admirable, their ambition and drive mark a distinct change in African-American literature.

Within the streets of Brooklyn, outside the walls of her brownstone, Selina hears more than her parents’ arguments. Mrs. Thompson, an elderly hairdresser from the South, is a source of wisdom to Selina. In the beauty salon, Selina first understands her place in a society divided by race and gender. Selina’s Barbadian friend Suggie, a maid in the white suburbs of New York, provides another voice for Selina to consult as she approaches womanhood. Suggie’s calypso dancing and frequent dates entice the young Selina to investigate further both her heritage and her burgeoning sexuality.

Many of these characters, including Suggie, speak the same Barbadian dialect and vocabulary Marshall heard as a young girl. From the way in which they use the same adjective twice, such as poor-poor, to emphasize a phrase, to the way in which they employ contrary adjectives such as beautiful-ugly to neutralize a statement’s power, Marshall draws from the words of the kitchen poets she heard as a child. In doing so, she manifests the heritage and identity of her characters through this hybridized Barbadian English, a throwback to another time made modern in Brooklyn.

Brown Girl, Brownstones was conceived as the first part of a trilogy that would later include The Chosen Place, the Timeless People and Praisesong for the Widow. None of the characters present in the first novel reappears in the next two. Rather, Marshall continues to explore the same themes of identity, displacement, and reconnection with the past in her next novels, and characters similar to Selina Boyce reinforce these themes. As Selina does, many of Marshall’s characters embark upon a journey to find themselves.

But just as Brown Girl, Brownstones chronicles Selina’s journey to womanhood, it also charts her passage from Brooklyn to Barbados. This decision reflects her deceased father’s desires yet is made with the same determination her mother used to keep the family in Brooklyn. At the end of the novel, Selina has become aware of all that has shaped her: her parents’ domestic struggle, the Barbadian Homeowners Association, the racism and sexism aimed at African-American girls, and, most distinctly, a Caribbean heritage she has yet to grasp fully. With an eye toward Barbados and her back toward Brooklyn, she tosses a single silver bangle toward the brownstone, not to leave its memory in Brooklyn, but to leave a piece of herself with it.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. As Paule Marshall does, Jamaica Kincaid blends historical fact and autobiography. Read Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother, thinking about how the protagonist envisions her past, present, and future. Then, write a well- developed essay contrasting the two novels’ protagonists. In what ways do these characters change as they pass into womanhood? Can both books be considered coming-of-age novels, the form that in literary studies we call the “bildungsroman”? Why or why not? Also, take into account the relationship the two protagonists have with the culture they know and seek to reconnect with, using specific passages from the novels to support your points.

2. Read Edwidge Danticat’s novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, comparing the female protagonist with Selina Boyce. In a well-developed essay, explore how both characters inhabit urban spaces while trying to reconcile their current lives with an idealized homeland.

3. The American dream stands at the forefront of many a great American novel, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Compare the vision of the American dream in these novels with the one presented in Brown Girl, Brownstones. How do Marshall’s (and Selina’s) unique background and immigrant status change her portrayal of the American dream? How do Selina’s family’s expectations differ than those of Jay Gatsby or the Joads?