#50, June 15, 2004

novel histories (2)

Death by Water

I first taught Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones in an American Studies course at Princeton University back in 1990. I was co-teaching the course with two other fellows, from whom I learned a great deal. We divided the lectures up around certain themes, and one of mine was immigration. The previous year this had a more labor history orientation, but on this occasion I wanted to teach something focusing more specifically on gender issues. Marshall's work fit what I wanted to do, getting at generational issues and intra-ethnic tensions, so I decided to assign it even though it fell slightly outside our period (being set around the Second World War -- while the course, I believe, was to end with the Great Depression). It also brought to the fore issues of race that are easily forgotten in discussions of immigration, and focused on a group, Barbadians, seldom discussed in immigration literature.

The connection with T.S. Eliot's “The Waste Land”, I belive, came to me as a result of a discussion with one of the other professors who was very pleased that I had assigned the work and mentioned the drowning of Deighton as reminiscent of Eliot's lines regarding death by water, and his going, not with a bang, but a whimper.

I used this essay in my e-book Hystrionyx. It has been slightly modified to fit within this section of Histrionics.

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

– T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”

In a scene from the movie “West Side Story”, the Puerto Rican boys and girls (some looking a little long in the tooth perhaps), banter back and forth in full voice. The girls sing, “I love to be in America/OK by me in America/everything free in America,” only to get a negative response from the boys. The girls then sing: “Here you are free and you have pri-ide”; Boys: “’long as you stay on your own si-ide” [“Ah-ah.” “Ah-ah"], and so on. This may be a simplistic gender division: the men disenchanted by their lack of opportunities to express their “manhood”; the women delighting in their new found freedoms (in fact, in the original play men and women sang both parts). Nevertheless, there is some truth to the existence of a gender dichotomy, reflecting the situation when men and women leave a patriarchal society and arrive in one of a different kind.[1]

In saying this, we are highlighting the importance not merely of the relations between men and women, but the relations between the two within a particular gender, race and class context. Such ideas are fleshed out more fully in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones.[2] Written in 1959 but not recognized for its great significance until at least ten years later, this work, among other things, uses a focus on the experiences of an adolescent daughter of Barbadian parents to highlight the importance of manhood and masculinity in the process of migration. For, in a country that places such importance on manhood, the main preoccupation for the male characters in Brown Girl is proving their masculinity. In fact, the West Indians in the book seem to conform to Booker T. Washington’s outlook almost exactly.[3] But the life and death of the father, Deighton, seem to show what happens to Washingtonian ideals in the crucible of the ghetto. Proving manhood, either by succeeding in material pursuits or by attempting to control his wife, becomes an obsession for him; and given the harsh realities of the ghetto, this obsession leads in his case to self-destruction.

The story, then, focuses on the early life of Selina, younger daughter of a couple from Barbados. Selina’s parents, Silla and Deighton, react very differently to the experience of coming to the United States and living in Brooklyn. The couple met after they came to Brooklyn; Silla is very sure that, in spite of all its problems, America has more to offer than “Bimshire”:

“Nice? Bimshire nice?....

“Lemme tell you how nice it is. You know what I was doing when I was your age?”

Selina shook her head.

“I was in the Third Class. You know what that is?”

Again she shook her head, but as her mother continued to glare down, demanding a fuller response, she said, “No...unless it’s got something to do with school.”

“School, ha!” Her sardonic laugh twisted the air. “Yes, you might call it a school, but it ain the kind you thinking of soul. The Third Class is a set of little children picking grass in a cane field from the time God sun rise in his heaven till it set. With some woman called a Driver to wasy yuh tail in licks if yuh dare look up. Yes, working harder than a man at the age of ten...” Her eyes narrowed as she traveled back to that time and was that child again, feeling the sun on her back and the whip cutting her legs. More than that, she became the collective voice of all the Bajan women, the vehicle through which their former suffering found utterance.”(p. 45)

Deighton meanwhile yearns for the position he, as a man, had held in Barbados. It was “poor-poor but sweet enough” (p. 11), and he wants to return as soon as he is able to earn enough to build a house on the land he owns.

This divergence accounts for a number of their differences in approaches to living in Brooklyn. Silla wants to establish herself and eventually buy a brownstone like all the other Bajans. Deighton, on the other hand, wants to cut corners to earn his fortune, then pack up and leave. His first scheme is to take a correspondence course in public accountancy. After making little effort to master accounting, he applies for a job at the three best firms in the city, with predictable results. He then lays aside this plan and buys a trumpet so that he can make quick money as a musician: “Besides you does get people respect when you’s a musician. You’s not just another somebody out here scuffling for a dollar. You’s an artist! You can play in any of those big bands...” (p. 84).

