Daughters by Paule Marshall

First published: 1991

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1940’s-1980’s

Locale: New York, New York; Triunion, West Indies

Principal Characters:

• Ursa Beatrice Mackenzie, the diminutive daughter of a short, light-skinned American mother and a tall, dark-skinned West Indian father
• Primus Mackenzie (PM), Ursa’s father, a lawyer and politician
• Estelle Mackenzie, Ursa’s mother, descended from a long line of schoolteachers and social workers
• Vincereta “Viney” Daniels, Ursa’s best friend since college
• Lowell Carruthers, Ursa’s lover for more than six years, a personnel relations specialist in an electronics firm
• Astral Forde, a Spanish Bay country girl who moves to Fort Lord Nelson with her friend Malvern to improve her lot
• Celestine Marie-Claire Bellegarde, a servant to Primus Mackenzie’s mother, “Mis-Mack”

The Novel

Daughtersexamines the personal and political growth associated with Africa’s diaspora in both the United States and the West Indies. Ursa Mackenzie is a nexus of two cultures who is trying to understand both. Part of the upwardly mobile black middle class, Ursa struggles with personal identity and relationships in a context of privilege while other black people are victimized not only by racism but also by their own people’s participation in a corrupt and corrupting political system. Daughters juxtaposes the personal and the political to demonstrate how inextricably connected the two are: Individual achievement cannot come at the cost of the larger African community.

The novel opens with Ursa’s abortion, which is paralleled later by a back-alley abortion Astral Forde undergoes and is contrasted to Estelle’s many miscarriages. The pregnancy and subsequent abortion is emblematic of Ursa’s ambivalence regarding all aspects of her life—her relationship with Lowell Carruthers; a second master’s degree that she cannot bring to closure; her attitude toward and relationship with her parents, especially her father, and with the island of Triunion; and her career, which has gone from corporate success to freelance political research. She is caught in stasis. She cannot decide.

Ursa’s personal dilemma is twofold. One problem is her relationship with Lowell. Neither is willing to give up independence, to commit completely to each other, to get beyond their Friday evenings, every two weeks, of dinner and sex. There were what Ursa considered “the couple of love years,” but those have long passed. Now Ursa and Lowell meet out of habit, out of the desire not to be completely alone. The novel traces the eventual disintegration of even this minimal connection the two share, when Ursa finally tires of having to listen to Lowell’s incessant complaints about office politics and when Lowell tires of Ursa’s dependence on her father’s love and approval, leaving no room for him.

The novel also follows the political career of Primus Mackenzie, Ursa’s father. That career presents Ursa’s second problem. Primus’s political career began with him hoping to change the quality of the lives of Triunion’s people. In a newly established democracy, with a poor economy dependent on whatever the people could grow, since highways, electricity, and telephones required for factories and industry were lacking, he discovered that progress is nearly impossible. He is opposed by corrupt countrymen who favor the status quo and are propped up by the United States government. Primus’s political party threatens to defeat the ruling party, and Primus tries to become the prime minister. In answer to that threat, an American destroyer points its guns at the island, scaring citizens ever after to accept the leadership in power. Primus capitulates to Western millionaires who want to turn his district into a resort. The resort will provide no jobs for his constituents and will not improve the Morlands district’s economy. The rich will not even have to drive on the bad highway past the children with their distended bellies and no seats in their pants. They will fly into a private airport. The resort is one more example of white capitalist exploitation of people of color, endorsed by their own government. Only by losing the election, subverted by his own wife and daughter, can Primus be stopped in his descent into money and resorts, with the concerns of his people forgotten. This situation is paralleled in New Jersey’s Midland City, where Ursa conducts her follow-up study on local politics only to discover that the people who elected the city’s black mayor were betrayed in favor of white men in suits.

The Characters

The novel begins in the 1980’s and is not a straightforward chronological account. Paule Marshall uses a variety of narrative techniques to tell her story. In the process of moving Ursa’s story forward, Marshall often relies on flashbacks to recount the lives of Primus, Estelle, Celestine, Viney, and Ursa. Marshall also uses an epistolary approach to reveal Estelle’s thoughts and experiences. She permits intimate looks at Celestine through her first-person accounts of her life, along with providing deeply personal narratives by Astral Forde.

In order to understand the present, readers must know a character’s past. His pampered and privileged upbringing has turned Primus into a domineering man. Ursa’s childhood memories of him are larger than life, recalling him as a man whose “head would be in the way of the sun.” Celestine’s complete and unquestioning devotion to him reinforces his behavior, much to Estelle’s dismay. Celestine will not accept Estelle’s American ways of doing things—wanting air conditioning and louvered windows, dressing her child in overalls with ducks on the bib rather than in starched pretty dresses and gold bangles, and transforming Mis-Mack’s store into an office where Primus can meet his constituents. She can even take Primus’s side in his long-standing affair with Astral Forde since, she rationalizes, all Triunion men have at least one “keep-miss.” Primus, however, is devoted to his wife and child. After wondering why Estelle did not leave her father when she discovered his affair with Astral, Ursa finally concludes that what she has “tried for years to understand about these two is perhaps none of her business.”

