CASE STUDIES

Afro-Caribbean
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 experiences been dealt with in any direct and substantial way in the
social science literature.
This chapter 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) asks 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
82 CARIBBEAN LIFE IN NEW YORK CITY
you I wouldnt let my mother know peace till she found the
money and send meto 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#the daughters
of estate workers, small landholders and artisans. My mothef s 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. An 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, Brownstones termed the work they were forced to do: scrubbing floors.
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
BLACK IMMIGRANT WOMEN 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 lack 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 mea 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.
Apart from 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 themselves as being 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
84 CARIBBEAN WE NNEW 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 go South 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 itself which often
praised them for being more reliable, trustworthy and hard-working. In
B r m Girl, Brownstones a 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 so honest
I could leave my purse, anything, lying around and never worry.
She was that kind of person. Ivealways told my friends theres
something different, something special about Negroes from the
West Indies. Some of the others are . . . well . . . just 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,
many of 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.
BUCK 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 Studies
3(1):29-56, Sept.
Ellison, R.
1952 The Invisible Mn. New York: Random House.
Marshall, P.
1984 The Chosen Place, the Timeless People. New York Vintage Contemporaries.
1983 Reena. In R m nnd Other StOrieS. Pp.69-92. New York Feminist Press.
1981 Brown Girl, Brownstones. New York Feminist Press.
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