Again Deighton fails in his quest and falls back on his last claim to manhood, the plot of land he owns in Bimshire. But Silla’s mind is on the present and America; tired of her husband’s lack of effort in getting the family established in Brooklyn and in her determination to eventually buy a brownstone, she sells Deighton’s land. This is almost the last defeat that Deighton can withstand:

His head dropped and he might have been inspecting his polished shoes, the crease in his trouser or the linoleum's gay pattern. But really he was watching the slow dissolution of his dream: the white house with Grecian columns and stained-glass bathroom windows crumbling before it was even built, the flamboyant tree withering before it could take root. He moaned, breaking inside as the dream broke. Yet, as the moan tapered into a sigh, something else emerged. That sigh expressed a profound relief. It was as though Silla, by selling the land, had unwittingly spared him the terrible onus of wresting a place in life. The pretense was over. He was broken, stripped, but delivered...(p. 115).

Once in this condition, Deighton is unfit to be recognized by the Bajan community. While he is unable to reestablish himself as the head of the family by securing steady work, other men, like Percy Challener, are doing so. Through their business association they add to their own prestige by ensuring, in a way similar to any fraternity, that the likes of Deighton are shunned: “[Deighton’s] eyes wheeled over the room in a desperate search for a single welcoming face. To the bar, but the men there had seen him, and as his eyes met theirs, as his hand lifted uncertainly, they turned away with cold nods, and their backs formed a wall against him” (p. 150).

After this there is no chance for Deighton to rescue his masculinity. Once his mental emasculation is matched by physical injury, he turns to Father Peace, clearly modeled on Father Divine or Daddy Grace, who can bring him peace from the gender war.[4] Deighton can regain his self worth vicariously by looking on as Father Peace acts like “the respected head of a large family” (p. 164). Selina, looking on at the movement’s feast, is embarrassed for them, “they seemed to her like children being led by the piper into the sea...” (p. 166). Her thoughts turn to Percy Challenor, “presiding like a threatening god at the head of his table on Sundays. They were alike, he and Father Peace. They ruled. What was it that made her father unfit to do the same? Why was he the seduced follower and not the god...?” (p. 169). But Silla can feel no sympathy for this “piece of a man”; after all, no “real-real Bajan man....would have his head turn by some bogus god” (p. 173). Now “his humility galled her. His quick assent to all she said goaded her on. Why didn’t he leap up and shout her down, or lean across the table and smash the words from her mouth? But no, instead he exulted in the pain each word brought and repaid her abuse with compassion...” (p. 175). She informs the police that her husband is an illegal immigrant, Deighton is deported, and before reaching Barbados he drowns. Death by water – life, masculinity, ending not with a bang, but a whimper.

Perhaps this is a suicide, Deighton’s last act of defiance, or his expression of his agency, when everything else – the accountancy, the musicianship, the respect of his fellows – has been denied him. But if that is the case, how do we handle this as historians? We want our agents to defy authority and make their own worlds, not throw themselves on funeral pyres or overboard and unmake them. We do not handle the seemingly irrational well; we need a psychological theory, a social theory, to deal with and contain it. And we don’t want to identify ourselves or our readers with such behavior, when, in fact, this is exactly where we should be situated. The very act of self-destruction is written into the transcript of advancement and uplift; the failure to “get ahead” is internalized as the failure of the individual. It could not be the fault of the social group, and blame could certainly not be laid at the door of a beneficent society, that allows so much for so many. Consider the suicide suitably contained.

In the form of a dialectic, the “war” between Silla and Deighton is carried over into the life of Selina. At first, describing her mother as Hitler, her loyalties lie with her father. But soon her own relationships teach her that her mother is a victim also. Her boyfriend, Clive the artist, who, like her, dismisses the Association, goes the way of Deighton, “his slack body contract[ing] with sudden self-disgust.” He doesn’t mean to hurt Selina, but he doesn’t have her strength(pp. 246 & 276). Through the ending of her relationship, through the experience, first hand, of racism, and through a new appreciation of the hardships of Miss Thompson, the African American hairdresser, and Suggie Skeet, the self-described “whore,” she learns that she is not “Deighton’s Selina” but “the” mother’s child. “And she was one with them: the mother and the Bajan women, who had lived each day what she had come to know. How had the mother endured, she who had not chosen death by water?”(p. 292).