How'd I Miss This Book?

A new series about catching up on older reads.

Credit: Martino Fine Books, AP

Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall (1959)

I’m not proud of this, but unfortunately there are some writers whose work I only get into after they have died. So though I had vaguely heard of the late great Paule Marshall, a contemporary of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin and a MacArthur fellowship recipient, I only finally decided to crack open her debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones, after reading Edwidge Danticat’smoving remembrance of her and Morrison and after seeing it on this list of the100 most important books by black women.

And now I’m furious with myself that it’s taken me so long to read this masterful coming-of-novel. The book is a gorgeously written, nuanced, heartbreaking story of one immigrant family living in Brooklyn just before World War II. Selina, the novel’s protagonist, is a dreamy, curious little girl who likes to write poetry and chat with the two other tenants in their brownstone, an old white lady who remembers the Scotch-Irish family who used to live in the building before they fled to the suburbs, and Suggie, who drinks rum and has sex with random men to escape the monotony of her job as a cleaner. Selina has a kindred spirit in her father, a handsome idealist who has inherited a plot of land in their native Barbados and dreams of building a grand house on the island. Standing in the way of that dream is his practical, formidable wife Silla, referred to as “the mother.” She wants to buy the land and use the money to buy the brownstone which they currently only rent. Ida, Selina’s older sister, is her mother’s docile ally.

Writing in elegant, graceful prose, Marshall walks us through this wrenching story about the elusiveness and futility of the so-called American dream, the straitjacket of racism, and the claustrophobia of living in a tight-knit, highly judgmental, striving immigrant community. I finished the book with a profound sense of gratitude that it had come into my life even if it was a little late. Get your copy. — Tomi Obaro