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university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 2, spring 2003 MICHAEL L. COBB Irreverent Authority: Religious Apostrophe and the Fiction of Blackness in Paule Marshall=s Brown Girl, Brownstones >Lord, lemme do better than this.= In a late chapter of Paule Marshall=s Brown Girl, Brownstones, the central mother in the text, Silla Boyce, irreverently describes some harsh truths about the way the blackness of her skin fails to offer an authoritative description of her Barbadian self B the way blackness fails to account for the differences between African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans. Her comments are a response to the decision not to include other racial, ethnic minorities (such as African Americans) in her community=s Barbadian homeowners= association, and it is a speech that contradicts any dream of racial unity predicated on the colour of one=s flesh. Silla exclaims: Take when we had to scrub the Jew floor. He wasn=t misusing us so much because our skin was black but because we cun do better. And I din hate him. All the time I was on the floor I was saying to myself: >Lord, lemme do better than this. Lemme rise!= No, power is a thing that don really have nothing to do with skin color. Look how white people had little children their own color working in coal mines and sweatshops years back. Look how those whelps in Africa sold us for next skin to nothing ... (224) Whether or not we agree with these assertions, such difficult sentiments emphasize the way race and power in the American context are often too simplified under a rubric like African American, a rubric often synonymous with black, and therefore neglectful of the variations of black experiences within the African Diaspora. Without a nuanced language of intra-racial difference, Silla understands that some racial >truths= are hard to articulate: >ANo, Nobody wun admit it, but people got to claw their way to the top on those on top got a right to scuffle to stay there@= (225). No one else wants to say what she has to communicate about intra-racial ambition, but Silla understands that she must, and must say it in such a way that will render, more faithfully, the actual racial dynamics that make her own homeowners= association so difficult to create and maintain. It=s no accident, then, that her more complicated accounts of herself and her own people require a frustrated appeal to the Lord: >Lord, lemme do better than this.= This arduous task is not unlike the similar verbal missions the other 632 michael l. cobb university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 2, spring 2003 characters must perform when the colour of their bodies is thought to explain, quickly, their own experiences of racial distinction in the midtwentieth -century United States.1 The blackness of their bodies is not eloquent, especially when they experience the racisms of blackness in the context of immigration, with radically different narratives of national and international belonging. Mary Helen Washington=s afterword to Brown Girl, Brownstones understands the crucial, interlocking differences between AfroCaribbeans and African Americans that are elided by colour: By skin color, by African origin, by their colonized status, the West Indians of Paule Marshall=s novel are inexorably connected to all black Americans, but it is their distinctiveness that yields the peculiar themes and images of the novel. The Boyce family does not belong to the tradition that created such American novels as Richard Wright=s Black Boy or Gwendolyn Brooks= Maud Martha or Toni Morrison=s The Bluest Eye. These transplanted Barbadians are an employed, literate, ambitious, property-owning, upwardly mobile, tough community of first-generation immigrants. Not one person in this novel is unemployed. These people came to >this man country,= as they call it, on purpose, as willfully as many white immigrants; and they exercise their collective force to get what they want. (312) Although I hesitate over Washington=s characterization of the divergences between the traditions of African American and Afro-Caribbean literatures (and her somewhat disparaging implications about the kinds of concerns occupying the more traditional canon of African American letters), she is correct to highlight the potentially silenced variation...

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