In her letters to the “homefolks,” Estelle provides an account of her life on the island and her reflections on events back in the United States. Living in two places, she provides perspectives on both: on the new independence of Triunion and the island’s corruption as well as on American historical facts including the Jim Crow laws that her parents endured while traveling in the South in the early 1950’s, the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the marches through the South in the 1960’s (during which her brother’s hip is broken by the police in an Alabama jail), the 1963 March on Washington, the Black Power movement, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. She tells Ursa, “I decided to write off the eighties the day Bonzo’s friend was sworn in.”

Astral Forde’s embittered narrative helps readers to understand the silent woman who watches young Ursa swim laps in a hotel swimming pool and who greets her as if she were a maid. Ursa later apologizes for treating Astral this way. Astral and her best friend, Malvern, hoped to improve themselves by moving from Spanish Bay to Fort Lord Nelson. Malvern finds a kind, broad-faced bus driver who gives her more children than can be accommodated in their poor excuse of a shack perched on a hill in Fort Lord Nelson’s shantytown. When she dies of cancer, though, she has husband, children, and Astral to note her passing. Astral has only Malvern, whom she sees when she needs someone upon whom to unload her selfish and obsessive concerns. Even at Malvern’s deathbed, Astral’s most pressing need is to rail at the half-conscious Malvern over Primus’s intention of selling his hotel, which Astral manages. It is the only thing in the world that Astral has left.

Ursa, like her mother, is a woman of two cultures trying to reconcile them. She is also a woman of two identities—an independent New York career woman and a daughter tied to her family in Triunion. It is Lowell who makes her confront that dependent daughter, eventually forcing her to return home after a four-year absence to face the island, her parents, and herself. It is her mother who pushes her to break Triunion’s and Primus’s stasis by giving the resort prospectus to her father’s political opponent, a young idealistic schoolteacher who reminds Estelle of the young Primus. It is Viney’s suggestion that Ursa reconcile with Lowell, combined with the Triunion memorial to Congo Jane and Will Cudjoe—slave rebellion heroes about whom Ursa has spent twelve years of her life trying to write—that makes Ursa realize the importance of black men and black women together.

Critical Context

Daughters is Paule Marshall’s fourth novel. Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) is a classic bildungsroman that has steadily gained respect and popularity since its publication. The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969) concerns itself not only with an individual and her family but also with an entire people. It is a large book exploring expansive ideas. Praisesong for the Widow (1983), the story of a middle-aged, middle-class African American woman, allowed Marshall, as she has said, to “deal with the notion that one has—women especially have—the absolute right to reconstitute their lives at no matter what age.” Daughters continues Marshall’s exploration of women, often living in two cultures, who come to know themselves as individuals, as women, and as members of the African diaspora.

Marshall acknowledges that she was greatly influenced in language, politics, and life by her mother and the other Barbados women who sat and talked in her mother’s kitchen after working long days cleaning other people’s houses. She has said, “I see myself as someone who is to serve as a vehicle for these marvelous women who never got a chance, on paper, to be the poets that they were.” Her novels are tributes to the women who scrubbed so their daughters could write.

Bibliography

Alexander, Simone A. James. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Marshall is one of three novelists whose representations of mother-daughter relationships are the subject of this study.

Ascher, Carol. “Compromised Lives.” Review of Daughters, by Paule Marshall. The Women’s Review of Books 9 (November, 1991): 7. Describes the novel as “intimately observed, culturally rich, morally serious.”

Brownley, Martine Watson. Deferrals of Domain: Contemporary Women Novelists and the State. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Includes a chapter on the intersection of romance and politics in Daughters.

Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Contains two fine essays providing thorough overviews and evaluations of Marshall’s early works. Also includes a detailed bibliography.

Marshall, Paule. “Holding onto the Vision.” Interview by Sylvia Baer. The Women’s Review of Books 8 (July, 1991): 24-25. Marshall speaks extensively about her last two novels.

Prose, Francine. “Another Country.” Review of Daughters, by Paule Marshall. The Washington Post Book World 21 (September 22, 1991): 1, 4. Points to Marshall’s handling of “a wide spectrum of serious subjects: race relations, female experience and female friendship, history, loyalty, social responsibility, the legacy of memory and the necessity of forgiveness.”

Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg. “Cutting Herself Free.” Review of Daughters, by Paule Marshall. The New York Times Book Review, October 27, 1991, 3-4. Claims that the book “attempts to look at black experience in our hemisphere, to praise what progress has been made and to point to what yet needs to be done.”