immigrant women in brown girl, brown stones

8/10/2019 Immigrant Women in Brown Girl, Brown Stones

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C SE STUDIES

Afro Caribbean


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BLACK

IMMIGRANT WOMEN

IN

BROWN GIRL, BROWNSTONES

PAULE MAlW3ALL

Virginia Commonwealth University

If

African Americans have suffered from

a

kind of invisibility (a subject

which Ralph Ellison brilliantly explores in his

1952

novel

The Invisible Man ,

and

if

the Black foreigner has been treated to a double invisibility (as

Bryce-Laporte, 1972,suggests in an article on Black immigrants), then the

West Indian immigrant woman might be said to suffer from a triple invisibil-

ity as

a

Black, a foreigner, and a woman. She simply has not been seen; nor

have her experiencesbeen dealt with

in any

direct and substantial way in the

social science literature.

Thischapter discusses an obscure group of women who came to theunited

States from the island of Barbados during the years following World War I.

This period witnessed the first major wave of West Indian immigration, and

coincided with the Great Migration northward of thousands upon thou-

sands of Black Americans from the rural South. In looking at the circum-

stances which brought the West Indian woman to the United States in the

early twenties we discern the traditional reasons which prompted most of

her groups to emigrate. There was the poverty of those idyllic-looking

"islands in the sun" with their single cash crop of sugar. "You know what it

is to work hard and still never make a head-way?'' one of the women

characters in

Brown Girl, Brownstones

19159:70)

sks bitterly.

That's Barbados. One crop. The bCack people having to work for

next skin to nothing. The white people treating we like slaves and

we taking it. The rum shop and the Church join together to keep

we pacify and in ignorance. That's Barbados. It's a terrible thing

to know that

you

gon be poor all yuh life no matter how hard you

work You does stop trying after

a

time.

People does see you so and call you lazy, but it ain't laziness. It

just that you does give up. You does kind of die inside I tell


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82

C R I B B E N L IF IN NEW YORK ITY

you I wouldnt let my mother know peace till she found the

money and send me to this man country.

Along with the poverty there were the tremendous population pressures

on these tiny islands, especially in a place like Barbados, which is one of the

most densely populated areas in the world. Because of these economic-de-

mographic conditions, Barbadians have always been on the move-whether

it was to resettle in neighboring areas such

as

Trinidad and Guyana or to try

their luck in places as far away as India, where it is known that some of them

went to help build the railroad shortly after the turn of the century.

For the women who left Barbados to come to the United States in the

twenties, the voyage north was financed in a number of ways. Money was

borrowed, a bit of family ground was sold, or a relative who had already

made his or her way to the States and found work dutifully sent home the

money for the ticket. Then there was what was called Panama Money

which,

in

many instances, paid the passage

North

This was the name given

to the remittances sent home by the fathers and sons who had gone off to

work building the Panama Canal between 1904 and 1914 My mother, for

example, came to the States on money inherited from an older brother who

had died working on the Isthmus. Panama Money-it was always spoken

of with great reverence when

I

was a little girl.

And

so

the women came. The majority of them were young# he daughters

of

estate workers, small landholders and artisans. My mothefs father was a

cooper-a maker of barrels in which the sugar, the life blood of Barbados,

was exported. Most of these women were unmarried, although a number

already had children. In some cases, this was the reason for them being sent

to

the States.

n

aunt of mine was banished to New Yorkfor having disgraced

the family with a child fathered by a pan boiler from British Guiana, who

came to Barbados every year during the grinding season to work in the sugar

factory. My mother arrived two years after my aunt as a tearful, overgrown

baby of eighteen who didnt even know how to braid her own hair. She

would never forget, she used to tell us, how awed and overwhelmed she felt

seeing New York rise shining and imperial from the sea that first day.

The search for work began almost immediately after their arrival. In

contrast to the more recent wave of West Indian women who came in the

sixties and found jobs-many of them

in

factories or

as

nurses aids and

sometimes even as secretaries, key punch operators, and the like-the only

work available to these earlier arrivals

as

well as to their

African

American

counterparts from the South) was as domestic-r as the women in Brown

Girl, rownstonestermed the work they were forced to do: scrubbingfloors.

These jobs were often sleeping-in arrangements which saw these young

women overworked, underpaid, and given only every other Thursday off.

A

short story published some years ago (Marshall,1983)takes place at the wake

of a Barbadian woman who had worked as a sleep-in domestic since coming


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BLACK IM MIGR ANT W O M E N 83

to the United States. All she had to show for her long forty years of labor was

a brownstone house in Brooklyn, which she never really got to live in very

much, and closets filled with clothes she never had the opportunity to wear.

Then there was the days work for the others. For the woman without a

steady job, days work was often a humiliating business of waiting on a street

corner in some White neighborhood for the local housewives to come along

and offer them a few hours work cleaning their houses.

Looking back on it now it seems to me that those Barbadian women

accepted these ill-paying, low status jobs with an astonishing ack of visible

resentment. For them they were simply a means to an end: the end being the

down payment on a brownstone house, a college education for their chil-

dren, and the much coveted middle-class status these achievements repre-

sented As Bryce-Laporte

(1972 passim

points out, the Black immigrant

was a fierce believer in and practitioner of the Protestant ethic.

