50 pages • 1 hour read
Paule MarshallBrown Girl, Brownstones
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1959A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Book 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 1: “A Long Day and a Long Night”
Book 1, Chapter 1 Summary
It is a Saturday in 1939, and 10-year-old Selina Boyce lives in a rented Brooklyn brownstone house on Chauncey Street with her father, mother, older sister, and two boarders. Silla Boyce, Selina’s mother, is obsessed with getting the down payment she needs to buy their brownstone, but Deighton Boyce, Selina’s father, is content to rent. Deighton’s dream is to return to Barbados and build a big house for his family. His relationship with his wife is so tense that the two sleep separately, and Silla complains bitterly about the worthlessness of her husband, who dresses like a dandy and goes off at night to visit his mistress.
One afternoon, Deighton tells Selina a secret: his sister has left him two acres of land back home in Barbados. Deighton allows Selina to share the secret with Beryl Challenor, her best friend, but makes Selina promise not to tell Silla, who will be sure to stop Deighton from fulfilling his dream of returning home in style. Selina goes out to play with Beryl, and she returns home just in time to get cleaned up for Silla, who always “[brings] the theme of winter” (22) with her wherever she goes.
Book 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Irritated by Silla’s browbeating when he tells her has not saved any money for a down payment on the brownstone, Deighton defends himself by telling Silla about the land he has inherited. Silla can hardly believe him, and she insists that he sell the land and use the money to buy the brownstone. Deighton, dressed in his finest, leaves in a huff to visit his mistress.
Silla broods in the kitchen about Deighton’s windfall. Her pregnant friend Virgie Farnum arrives. Her visit gives Silla the chance to list all the wrongs Deighton has committed, the biggest of which is her belief that Deighton killed their fragile son (a boy with a damaged heart who died before Selina was born) by driving him in a car with poor suspension.
Virgie is a childhood acquaintance of Deighton’s, and she eggs Silla on by telling stories about how Deighton’s mother worked herself to death to give her spoiled son everything he wanted. Even then, Deighton spent his time pursuing women and jobs that whites would never grant him. When his mother died, Deighton headed for Cuba but jumped ship to enter America illegally. Silla swears that she is going to do something to get the value of Deighton’s land.
Book 1, Chapter 3 Summary
That night, Suggie Skeete, one of the boarders in the Boyce brownstone, gets drunk and sleeps with a male visitor, angering Miss Mary and Maritze, two white boarders, who can hear the noise below. Deighton walks down Fulton Street, where he envies men drinking freely in bars and fends off a friend’s chiding questions about his refusal to invest in property in Brooklyn. Deighton is relieved when he arrives at his mistress’s flat. She welcomes and caresses him with no questions asked, nor demands made.
Miss Thompson, an African-American woman from South Carolina, stops at her daughter’s tenement flat to discover her three granddaughters alone. Though she’s already worked a long day, Miss Thompson bathes the children and welcomes them into bed with her for the night.
Ina Boyce, Selina’s older sister, arrives home and asks her mother for soda money. Silla accuses her of hanging out with boys. Ina replies that she saw Deighton headed somewhere on Fulton Street and that she overhead Selina and Deighton discussing the land in Barbados. When Selina admits that she would like to live in Barbados, Silla tells her how she grew up as an unpaid child laborer in Bimshire (a nickname for Barbados). As Selina contrasts the carefree stories of Deighton’s childhood with Silla’s, “[i]t seemed to Selina that her father carried those gay days in his irresponsible smile, while the mother’s formidable aspect was the culmination of all that she had suffered” (55).
Book 1 Analysis
In Book 1, Paule Marshall establishes the cultural context for the novel, introduces the major characters, and sketches out the conflicts that drive the plot. These elements serve to reinforce the themes of coming of age and struggling over immigrant identity in America.
Selina Boyce is the child of Barbadian immigrants who participated in mass migration by Afro-Caribbeans to the northeastern United States during the 1940s and 1950s. Deighton Boyce, with his seamstress mother and college education, represents the emergent middle-class roots of one part of that emigration, while Silla’s hard-luck story as a member of the “Third Class” makes her representative of working-class migrants. Silla, moreso than Deighton, embodies the striving ethos of that early wave of Afro-Caribbean migrants, however. Her commitment to hard work, owning property, and moral uprightness—to the exclusion of other dreams and goals—places her in conflict with her husband and, especially, her daughter, whose relationship to the United States and Barbados are quite different from her mother’s.
Selina is one of what first-generation immigrants call “New York children” (61). She values leisure, has a romanticized notion of Barbados even when told how difficult it is to survive there, has little understanding of the risks associated with migrating, and has not yet encountered enough of the racism outside of her relatively closed community to understand her mother’s forbidding demeanor. Selina also has an idealized understanding of whites. The two white people in her orbit are Maritze and Miss Mary. Miss Mary, surrounded by the leftovers of the former, white inhabitants of the house, is full of stories about that white family. As the recipient of these stories, Selina creates elaborate fantasies about the family, much like she does when she listens to her father’s fantasy of his big house in Barbados.
Selina and her sister Ina both become pawns in the struggle over the shape of the family’s life as immigrants in the United States. The arrival of the letter about Deighton’s land inheritance is the inciting incident that causes the simmering tension between Deighton and Silla to erupt into open conflict. As the baby in the family, Selina feels an affinity for Deighton’s dreamy vision to return to Barbados, but her mother’s nightmarish accounts of her childhood check that vision. Selina’s half-formed understanding that her father’s choices are not quite in line with the prevailing Barbadian immigrant’s American Dream—to work hard, save money, buy property, and push the next generation further—causes her to question herself and puts her on the path to a painful coming of age.
While Ina conforms effortlessly to those expectations, Selina already shows streaks of individualism and defiance that contribute greatly to her burgeoning understanding of herself. Selina’s struggle throughout the novel is to come to terms with the impact of cultural expectations for the child of Barbadian immigrants and to accept the degree to which she is both like and unlike her mother.
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