Brown Girl, Brownstones

Silla nags Selina about going to college and becoming a professional, perhaps a doctor. Silla wants Selina to attend the city college, which offers free tuition, during the day instead of going to night school and working during the day like Ina does. While Silla’s friends express admiration of Silla’s strength in the face of being a widow, Selina knows that her mother suffers from insomnia and desperately desires Selina’s forgiveness for her role in Deighton’s death. Silla is not okay; she is so unhinged that she nearly chokes Miss Mary to death one day. She wants the boarders out so she can split the rooms and raise enough rent to fund a professional career for Selina.

When Miss Mary dies months later, Selina realizes that Miss Mary’s decision to force her daughter Maritza to live in the past—by surrounding her with artifacts and stories about the family that lived in their room before them—parallels how trapped Selina feels mourning her father. Selina decides to stop grieving, but she does not know what to do now that the grieving is over.

Selina goes to Miss Suggie’s room, drinks rum, and listens to calypso records with her. Miss Suggie encourages Selina to leave off her mourning: The best way to honor Deighton is to enjoy life and find herself a man. When Selina asks Miss Suggie if she has ever thought of going back to Barbados, Miss Suggie tells her that of course she has not; Deighton killed himself specifically because he did not want to go back either. This conversation convinces Selina that it is time to move on from her grief. Selina gets drunk on the rum.

That fall, Silla convinces a judge to allow her to evict Miss Suggie, whom she claims is a sex worker and a bad moral influence on the Boyce girls. Miss Suggie gives Selina a bottle of perfume and tells her not to come find her.

Selina also starts college that fall. She feels alienated from her mostly white peers. The only pleasure she feels at first is walking through Manhattan after class or standing outside the famous Metropole Jazz Café listening to music spilling out into the street. On some evenings, Selina visits with Miss Thompson and complains about her mother’s obsession with owning the house. Miss Thompson tries to temper Selina’s bitterness by explaining that she might come to understand her mother one day.

Miss Thompson’s injured foot has worsened so much over the years that she is forced to walk with a cane. Selina finally convinces Miss Thompson to talk to her about what happened to the foot. Miss Thompson immigrated to New York years ago as a young woman, but she went back to South Carolina to visit her family. A white man attempted to sexually assault her and chopped a piece out of her foot with a shovel during the attack. The foot never recovered. Selina desires to avenge Miss Thompson by doing violence against one of the whites around her, but Miss Thompson insists that Selina should look forward in life instead of backward—meet someone, have fun, fall in love. She convinces Selina to go to the Barbadian Homeowner’s and Business Association meeting on a dare. Miss Thompson looks at Selina and sees an attractive young woman; she tells Selina as much.

Selina keeps her promise and attends the next Barbadian Homeowner’s and Business Association meeting with her mother. Selina listens as Cecil Osborne talks about all the Association’s big plans and the danger posed by the city’s proposal to demolish the brownstones and build housing projects. The Barbadians must gain political power in city government to protect themselves, he warns. He closes by announcing that the Association will award a college scholarship to two young people within the Association. The fervent tone and enthusiastic response to Cecil’s words make Selina see him and the audience as a community. She both admires and feels uncomfortable with their strong sense of identity.

A speaker disrupts the meeting’s harmony when he stands up to advocate that the Barbadians join forces with African Americans. Afterward Silla and her friends discuss this argument. To Selina’s surprise, Silla explains how conflicted she feels about uniting the two groups; as a proprietor of her house, she rents mostly to African Americans and overcharges them. Silla concludes that it is a dog-eat-dog world in which economic exploitation is the only way to get ahead, and African Americans must realize the same if they wish to be successful. Selina is shocked to discover that she agrees with her mother; she cannot think of a good way to counter her mother’s argument.

At her mother’s urging, Selina joins the young people’s wing of the Association. She finds the group uptight and feels alienated by how readily the members conform to their parents’ expectations. She shocks them all by telling them that she finds the whole Association to be “[p]rovincial” (200) because they fail to understand that the whites who hold power make no distinctions between Barbadians and African Americans. She leaves abruptly.

On her way out, Selina bumps into Clive Springer, the 29-year-old son of one of the Association members. Against her better judgment, Selina walks through the city with Clive, listening to blues and jazz music seep out of clubs along the way. They eventually end up at the caretaker’s shelter at Fulton Park, where they have a sexual encounter and discover that they both fail to live up to their parents’ expectations.

Selina learns that Clive is a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and a man whose budding career as an artist ended when his mother hunted him down in his apartment in Greenwich Village. He tells Selina that he grew disenchanted with Greenwich Village, a bohemian, artistic quarter of New York City, after concluding that its culture centered primarily on young people using cross-racial sexual relationships between black men and white women for shock value. Clive also dislikes the presence of so many gay people (he uses anti-gay slurs to describe them). Selina spends much of the rest of the year going to school and sneaking off to make love to Clive. When she is with Clive or when she watches him paint in his room, Selina feels that she is her father’s daughter and is rebelling against her mother’s morals. She feels a sense of freedom.

Despite how much she enjoys Clive’s company, Selina senses that he is not really attached to her in the way she wants. She and Clive have an argument in which he describes Selina as being full of will and energy; she is like her mother. Selina recoils at this description, but the two make up. Selina uses her money to buy him paint and contents herself with Clive’s remoteness.

