Brown Girl, Brownstones

This relatively short section is an interlude in which Marshall offers the readers competing visions of Barbadian and Caribbean-American childhoods: Deighton’s idyllic childhood, Silla’s nightmarish childhood, Beryl’s middle-class childhood, and Selina’s working-class childhood. While a pastorale is, in literary and musical terms, an idealized representation of life in the countryside, Marshall uses the term ironically here. This section introduces additional internal and external conflicts for Selina, who finds that her emerging identity does not quite fit into any available models.

Deighton, whose perspective is rooted in his early life, is the source of much of Selina’s idealistic beliefs. The story Virgie Farnum tells about Deighton’s past contrast his character with Barbadian values. Deighton’s reliance on his mother as a child, his aspirations to a middle-class life as a teacher after college, and his decision to skip the legal migration process after his mother’s death mark him as lazy and improvident.

Silla’s friends’ overwhelmingly negative comments about Deighton’s values make it easy to forget that using education as a ladder to the middle class, reinvention through immigration, and being assertive in breaking racial barriers are all accepted parts of American Dream ideology during the moment in which Marshall is writing. Racism doesn’t put this dream out of reach for people of color, but Deighton’s refusal to be a property-owning striver puts him out of step with his immigrant peers’ perspective on the dream. What Selina learns as she listens to Silla’s and the community’s harsh assessments of Deighton is that there is a very narrow definition of what it means to be an authentic Barbadian in America.

Silla’s own childhood experiences as a member of the “Third Class” fit in better with the mythology surrounding Caribbean immigrants’ identity. Silla’s life was back-breaking, barren of play, and full of experiences that forced her to become self-reliant and hardworking to survive. Silla’s refusal to present Barbados as a paradise to which one can return leads her to embrace an important part of American Dream mythology that coincides with Caribbean-American ideology: the idea of working one’s way to success.

Silla’s commitment to work over all else introduces an element of conflict for Selina, however. On the one hand, Silla and other first-generation Caribbean-Americans want their children to have a strong connection to the parents’ culture of origin. On the other hand, to undertake the difficult path of going to a foreign country to start over implies a rejection of some element of the country of origin. Emigrés come to the United States and stay to create a different childhood and set of opportunities for their children. In Silla’s case, she fled work without reward, work that didn’t offer a path to the middle class.

Beryl’s childhood aligns more closely with the outcome Silla wants for her children. Beryl is a placid character who has no problem conforming to expectations. Her parents are exemplary Barbadian immigrants who have worked hard enough to secure businesses and property so that their daughter will get an education and achieve instant entrée to the middle class as a lawyer or doctor. Even this seemingly idyllic outcome has its downsides, however. Beryl at one point reveals that her father is a tyrant who regularly beats his children. For a childlike Selina, who dreams of becoming a poet, such a path seems stifling.

Faced with these competing visions of childhood and identity, Selina makes choices that bring her into direct conflict with the expectations of her immigrant community, parents, and peers. Selina values self-expression, instead of conformity, and the leisure to explore her dreams. Selina’s descriptions of moving through the city celebrate the pleasures available even to working-class people in the early 20th century. Prospect Park was the brainchild of Frederick Olmstead, who envisioned outdoor spaces as places where people from all walks of life could experience a bit of the country even while they lived in the city. The central scenes outdoors, where the “panorama of Sunday in Brooklyn” (50) represent for Selina “the shape of her freedom” (51).

That freedom is one in which Selina violates gender expectations, recites poetry to her friend, experiences same-sex attraction that she barely has the words to describe, and engages in leisure that her mother rejects as a worthwhile use of time, even for a child. By playing and moving freely through the city’s green spaces, Selina begins consolidating an identity that includes elements of her father’s creativity and her mother’s fierce determination and work ethic.