Observing Places essay

In the following excerpt from Brown Girl, Brownstones, Paule Marshall creates a catalog of the sights, sounds, and smells of a Brooklyn street during the Great Depression of the 1930s. In this paragraph, she records a typical Saturday night on Fulton Street : the bright lights, the clamorous street activity, the mixed odors of foods, and the faces of the street people. The specific details contribute to the overall idea of the street’s vibrant, chaotic energy.

Unlike Chauncey Street , Fulton Street this summer Saturday night was a whirling spectrum of neon signs, movie marquees, bright-lit store windows and sweeping yellow streamers of light from the cars. It was canorous voices, hooted laughter and curses ripping the night’s warm cloak; a welter of dark faces and gold-etched teeth; children crying high among the fire escapes of the tenements; the subway rumbling below; the unrelenting wail of a blues spilling from a bar; greasy counters and fish sandwiches and barbecue and hot sauce; trays of chitterlings and hog maws and fat back in the meat stores; the trolley’s insistent clangor; a man and woman in a hallway bedroom, sleeping like children now that the wildness had passed; a drunken woman pitching along the street; the sustained shriek of a police car and its red light stabbing nervously at faces and windows. Fulton Street on Saturday night was all beauty and desperation and sadness.

Compare Marshall ‘s portrait of the clamorous activity on Fulton Street with Wendell Berry’s tranquil description of a barn on a family farm. Berry , author of The Unsettling of America and other books on America ‘s agricultural crisis, gives us a simple but effective portrait of Elmer Lapp’s Place. Since one of Berry ‘s purposes is to argue that the family farm is worth saving, the details he selects create a positive dominant idea about farm life.

The thirty cows come up from the pasture and go one by one into the barn. Most of them are Guernseys , but there are also a few red Holsteins and a couple of Jerseys . They go to their places and wait while their neck chains are fastened. And then Elmer Lapp, his oldest son, and his youngest daughter go about the work of feeding, washing, and milking.

In the low, square room lighted by a row of big windows, a radio is quietly playing music. Several white cats sit around waiting for milk to be poured out for them from the test cup. Two collie dogs rest by the wall, out of the way. Several buff Cochin bantams are busily foraging for whatever waste grain can be found in the bedding and in the gutters. Overhead, fastened to the ceiling joists, are many barn swallow nests, their mud cups empty now at the end of October. Two rusty-barrelled .22 rifles are propped in window frames, kept handy to shoot English sparrows, and there are no sparrows to be seen. Outside the door a bred heifer and a rather timeworn pet jenny are eating their suppers out of feed boxes. Beyond, on the stream that runs through the pasture, wild ducks are swimming. The shadows have grown long under the low-slanting amber light.