Customer Reviews

Praise-Song for the Widow

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

...The occasionally brilliant wording and the solid characterization make Avey Johnson an engaging protagonist. Her journey from a confused, troubled widow on an expensive cruise to a liberated woman with deeper understanding of her cultural and familial heritage make this book worth reading. This journey is interspersed with recollections of her relationship with her dead husband. This allows the reader to empathize deeply with her plight.

On a Caribbean cruise, Avey Johnson begins to have symptoms of both mental and physical illness. Driven by needs she doesn't understand, she leaves the cruise and finds herself adrift in a tide of Patois-speaking islanders, who are all intent on a cultural pilgrimage to a neighboring island. Her meeting with an island patriarch draws her into the pilgrimage as well. There, she learns that this is the culture she abandoned at the same time she abandoned her working-class roots.

The flashbacks to her life with her husband Jay not only chronicle her life preceding the cruise but also give a greater understanding of Avey as she throws herself headlong into a mysterious journey of self-discovery. The greater familiarity with the character is one of the book's strongest points.

The reason the book only rates four stars is that its symbolism makes it inaccessible when simply read for pleasure. This is not an offense worthy of a whole star, so my actual rating is four and a half stars, or 90%.

The symbolism sprinkled throughout the book does provide constant rewards, though- like Shakespeare, you can never finish gaining new insight through re-reading.

I feel confident in recommending this book to anyone who enjoys character-driven fiction. The symbolism was made apparent to me, as I read the book as part of a writing course. With that in mind, use only as directed.

This is a sensitive and introspective account of a woman coming to terms with her husband's death and her own independance. It's a shame that we don't hear Marshall's name as often as we do Walker's, Morrison's. We hear more about Terry McMillan's vapid and superficial writing than we do about a really talented writer like Marshall!

"She even thinks that up in heaven / Her class lies late and snores,/ While poor black cherubs rise at seven / To do celestial chores." --"For a Lady I Know" by Countee Cullen

The Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen speaks of a creature of leisure in his short poem, "For a Lady I Know"--the type of person who expects those of an African-American heritage to handle matters of work even unto death. Jerome Johnson, the husband of the staid protagonist of Paule Marshall's _Praisesong for the Widow,_ Avey Johnson, lives the reality of Cullen's words. The industrious Jerome labors beneath an Irish supervisor who allows Jerome to do all the work in the department store they both work in, while the supervisor takes the credit. Jerome expresses his dismay about this in an argument he has with Avey one evening, in which she accuses him of cheating on her in the long hours he spends away from the home. He cries: "Okay, you go take my job at the store then! Go on. Go on down there and see how you like working for some red-faced Irishman who sits on his can all day laughing to himself at the colored boy he's got doing everything" (105)

When Jerome is young, newly married to Avey and living on Halsey Street, he is aware of the pressures of race working at the department store in the shipping room. Not only does he organize the store's floor so that it is efficiently run during its opened hours, he also stays after work late, slaving in the storeroom to ensure that the store will be smoothly operating during the next day. Jerome's supervisor realizes that Jerome runs shipping and receiving, although "[Jerome has] to be careful not to make it appear so" (92). This truth is known throughout the store, even to the salesgirls who secretly admire Jerome's work ethic and charm. The pretenses of the supervisor's work are just a formality, something that is probably meant to soothe the supervisor's ego and to keep Jerome's job in the Caucasian-dominated store safe.

In working as endlessly as he does, allowing another person to take the credit, Jerome is succumbing to the sway of oppression. He is aware of the sacrifices he is making and how they strip pieces of his dignity away from him, even if he does not outwardly acknowledge it often. When he does speak of it, it is in the privacy of his apartment, and only to his wife. He downplays the seriousness of what he is allowing to happen to him in order to survive in a business that favors light-skinned people. He says to Avey, trying to laugh it off: "Two jobs for the salary of one. They really got themselves a good thing in me" (92).

Jerome's attempt to find levity in the bad business practices of his supervisor seems to be his way of coping with what would otherwise fill him with anger and despair. Hints of the passion and rage burning beneath his civilized façade emerge during his lovemaking with Avey, a time when he is able to surrender from the pressures of race that are a force during his working hours and also, when he returns home. During these stolen times with Avey, Jerome alternates between an almost blind need to possess her and a desire to cleanse himself of the sins of the day. During one interlude, he cries to her, like a man stripped of his dignity and bared to the marrow: "Take it from me, Avey! Just take it from me" (129). Marshall likens the emotion of the moment to, "a burden he wanted rid of. Like a leg-iron which slowed him in the course he had set for himself" (129).

The impassioned Jerome speaks beneath the surface of their sexual liaisons and perhaps hints at the shame he feels at having to present himself a certain way for the benefit of his Caucasian coworkers. Jerome neatly grooms his mustache with oil and carefully presses his clothes, trying to affect an air of appeal and trust amongst his coworkers. He secretly takes pride in the fact that they do not regard him the way they do most African-Americans. Many African-Americans refer to this readiness to appease Caucasians as "the Uncle Tom syndrome," which relates to the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, first published on March 20, 1852. Certainly Jerome "Jay" Johnson does not do these things for any other reason but survival. Instinctually, he realizes that he must play a certain game to move further at the store.

