To Da-duh, in Memoriam (1976). Content and Description

Surveying the entire body of Marshall’s work, it is easy to see why the author proclaims herself “an unabashed ancestor worshipper” (Reena 95). Her characters seek a past they may have never known, and guiding them back to these earlier times are Marshall’s ancestor figures: Mrs. Thompson in Brown Girl, Brownstones; Leesy Walkes in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People; Aunt Cuney and Lebert Joseph in Praisesong for the Widow; and Da- duh in the often anthologized short story “To Da- duh, in Memoriam.”

According to Marshall, this last story is her most autobiographical, inspired by a visit to her grandmother in Barbados at the age of nine. Reminiscing on the year she spent with her grandmother, Marshall likens their relationship to a power struggle: “It was as if we both knew, at a level beyond words, that I had come into the world not only to love her and to continue her line but to take her very life in order that I might live” (95). Da-duh, as do Marshall’s other ancestor figures, encourages a return to traditional values. Yet, while she goes to great lengths to share with her granddaughter all Barbados has to offer, she does so partially out of fear: New York City frightens Da- duh, and it is through her granddaughter that she truly realizes the difference between Barbados and the world at large, a discovery the narrator laments only upon reaching adulthood.

The tension between Da-duh and her granddaughter, and thus the old and new worlds, is evident in their first encounter. Rather than sharing a conventional greeting, the two challenge each other by locking gazes for an extended period. Da-duh turns away first, dismissing her granddaughter as “one of those New York terrors” (98). Yet, she does not surrender this easily, let alone in her own territory. She leads her granddaughter on a tour of the land, inquiring as to whether or not mango trees and sugarcane can be found in New York: “I said I know you don’t have anything this nice where you come from” (100).

Though she momentarily has the upper hand, the old woman is as curious about Brooklyn as the young girl is about Barbados. When she asks the narrator about snow, the girl seizes her chance to exaggerate what she knows her grandmother has never seen. Afterward, she assaults her grandmother with dances and songs learned on the streets and playgrounds of Brooklyn, appearing to the woman as “a creature from Mars, an emissary from some world she did not know but which intrigued her and whose power she both felt and feared” (102). During their walks about the island, the girl re-creates the myriad technologies within reach of a New Yorker: “refrigerators, radios, gas stoves, elevators, trolley cars, wringer washing machines, movies, airplanes, the cyclone at Coney Island, subways, toasters, electric lights” (103).

With each description of this fantastic world, the grandmother weakens a bit. She displays a childlike curiosity about her granddaughter’s world, yet she holds within herself a fear and distrust of technology, much as the people of Bournehills in Marshall’s earlier novel The Chosen Place, the Timeless People do. It is not simply her own world that dissolves in each description of New York, but a world wherein past generations walked, not below buildings, but between rows of sugarcane. A source of pride for Da-duh, these canes intimidate the granddaughter just as the buildings frighten the grandmother. In each case, the foreign world looms large in each character’s mind, forcing her to consider worlds outside her own.

In a final showdown, the two trek deep into the gully, where Da-duh displays to her granddaughter a single tree towering above the rest. She implores the girl to tell her whether New York City claims anything so tall. Her granddaughter tells Da-duh of the many buildings rising high over New York, specifically the Empire State Building, which was at that time “the tallest in the world” (104). Da-duh refuses to believe and even raises a hand as if to strike her granddaughter before the girl promises to send a postcard of the building upon her return home.

As Marshall’s character Avey Johnson discovers in Praisesong for the Widow, the industrial world hides the natural world and prevents its residents from experiencing a connection and bond with the land. After hearing of New York’s buildings, Da-duh does not see the canes and trees in front of her, for “Some huge, monolithic shape had imposed itself, it seemed, between her and the land, obstructing her vision” (104).

It is not simply the land Da-duh can no longer see, but the entire culture that thrived upon it. In realizing the difference between the old world and the new, between the traditional and the modern, Da-duh envisions herself as a dying person and soon takes ill. When English planes fly low over the island to intimidate strikers, everyone but Da-duh flees into the sugarcane. When they return, they find Da-duh dead. Such an overwhelming display of technology validates her fears, and she passes away as a relic of a time forever spoiled, its innocence lost within the machines of the world.

In the story’s final paragraph, the narrator remembers her grandmother from an adult perspective as an artist in downtown New York: She died and I lived, but always, to this day even, within the shadow of her death. For a brief period after I was grown I went to live alone, like one doing penance, in a loft above a noisy factory in downtown New York and there painted seas of sugar-cane and huge swirling Van Gogh suns and palm trees striding like brightly-plumed Tutsi warriors across a tropical landscape, while the thunderous tread of the machines downstairs jarred the floor beneath my easel, mocking my efforts. (106)

As an adult living in New York—a place both geographically and culturally distant from the Caribbean—the narrator, much as Selina Boyce does in Brown Girl, Brownstones, seeks to reconnect with the land of her ancestors. Yet, technology and industrialism prevent her from experiencing a connection with the natural world, just as they did with Da-duh. Upon her first trip to Barbados, the narrator was intimidated by the Caribbean landscape and “longed then for the familiar” (99). By painting the world of Barbados, she attempts to lessen the feeling of separation between her and the land of her ancestors. Still, she cannot escape the modern world, though she tries. As an adult, the narrator realizes the difficulty in preserving one’s traditional values and heritage in a world bereft of magic, where skyscrapers shoot from land where trees once stood.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. In Marshall’s fiction, the Caribbean landscape takes on a mythic quality. While the narrator of “To Da-duh, in Memoriam” is enthralled by the unfamiliar sights of Barbados, Da-duh is equally curious about Brooklyn. Write a well-developed essay exploring the mythic dimensions of Da- duh’s Caribbean world and the narrator’s Brooklyn. In what ways are the girl’s descriptions of the city mythic to Da-duh? What values do these mythic representations seem to suggest? Does Marshall leave readers with any sense that these respective sets of values can be reconciled?

2. Marshall frequently uses sugarcane to symbolize the past to which Da-duh clings. Marshall’s use of this imagery is intriguing, as sugarcane was introduced to the Caribbean by Europeans and harvested by African slaves under horrific conditions. Similarly, the narrator of Marshall’s short story carries the technological marvels of New York to the island, culminating in Da-duh’s death. In a well-developed essay, compare Marshall’s depiction of encroaching technology with her treatment of the subject in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, noting the historical significance of sugarcane. Is Da-duh’s reticence the same as that of the people of Bournehills? Though Da-duh boasts of the island’s staple crop and takes comfort in its presence, is it so different from the buildings of which her granddaughter speaks or the development the anthropologists plan for Bourne Island?

3. It is clear toward the end of “To Da-duh, in Memoriam” that the narrator is lamenting the loss of her own innocence as well as her grandmother’s death. Compare the narrator’s perception of Da-duh as a child and as an adult. How does the narrator’s memory of her grandmother change with age? What does Marshall accomplish by equating Caribbean traditions with the narrator’s youth?