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Tracie Church Guzzio
Marshall, Paule (1929– )
Paule Marshall, née Valenza Pauline Burke, was
born April 9, 1929, in Brooklyn, New York, to
Samuel and Ada Burke, who had emigrated sepa-
rately from Barbados after World War I. At 18,
Marshall’s mother paid her passage with “Panama
money” inherited from an older brother who had
died, like thousands of other West Indian migrant
laborers, digging the Panama Canal. Growing up
during the Depression in a close-knit West Indian
community in Brooklyn, Marshall vividly experi-
enced Barbadian—or Bajan—culture through her
mother’s friends’ conversations around the kitchen
table. Prominent in Marshall’s writing are the lan-
guage patterns, figures of speech, and relentless
character analyses she overheard. Marshall visited
Barbados for the first time when she was nine.
Although the trip inspired a series of poems, she
would reject her West Indian heritage for a time
later in her youth.
Also during her youth, Marshall suffered a pain-
ful period when her father left home to become a
devotee of cult leader Father Divine. As a teen-
ager, the consistent neglect or distortion of Afri-
can-American culture disturbed Marshall. An avid
reader, Marshall spent countless hours at the public
library, though no literary representations of black
people—African, African-American, or African-
Caribbean—were readily available to her. When
she finally had the opportunity to read the great
black male writers, such as PAU L LAURENCE DUN-
BAR and RICHARD WRIGHT, Marshall realized that
black women’s voices were largely missing from the
impressive body of material she had found. Over
her 50-year career, she has worked to fill this void,
and in the process also paved the way for other
important writers, among them TONI MORRISON,
JAMAICA KINCAID, ALICE WALKER, NTOZAKE SHANGE,
EDWIDGE DANTICAT, and NALO HOPKINSON.
Marshall’s inspiration to write came after an
illness forced her to leave Hunter College, where
she was majoring in social work, to spend a year
at a sanatorium in upstate New York. There, in a
tranquil lake setting, she wrote letters so vividly
describing her surroundings that a friend encour-
aged her to think of a career in writing. Upon her
release from the sanatorium, she transferred to
Brooklyn College, changed her major to English
literature, and graduated cum laude and Phi Beta
Kappa in 1953. She then took courses toward a
master’s degree at Hunter College. Unable to find
a job with a major publishing company in New
York, Marshall was employed briefly as a librarian
and then became food and fashion editor for the
small, popular African-American magazine Our
World, where she worked until 1956.
Despite the sexism she encountered as the only
woman on the staff, she was eventually given fea-
tures, and some of those writing assignments took
her to the West Indies and Latin America. Mar-
shall wrote fiction in her free time, publishing her
first short story, “The Valley Between,” in 1954.
In 1957, she married psychologist Kenneth Mar-
shall, with whom she had a son, Evan Keith, a year
later. Over her husband’s strong protests, Marshall
hired a babysitter so that she could finish her first
and best-known novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones
(1959), which is regarded by many scholars as the
beginning of contemporary African-American
women’s writing. Marshall divorced in 1963 and
began teaching part-time at several universities. In
1970, she wed Haitian businessman Nourry Mé-
nard and began dividing her time between New
York and Haiti.
Marshall has produced five novels and two
collections of short fiction: BROWN GIRL BROWN-
STONES (1959), Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961),
The Chosen Place the Timeless People (1969), Reena
(1983), and Praisesong for the Widow (1983). In her
earliest work, Marshall broke new literary ground
with her exploration and celebration of black im-336 Marshall, Paule