To Da-Duh, In Memoriam

“Moving swiftly toward us (so swiftly it seemed she did not intend stopping when she reached us but would sweep past us out the doorway which opened onto the sea and like Christ walk upon the water!), she was caught between the sunlight at her end of the building and the darkness inside—and for a moment she appeared to contain them both: the light in the long severe old-fashioned white dress she wore which brought the sense of a past that was still alive into our bustling present and in the snatch of white at her eye; the darkness in her black high-top shoes and in her face which was visible now that she was closer.”

This sentence sets up several symbolic elements of Da-duh. First, it emphasizes her mythical qualities with a simile comparing her to Christ walking on water. Next, it highlights Da-duh’s complexity through the imagery of the contrasting white dress and dark skin. Relatedly, it associates Da-duh firmly with the past without fully relegating her to it—she remains part of the “bustling present”—evoking the theme of Conflict and Cultural Connections Between Generations.

“Perhaps she was both, both child and woman, darkness and light, past and present, life and death—all the opposites contained and reconciled in her.”

The narrator reflects on Da-duh’s many contradictions, expressed in a catalog of dichotomies. This symbolic language comes full circle when the narrator talks about her own life at the end of the story; she describes how she lives “within the shadow of [Da-duh’s] death” (106), meaning that like her late grandmother, she embodies both life and death. Like the preceding passage, this one speaks to both the difficulty and necessity of bridging the past and present.

“‘Come, soul,’ Da-duh said and took my hand. ‘You must be one of those New York terrors you hear so much about.’”

This quote illustrates how Paule Marshall uses dialogue to give realism to her depiction of Barbadian life and language. Da-duh calls the narrator “soul,” a Bajan (Barbadian) creole term that women often use to address one another. This familiarity contrasts with the distance implied by Da-duh’s reference to “New York terrors” that she has only heard about. While the latter becomes a lightly teasing form of endearment in context, it foreshadows the real distress that Da-duh will feel as she learns about New York.

“You would think New York is the only place in the world to hear wunna. That’s why I don’t like to go anyplace with you St. Andrews people, you know. You all ain’t been colonized.”

The term “wunna” in Bajan creole means “you all.” Da-duh expresses her embarrassment and disappointment in her St. Andrews family members’ behavior by chastising them for not being “colonized,” treating this as a synonym for “civilized” rather than using it in the literal sense. This is representative of how Da-duh has internalized the racist ideology of colonialism, developing the theme of The Black Diaspora and Colonialization.

“Da-duh sat on a trunk in our midst, a monarch amid her court. She still held my hand, but it was different now. I had suddenly become her anchor, for I felt her fear of the lorry with its asthmatic motor (a fear and distrust, I later learned, she held of all machines) beating like a pulse in her rough palm.”

This quote offers another example of how Da-duh embodies opposing and competing forces. On one hand, she is a regal “monarch,” someone who is symbolically important and larger-than-life. On the other hand, she is deeply human and afraid of riding in a truck, relying on her young granddaughter for support. This anxiety about the truck reveals her broader discomfort with urban and technological modernity.

“I suddenly feared that we were journeying, unaware that we were, toward some dangerous place where the canes, grown as high and thick as a forest, would close in on us and run us through with their stiletto blades.”

The narrator uses figurative language to emphasize her fear of the strange vegetation in Barbados, specifically the imposing sugarcane. She imagines that the stalks are menacing “stiletto blades”. This symbolism evokes both her unfamiliarity with the environment and the violence of the crop’s cultivation, historically.

“She went on for some time, intoning the names of the trees as though they were those of her gods. Finally, turning to me, she said, ‘I know you don’t have anything this nice where you come from.’”

This quote develops the theme of Environment as Source of Identity. Where the narrator finds the plants in Barbados intimidating and scary, Da-duh treats them as “gods” whose very presence graces and shapes her life. She ends her catalog with an implicit challenge to the narrator, revealing that her listing of the trees has not just been a way of sharing something she loves; rather, it is a way of proving her own value.

“It was a violent place, the tangled foliage fighting each other for a chance at the sunlight, the branches of the trees locked in what seemed an immemorial struggle, one both necessary and inevitable. But despite the violence, it was pleasant, almost peaceful in the gully, and beneath the thick undergrowth the earth smelled like spring.”

Over time, the narrator learns to appreciate the environment of Barbados on its own terms. While she still sees “violence” in the vegetation, she has also come to see the landscape as “pleasant” and “peaceful.” This indicates that the narrator is coming to appreciate and understand Da-duh’s perspective and world.

“But as I answered, recreating my towering world of steel and concrete and machines for her, building the city out of words, I would feel her give way. I came to know the signs of her surrender: the total stillness that would come over her little hard dry form, the probing gaze that like a surgeon’s knife sought to cut through my skull to get at the images there, to see if I were lying; above all, her fear, a fear nameless and profound, the same one I had felt beating in the palm of her hand that day in the lorry.”

The narrator recognizes that, as intimidating as she finds Da-duh’s world, Da-duh is even more afraid of the narrator’s urban and mechanized world. This quote uses simile to emphasize Da-duh’s intelligence, describing her discernment as “like a surgeon’s knife,” but it also underscores her vulnerability, suggested by her frightened heartbeat.

“All the fight went out of her at that. The hand poised to strike me fell limp to her side, and as she stared at me, seeing not me but the building that was taller than the highest hill she knew, the small stubborn light in her eyes (it was the same amber as the flame in the kerosene lamp she lit at dusk) began to fail.”

This passage compares the dying light of Da-duh’s eyes following her “defeat” to the “flame in the kerosene lamp.” This comparison emphasizes the lack of modern infrastructure, namely electricity, in Da-duh’s world. Instead, she relies on an old-fashioned kerosene lamp. When that “light” goes out in the face of unrelenting technological progress, it represents the old world giving way to the new and foreshadows Da-duh’s death.

“Some huge, monolithic shape had imposed itself, it seemed, between her and the land, obstructing her vision.”

The “huge, monolithic shape” alludes to the Empire State Building, the building whose existence makes Da-duh feel as if her whole world, of which she was once so proud, is small. Knowledge of this building becomes a barrier to Da-duh’s connection to the land, which was previously a wellspring of identity and meaning.

“On the day of her death England sent planes flying low over the island in a show of force—so low, according to my aunt’s letter, that the downdraft from them shook the ripened mangoes from the trees in Da-duh’s orchard.”

This passage references the airplanes that the British used to do flyovers to suppress the 1937 protests in Barbados. These airplanes literally and figuratively shake the foundations of Da-duh’s world, breaking it apart, as illustrated by the “ripened mangoes” that fall from her fruit trees in a symbol of technology’s encroachment on the island’s landscape.

“She remained in the house at the window so my aunt said, watching as the planes came swooping and screaming like monstrous birds down over the village, over her house, rattling her trees and flattening the young canes in her field. It must have seemed to her lying there that they did not intend pulling out of their dive, but like the hardback beetles which hurled themselves with suicidal force against the walls of the house at night, those menacing silver shapes would hurl themselves in an ecstasy of self-immolation onto the land, destroying it utterly.”

The narrator imagines the horror Da-duh must have felt in seeing the airplanes fly over her land. She describes the mechanical objects in natural terms like Da-duh might use, comparing the planes to “hardback beetles.” This blended imagery creates a parallel between Da-duh and the narrator, who paints scenes from Barbados amid the “thunderous tread of […] machines” (106), implying underlying similarities between the two women.