Paule Marshall [Obituary]

Richard Sandomir, “Paule Marshall, 90, Influential Author Who Wrote of Ethnic Identity, Is Dead,” New York Times, August 17, 2019, p. B13. 

     At a local library, she found sustenance in writers as diverse as Jane Austen, Zane Grey  and William Makepeace Thackeray.  She also discovered the black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.  The opening lines of his “Little Brown Baby” (“Little brown baby with spa’klin’ eyes/ Come to yo’ pappy an’ set on his knee”) moved her, she later said because her father had already left. 

COMMENT

Her obituary says that Marshall, best known for writing Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959),  wrote strong female characters using the linguistic rhythm s of Barbaddian speech, and that her novel is conserved to be the beginning of contemporary African-American women’s writing. I am a bit surprised that I have never heard of the book.  I am also surprised that a foundational Black writer felt inspired by poetry written in dialect.  I have always hated reading dialect because, I suppose, I assume that people with different accents are really just pronouncing written language differently.  The issue of Black language also comes up in an article about Maya Angelou who wrote in Black vernacular. [1]   It seems that as more diverse writers use English it may be even more important to represent different language patterns on the page, but hopefully without falling into the trap of stereotypes.

[1] Well Read, Well Known