Who was Paule Marshall
June
Who was Paule Marshall? A fierce, determined, daughter of immigrants from “the islands;” a writer of novels that explore worlds previously unknown, not even guessed at, by this Southerner. We met, truly, in China, where she shepherded our group of diverse women through days of excitement and wonder as we tried to fathom what transformation of a society might look like. It was 1983 and, as I have elsewhere observed, every single Chinese woman we interacted with looked exhausted. The men just looked hunkered down for the long haul. We were all moved by this: the common facing up to the reality that everything must change. (I hear this phrase of course in Nina Simone’s voice). Paule wasn’t exactly secretive, but nobody knew very much about her personal life. We still don’t know a lot, from Washington’s book, but what shines is Marshall’s various flights from what is expected of the “average” woman. Which of course she was not. Sometimes we meet people that we just like. And I adored Paule. She was funny, subversive of rote behaviors of any kind, and grounded in the reality that as a black woman she was here, on this great earth, to live life as herself; that it was the duty of others, if it was of interest to them, to not let this sometimes quite charming insistence, trouble them. ~aw
