61 pages • 2 hours read
Praisesong For The Widow
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Part 4, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “The Beg Pardon”
Part 4, Chapter 1 Summary
Avey wakes to find herself inside the house of Lebert Joseph’s daughter, Rosalie Parvay. Avey lies still for a moment, collecting herself. Inside the house, “sacred elements” have been laid out for the Old Parents: “a lighted candle in a holder and, next to it on a plate, a roasted ear of corn fresh from the harvest” (213). Outside, the four corners of the property had been “liberally sprinkled with rum from a bottle of Jack Iron” (213). This is all done to please the Old Parents, who would stop by the homes of their descendants before the Big Drum to “warm their chill bones over the candle flame” and eat the corn (214). First, though, they would have to finish the rum sprinkled across the property.
Now fully conscious, Avey is filled with the same horror and humiliation she felt the day before. Rosalie comes into the room, moving about in the same abrupt, uneven manner as her father. The sight of Rosalie’s gold earrings and head scarf make Avey realize that the slightly younger woman had been keeping watch over her all night. Avey is apologetic and becomes increasingly embarrassed when Rosalie demands to bathe her. Avey resists at first but is soon soothed by Rosalie’s gentle and deft touch, the respect with which she treats Avey’s body by keeping most of it covered, and the soft singing of the woman as she scrubs Avey from head to toe. Avey fully relaxes, losing herself to sensations and smells of the bath, which bring to mind a similar bath she had in Tatem—“another memory drifting up out of the void” (221).
After the bath, Rosalie begins rubbing oil across Avey’s body, kneading and pull at her limbs. The movement reminds Avey of how she would stretch the babies’ limbs after a bath to make sure their bones grew straight. Rosalie does the upper half of Avey’s legs last, which had become stiff and stolid from years of being suffocated in a girdle. After rigorous kneading, Avey finally beings to feel sensation again. The tingling spreads to her heart and every part of her body.
Lebert returns with humility and hesitation; he had spent most of the night waiting outside of Avey’s room, guilt-ridden and worried. He shyly approaches the women as they sit at the buffet table, only warming up to his old self once Avey is laughing and confirming that she still wants to go to the Big Drum. Though she knows he deceived her into coming on the trip, Avey likes him more for it. Lebert leaves to finish preparing for the fete, promising to escort them halfway.
Part 4, Chapter 2 Summary
Avey, Rosalie, and the young maid, Milda, meet Lebert Joseph at the top of the hill under a gloomy evening sky. The night is the darkest Avey has experienced since her childhood summers in Tatem. As the man makes his way up the hill, Avey sees him as many hundreds of years older than he is, hunched over his walking stick and hobbling towards them. However, as he nears, Avey is shocked to see him transform once again, losing all the years and appearing half his age. They soon reach a decrepit house with a large yard cleared for tables with food and drinks and drummers in the center. Avey meets lots of people with “euphonious and lyrical” names who speak to her with familiarity (234). Avey is seated at the edge of the yard, fussed over by Lebert and Rosalie. Father and daughter run off to join the festivities, leaving Milda to look after Avey.
Lebert kneels in the center of the yard, encircled by elderly and middle-aged persons. The crowd falls silent as Lebert begins to sing the “Beg Pardon” (236). The crowd joins, and Avey realizes that this is the song “for all their far-flung kin” living further west (236). Avey momentarily sees her great-aunt in the body of Milda, but the apparition fades as quickly as it appeared.
Next, the nation dances begin. The oldest of each nation begins the song and dance, then other voices respond to their calls. Avey remembers the fervency with which Lebert had asked her which nation she belonged, listing each one, as he now whispers in her ear the name of the nation as someone moves to the center of the circle. Avey watches the dancing for more than three hours, her eyes circling back to the rum kegs serving as drums, which Lebert had called “the bare bones” of the celebration (240). Avey thinks she should be angry or disappointed about the yard’s sparse set up—that Lebert had tricked her once again. But, she only felt more consumed by the events. Slowly, something begins to stir within the emptiness that had filled her since she had been on the cruise ship.
When the creole dances begin, Avey insists that Milda joins. Her and the other young people in the yard make the dancing livelier. Avey then notices a heavy, dark note rising above the rest of the music. The dancing appears to stop as the note conveys feelings of isolation and loss; it hangs above the rest of the music for a moment, as though to remind them all of “the true and solemn business of the fete” (245). Avey had heard that same sound the first day on the wharf—muted but rising from the crowds of people surrounding her.
The older people move in a slow circle around the younger, more enthusiastic dancers. Slowly, the circle moves closer to Avey’s seat, threatening to surround her. She drags her chair to the corner of the yard and goes to stand where she once sat. When the crowd of dancers reaches her, she takes “a single declarative step forward” and joins them (247). Her body moves automatically, gliding with the circle and slowly becoming more animated. In that circle, Avey feels like a child again; she feels the hundreds of threads connecting her to those in Tatem, those on her trips to Bear Mountain, and, now, those surrounding her in the yard. Then, Avey begins to truly dance.
