Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall

First published: 1983

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: 1920’s, 1940’s, and mid-1970’s

Locale: New York, Grenada, and Carriacou

Principal characters

• Avatara “Avey” Johnson, a middle-age woman
• Thomasina and Clarice, her traveling companions
• Jerome “Jay” Johnson, her late husband
• Lebert Joseph, an old shopkeeper in Grenada
• Rosalie Parvay, Joseph’s daughter
• Aunt Cuney, Avey’s great-aunt

The Story:

Avey Johnson, a sixty-four-year-old African American woman, now single, is packing her bags. She is aboard the cruise ship Bianca Pride with her friends Thomasina and Clarice, and she has decided in the middle of the night to leave the cruise and fly home to New York. Three nights earlier, Avey had a dream about her great-aunt Cuney, with whom she used to spend summers as a child on Tatem Island off the South Carolina coast. In the dream, Aunt Cuney called Avey to follow her down the path they used to walk together in Tatem, down to the shore where Aunt Cuney would tell the story of a group of Igbo slaves who walked across the water back to Africa. Since the dream, Avey has felt bloated and unsettled.

After quarreling with her friends about her hasty decision, Avey spends the morning trying to avoid the other passengers, but she cannot find a place to be alone. Finally, the ship docks at Grenada, and she gets off with her six suitcases and hatbox. She quickly realizes that she has not thought through her plans for getting home. She has assumed that it would be easy to get a cab to the airport and to get a flight home, but instead she finds herself on a crowded wharf with cobblestone streets, crowds of people speaking a patois she cannot understand, and no vehicles or guides in sight. The people crowding the wharf seem to be locals, dressed up and carrying overnight bags and wrapped presents and boarding an assortment of old wooden cargo ships. Finally, she finds a taxi driver and learns that the one daily flight to New York has already left. As the driver takes her to a large tourist hotel, he explains that the locals are taking their annual excursion to Carriacou Island, a trip he has never understood.

Avey begins to remember her early years with her late husband, Jay, and then hears his voice, challenging her for wasting money on the unfinished cruise. The couple had lived on Halsey Street in Brooklyn, New York. Jay, as Avey moves back to the past, is a hard-working man, dedicated to providing for his family; he works two or three jobs at a time and had completed an accounting degree, but no white men will hire him. Avey does clerical work and is raising three daughters. There is love in the home—for awhile. Jay comes home in the evenings and plays jazz or blues records, and the two dance and make love. As time goes on and life gets harder, Jay becomes exhausted and Avey becomes suspicious and shrill. A dramatic argument one night almost separates them forever. Although they stay together, they never recapture their passion for each other. Gradually, though, Jay succeeds with his own accounting business, and the family is able to buy a house in the wealthy suburb of North White Plains.

Avey enjoys her new prosperity but sometimes longs for the early years with Jay. He never plays records any more or dances in the living room. He had shaved off the moustache he used to be vain about, and he begins to make disparaging comments about other African Americans and what he sees as their frivolous, unproductive ways. Now in the present moment, Avey, in her hotel room in Grenada, mourns for all she has lost, crying herself to sleep.

Avey wakes up and decides to take a walk before her flight. As she walks farther down the deserted beach she feels her mood lighten. Finally, she realizes she has walked too far in the heat and finds shelter from the sun in a little rum shop. The old man who runs it, Lebert Joseph, can tell immediately that Avey is troubled. He describes the importance of the Carriacou excursion, during which the people visit their families, remember their ancestors, and hold a big drum dance. He is concerned because Avey cannot even name the nation of her ancestors, and that his own grandchildren in New York have never participated in the big drum dance. He sings to her, gives her a glass of fresh coconut water, and persuades her to delay her flight and go with him to Carriacou.

Avey boards one of the old sloops and is seated with a group of old women. She remembers the trip she used to take down to Aunt Cuney’s home every summer, and she remembers a fiery sermon one Easter Sunday. Suddenly, she becomes violently ill, vomiting and losing control of her bowels. The other women embrace her and help her lie down.

Avey wakes up in a bedroom in the home of Rosalie, Joseph’s daughter, and she is gently bathed and massaged by Rosalie and her maid. Joseph has stayed awake all night watching her, feeling guilty that he encouraged her to make the trip. Avey decides to fly back to Grenada, which means staying another day. That night, she attends the big drum dance. As she listens to the singing and watches each group dance its ancestral dance, she recognizes some of the steps of the “Carriacou Tramp” from a dance she witnessed as a child in Tatem. She joins the dance. The next morning, she flies home, determined that she will fix up Aunt Cuney’s place and teach her grandchildren the old stories.

Bibliography

Anatol, Giselle Liza. “Caribbean Migration, Ex-Isles, and the New World Novel.” In The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel, edited by Maryemma Graham. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Examines the works of Paule Marshall and Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat as literary representations of the dynamics between African diasporic populations in the United States.

Benjamin, Shanna Greene. “Weaving the Web of Reintegration: Locating Aunt Nancy in Praisesong for the Widow.” MELUS 30, no. 1 (Spring, 2005): 49-67. Examines the influence of folk stories about Aunt Nancy, the American version of the half-woman, half-spider trickster of West African tales.

Coser, Stelamaris. “From the Natives’ Point of View: The Ethnographic Novels of Paule Marshall.” In Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. An accessible overview of the novel. Focuses on the Caribbean as the place midway between Africa and New York for Avey and for Marshall, the place where history and the future are intertwined.

DeLamotte, Eugenia C. “Voice, Spirit, Materiality, and the Road to Freedom: Third World Feminism in Praisesong for the Widow.” In Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Focuses on American materialism as an outgrowth of American racism, separating Avey from her spiritual and sensual hungers.

Denniston, Dorothy Hamer. “Recognition and Recovery: Diasporan Connections in Praisesong for the Widow.” In The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. An analysis of African American and Caribbean cultural elements—music, poetry, dance—that reflect the wholeness Avey sacrifices for materialism, but ultimately reclaims.

Gnage, Marie Foster. “Reconfiguring Self: A Matter of Place in Selected Novels by Paule Marshall.” In Middle Passages and the Healing Place of History: Migration and Identity in Black Women’s Literature, edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. Focuses on Marshall’s treatment of women on their journeys to selfhood, examining how those journeys cause or shape their migrations. Novels discussed include Praisesong for the Widow.

Pettis, Joyce. “The Journey Completed: Spiritual Regeneration in Praisesong for the Widow.” In Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall’s Fiction. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Pettis sees Marshall as an explorer on a journey toward a new spiritual vision, with Praisesong for the Widow as the author’s only novel whose protagonist realizes this goal.

Rogers, Susan. “Embodying Cultural Memory in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.” African American Review 34, no. 1 (Spring, 2000): 77-93. Explores the idea, suggested by the novel, that Avey’s Africanness is an authentic part of her identity, while being an American is not. Also examines the significance of Avey’s return to the United States after her reawakening.

Smith, Maria T. African Religious Influences on Three Black Women Novelists: The Aesthetics of Vodun—Zora Neale Hurston, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Paule Marshall. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. Examines the ways in which Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow alludes to the vodun, or Voodoo, pantheon and ancestor veneration that recognizes the interconnectedness of all living things but also functions as a source of cultural resistance.