ABSTRACT
By skin color, by African origin, by their colonized status, the West Indians of Paule Marshall's novel are inexorably connected to all black Americans, but it is their distinctiveness that yields the peculiar themes and images of the novel. The Boyce family does not belong to the tradition that created such American novels as Richard Wright's Black Boy or Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha or Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. These transplanted Barbadians ate employed, literate, ambitious, property-owning, upwardly mobile, tough community of first-generation immigrants. Not one person in this novel is unemployed. These people came to "this man country," as they call it, on purpose, as willfully as many white immigrants; and they exercise their collective force to get what they want. 3
Silla, similarly, must scrub her way through the dirt of racist stereotyping, and appeal-"Oh Lord"-to greater linguistic powers. She arduously apostrophizes an otherwise inarticulate complaint about black female differences. Silla engages in a form of critical speaking advocated by Spillers, who notes, albeit in a different context (and makes no mention of religion), the sheer difficulty of speaking that must be confronted and resisted "in order to speak a truer word concerning" the black feminist self 14 Religious apostrophes equip Marshall's characters with the ability to represent their bodies as racialized bodies asking difficult questions, with the ability to make their "fact of blackness" more like an open and less-weighty "fiction of blackness." The pages that follow will demonstrate the manner in which these religious apostrophes help the novel's female agents to come clean.
