American sensibility that has helped create a re-
ceptive readership for more recent writers.
In Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Avatara
“Avey” Johnson, a recent widow, is on a Caribbean
cruise when her materialistic existence is dis-
rupted by a dream of her dead aunt. So begins for
Avey the traditional pattern of the Gullah Praise
House initiate’s liminal “seeking” journey and
subsequent ritual entrance into full community
membership. In the novel, Marshall’s metaphor
for spiritual resistance to psychic colonization is
the famous Gullah folktale of Ibo Landing that
tells of a group of captured Ibo who, upon reach-
ing the Sea Islands in chains, simply walk into the
ocean to return to Africa. Beginning to confront
and occupy the previously vacuous silence of the
Middle Passage in oral and literary traditions,
Marshall insists that the future of U.S. society is
possible only if Americans first embrace slavery’s
terrible past, as TONI MORRISON similarly empha-
sized four years later in BELOVED (1987). Liberation
of self and the greater community can come only
with the visceral experience of history, myth, and
ritual of the African diaspora, which is the mission
of individual storytellers, like Avey Johnson and
Marshall herself, to tell.
After winning the Tribute to Black Womanhood
Award from Smith College (1983), the Langston
Hughes Medallion Award (1986), the New York
State Governor’s Arts Award (1987), and the John
Dos Passos Award for Literature (1989), Marshall
experienced, during the 1990s, another fruitful de-
cade. She received the PEN/Faulkner Award (1990);
published her fourth novel, Daughters (1991); was
awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (1992); and was
designated a Literary Lion by the New York Public
Library (1994).
Daughters is set in New York City, the home
of 34-year-old freelance consumer researcher
Ursa Mackenzie, and on the fictional island of
Triunion, Ursa’s birthplace and the home of her
politician father, Primus Mackenzie, her Ameri-
can-born mother, Estelle; and Primus’s mistress,
Astral Forde. When the story opens, Ursa, who has
just had an abortion, is about to end a stagnant
relationship with her long-time boyfriend. On her
job, she is studying black empowerment in a New
Jersey city where the black mayor is selling out
to the white establishment. She is also thinking
about her long-delayed thesis project on the Tri-
union slavery legend of freedom fighters and lov-
ers Congo Jane and Will Cudjoe. Estelle summons
Ursa to Triunion, where her formerly incorrupt-
ible father is cooperating with white developers in
plans that will despoil the environment and en-
danger the poverty-stricken residents. Marshall’s
interest in individual responsibility to commu-
nity, the resurrection of history, gender relations,
and female empowerment are again emphasized
in this book.
A framed snapshot in Marshall’s grandmoth-
er’s house of a cousin she never met was the inspi-
ration for her fifth novel, The Fisher King (2000), a
story that echoes JAMES BALDWIN’s “SONNY’S BLUES”
(1957). Against family and community pressures,
this cousin had aspired to be a jazz musician but
was drafted into the Army during World War II
and died soon thereafter. In the novel, disowned
by his family for his choice of career, Sonny-Rett
Payne, a jazz pianist, had fled New York for Paris
in 1949 to escape family disapproval and U.S. rac-
ism. His success in Europe and subsequent death
there form the background of the story. Decades
after Sonny-Rett left, his eight-year-old Parisian
grandson is brought to his old Brooklyn neigh-
borhood to attend a memorial concert in Payne’s
honor and ends up a pawn in the adults’ family
feud and inability to settle past grievances. The
family begins to reevaluate their ideas about
themselves during the course of the novel, but
the text is open-ended, by which Marshall may
be suggesting that life is short and that examining
oneself, repairing lost relationships, and creating
a stronger community is up to the reader. As she
does in Daughters, in The Fisher King Marshall
poses certain questions for which she does not
provide answers. In both texts, the ambiguous
endings have been frustrating for some readers
and reviewers.
Marshall’s many honors include a Guggen-
heim Fellowship, a Ford Foundation grant, and
two National Endowment for the Arts awards. The
recipient of five honorary doctorates, Marshall
has taught at numerous universities in the United338 Marshall, Paule