736 Marshall, Paule
to thrive in Brooklyn, the father lost in a dream of
Caribbean grandeur. The mother triumphs, but only
at the cost of being called “Hitler” by her daughter.
At the conclusion of Brown Girl, Brownstones,
Selina embarks for the West Indies. Unlike Fran-
cie in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, who goes off to
the Midwest to claim an education, Selina, unable
to find herself reflected in “America,” chooses to
embrace her Afro-Caribbean roots in order to estab-
lish a firm foundation for her own future and resolve
the conflicts that have marked her childhood.
Joyce Zonana
cominG oF aGe in Brown Girl, Brownstones
At the beginning of Paule Marshall’s debut novel,
Brown Girl, Brownstones, its heroine Selina Boyce is
a lonely, awkward, bookish girl of 10; at its conclu-
sion, she is a poised young woman of 20, a dancer
and a writer, choosing to pursue her vague yet press-
ing dream of “love, a clearer vision, a place.” Selina,
like so many characters in coming-of-age novels,
leaves family and friends and familiar territory to
chart an unknown path in her quest for an authentic
life.
Selina’s coming-of-age is fraught with difficulty:
She must find her way as a female, as an immigrant,
as a person of African descent, and—most acutely—
as someone who has grown up in a household ripped
apart by conflict. As she matures, she must find a way
to integrate her identities and come to terms with the
competing claims on her allegiance. What kind of
woman will she be? What kind of Bajan? What kind
of black? What kind, ultimately, of an adult?
In the book’s opening scene, Selina, on the verge
of adolescence, is a “neuter” figure with no clear
gender identity and little self-esteem. Possessed by a
sudden desire to “declare herself ” to the world, she
bursts into her sister’s room, only to be rebuked by
the older girl who is ostentatiously “sick” with her
menstrual period. Not much later, Selina becomes
aware of her best friend’s small breasts and the fact
that she bleeds every month “from below.” Feeling
trapped in her “hard flat body,” Selina becomes jeal-
ous of the other girls, seemingly “joined against her
in their cult of blood and breasts.” But soon enough
she herself matures physically; by 15 she has breasts
of her own and—after a homoerotic interlude with
her best friend—has begun to long for intimacy
with a boy.
Yet physical maturation is not the same as “com-
ing of age.” Many more things must happen before
Selina can claim her womanhood. Even choosing
to have a passionate illicit affair with a young Bajan
artist does not confer that status on her; it is, in the
end, her decision to leave her lover and to articulate
her own moral vision that marks her initiation into
adulthood.
One of the central difficulties Selina faces as
she matures is the question of which parent with
whom to identify: “the mother,” Silla, or her father,
Deighton. Silla is a hard-working, bitterly pragmatic
woman, “the collective voice of all the Bajan women,
the vehicle through which their former suffering
found utterance.” To Selina, she represents winter
in the midst of summer; she imagines that the
mother’s dark presence causes even the sun to give
way. Deighton, Selina’s apparently more cheerful
father, is ever the optimistic dreamer. Building sunlit
castles in the air, he enchants Selina with visions of
the white house with “tall white columns . . . like
some temple or other” he plans to build on land he
has inherited in Barbados. When Silla determines
to wrest this land from Deighton, so that the family
might “buy house” in Brooklyn, she does so at the
cost of alienating her daughter, who clings fiercely
to her doomed father.
Selina identifies with her father in part because
all the models of black womanhood available to her
are flawed: the bitter mother, the carefree but inef-
fectual Suggie, the wounded Miss Thompson, the
self-satisfied ‘Gatha Steed. Selina wants a life that
will take her outside the realm of unremitting work,
careless sensuality, long-suffering victimization, or
bourgeois respectability; she does not see how she
can have the freedom and authenticity she seeks
without entirely rejecting the older women in her
community.
It is not until her devastating experience of
humiliation by a wealthy white woman that she rec-
ognizes that she is “one with . . . the mother and the
Bajan women, who had lived each day what she had
come to know.” In this shattering moment, Selina
embraces her blackness, her immigrantness, and her
femaleness, realizing that she can integrate, rather