Bright Shadow by Joyce Carol Thomas

First published: 1983

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: Summer, 1971, through Easter, 1972

Locale: Ponca City, Oklahoma

Principal Characters:

• Abyssinia (Abby) Jackson, a twenty-year-old black student at Langston University
• Carl Lee Jefferson, Abby’s boyfriend, a tall, handsome track star
• Strong Jackson, Abby’s strict father
• Patience Jackson, Abby’s mother
• Serena Jordan, Abby’s aunt
• Rufus Jordan, a minister who marries Aunt Serena

The Novel

Bright Shadowis a love story. It continues the life of Abyssinia Jackson where it left off at the end of Joyce Carol Thomas’s first novel, Marked by Fire (1982).

Abyssinia is attracted to Carl Lee Jefferson, a fellow student at Langston University. Her father, Strong, does not like the boy because of his family. Carl Lee is the son of the town drunkard. Abby’s mother, Patience, has a sister, Serena, who lives next door to the Jacksons. She is sixty years old and has just married a former minister named Rufus Jordan. This minister, who recently moved to Ponca City, Oklahoma, from Houston, Texas, has an evil look in his eyes. His demeanor and booming voice frighten Abby.

Against her father’s wishes, Abby invites Carl Lee to her house for a visit. Strong tells Carl Lee the story of Abby’s birth. This narration fills in background material from the previous novel, Marked by Fire. It explains the close relationship that Abby has with her Aunt Serena. Strong alludes to another unusual birth, that of Carl Lee, the winter before Abby’s, but drops the subject when Patience gives him a warning look.

A few days later, Abby has a bad dream about Aunt Serena. It leaves her with a feeling of dread. That Saturday, when Carl comes over to help her rake leaves, they visit with her aunt over the fence that separates their two properties. Abby is given a bouquet of blue iris from Serena’s garden. After Carl leaves, Abby tries to find out what her aunt thinks about this new beau. Aunt Serena says that he is a fine boy and that she likes him.

Every day for a week, Carl Lee and Abby observe Serena and her new husband as they go to a nearby cornfield. When they get there, the Reverend Jordan preaches a sermon with only the cornstalks, a scarecrow, and Aunt Serena to hear him. When the moon is at its fullest, the couple walks to the cornfield at night instead of during the day. The next morning, Abby learns that her aunt has been murdered. She is horrified, moreover, to discover that she has made crackling bread out of strips of Aunt Serena’s skin.

Abby is anguished by the death and takes long walks in the country to take her mind off it. On one of these excursions, she finds a cat under a bush. She realizes it is not an ordinary cat because the bush is covered with starflowers and song sparrows.

Carl Lee sustains Abby through the terrible grief that afflicts her, and their love deepens. Strong and Patience begin to change their minds about the young man. Their new attitude of acceptance stems from the support he gives Abby. Slowly, Carl Lee begins to trust Abby enough to confide in her, and she learns that he also has troubles. His father abuses him. When his father tries to force him to eat a rat, Carl Lee leaves home. Abby misses him greatly.

While Carl Lee is away, Abby has a nightmare about Aunt Serena. It affects her so much that she begins tearing up flowers that have bloomed in her garden on the first day of March. She plants weeds instead. Patience and Strong are worried about her. They try to talk to her about Serena, and they tell her that she must cry and get the pent-up grief out of her system. She does cry, but the pain is still there.

Soon, it becomes known that Carl Lee’s father is very sick. His diseased liver is making him mortally ill. People no longer see him around town, and no one knows his whereabouts. Carl Lee comes back to look for his father and asks for Abby’s assistance. Together, they search the woods and at last are led to his grave by a Cherokee Indian woman who turns out to be Carl Lee’s mother. When Abby returns home, her parents tell her the story about Carl Lee’s birth: His mother was thrown out of her home forever because she had gone into the woods according to Indian custom to have her baby. Carl Lee’s father could not accept his wife’s Indian ways and took the baby away from her.

On Easter morning, flowers spring into bloom among Abby’s weeds. Carl, a Methodist, decides to go to the Pentecostal church with Abby. As the organ plays, they sing a duet, and grief is conquered for both of them.

The Characters

A third-person narrative with a limited omniscient point of view, Bright Shadow’s characters are known through the protagonist, Abby Jackson. She is a dynamic heroine, just as she was in Marked by Fire, but this time her changes occur as she tries to overcome an emotional trauma caused by her aunt’s bizarre murder. All the characters are described with the lavish use of adjectives by the author.

