The American Century: Literature since 1945 677whom she has described in her nonfiction as the “poets in the kitchen.” Her first
novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, was also a first in several different ways when it
appeared in 1959. It was one of the first novels, since the time of Claude McKay, to
explore the link between African-American people and their West Indian
counterparts. It was one of the first to delve into the inner life of a young black
female protagonist. It was also one of the first to explore in detail the relationship
between a black mother and daughter. Selina Boyce, the protagonist in Brown Girl,
Brownstones, is the daughter of first-generation Barbadian immigrants. She is
brought up in the brownstone buildings of Brooklyn, in an area that, as the novel
opens in 1939, is experiencing a sea change in terms of its inhabitants. The whites
are moving out or “discreetly dying,” and West Indian immigrants are moving in.
The brownstones constitute an anchor in this sea of racial change; and, as Selina
grows up there, listening to the kitchen talk of her mother Silla and her friends and
witnessing the reveries of her father, Deighton, in his upstairs sun room, she finds
herself torn. Her mother, a powerful figure, longs to assimilate, to “buy house” as she
puts it and buy into the American dream. Her father, a feckless romantic whom
Selina adores, dreams of returning to Barbados. “He’s always half-studying some
foolishness,” Silla complains. Doting on her father, wrestling with the overwhelming
force and influence of her mother, Selina also has to contend with the prejudice of
the white people she encounters, in whose eyes, like “a well-lighted mirror,” she sees
“with a sharp and shattering clarity – the full meaning of her black skin.” Marshall
pointedly refuses to resolve the process of cultural and national adaptation Selina
engages in as she grows up. At the end of Brown Girl, Brownstones, Selina is still faced
with the task of coming to terms with her equivocal feelings about her mother and
(now dead) father and the mixed, polyglot character of her inheritance. She plans,
however, to leave Brooklyn for the “islands” – not, it seems, to imitate the return to
origins dreamed of by her father but to retrace the diasporic wanderings of her
mother. Silla had arrived by ship from the Caribbean to the New World, “watching
the city rise glittering with promise from the sea.” “I’m truly your child,” Selina now
tells Silla; and she takes up the burden, not of abandoning her American identity –
that would be impossible – but of discovering the other cultural fragments required
for self-definition.
The wandering quest Selina takes up at the end of Brown Girl, Brownstones has
become a hallmark of Marshall’s fiction. It characterizes the four novellas collected
in Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961), and her later novels The Chosen Place, the
Timeless People (1969), Praisesong for the Widow (1987), and Daughters (1991).
Involving, very often, a reverse Middle Passage, it dramatizes a search for and
reconciliation of the self with an African diasporic historical past. In its own way, it
also marks the longer fiction of Jamaica Kincaid: Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990),
and The Autobiography of My Mother (1996). Annie John charts the growth of an
angry, alienated, and exceptionally bright girl, who wryly refers to herself and her
friends as “descendants of slaves,” from the ages of 10 to 17. Growing up in Antigua,
she is about to embark for England at the end of the novel, to study nursing: not
because she loves that country, or desires that particular career, but because sheGGray_c05.indd 677ray_c 05 .indd 677 8 8/1/2011 7:31:38 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 38 PM