To Da-Duh, In Memoriam

Paule Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn in 1929 to two Barbadian immigrants. Her father later left the family to join the Father Divine cult. She earned an English degree from Brooklyn College in 1953. Her debut novel, based on her childhood growing up in the Barbadian immigrant community, was Brown Girl, Brownstones, published in 1959. The work was critically acclaimed, anticipating the accolades Marshall would enjoy throughout her career: In 1961, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship, while in 1965, she accompanied the legendary poet Langston Hughes on his State Department-funded world reading tour. She went on to work as an English professor at New York University and elsewhere. In 2019, she died of dementia. 

Like “To Da-duh, in Memoriam,” Marshall’s fiction was often based on her experiences growing up as a second-generation Barbadian immigrant in New York. She particularly focused on women’s experiences in that community and the way they told stories to support each other, transmit cultural knowledge, and form bonds. In her personal essay “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” she connects this practice to the “African tradition in which art and life are one” (Marshall, Paule. Reena and Other Stories. New York, The Feminist Press, 1983, p. 6). Reflecting on hearing her mother talk with her friends over the kitchen table, she wrote, “I grew up among poets. Now they didn’t look like poets […] They were just a group of ordinary housewives and mothers” (4). Conscious from a young age of the class-, race-, and status-based discrimination her community faced as poor and working-class Black immigrants, she used literary realism to examine and express how the characters in her stories navigate the world as Black women, immigrants, and/or colonial subjects. She was particularly lauded for her ability to represent the distinct lexicon and grammar of the Barbadian community in the mid-20th century.