Selina takes a modern dance class that spring and discovers that she has some talent when Rachel Fine, a classmate, compliments her and asks her to join a dancing club. Selina attempts to tell Clive about her sense that the white members of the club see her as black but not as a human being; she is determined to continue dancing to prove them wrong. He says he understands why feels she must continue going but insists he doesn’t want to constantly focus on race.

When she keeps talking, Clive engages in a long monologue about how powerfully whites see blackness as a symbol of their own fears. For his part, Clive has given up trying to make whites see his essential humanity. He had a white friend once, but they had a falling out after Clive realized the friend still did not see him as fully human. Clive and Selina make love again. His mother calls him away to pick her up from the Association because she is having an anxiety attack. Selina is disturbed that Clive leaves her to attend to his mother, and she feels abandoned.

Selina’s secret relationship with Clive continues until the start of summer. A friend tells Silla that Selina has been carrying on with Clive. Silla almost strikes Selina but stops after Selina tells her that she just wants some company and that the two are not involved sexually. Silla tells her that everyone knows how shiftless Clive is. His mother burned all his paintings and prevented him from going to art school, but the boy still would not get a job after college. Silla fears that Selina’s rude behavior to the members of the Association will stop Selina from receiving the scholarship.

Selina and Clive spend a day at Sheepshead Bay Beach and talk. When Selina asks if the story about Mrs. Springer burning all his paintings is true, Clive says it is and explains to Selina that the women in their lives—the entire country, really—see artists as criminals; artists make people uncomfortable by calling the status quo into question. Clive feels a little sympathy for people like their parents, who have so much to overcome, however. Selina feels no sympathy. She believes people should be left to be their own individual selves. She, for example, has no interest in studying medicine as Silla desires. Most people, Clive argues, are content with material things because self-expression and individuality require too much effort. Some artists manage to escape that trap, but the world takes everything from them as a result.

Clive also labels himself as a third kind of a person—one with the desire to be an artist and all the technique in the world but no true talent. Clive sinks into a moment of despair and almost falls or jumps into the ocean. Selina manages to pull him back. His near-fall reminds Selina of her father’s death. She comes up with a plan to save him. She vows to do whatever it takes to earn the scholarship from the Association. Instead of going to medical school, she will use the money to start a whole new life somewhere else with Clive, who will be able to be a painter at last. Clive is astonished but says nothing.

Selina, despite her mother’s suspicion that she is up to something, returns to the Association and apologizes to the young members she insulted on her previous visit. She soon becomes indispensable to the Association’s activities. Clive envies her sense of purpose, something he is never able to achieve for himself. For the first time in a long time, Selina is happy. She goes to school, works for the Association, and sneaks in visits to Clive. She excels in the modern dance club as well. As spring rolls around again, the Association elects her vice president, and she earns a lead part in a dance recital.

Selina and Rachel Fine grow closer. Rachel confesses that she is back in a relationship she ended because her boyfriend tried to give her a big engagement ring that he got from his uncle’s jewelry store. She got back together with him because her subsequent boyfriends seemed like boys instead of men. Selina in turn tells Rachel about her relationship with Clive and her plan to use the scholarship money to live with him. Rachel tells Selina that she has an aunt who books entertainment for Caribbean cruises; the aunt might be able to get Selina a job, and Selina might be able to find her way to the islands.

Selina’s recital performance is an artistic success, and she feels pride and a sense f accomplishment. At an after-party, Selina’s joy is spoiled during a conversation with the white mother of one of the performers. After ferreting out that Selina’s parents are from the West Indies, the woman says that Selina reminds her of her hard-working and honest West Indian maid—whom she initially refers to as a “girl” (253). The woman says that, when she saw how accomplished Selina is, she just knew that Selina could not be a native-born African American because Selina doesn’t act like she is really black. She asks if Selina would mind saying something for her in a West Indian accent.

Angered and hurt by the racist assumptions and cruelty of the woman’s words, Selina leaves abruptly. Looking at herself in a store window on the way home, Selina feels a sense of double consciousness. She is the person she feels herself to be inside and the person the white woman sees; she is also the person she presents to the members of the Association and the person who plans to take the scholarship money. She decides in that moment that she must figure out how to be authentic by battling against racist assumptions and by refusing to dishonor her own values. The effort it will require infuriates her. She heads to Clive’s room.

When Selina arrives at Clive’s room, he is sympathetic but quickly leaves to pick up his mother, who is having another anxiety attack. Selina opts not to wait, and she leaves her key behind. Having realized that Clive really might be the lost cause he claims he is, she is done with him. She goes home and sinks into a week-long depression. She learns later that week that Ina is engaged to be married to Edgar, her mild-mannered Barbadian-American boyfriend.

That night, Selina is awarded the scholarship by the Association but rejects it. Back at home, Silla is furious. She accuses Selina of being just like her father—always wanting to make the grand gesture to make himself look better than others, even when he could not afford to do so. Selina confesses her duplicity with the Association and why she refused the money. Selina admits that she perhaps was motivated to reject the scholarship by a desire to humiliate her mother, but in the end, she just wants to make her own way just like her mother, who left Barbados when she was 18. Selina wants to be her mother’s child, in other words. Silla grudgingly accepts her daughter’s decision.

Afterward, Selina walks through her neighborhood and pictures all the people she has known in her life. She calls Rachel to ask if her aunt can secure a job for her on one of the Caribbean cruise ships. Afterward, Selina walks more. She sees the oppressively uniform housing projects springing up where her community’s coveted brownstones used to be and hears the new immigrants’ Spanish language displacing her West Indian neighbors’ dialect. She feels like “the sole survivor amid the wreckage” (274).