To Da-Duh, In Memoriam

Paule Marshall's short story "To Da-Duh, In Memoriam" was first published in 1967 and later included in her 1983 collection Reena, and Other Stories. Marshall was the daughter of parents who were part of the first wave of Barbadian migrants to the US. Growing up in Brooklyn, she was strongly influenced by Caribbean origins of language and culture, which in the story are personified by the character of her grandmother, Da-Duh.

As a child, the author visited her grandmother in Barbados, and this autobiographical tale - told from a retrospective, adult point of view - recaptures that visit as a quest for identity through the generational bond and conflict between two strong women, as well as the transition from traditional, rural island customs to modern, urban ways of life that frames their relationship.

The importance of Marshall's connection to her family in the Caribbean, and especially the ancestral role of her grandmother symbolizing her roots in a lineage of black women, is a theme that permeates her writing, and was introduced in her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), which she started writing while in graduate school and dedicated to her grandmother.

“To Da-duh, in Memoriam” begins in 1937, as the nine-year-old narrator, accompanied by her mother and sister, arrives by boat in Bridgetown, Barbados, from Brooklyn for a family visit. The father notably stays in New York, deeming the trip a waste of money, which shows that the most binding family ties hold between women. The narrator is struck by the deference her mother, who left Barbados fifteen years earlier, shows Da-Duh, the family matriarch, and describes her becoming a child again.

The narrator has never met Da-Duh before, and as the 80-year-old woman sizes her up, she boldly meets her stare, which establishes the complex bond of matching strengths, strong wills, rivalry and respect between the girl and the elder, who calls her "fierce" and takes her by the hand to meet the rest of the relatives before they head to Da-Duh's home in St. Thomas. Da-Duh's physicality, as described by the narrator - small and statuesque, with a rigid face and lively eyes commensurate with her quick movements - attests to her alert and assertive, dominating personality and single-minded disposition.

The following day, Da-Duh takes the narrator out and shows her the proliferation of fruit orchards and sugar cane fields. She asks if there is anything as nice in New York, adding that she has heard the city has no trees. When Da-Duh asks the narrator to describe snow, the latter says it piles up higher than her grandmother's house and is cold enough to freeze someone. She literally sings the praise of the city and of American culture by performing popular songs and dances for Da-Duh, who reacts in silent bewilderment.

Da-Duh is rendered even more speechless by her granddaughter's revelation that she beat up a white girl in class, which resonates starkly with the grandmother's wish to have had white boys as grandchildren. (She in fact had grandchildren from the illegitimate children of white estate managers.) Da-Duh's conservative attitudes in terms of gender and race relations qualify her as out of touch with progressive values and rights, and ironically reveal her forceful demeanor to be couched in the dynamic of colonial exploitation. (Significantly, her appreciation of the sugar cane plantations never probes the economic power structure that undergirds them, because she automatically assumes the white man's natural position to be at the top of the food chain.)

The narrator spends most of the remainder of her visit with Da-Duh, telling her all about the buildings and technology New York has to offer. The grandmother is taken aback and almost fearful at the descriptions of this modern metropolis. Her last stand is taking her granddaughter to Bissex Hill and showing her a tall palm tree - the tallest thing she's ever laid eyes on. She asks the narrator if there is anything so high in New York, and the narrator is by now almost reluctant to deal Da-Duh's spirit a final blow by her answer of the Empire State Building, of which she promises to send the incredulous old woman a postcard of upon her return home. Da-Duh never receives the postcard, though. After the family leaves, the 1937 Bridgetown strike takes place, leading the British to send planes to fly low over the island and scare the protesters. Da-Duh is the only one who refuses to take refuge in the cane fields, and stays home. Later the townspeople find her dead in her chair by the window.

For a while, as an adult, the narrator paints landscapes of the sugar cane fields of Barbados in fond remembrance of her grandmother, whom she vividly imagines seeing the planes come at her like "monstrous birds". Her entire apocalyptic vision frames Da-Duh's demise symbolically, as the conflagration of an entire way of life. Within the aestheticizing remove of that historical perspective, however, there is also the experience of family time, where the narrator can summon a child's imagination to make sense of her grandmother's death, and also a grown-up's heartfelt appreciation of its organic, cyclical meaning: "She died and I lived."