Brown Girl, Brownstones
Marshall’s First Book:
A Beautiful Copy
Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. New York: Random House, 1959.
8vo.; top-edge stained salmon; marble paper-covered boards, black cloth spine; illustrated dust-jacket, virtually as new. In a specially built cloth slipcase.
First edition of Marshall’s first book; followed by three later novels: The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1970), Praise Song for the Widow (1983), and Daughters (1991); and two collections of short fiction: Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1962) and Reena and Other Stories (1983).
Marshall (née Valenza Paule Burke), born in 1929, was raised by Barbadian immigrants in Depression-era Brooklyn. By the time she graduated from Brooklyn College in 1953, she had acquired a husband, Kenneth E. Marshall (whom she divorced in 1963), and a Phi Beta Kappa key. Erudite and creative, she worked for several years at the New York Public Library and joined the small magazine One World as a staff writer, while developing her fiction style out of her cultural experiences as a first-generation American.
Marshall had begun experimenting with writing at the age of nine after a trip to the West Indies, where the culture and landscape of her parents’ homeland inspired her to fill a notebook with poetry. Ten years later she began writing in earnest, in an idiom which drew on the lyrical language that had permeated her childhood. Though concerned with the plight of the uprooted Barbadians in American society, Marshall focused on the unique concerns of women, whose long talks in her parents’ basement kitchen had shaped her youth:
For these immigrants form Barbados, language was therapy for the tribulations they endured as invisible citizens of a new land—invisible because black, female, and foreign. But talk was more than that, too, for the West Indian dialect, syntactically unique and metaphorically inventive, sustained these women whom Marshall characterizes, in the words of James Weldon Johnson’s famous poem, as “unknown bards” in the nurturing culture of home while in exile. In their native everyday speech Marshall’s forebears, mothers, and kin in Marshall’s mind and imagination, affirmed themselves in the world through spontaneously creative use of the idiom, which bears in its forms and sound the conception of life, the philosophy, that embodies an Afro-Caribbean heritage. Finding the means for later generations to emulate the kitchen poets she knew in her childhood is the burden of Marshall’s fiction. (John M. Reilly in Contemporary Novelists, NY: St. James Press, 1996, p. 661)
In Brown Girls, Brownstones and later works, Marshall expresses the music of these “unknown bards,” transporting it to a decidedly literary plane and expanding its audience.
In 1954 Marshall published her first story, “The Valley Between,” and began Brown Girls, Brownstones two years later. Partly autobiographical, like many of her works, the novel traces the maturation of a first-generation Barbadian-American who must come to terms with the disillusions and disappointments of her life in Brooklyn to which, it becomes clear, her parents have sacrificed the development of their own culture. Although the protagonist’s trials describe the plight of thousands of isolated cultural groups in America at that time, Marshall’s development of a full, complex feminine protagonist would lead her to establish “the unique concerns of female identity” at the center of her future works. Reilly identifies at that center “the importance of lineage in the lives of women on the cusp of historical change,” told in a personal as well as political context:
Informed…by a reflexivity that is absent from the creations of “unknown bards,” the tales Marshall makes into novels reach beyond simulation of folk art, beyond the surface realism, nostalgia, or elementary denunciations of modernization that would constitute the easy and simple responses to historical transformation of traditional culture
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