Brown Girl, Brownstones 737than bifurcate, the ways of “the mother” and the
father. Although she will not choose the path of her
mother, she now has compassion for her. And with
this compassion she is freed to shape an authentic
adult identity that integrates masculine and femi-
nine, dream and reality, vision and fact. No longer
“neuter,” Selina is now an androgynous whole, an
adult who will work to create a world in which the
black, female, immigrant self can embrace—and be
embraced by—all of life.
Joyce Zonana
race in Brown Girl, Brownstones
Race—or, more precisely, skin color—is an ines-
capable social marker in Brown Girl, Brownstones,
profoundly affecting the lives of the novel’s Bajan
protagonists. Having left Barbados to escape the
ravages of colonialism, these descendants of Afri-
can slaves are treated as “dark intruder[s],” or, even
worse, “nonexistent” beings in the United States,
where they hoped to find equal opportunity. Silla
Boyce argues that “power is a thing that don really
have nothing to do with color,” but her daughter
Selina comes to believe that whites abuse blacks
because they confuse dark skin “with what they
feared most . . . the heart of darkness within them
and all its horror and fascination.” The novel sug-
gests that until all people learn to embrace the
“darkness within,” even as they fight the “illusion”
of surface racial difference, the ideology of white
supremacy will “intrude” into “every corner” of black
life, “tainting . . . small triumphs” and “exulting at
. . . defeats.”
Told almost entirely from the point of view of
its central black characters, Brown Girl, Brownstones
offers only occasional glimpses of what lies behind
the inaccessible white faces that surround the Bajan
immigrants. Early in the novel we hear from Mari-
tze, a poor white woman who lives in the same
brownstone as the Boyces: “foreign black scum,” she
calls them, and we understand what the Bajans are
up against. Later, a rich white woman condescends
to Selina: “ ‘Oh, please say something in that delight-
ful West Indian accent for us!’ ” she demands, and
Selina recognizes that, to people like this, her “real
face”—neither black nor white but human—can
never emerge.
Both of Selina’s parents, Silla and Deighton
Boyce, grew up in Barbados, where “the white man
own everything.” Silla’s memories center around
her people’s inability to make headway “no matter
how hard you work.” For Deighton, the most dev-
astating effect of white racism is his psychological
humiliation: “utterly unmanned . . . before he was
yet a man,” he cannot forget the white faces “that
had always refused his request for a clerk’s job.”
In New York, Silla, focused on “buying house,”
can brush aside the insults of white children; but
Deighton, still dreaming of “something big,” con-
tinues to be wounded by the demeaning treatment
he receives. In the end a shattered man, he finds
consolation only in the cult promises of “Father
Peace,” a black preacher who claims to be “God
Incarnate.”
Selina, born in the United States, escapes colo-
nial brutality, but she must still come to terms with
racism. As a child, she watches whites flee the “dark
sea” of West Indians moving into the neighbor-
hood. She fantasizes about acquiring the “beauty
and gentility” of the white family that had occupied
her brownstone. But when she glimpses herself in a
mirror, she sees that she is “a dark girl alone”; sure
that she does not “belong here,” she imagines that
she is “something vulgar in a holy place.” Thus we
see that by the age of 10, she has internalized the
white supremacist ideology that identifies white as
good and black as bad, white as beautiful and black
as ugly, white as genteel and black as vulgar. As she
grows older, Selina maintains this internalized rac-
ism. She goes to college, becomes a bohemian artist,
and tries to distance herself from what she sees as
the vulgarity of the Bajan immigrants.
Several incidents force her to reevaluate her
stance. When she learns how Miss Thompson
received the festering “life-sore” on her foot, Selina
wants to “avenge the wrong.” As a young woman,
Miss Thompson had been attacked by a “big red
cracker with a shovel” who saw her as an “uppity
nigger.” Miss Thompson urges Selina to join her
“people” in the Association of Barbadian Hom-
eowners and Businessmen, but Selina resists. She
joins the association, but only to assert her supe-
riority to it. Not until she is utterly humiliated by
a white woman who reminds her that she is “only