Abby has dusky-lashed, cocoa-colored eyes set in a pecan-brown face. There is a birthmark on her cheek. She is independent, tenderhearted, and a good student. Her voice is a sweet soprano, and her face mirrors intense grief over the loss of her aunt. Her forebodings come to her in dreams.

Abby’s view of Carl Lee, the boy she loves, dwells on his features, such as eyes that are shiny and liquid like still water. She thinks of his hair like blackberries and his skin as like that of a ripe plum. He has a strong baritone voice, and “strong” is a word Abby uses often in thoughts of him. She seems to be connecting him with her father, Strong, who sees the boy in a totally different way. To Strong Jackson, Carl is a “skillet headed ape.”

Abby’s father, Strong, is stern. He has broad shoulders and thick, black hair salted with sprigs of white, and he often bellows. He can draw blueprints and build furniture. His wife, Patience, is plump and caramel-colored, with snow-white hair that falls in braids to her shoulders. She sews quilts with a missionary named Ruby Thompson, a flat character who serves primarily as someone to participate in dialogue that furthers the story. She is the spokeswoman for the neighbors when they confront Abby about her weed garden.

Aunt Serena is a plump woman with butter-colored skin. Her front teeth glitter, and her voice ranges from a sound like crystal to that of a trumpet. Alert eyes, a songbird singing voice, and a wonderful laugh complete the portrait. This sixty-year-old woman dips snuff with a hackberry limb from which she has teased out a natural brush with her fingers. She is very religious and has just married a preacher, the Reverend Rufus Jordan, who comes from a big city where he was the pastor of a big church.

Jordan is overweight, squinty-eyed, and squat. He talks in honeyed words that carry a hint of menace, and his laughter is forced and unnatural. He has high shoulders, and his head is too far forward on his rigid neck. His bass voice and his mean eyes frighten Abby. Actually, she probably senses that he is crazy.

The parents of Carl Lee are minor characters. His father, an alcoholic, has liver disease. During the novel, he disappears and is found dead. Carl Lee’s mother is an American Indian. Of Cherokee descent, she is variously described as a “bright shadow,” a bird of light movement, and a statue of proud grace. She has black hair that hangs like silken ropes down her back. A band of beads lies across her brow and a multicolored blanket drapes her body.

At the end of the story, Abby borrows a bright shadow of a voice from her dead Aunt Serena. It is one of the miracles of spring.

Critical Context

Joyce Carol Thomas is an accomplished storyteller who creates believable people for whom readers have sympathy. She shows African Americans to be physically attractive, sensitive, caring individuals who are eminently worthy of full membership in the great human family.

This sequel to the acclaimed Marked by Fire was itself honored by the annual Coretta Scott King Award for outstandingly inspirational contributions to black literature for children. The story is continued in the novel An Act of God (1985), in which Abyssinia attends medical school, and Water Girl (1986). A story about Carl Lee’s childhood is told in The Golden Pasture (1986).

Bibliography

Bell, Bernard W. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. Complete history of the African American novel and its practitioners. Argues that 1983—the year of Bright Shadow’s publication—was a crucial transition year for the form.

Caywood, Carolyn. Review of Bright Shadow, by Joyce Carol Thomas. School Library Journal 30, no. 5 (January, 1984): 89-90. Mixed review that calls the book’s melodrama contrived but that praises Thomas’s “sensuously descriptive passages celebrating the physical beauty of the black characters.”

Davis, Thulani. Review of Bright Shadow, by Joyce Carol Thomas. Essence 14, no. 12 (April, 1984): 50. Warm review by a respected dramatist and novelist.

Earhart, Amy E. “Joyce Carol Thomas.” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Critical biographical essay on Thomas, accompanied by a bibliography of works by and about her.

Rollock, Barbara. Black Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books: A Biographical Dictionary. New York: Garland, 1988. Useful factual summary of Thomas’s career that discusses her editorship of the black women’s newsletter Ambrosia and her lecturing in Africa, Haiti, and the United States.

Thomas, Joyce Carol. Marked by Fire. New York: Avon Books, 1982. Thomas’s acclaimed first novel about Abby Jackson and her family, for which the author won an American Book Award.

Valkeakari, Tuire. Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952-1998. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Study of Christian imagery and rhetoric in African American novels of the second half of the twentieth century. Useful for placing Thomas’s use of church music in context.

Yalom, Marilyn, ed. Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1983. Notes that women are central to Thomas’s fiction and that her characters are drawn from people she has known in real life.