The Fisher King by Paule Marshall

First published: 2000

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1984

Locale: Brooklyn, New York

Principal Characters:

• Sonny Carmichael Payne, an eight-year-old schoolboy from Paris, France, who comes to Brooklyn to attend a memorial concert for his grandfather
• Sonny Rett Payne, Sonny’s deceased grandfather, who is an expatriate jazz saxophonist
• Hattie Carmichael, the former lover of Sonny Rett who is raising Sonny Carmichael
• Edgar Payne, brother of Sonny Rett Payne and granduncle of Sonny Carmichael Payne
• Florence Varina McCullum, Sonny Carmichael Payne’s maternal great-grandmother, who gives lectures to tourists about her home under the auspices of Brooklyn’s Landmarks Conservancy
• Cherisse McCullum, Florence’s daughter and Sonny Carmichael Payne’s grandmother
• Ulene Payne, Sonny Carmichael Payne’s paternal great-grandmother and mother of Sonny Rett Payne

The Novel

At the opening of The Fisher King, Edgar Payne writes to Hattie Carmichael in Paris that he is planning a memorial concert to take place in the spring of 1984 in honor of his deceased brother. He invites Hattie to attend the concert and to bring with her young Sonny, who is his brother Sonny Rett Payne’s grandson. Edgar invites Hattie because she was the closest person to his brother’s work and she understood it better than anyone else. Hattie arrives in Brooklyn with Sonny and introduces him to his great-grandmothers, Florence McCullum and Ulene Payne, both of whom are nearly ninety years old. Florence is an African American who looks down on Ulene’s West Indian heritage. She also resents the fact that her daughter, Charisse, ran off to France with Ulene’s son.

When Sonny Rett Payne was a small boy, Ulene taught him to play the piano, but she only cared for classical music, considering jazz “the Sodom and Gomorrah music!” She beat him when he played jazz and finally drove him to move to France, where he lived the rest of his life with Cherisse and Hattie. Cherisse and Sonny Rett had a child who became Sonny Carmichael Payne’s mother.

Among these family grievances, young Sonny tries to sort out the truth about his family members, whom he has never met before. He frequently escapes the adults to draw pictures of medieval castles and knights in armor in his drawing pad. The concert takes place, and through the stories of his great-grandfather that Sonny hears recounted there, he realizes that the musician was an amazing and admirable man. His granduncle, Edgar Payne, takes him to meet Edgar’s two grandchildren, who are Sonny’s cousins, and after a few awkward sallies the three children become great friends. Sonny warms to Edgar’s breezy, American ways, such as giving the boy gentle uppercuts to the chin, and grows to love going to Ulene’s house, where she has a player piano that she teaches him to play.

By the end of the novel, Edgar insists to Hattie that they have to do better by young Sonny than to let him grow up in poverty in Paris, attended most of the time by an incompetent neighbor. Edgar wants Sonny to live in Brooklyn, where he can look after him and make sure he gets the care and opportunities a young boy needs. Hattie is charged with making the proper decision, and although the ending is ambiguous, a reader may sense she is ready to make some changes in her and Sonny’s lives.

The Characters

Edgar Payne is the catalyst for the action of novel. When he was a young man, he refused to have anything to do with the kind of music his brother, Sonny, played, but shortly after he heard that Sonny had died, Edgar happened to hear a jazz station play an all-night tribute to his brother. He listened, and by morning he went out and bought every record his brother had released. He finally understood jazz. Edgar has changed since he was young, and his extended family is now his major concern. The concert to which he invites Hattie and young Sonny is a way for Edgar to make up for the years of neglect of his brother and a way to resolve the late jazz musician’s anger with his family in Brooklyn.

The fate of young Sonny rests in the hands of Hattie Carmichael. She is the novel’s major link to a past that makes up a great deal of its plot, as she is the one whose memories of Sonny Rett Payne in France compose the background of the unfolding story. She has great strength of character, determination, and practical competence, having ably handled the business and publicity demands on her musician lover when he was alive. After his death, she adopted his child. Although she provides as well as she can for the boy and seems to have raised him well, young Sonny has none of the advantages that are considered standard in an American middle-class childhood. She is bitter on behalf of her late lover, but she is able to change when she understands how much richer a life young Sonny can have in the United States. There is a thaw within her at the end of the novel.

Both Edgar and Hattie change throughout the novel, becoming fully realized, successful characters. Sonny, only eight years old, also changes during the novel. He learns to accept his family with all their physical and mental quirks, and he is quick to respond to their well-intentioned kindnesses and love. The novel ends with the hope of a bright future for the boy, in which he will enjoy a loving family and opportunities to develop his strengths. In their struggles with the past and the present, these characters transcend their circumstances and become universal.

Critical Context

By the time The Fisher King appeared, Marshall was an acclaimed American novelist who had won a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a National Institute for the Arts Award, and a John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Her 1969 novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, is considered among the best novels written by an African American woman.

The Fisher King, Marshall’s seventh novel, was inspired by a photograph of her own cousin, Sonny, whom she never met due to a family feud. She eventually learned that in his teen years her cousin became a jazz saxophone player, which was a brave undertaking in his upwardly mobile community. Sonny died mysteriously after being recruited into the Army in World War II, but his determination to be an artist remained with Marshall. She invented a life for him in The Fisher King, to compensate for the full life he might have led.

Bibliography

DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Focuses on a complex and repetitive pattern in Marshall’s work.

Denniston, Dorothy Hamer. The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Traces the development of Marshall’s Afrocentric vision and shows how her distinctive style combines Western forms with the African oral tradition.

Gadsby, Meredith M. Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Offers a special emphasis on the creative artistry of Paule Marshall, drawing on critical and ethnic studies to cover a wide range of topics.

Hathaway, Heather. Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Explores the ways in which literature can probe the complexities of displacement and identity construction that often accompany migratory experiences.

Pettis, Joyce. Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall’s Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. An exploration of the gender, race, and class oppression that contributes to the problems faced by Marshall’s characters. Places Marshall’s work squarely in the tradition of African American and Caribbean culture.