I am so happy I encountered this text.
I've never heard of Paule Marshall and aren't familiar with her other pieces, but this short story has made me a fan.
Seeing myself in Reena made it initially hard to continue reading through.
Seeing that her mother was from Barbados and the mention of pon, made me smile at the knowing that this story was necessarily hard and important - and for me.
My heart offered soft smiles at the multiple times I wanted to share the piece and say - read this! What do you think?? As I had done in the past to a partner overjoyed to discuss the invariable nuances offered in any book.
A soft smile at myself - I really love reading.
As I believe Nikki Giovanni once said, the worlds that you can enter by diving into a text.
The focus of my college entrance essay.
Ravey I don't think you could ever have the boring life chapter, you fearfully dread.
Those that know you best, forever affirm that
You're a free spirit
Adventurous
Curious
A writer
Ravey, we know it's a blessing to desire so much from life and have the ability to work towards achieving it.
However, we need to take a genuine pause and reflect on our familiarity with Reena's husband's diffidence that prohibits him from putting in work towards his true dreams.
We want to be a public, digital creator
We want to have a community of artists, yogis, meditators, readers, writers
We want to be seen, acknowledged, respected for this facets of self
And so Ravey - as we said in conversation with Sariyah & Keelah - give people the chance to root for you.
Paule Marshall Words I Loved...
"Like most people with unpleasant childhoods, I am now on constant guard against the past." (151)
"Her honesty was so absolute it was a kind of cruelty." (152)
"Time has sketched in, very lightly, the evidence of the twenty years." (153)
"She and I had not been friends through our own choice...rather, our mothers.." (154)
"[She] had had a quality that was unique, superior, and therefore dangerous. She seemed defined, even then, all of a piece, the raw edges of her adolescence smoothed over..." (154)
"I merely served as the audience before whom she rehearsed her ideas and the yardstick by which she measured her worldliness and knowledge." (154)
"....and so in awe of Reena that he [her dad] avoided her." (155)
"[she] was less a person to me than the abstract principle of force, power, energy." (155)
<3 "Barbadian favorites...." (156)
"The old imbalance between us had ended and I was suddenly glad to see her." (157)
"Aunt Vi had seldom slept in her bed or, for that matter, lived in her house, because in order to pay for it..." (157)
"...it was clear that she had written out the narrative in her mind many times...had been painstakingly analyzed" (157)
"Her laugh was bitter but forgiving and it ended in a long reflective silence." (158)
"My mother stopped speaking to any number of people because they said I would have been pretty if I hadn't been so dark." (159)
"...really rejecting themselves in rejecting me." (159)
"... so that, despite ourselves sometimes, we run after that whiteness and deny our blackness.... I wasn't a person to that boy's parents but a symbol of the darkness they were in flight from..." (160)
"...seemed intimidated.. by the strength and cogency..." (160)
cogency: the quality of being clear, logical, and convincing; lucidity.
"Her smile held long after the words had died." (161)
"Neither one of us could really escape what our color had come to mean in this country." (162)
"...I had been the means, the instrument of his revenge." (163)
"I stayed numb for a long time." (163)
"...which everybody but me could see, some rare disease that had turned me into a monster." (165)
"My father didn't say anything but I knew because he avoided me more than usual. He was ashamed, I think, that he hadn't been able as a man and as my father, to prevent this." (165)
"There didn't seem to be any way to escape...All that defeat." (166)
"Her bewilderment. Her resignation. Her anger." (166)
"She had been trapped from the day she was born in some small town down South." (166)
"Alone and lonely, and indulging themselves while they wait." (168)
"Emotionally, though, I am less kind and understanding, and I resent like hell the reasons some black men give for rejecting us for them [white women]" (168)
"And they had lived the meaning of this allegiance, so that even when they could... they had chosen..." (170)
"I-we-were so happy I was frightened at times." (170)
"It wasn't the money, but a kind of safety which he had never experience before which kept him there." (171)
"You see, despite his talent-and he was very talented-he had a diffidence that was fatal." (171)
"This wasn't enough somehow."
"...he couldn't bring himself to try-and this contradiction began to get to him after a while." (171)
"It was then, I think, that I began to fail him. I didn't know how to help, you see. I had never felt so inadequate before. And this was very strange and distrubing for someone like me. I was being submerged in his problems-and I began fighting against this" (172)
"After a time we both got caught up in this thing, an ugliness came between us, and I began to answer his anger with anger... our mutual despair" (172)
"...she hoped to write someday. 'If I can ever stop talking away my substance'" (173)
"and yet I feel, strangely enough, as though life is just beginning-that it's new and fresh with all kinds of possibilities. Maybe it's because I've been through my purgatory and I can't ever be overwhelmed again." (174)
"...(even though, frankly, I question whether I want to be integrated into America as it stands now, with its complacency and materialism , its soullessness" (174)
"All that hard work. All her life... Our lives have got to make more sense, if only for her." (175)
• December 23, 2022 | Barbados •