Later in Marshall's novel, after Jerome has scaled the proverbial ladder of success, he becomes disparaging of the African-Americans who are not as successful as he is. On one of his tirades to Avey, he shouts:

The trouble with half these Negroes out here is that they spend all their time blaming the white man for everything. He won't give `em a job. Won't let `em in his schools. Won't let `em in his neighborhood. Just won't give `em a break. He's the one keeping `em down. When the problem really is most of `em don't want to hear the word `work.' If they'd just cut out all the good-timing and get down to some hard work, put their minds to something, they'd get somewhere (135).

Avey gently reminds him that he was turned away from jobs because of his colour and also overworked so another could take his credit; Jerome is not moved, showing that the strain of the past has taken quite a toll on him. Clearly, he has changed from the young, ambitious man he used to be. Where he once eagerly returned home from work to dance to his favorite records by "Coleman Hawkins, the Count, Lester Young (old Prez himself), The Duke--along with the singers he loved: Mr. B., Lady Day, Lil Green, Ella" (94), he now returns home sans his mustache, proud of his accomplishments in a world that had once denied him. Jerome fails to realize that in discovering success in the Caucasian world by pretending to be something other than himself, he has left a piece of himself behind. The burden of colour is now the mask he wears, a mask that has become his face until even Avey mourns the loss of the man he once was, compared to the man she sees before her in the final years before Jerome Johnson's death.

Written by Jewel Welter

A widow for four years, Avey Johnson has stanchly held herself up, living in the suburbs of New York City, lonely and adrift yet mostly conforming to the expectations of her friends, associates, and three daughters. While on a cruise in the Caribbean, however, she is troubled first by a dream and then by a comprehension of the vacuity of the experience (not to mention the insistent demands of her friends to have fun, damn it), including an epiphany of sort when confronted by a peach parfait in the artificial environs of the appropriately named Versailles Room. To the angry dismay of her farcically domineering friends, she leaves the ship for good at the port of the next island, fully expecting and intending to take the next plane back to New York. But her moment of resolution leads to an emotional collapse, and in Grenada her adventures (and misadventures) truly begin.

Marshall intersperses flashbacks from Avey's marriage and memories from her childhood with scenes from her impulsive flight to Grenada and her equally spontaneous escape with a group of complete strangers to the offshore island of Carriacou. What becomes apparent to the reader, as well as to Avey, is that she has lost touch with who she is and where she came from: not only with her South Carolina roots and her days as a young adult in Harlem and on Halsey Street in Brooklyn, but also with the African heritage that her aunt had often urged on her as a child. It is not simply that she has become "too white" but rather that the process of assimilation into an unquestioning and comfortable suburban life has made her not much of anything at all.

There is a certain pedantic quality to Marshall's prose, a sporadic appeal to heavy-handed symbolism that turns the book's themes into a capitalized Message: don't abandon your roots. But the intricate portrait of Avey Johnson largely dispels the thought that Marshall is simply preaching; this is indeed a praisesong for a widow rather than a sermon for readers. In fact, if I were to choose one word to summarize Marshall's prose here it would be "visceral." The language she uses to describe Avey Johnson's collapse and reawakening is both guttural and painstaking; the reader is not simply an observer of her trepidation, mortification, and confusion but also a participant in the blank nightmare her life has become. (I can't imagine the reader that won't be squeamishly horrified when Avey's emotional troubles turn physical.) While the final destination of Avey Johnson's late-life voyage is no surprise, the path she takes to get there is both excruciating and inspiring.

Ordered the book on a saturday, it was in my mail box by wednesday! Excillent condition, shrink rapped, and never used even though the book is 25 years old!Great book seller! Will deffently use again!! Oh and the book was great!

This book was surprisingly boring. Paule Marshall's one of my favorite writers, but this book didn't do it for me. The pace was too slow and too many pieces didn't tie together. The story just felt fragmented and the narrative wasn't compelling. A shame too...

Although this book is written in a different style than I expected.(The going back and forth between past present and future will get you lost if you're not careful)I believe it was well written and has deeper meaning, Avey Johnson goes on a cruise with friends and realizes that she's not exactly where she needs to be but finds out that she was closer than she thought. We should all take a journey of re self-discovery....remembering never to forget our roots or that we can always go home.

Paule Marshall's writing shines in this book. Her character Avey Johnson is a very introspective person and is struggling as she's coming into her own and facing ghosts of the past. It was magical to read. Her use of the English language was superb.

Avey Johnson - a black, middle-aged, middle-class widow given to hats, gloves, and pearls - has long since put behind her the Harlem of her childhood. Then on a cruise to the Caribbean with two friends, inspired by a troubling dream, she senses her life beginning to unravel - and in a panic, peaks her bag in the middle of the night and abandons her friends at the next port of call. The unexpected and beautiful adventure that follows provides Avey with the links to the culture and history she has so long disavowed.

--- from book's back cover

I had heard such great things about this book and was eager to read it. The story flowed well in the beginning and the author's use of language was exquisite. However, the story seemed to sag in the middle with confusing flip-flopping between Avey's past and the present situations that she found herself in. It was a little hard to tie these elements together; I still don't know what the significance of the old man was. This was a book club selection so it will be interesting to see what the others in my group think about it.