“Brown Girl, Brownstones: (1959) A novel by Paule Marshall, The title refers to the rows of Victorian brownstone houses that abound in Fulton Park, Brooklyn, where Selina Boyce, the main character, lives. Selina is the daughter of Barbadian immigrants who moved to the U.S. twenty years earlier. After two decades of labor, mostly as domestics and factory workers, they, along with other Barbadians, have moved out of a cockroach-infested nieghborhood to better environs, with dreams of owning their own house. The Boyces attempt to acquire one of the brownstones and rise in the eyes of other middle-class Barbadians, However, Selina’s father, Deighton, has a vision of a perfect house he would consider living in, the kind of house in which whites would want to live. The money to acquire a house is obtained through inheritance, but because the house he wants is not available, Deighton decides to spend every bit of the money on a shopping spree on Fifth Avenue. The dream of the house is abandoned as the area is picked by inner-city developers for a major project.
Meanwhile, Selina has spiritually grown away from her family. She goes to college and copes with racism, temporarily transcending it through the medium of dance. However, the effect is short-lived: at a party following her stage performance, hosted by a rich white family on the Upper East Side, she begins to feel the pressure of racism again, through the unconsciously racist comments that are passed socially. But Selina emerges at the end of the novel as a much stronger person, having discovered herself through art.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
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