By Farah Jasmine Griffin

An exquisite jewel of a book, Paule Marshall’s memoir, Triangular Road, is a welcome work of nonfiction by one of our greatest writers. Neither tell-all nor confessional, Triangular Road does tell the story of a writer in motion, a self-described “traveling woman,” one who has devoted her life to creating complexly rendered novels and stories about the historical, psychological and political dimensions of the African Diaspora. In fact, Triangular Road should be read alongside Marshall’s best-known works of fiction, Brown Girl, Brownstones, Reena and Other Stories, Chosen Place, Timeless People and Praise Song for the Window.

Triangular Road traces Marshall’s travels from her home in Brooklyn to Barbados, Paris, London, Grenada and Nigeria. In so doing, it also traces her journey as a writer, demonstrating the way that history and place shaped her sense of vocation and history as well as character, setting, and theme.

Originally written as three lectures delivered at Harvard on the theme of “Bodies of Water,” the book is an homage to Marshall’s beloved friend and mentor, Langston Hughes.  In fact the opening chapter tells of her travels throughout Europe on a State Department tour with Hughes; subsequent chapter titles are inspired by his famous poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

In “I’ve Known Rivers: The James River,” Marshall tells of a Labor Day excursion along the James River in Richmond Virginia. In many ways, it is a microcosm of Marshall’s other works, in that it contains her strong sense of history and the aesthetic sensibility that has arisen from this historical understanding. As she and a friend watch a rafting party of young college students, Marshall’s imagination follows the river until she encounters the “chained and coffled nightly traffic,”  “the chattel cargo” that traveled the James to be let off and sold in Richmond. The weight, the burden and the responsibility of this history is one that Marshall bears with creative grace.

The child of immigrants from Barbados, Marshall left her tight-knit, stifling Brooklyn community as a young woman in search of her own voice and vision. And yet, she would forever be in search of those ancestors who preceded her. Throughout her travels she not only met relatives who never made the trip to the U.S., she would also encounter others whom she claimed as ancestors.

Paule Marshall

For instance, unable to find anything on her father’s family during a trip to Barbados, Marshall nonetheless, uncovers the history of the enslaved who arrived on that “gem of an island,” some to stay and others to be shipped to ports like Charleston, Savannah and Richmond.

As part of her chosen ancestry, she includes, “the twenty-and-odd negroes” who arrived in Jamestown, writer/abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, the “132 sick and ailing chattel cargo” of the slave-ship Zong who were disposed of at sea.  “I promptly added all…to my gene pool.”  Marshall is of that group of Black writers that includes Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Cade Bambara, who believed that black artists must live the collective history of black people as if it were their own in order to best articulate it and give it meaning.

One leaves Triangular Road hungry for more:  More about the challenges of a young wife and mother trying to find her voice and the space to write.  More about her time in Africa and about the personal relationships in all of these places that helped to shape the artist she would become.  While the memoir illuminates the work, Marshall herself nonetheless remains a bit of a mystery.  My sense is that this is just how she wants it to be.

Farah Jasmine Griffin is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies and Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. Her books include Who Set You Flowin’? The African-American Migration Narrative and If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday.