61 pages • 2 hours read
Praisesong For The Widow
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Part 1, Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Runagate”
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
The day after the dream, Avey is unsettled by a parfait. She and her traveling companions sit in the luxurious Versailles Room surrounded by people facing them who “gave the impression of having their backs turned” (47). Avey has grown accustomed to not noticing this and, when she does, to “not feel anything one way or the other about it” (47). She does notice though, the long mirrors surrounding them. Avey takes in the woman who is meant to be her—“the woman in beige crepe de Chine and pearls” (48)—and does not recognize herself. This has happened before, but when she mentioned it to her doctor, he only laughed and said it was a sign of her affluence (49).
So, when the parfait, decadently arranged, arrives, Avey is overwhelmed with an unrecognizable sensation; she becomes aware of the sound surrounding her, becomes “immobilized,” and suddenly, her hand puts the spoon down “with a jerk” (50). A strange feeling spreads through her stomach. She tells her companions it is simply indigestion and passes on eating the parfait. The sensation lingers until the lengthy dinner is over and stays away during their stroll and game of pinochle. It returns, though, once a waiter offers them drinks. It intensifies as they return to the Versailles Room for the midnight buffet, and Avey excuses herself for the night. She takes an antacid, hoping it really is just indigestion, and goes to bed.
The next morning (the day before she leaves the ship), Avey feels unstable on her feet. After being told by Thomasina that the ship is steady, Avey decides to spend the morning alone. However, she cannot be left alone—every corner she finds to hide in is invaded by groups of loud elderly people. Frustrated, she stands on the observation deck and watches the many games happening below. To her shock, the players appear to turn on one another, become “Neanderthal men clubbing each other with the murderous sticks while the crowd cheers” (56). As this vision fades, a memory takes its place: a cop beating a black man horribly for a minor traffic violation before shoving the man into the car and taking him away. Avey is shaken by the memory, wondering what made her think of the dreadful night when she and Jerome watched this all from their bedroom window. Then, she watches an elderly woman shoot clay pigeons and becomes suddenly overwhelmed with empathy for the pigeon, feeling as though the woman turned the gun on her. Avey moves quickly through the ship, careful not to look anyone in the face. By the pool, an elderly man reaches up and grabs her skirt, inviting her to join him. She sees him as a skeleton in a cap, cries out, and runs away, spending the morning shuffling from place to place.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
Avey meets with the purser to organize her departure. The purser’s concern is deflated when Avey gives him the look “that said she had already left” (61). She returns to the room to collect her bags and finds Clarice stubbornly silent—reiterating her belief that it is her fault Avey is leaving—and Thomasina sitting in the armchair watching Avey with “helpless curiosity and awe” (62). As Avey turns to say goodbye to her companions, she becomes mute, suddenly overwhelmed by the look in Thomasina’s eyes that seems to express that “if she could have brought herself to it […] would have asked to be taken along” (63). On the boat heading away from the ship, Avey attempts to look back and offer a silent apology, but she is blinded by the light and heat from the sunlight against the ship.
When she arrives on the island, she is disappointed to realize that no taxi is waiting for her. As crowds of people dressed in vibrant colors and holding equally brightly wrapped packages passes her, she begins to worry that a taxi will not be able to reach her. She hears the passersby speaking Patois and is comforted by “the peculiar cadence and lilt” of the language (67). At first, she thinks it to be the dialect of English spoken on many of the islands. When she recognizes it is Patois, she also realizes she heard it three days earlier and begins to wonder if the sound triggered her dream of her great-aunt—the language had reminded her so much of “the way people spoke in Tatem” (67).
As she stands there, people in the crowd greet her like they know her. She waves and smiles back politely, but her worry increases, repeatedly wondering when a taxi might arrive. Then, she is grabbed by a man and pulled into the crowd. When she pulls her arm back, he apologizes for mistaking her for his friend, Ida. Avey is upset, wondering how the people around her could miss her clothing and suitcases, which clearly marked her as an outsider. Just as her worry piques, a man arrives, startling her, and offers her a taxi.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
In the taxi, Avey learns that the sole flight to New York already left, but there would be another the next day. She fearfully asks about a hotel and learns that the island is full of them. The driver takes in her expensive clothing and says he will take her a fancy hotel. Avey then learns that the people crowding on the wharf were “out-islanders”—people from the tiny island of Carriacou who came to Grenada to live and work. Every year, they all went home for two or three days, called the Carriacou Excursion. The driver reveals that they all speak English perfectly but only speak Patois during the excursion. As the driver goes on to tell a story about the time he dated a girl from Carriacou, Avey feels ashamed for distrusting the friendliness of the people. The driver describes the people of Carriacou as community oriented. He admires this about them but shares that a lot of people on the island say “they’re playing white” (78).
The driver takes her towards the hotel and passes a white-sand beach that draws Avey’s attention. They soon arrive at a 20-story hotel where “[o]nly white people mostly stays” (81). Looking at it, Avey is reminded of the sensation she felt when she and Jerome took a weekend tour of the Laurentians; she had thought about how “Eskimos long ago” would banish “their old people out to die” (81), and she had to fight back tears.
Avey arranges accommodation with the hotel and the driver for her flight tomorrow. In her haste, she realizes she did not look around at the hotel at all; when she does, she is unsettled by its similarity to the ship she just left, feeling she has been lead back to the very thing she meant to escape. She tries to thinks of the home she will be returning to soon to calm down, yet she cannot help but think of the museum she had visited in Martinique—of the “the prized possessions of the well-to-do of St. Pierre before the volcano had erupted at the turn of the century, burying the town in a sea of molten lava and ash” (83). Despite the heat, Avey shivers.
Part 1, Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Chapter 4 demonstrates the ways in which Avey’s subconscious desires and fear manifest physically, which she is unable to interpret fully. The chapter also focuses on the deteriorating effects materialism has had on Avey’s sense of self. As she takes in the vast luxuriousness of the ship’s dining room, she thinks of Marion’s criticizes because they reflect her own. She is beginning to realize that such an artifice of opulence comes at a cost: feeling out of place and not even recognizing herself.
The sense of being an outsider in this space is represented through the purposeful avoidance the other diners practice among Avey, Clarice, and Thomasina. Though they are pointedly—in an artificial manner—polite, the diners clearly act in ways that indicate the black women do not belong in predominantly white spaces. Avey’s lifelong decision to ignore this reveals the frequency of such treatment and the sacrifices she is forced to make to remain comfortable in the places in which she wants to belong.
The thing that makes Avey the most unrecognizable to herself, though, is her carefully crafted appearance. the pattern of not knowing who the woman in the fine clothing in the mirror demonstrates how Avey creates a contrary identity to belong, and this identity wholly revolves around money. She weaponizes the trappings of wealth to passively assert her right to belong in these spaces. The feeling that overtakes Avey, triggered by something as trivial as the parfait, evinces her intuitive knowledge that she has lost something: herself. Moreover, the feeling intensifies when her status is pointed out again by being waited on or by returning to the dining room. The two visions she has—the memory of the brutal attack of the cop onto an innocent black man and the sensation that the woman shooting clay pigeons is shooting at her—signifies her psyche’s push to take her out of these spaces. They also, more significantly, represent the cultural identity she forfeited to blend in with the wealthy and predominantly white society she and her husband entered long ago.
Chapter 5 introduces the theme of the cultural significance of language and further alludes to why Avey was inspired to leave the ship. First, Avey attempts to look back, but when she does, “her eyes [are] assaulted” by the light reflecting off the ship. This suggests that Avey should not look backwards and instead continue to move away from the ship. As soon as she lands on the island, Avey immediately sees herself as an outsider because of the islanders’ appearances compared to her own, even though they treat her with familiarity. Here, clothing symbolizes Avey’s perception of identity and belonging as wholly wrapped up in appearances. The bright, colorful outfits of the crowd juxtaposes Avey’s muted ensemble. Moreover, her indignance at being mistaken for an islander represents her engrained desire to belong to a group more like the one on the ship she just escaped.
Finally, the significance of language is central to this chapter. Avey does not notice at first that everyone around is speaking Patois because she expected English. The language reminds her of her childhood trips to Tatem, suggesting her psyche’s desire to regenerate a cultural connection through her dream of her great aunt. The significance of language becomes more apparent as Avey struggles to make herself understood; the panic that fills her represents the power of language. She grows to distrust, even fear, these friendly strangers simply because she cannot understand them.
Chapter 6 focuses on the lasting significance of culture and community and alludes to Avey’s cultural regeneration through the Carriacou Excursion. As the driver explains the islanders’ connection to their home and dedication to maintaining these ties, the novel alludes to the absence of cultural connection in Avey’s life. It suggests that this is the void she is compelled to fill. Avey feels guilty for being suspicious of “their simple friendliness” (77), which proves she has become accustomed to mistrusting strangers’ intentions after a lifetime of being misunderstood herself. This behavior again emphasizes how much she has changed.
The motif of storytelling appears in the chapter as the driver explains his former relationship to a Carriacouan, serving as an example of the othering that appears everywhere. The islanders treat the Carriacouans as other because of their customs, even accusing them of acting like white people simply because they have a tradition different from theirs. The importance of race here is also emphasized when the driver, judging Avey’s appearance, takes her to a hotel frequented by white guests. This aligns understandings of wealth and privilege exclusively with whiteness, erasing Avey’s black identity and undermining black individuals’ right to exist in these spaces. For this reason, and because the hotel is draped in the same artificial splendor of the cruise ship, Avey is again overwhelmed with an unnamable sensation, suggesting that she feels trapped.
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