The Grasp That Reaches beyond the Grave: The Ancestral Call in Black Women's Texts

Chapter 2 Ancestral Prodding in Praisesong for the Widow

2 Ancestral Prodding in Praisesong for the Widow In “Mechanisms of Disease: African-American Women Writers, Social Pathologies, and the Limits of Medicine,” Ann Folwell Stanford approaches Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow by studying the body as an indication of social ills. According to Stanford: Praisesong chronicles Avey’s experience of what might appear to be a cardiac or gastrointestinal irregularity but might also be simply dismissed as a psychosomatic complaint. In probing her illness and subsequent healing, the novel refuses to separate the community from individual bodies—or the psychosomatic from the somatic—and in so doing, foregrounds the social context of Avey’s physical troubles. (“Mechanisms” 35) In discussing Avey’s visitations by her Aunt Cuney, Stanford refers to “a disturbing and recurring dream” and a “profoundly unsettling dream” along with her physical symptoms as if Aunt Cuney’s visitations were merely symptoms of her illness and not a haunting (36). However, a very different perspective on this issue emerges when taking into consideration Avery F. Gordon’s assertion in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination: “Haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither pre-modern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is generalizable social phenomenon of great import” (7). The importance of haunting is what the ghost reflects. For Gordon, “the ghost is a crucible for political mediation and historical memory . . .”(18). 59 60 The Grasp that Reaches Beyond the Grave Kathleen Brogan makes a similar point in Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. According to Brogan, “As both presence and absence, the ghost stands as an emblem of historical loss as well as a vehicle of historical recovery” (29). Thus a ghost, which in the realm of popular culture tends to have a negative connotation, may actually perform a useful service. In the case of Avey, this service is to facilitate a spiritual rebirth that allows her to reconnect with her ancestors. Therefore, I argue that Praisesong for the Widow is not so much a haunting, but a prodding by her ancestor, Aunt Cuney, who uses dreams and the assistance of elder culture bearers such as Lebert Joseph to remind Avey of her history and the importance of maintaining family legacies. When her ancestor reaches out to her through her dreams, Avey’s rebirth is triggered. The dream is particularly disturbing because “[a]s a rule she seldom dreamed” (Marshall 31). Avey’s lack of dreams is reflected in the phenomenon discussed by G. Thomas Couser in “Oppression and Repression: Personal and Collective Memory in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony .” Couser argues: rather than dwell on (and in) a painful past, minority groups may sanitize memory in order to preserve positive self-images. Reviving such memories is necessary, however, precisely because, at least for groups whose traditional culture is primarily oral, the only history is memory. Not to remember is to accede to the erasure or distortion of collective experience; to repress memory is to reenact and perpetuate oppression. (107) Avey’s lack of dreams is one such attempt to sanitize memory. According to the narrator, Avey stopped dreaming after experiencing nightmares during the mid-1960s in which she dreamed of images from the news: “electric cattle prods,” “lunging dogs,” “high-pressure hoses,” and “cigarettes being ground out on the arms of those sitting in at the lunch counters” (31). She dreamed of the Birmingham bomb in 1963, but in her version she found her own daughters in the debris. It is significant that Marshall links Avey’s dream of Aunt Cuney with nightmares representing the political unrest of the Civil Rights Movement. Gordon observes, “Slavery has ended, but something of it continues to live on, in the social geography of where peoples reside, in the authority of collective wisdom and shared benightedness, in the veins of the contradictory formation we call New World modernity, propelling as it always has, a something to be done. Such endings are what haunting is 61 Ancestral Prodding in Praisesong for the Widow about” (139). Gordon’s point about social geography is evident in the name of the suburb where Avey lives, North White Plains, and even the name of the cruise ship, the Bianca Pride. North White Plains had been a white neighborhood until blacks moved in and it underwent white flight, leaving only the Archers and Weinsteins: “The only...