Volume 30, Number 7 · April 28, 1983
Roots
By Darryl Pinckney
Brown Girl, Brownstones
by Paule Marshall, afterword by Mary Helen Washington
Feminist Press, 324 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Praisesong for the Widow
by Paule Marshall
Putnam, 256 pp., $13.95
Paule Marshall does not let the black women in her fiction lose. While they lose friends, lovers, husbands, homes, or jobs, they always find themselves. The precocious heroine of Brown Girl, Brownstones (first published in 1959, now reissued) comes of age and rejects the class aspirations of her tightly knit Barbadian community in Brooklyn. The willful teacher of The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969) is middle-aged and heading toward a sharp turn in her rocky road, one that will take her into battle with developers on her Caribbean island, and then to the unknown in Africa. The well-heeled woman approaching old age in Praisesong for the Widow finds spiritual renewal on a remote island in the Caribbean.
Review, 4394 words
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