Betsey Brown

 

Acclaim for
Betsey Brown
by
N
TOZAKE
S
HANGE

“[Ntozake Shange] is a unique and gifted, literary executant and works under strong impulses to do things her own way despite settled conventions of craft. The author's peculiar chemistry (a synonym for talent), plus her singlemindedness, has brought her a decided victory. She has made Betsey Brown live. We care about the child and wonder what will happen to her, how she will fare. This doubtless was the author's intention—and mission.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

“Shange is a superb storyteller who keeps her eye on what brings her characters together rather than what separates them. . . . After you've read
Betsey Brown
to yourself, you can read it aloud to a friend.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“No contemporary writer has Shange's uncanny gift for immersing herself within the situations and points-of-view of so many different types of women. No wonder she has achieved an almost oracular status among her female readers. She is a writer of many masks. She can serenade you, and she can cut you; she can chirp, as well as growl; she can delight, as well as antagonize.”

—Ishmael Reed

“Ntozake Shange's writings compose one long, continuous song: by parts blues medley, swaying gospel melody, plaintive torch ballad.”

—The Washington Times

“Betsey Brown
is a joy to read. Every sentence seems filled with a delicate, jubilant, sly, comical, musical brio. The energy, good humor, imagination and joie de vivre make this novel a refreshing exception to most contemporary fiction.”

—Phillip Lopate

Betsey Brown

BY NTOZAKE SHANGE

THEATER
for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
Three Pieces:
Spell #7
A Photograph: Lovers in Motion
Boogie Woogie Landscapes

POETRY
nappy edges
A Daughter's Geography
Ridin' the Moon in Texas
The Love Space Demands

FICTION
Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo
Liliane
Some Sing, Some Cry
(with Ifa Bayeza)

A NOVEL

Ntozake Shange

ST. MARTIN'S GRIFFIN  
  NEW YORK  

Title

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3

chapter 4

chapter 5

chapter 6

chapter 7

chapter 8

chapter 9

chapter 10

chapter 11

chapter 12

chapter 13

chapter 14

 

 

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

BETSEY BROWN
. Copyright © 1985 by Ntozake Shange. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Picador edition as follows:

Shange, Ntozake.

Betsey Brown / Ntozake Shange.

    p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-312-13434-1

1. Afro-American teenage girls—Missouri—Saint Louis—Fiction. 2. Afro-American families—Missouri—Saint Louis—Fiction. 3. Family—Missouri—Saint Louis—Fiction. 4. Saint Louis (Mo.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3569.H3324B4 1995

 

ISBN 978-0-312-54123-1 (Griffin edition)

First St. Martin's Griffin Edition: October 2010

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

This book is dedicated to my family.

Many thanks to all those involved in the ten-year saga of
Betsey Brown
, the novel, especially Ifa, Bisa, Paul, and my parents, as well as the annual encouragement of Joseph Papp, Bonnie Daniels, and my editor, Michael Denneny. As Jessica says, “We'll show you some real rock & roll” or as Olga says, “We let the pot steep till the kettle was black.” It takes all that to make a little girl herself.

 

 

 

 

& this is for the man who chases butterflies

& alcoholics in latin night club dreams

& kisses me with zoom lenses on the beaches

of the Hollywood Freeway

all the hibiscus bloom as you devour iguanas

& this is for the men who loved me &

the one I love

& the child who is a mirror

—Jessica Hagedorn

“Something About You”

Dangerous Music
, Momo's Press

Betsey Brown

The sun hovered behind a pink haze that engulfed all of St. Louis that Indian summer of 1959. The sun was a singular preoccupation with Betsey. She rose with it at least once a week. She'd shake Sharon or Margot outta they beds and run to the back porch on the second floor to watch the horizon set a soft blaze to the city. Their house allowed for innumerable perspectives of the sun. From the terrace off Betsey's room, where she was not 'sposed to stand, she could see the sun catty-cornered over the Victorian houses that dotted the street, behind maples and oaks grown way over the roofs of the sleeping families. On her street you could name the families without children in one breath. Why, one reason to live there was cause there were so many children. Only the Blackmans directly cross from Betsey with their pillars and potted dwarf plants didn't like children, which must be why
they didn't have any. In the wintertime Mrs. Blackman would come running out in her furs, shouting for everybody to get off her lawn, even though it was the best one for sledding cause there were two slopes. Whatta shame she couldn't understand that. Yet seen from the terrace, when the dawn came in the winter, Mrs. Blackman's dwarfed plants wrapped in shields of ice glistened like rainbows. Betsey never told Mrs. Blackman that. She didn't mention the shadows of the nuns dressing in the convents, either. There was a preciousness to St. Louis at dawn or dusk that was settling to the child in the midst of a city that rankled with poverty, meanness, and shootings Betsey was only vaguely aware of.

