Triangular Road: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Paule Marshall has always been one of my favorite writers since back in the day when I read Brown Girl, Brown Stones. In her new book, Triangular Road: A Memoir, her loyal fans are given a treat in this part memoir and family history, part travelogue, part writing process, and part history of the Black Diaspora. In 1965, the esteemed Langston Hughes of Harlem Renaissance fame, invited Marshall to be part of a two-month European tour to discuss Black-American literature as part of a teaching and lecture series at European universities. At the time she had one novel and a collection of short stories published and felt honored to be in the presence of Mr. Hughes. Always the political activist, the lectures often turned to the plight of the Black Americans. She fell in love with Paris that sparked a love of travel.

Daughter of Barbadian immigrants, she grew up in an insular community of immigrants from Barbados in Brooklyn, New York. Marshall, at age thirteen changed her middle name, Pauline, which was the name that she was known as, to Paule, pronounced as Paul for Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Her world was even separated from other West Indians; they all had a pecking order of status and class. While her mother embraced all things Bajan and took Marshall and her sister back to visit her mother in her homeland, her father wanted nothing to do with Barbados. An illegal alien, he would not even speak of his family or where he lived; he was just glad to be gone from what he called that" two by four" island. Working a series of factory jobs which he felt were beneath him and his cheap suits, he soon took up with the Father Divine movement and abandoned the family when Marshall was eleven years-old. Devastated, she threw herself into her studies, graduated from high school and at age seventeen entered Hunter College, despite her mother's insistence that she go to work for the telephone company because they were now hiring colored. Marshall's writing was rewarded with generous grants and fellowships, such as the Guggenheim Award and MacArthur grant, which allowed her to travel and write. She lived in Barbados for several months and Grenada for a year and traveled to Europe and Africa.

The most compelling part of this slim volume was of recalling her visitation to her maternal family in Barbados and her precious time there as a child and adult. I could see the green hills and feel the coolness of the sea baths; her details were so vivid. Marshall deftly articulated the significance of the triangular integration of Brooklyn, Barbados and the African continent into her life. Equally satisfying was her frankness about her writer's block and her process for overcoming the obstacles that got in her way of her writing. Although I wanted more in-depth intimate details about her life such as the contentious relationship with her mother, I was still able to discern what made her such an indomitable force. I am as enthralled with Madame Marshall as I was when I was introduced to her in the 1970s and I bow down to a true artist and class act, phenomenal woman. How fitting to have read this book during Women's History Month. I recommend to Paule Marshall fans and writers.

Dera R. Williams
APOOO BookClub

Triangular Road was a great, easy read. I devoured it in a few hours, and later returned to slowly savour the book. If you're looking for shocking details about the life of Paule Marshall, you'll be disappointed. It's not one of those kinds of books. What you'll find is a glimpse of history through the rich life of this author. It reminded me of sitting and listening to an elder who lived a full life, and being surprised and delighted to learn just how much they experienced.

For those so inclined you may even find yourelf revisiting historical events of the civil rights movement or the Harlem Renaissance. You'll appreciate the expereinces of the African Diaspora. I was so impressed I revisited some of Paule Marshall's earlier works, and remembered how much I've enjoyed this authors works. I definitely recommend Triangular Road.

In his poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", the great African American poet Langston Hughes embodied black history with the words quoted in the title of this review. Langston Hughes, large bodies of water, and black history all figure prominently in this new eloquent memoir, "Triangular Road" by the African American novelist and short story writer, Paule Marshall (b. 1929). The recipient of both Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, Marshall is best-known for her first novel "Brown Girl, Brownstone" and for a subsequent novel "Praisesong for the Widow." Her new book is based on a series of lectures that Marshall delivered at Harvard University in 2005 titled "Bodies of Water" that focused on the impact of rivers, seas, and oceans on black history and culture in the Americas.

Besides its broad depiction of African American history, Marshall's book tells her own story as a person and as a writer. The "Triangular Road" refers to three far-apart places that deeply influenced Marshall: Brooklyn, where she was born, Barbados, the birthplace of her mother and father, (and the Caribbean generally), and Africa. All three places receive personal characterizations from Marshall. These three places also capture Marshall's own view of herself. Near the end of her memoir, she writes (p. 163) :

"After all, my life as I saw it, was a thing divided in three: There was Brooklyn, U.S.A. and specifically the tight, little, ingrown immigrant world of Bajan Brooklyn that I had fled. Then, once I started writing, the Caribbean and its conga line of islands had been home off and on for any number of years. While all the time, lying in wait across the Atlantic, in a direct line almost with tiny wallflower Barbados, had been the Gulf of Guinea and the colossus of ancestral Africa, the greater portion of my tripartite self that I had yet to discover, yet to know."

Marshall describes a series of journeys over rivers, seas, and oceans that she took between 1965 and 1977. The journeys begin with a trip to Europe that she took under State Department auspices at the invitation of her mentor, Langston Hughes, whom Marshall describes as a "loving taskmaster, mentor, teacher, griot, literary sponsor, and treasured elder friend." (p. 33) Marshall offers an insightful portrayal of Hughes in his late years and a tribute to his importance as a friend and writer.

In a brief second section of the book, Marshall uses a Labor Day visit to a secluded spot along the James River in Richmond to meditate upon the long history of slavery, including the frequently fatal and always torturous ocean passages from Africa through the West Indies to colonial Virginia and the teeming slave markets in early Richmond. Marshall observes that "this particular holiday needs to be more inclusive in whom it acknowledges." (p. 58) Marshall is referring to the long and harsh history of slave labor in the United States which is frequently overlooked in thinking about labor during the American holiday of Labor Day.

In the lengthy third section of the book, Marshall describes her visit to Barbados, the home of her parents, and a subsequent visit to Granada. These visits serve as the source of further reflections on the role of the Caribbean Islands in the slave trade and of the life of immigrants, from the West Indies, such as Marshall's parents, in the United States. Marshall's father had been an illegal immigrant, and he abandoned his family in Brooklyn when Marshall was eleven years old. Marshall's mother tried to discourage her precocious daughter's intellectual and literary ambitions in favor of a job with the phone company. Marshall offers flashbacks of her early life and of her decision to become a writer. These descriptions have a strong feel of immediacy. Thus, Marshall describes how she first went to Barbados, with the encouragement of her editor, to shorten and revise the manuscript of what became her first novel. She learns that "writing is rewriting, is honing, pruning, refining, is becoming, essentially, one's own unsparing editor" (p.101) On her trip to Grenada some years later, Marshall overcomes writer's block and learns how a novelist captures the heart of a historical experience through the use of the imagination and empathy rather than simply through a dry recitation of fact:: "Never let what really happened get in the way of the truth." (p. 148)

In the final section of the memoir, Marshall again crosses the ocean in 1977 for a trip to the Second World Festival of Black and African Arts held in Lagos, Nigeria in 1977. She meditates on the unity of black experience, for all its variety, and upon the need for a shared understanding and sense of forgiveness between Africans and black people living elsewhere for their respective historical roles in slavery. Marshall, at the age of 79, continues to write about her African experience with plans for further novels and stories to follow.

This is a beautiful intimately written short book which captures a great deal about a writer's life and about the "deep like the rivers" heart of a people.

Robin Friedman

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