Even when they married and had children, these women continued to

work I remember the trauma I would undergo on those occasions when I

was left with a neighbor while my mother disappeared for the day to scrub

some strangers floor.

Along with work, the lives of the women revolved around house and

children. Husbands, it seemed to me

d

a little girl, occupied a somewhat

peripheral place in their wives constellation aside, of course, from their role

as wage-earners. Following the traditional customs of life in Barbados, their

outings with their husbands were mainly confined to church, weddings,

funerals, and wakes and boat excursions up the Hudson in the summer and

the annual dance of the Sons and Daughters of Barbados in the winter.

Apartfrom these occasions, the women looked to each other for their social

life-and with the women in

Brown Girl Brownstones

as well as with my

mother and her friends in real life, this consisted mainly of sitting around the

kitchen table after their return from work each day and talking. Endlessly

talking. Much of the talk had to do with home-meaning Barbados; the

places, people, and events there

as

they remembered them. It was clearly an

effort on their part to retain their cultural identity amidst the perplexing

newness

of

America. Perhaps sensing the disregard in which they were held

by the society, their triple invisibility as it were, they felt the need more

strongly than other immigrant groups to hold onto the memories that de-

fined them.

In terms of their relations with Black American women it seems to me from

what I observed as a child that the West Indian woman considered herself

both different and somehow superior. From the talkwhich circulated around

our kitchen it was clear, for example, that my mother and her friends per-

ceived themselvesasbeing more ambiticius than Black Americans, more hard

working, and in terms of the racial question, more militant and unafraid in

their dealings with White people. Be Jesus Christ, in this white man world


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8

C R I B B E N

W

N N E W

YORK CITY

you got to take your mouth and make a gun, one of the women characters

in Brown

Girl Brownstones

declares.

In real life my mother used to say with pride that she probably would not

live long if she were to goSouth since she would never like anyfoo1ishness

from

the crackers there: Thefd have to

string

me up from the nearest tree

first, she would boast

The distance these immigrant women sought to put between themselves

and other Black women was often reinforced by the society tself which often

praised them for being more reliable, trustworthy and hard-working. In

B r m

Girl,Brownstonesa White woman speaks

of

her West Indian domestic

in these terms:

Ive never been able to get another girl as efficient as Ettie.

When she cleaned the house was spotless. And she was sohonest

I could leave my purse, anything, lying around and never worry.

She was that kind of person. Ive always told my friends theres

something different, something special about Negroes from the

West Indies. Some of the others are well ust impossi-

ble 1959288).

With this kind of insidious divide and rule encouragement it is no wonder

that even in the face of the racism they inevitably encountered, these West

Indian women sought to escape identification with those who were consid-

ered the pariahs

of

the society. If only we had had our own language, my

mother used to lament-meaning by that something which would have

clearly established that they were different, foreign and, therefore, perhaps

more acceptable.

The racial pride and political consciousness which they believed they

possessed to a greater degree than American Blacks was perhaps most dra-

matically expressed in their involvement in the Garvey Movement of the

twenties. Not only did they faithfully contribute

to

the Universal Negro

Improvement Association out of their meager salaries but they attended

meetings, marched in parades, and served as members of the nurses brigade,

manyof them when the movement was at its height. Talk of Garvey and Black

self-help and Black pride still figured in their conversations long after the

Movement had failed. They remain steadfast Garveyites to the end.

All in all it seems to me that these women who are now-the ones who are

still living-the mothers and grandmothers of

my

generation, accomplished,

in general, what they had set out to do in coming to America. By dint of hard

work, sacrifice, and a fierce determination and will, they acquired the house,

the university degrees for their children, the cars, the fur coats (which were

usually, I remember, black Persian lamb) and, more recently, the trips home

to Barbados each year to celebrate independence.


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B U C K

lMh4lGRAhT WOMEN

85

They accepted without question the materialistic ethic of this country

while at the same time remaining, it seems to me, strangely aloof from

America. Their aloofness, which was perhaps a defensive device, was ex

pressed in the almost contemptuous way they insisted on referring to the

United States

as

this mans country.

It

would always, in other words, be

foreign territory-someone elses turf This sentiment was captured in a host

of other ways as well, such as their speech, which remained as stubbornly

Barbadian

as

when they first walked off the ships at Ellis Island.

They were, for all their insularity, fears and misguided materialism,

women of impressive strength, authority, and style. Unfortunately, because

they were women-and Black women at that-this country never saw fit to

acknowledge their presence or their

worth,

or to make full use of the

tremendous human resource they represented. Their experience as immi-

grant women has yet to be regarded as worthwhile historical and sociological

data in its own right.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bryce-Laporte, R.S.

1972 *Black Immigrants:The Experience of Invisibility and Inequality,Journal of B W tudies

3 1):29-56, Sept.

Ellison,

R.

1952

The

InvisibleMn New

York:

Random House.

Marshall, P.

1984

The ChosenPlace, the

Timeless People. New

Y o r k

Vintage Contemporaries.

1983 Reena.In R m

nd

Other StOrieS.Pp.69-92. New

York

Feminist

Press.

1981 Brown Girl, Brownstones. New

York

Feminist

Press.

immigrant women in brown girl, brown stones

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