The sun and the stairways protected her, gave her a freedom that was short-lived but never failing. Her house sat on a small hill and there were stairs that went to the front door, but you could use the same stairs to go anywhere around the house cause the stairs also led to a porch that went all the way round the side of the house. That's how come nobody could ever tell exactly where Grandma was. She could be anywhere on that porch just watching you do wrong. Then there were the back stairs, only three of them: one, two, three wooden ones, all creaky and needing paint. Underneath those stairs Betsey helped a stray cat have babies. She lined up worms and rocks. She lay flat on her back sometimes, being quiet and unseen, while everybody went looking for her or while everybody was coming up the steps. She heard a lot of secrets lying under the back stairs. Heard a lot of kissing. Now, kissing is hard to hear, but Charlie kissed back there sometimes. Jane and Greer were always kissing. The stairs to the basement were magnificently narrow, like a dungeon the basement was. In the summer it was ever so cool and in the winter it was warm. Betsey didn't know
why more of the family didn't covet the basement. Maybe it was on account of the dark and the smell. It smelled funny down there. Jane said that white folks usedta make the colored help sleep down there. Now that Jane would never do, put a Negro in the basement.

But the best stairs were the back stairs that went all the way to the third floor. These stairs turned this way and then that. Why, a body would hide in a cranny on those stairs and never be found. They were dark, too, a blackish wood gainst blackish walls like servants should never see the light of day. Betsey loved the back stairs that led to the littlest porch on the third floor, which Jane never warned her about, cause Jane'd never seen it, Betsey 'sposed. From there, on fall mornings, in her pajamas and overcoat, Betsey watched the dawn come up over the steeple of the church way down Union Boulevard, past Soldan and the YMHA. The bells would cling a holy cling that no one in the house could hear. They used alarm clocks.

So Betsey had fashioned parameters of her own for the house she shared with everyone else. The only real problem was doors. Every room was connected to another room by a door and Jane forbade anyone to lock the doors. The second floor was a pathway of bedrooms with a hallway right next to it. Only Charlie's room wasn't connected to anything and that was because he was in high school. Betsey didn't see what kinda reason that was to have a room that wasn't connected to everybody else's. That's why Betsey liked to be up before everyone else, out on one of her porches, taking in the world all on her own. There she made up stories or just stayed out of the fracas Sharon, Margot, and Allard would be making all the time. Sound traveled uncannily in this house and everybody was always yelling to
everybody else. Arguing all the time. Howdy-Doody or American Bandstand, Little Rock or Amos and Andy.

Alone on her balcony, Betsey luxuriated in the quietness, letting her thoughts ramble.

“Speak up Ike, an' 'spress yo'se'f,” Betsey murmured, remembering yesterday afternoon on Union Boulevard when Willetta and Susan Ann had ripped into each other over that basketball champ with the good hair, Benny. Betsey kept trying to remember how Willetta's bra looked and how Susan Ann had scratched Willetta's face with the longest red nails. She was certain that the black-laced bra and the red nails had something to do with the way Mr. Paul Laurence Dunbar wanted her to say, “Speak up Ike, an' 'spress yo'se'f.” Some sultry willing-to-fight-over-you,-if-you-give-me-a-chance way of saying the line. Today Mrs. Mitchell was having the elocution contest for Class 7B, Betsey's class, with the kids from cross the tracks and the kids from the right side of em too. Willetta and Susan Ann had gathered such a crowd round em, tearing at each other that way. And Benny, he just went on to the game gainst Sumner, like he didn't know nothin bout all this blood and swearing and cussing going on in his name. It was evil and wicked to fight, but Betsey wanted the grown woman bit of it to rub off on her today when she said, “Speak up Ike, an' 'spress yo'se'f.”