Lebert catches sight of her, smiles with fatherly adoration, and then suddenly stops in front of her. He bows and soon everyone else in the yard bows as they pass her. An elderly woman with cataracts approaches Avey and introduces herself. Avey introduces herself how her great-aunt Cuney once instructed her: “Avey, short for Avatara” (251).
Part 4, Chapter 3 Summary
Lebert and Rosalie take Avey to the airport on Carriacou so she can return to Grenada, telling her the whole time that they are certain she is an Arada because of the way she danced the Carriacou tramp. Avey laughs and tells Lebert she trusts his judgement. Avey gives a heartfelt goodbye to the father and daughter, attempting to preserve the image of them in her mind as the plane takes off. She watches their figures grow smaller from the plane.
As the plane flies over the small island, Avey is overcome with the sensation that Carriacou—“more a mirage rather than an actual place”—was put there to fill a “longing and need” (254).
Avey remembers the taxi driver who spoke disparagingly about the excursion and resolves to set him right if he is the one to take her to the airport from her hotel. She will tell him about how the music changed the apartment on Halsey Street and about her namesake, whose mind had walked across the water with the Ibos on the Landing. She resolves to tell everyone she can of these things, hoping to enlist Marion in her cause. Avey develops a newfound understanding of her youngest daughter, the very baby she had tried to root out by throwing herself down a flight of stairs.
Her thoughts continue to circle back to the house her great-aunt left her in Tatem. By the time she lands in Grenada, Avey has decided to fix the house—maybe sell the house in White Plains, as Marion always suggested—and demand that her grandchildren spend the summers with her in Tatem. Maybe Marion will bring some of her students. She ponders turning the house into a summer camp. And every week—at least twice—Avey will take her family and guests down to the Landing and tell the tale of the Ibos’ first arrival.
Part 4, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Chapter 1 characterizes Avey’s cultural regeneration as a spiritual rebirth through the bath Rosalie and Milda give her. The significance of tradition and heritage are introduced in the chapter’s opening by describing the rituals that honor the Old Parents. The primary point of the weekend’s celebration is to give the Old Parents “their remembrance” (214), a tradition in stark contrast to the many events and individuals Avey had forgotten. These memories gradually begin to resurface as Avey continues her journey; in the basin, she recalls a distant memory of one she had in Tatem. These recollections signify repairing Avey’s ancestral ties and emphasize the significance of memory.
The bath is reminiscent of a baptism as Rosalie gently cleanses Avey and murmurs to herself. Avey regresses to a childlike state because of her humiliation as being cared for so tenderly allows her to rebuild her dignity and sense of self. This is most concisely represented through Avey’s numb and inert legs, stiffened by her routine use of a girdle, which Rosalie must work hard to revive. As Rosalie kneads Avey’s limbs like an infant, she is slowly bringing life back into each part of Avey’s body. This offers a metaphor for Avey’s spirit, which has been constrained and smothered by trappings of middle-class life. Rosalie is able to awaken this part of her: “The warmth, the stinging sensation that was both pleasure and pain passed up through the emptiness at her center. Until finally they reached he heart” (224).
This opens Avey up to more memories from Tatem, which she describes as appearing with the urgency of a recent memory attempting to imprint itself upon “the empty slate of her mind” (225). Since she woke up in her hotel room in Grenada, Avey felt her mind had been cleared. Therefore, this chapter—and indeed the entire novel—posits that Avey had to allow her mind to revert to a blank slate before she could rebuild memories rooted in her cultural identity. Her rebirth in the basin allows this, opening her up to more sensory experiences that she can associate with her cultural history.
Chapter 2 shows Avey’s memoires of Tatem becoming more frequent and present in her conscious mind, suggesting the near completion of her cultural regeneration. Distant memories continue to resurface, beginning with the darkness of Tatem, then with Avey’s childhood memory of her desire to join the Ring Shout, and ending with her final decree of cultural self-possession by introducing herself as Avatara. Avey’s reclaiming of her cultural identity, though, is most significantly represented through the motif of dancing. Throughout the novel, but most importantly in this chapter, dancing has represented cultural expression and identity. During the Big Drum, it is an essential part of a ceremony that honors ancestors and perpetuates longstanding traditions. As Avey takes in the many nations performing their individualistic dances, the novel asserts the necessity of honoring legacies through physical movement. Because movement is emblematic of life itself, ancestors live on through these traditions. The nation dances mirror the call and response from Avey’s church memory, suggesting that cultural ties transcend geographical boundaries and further declaring Avey’s deep (if adjacent) connection to the Carriacouan people and their traditions. This is implied to be a connection shared by generations and myriad nationalities because it is borne from diaspora. The chapter represents this through the solemn note that is heard above the rest of the lively music:
[T]he theme of separation and loss the note embodied, the unacknowledged longing it conveyed summed up feelings that were beyond words, feelings and a host of subliminal memories that over the years has proven more durable and trustworthy than the history with it trauma and pain out of which they had come (244-45).
The note signifies the generational trauma intuitively understood by African descendants because of the cultural and personal imprint of slavery; the subjective histories recorded pale in comparison to the cultural memory expressed through song and dance, which are used to represent conscious and subconscious experience. The note is used “to both summon and remind” those who hear it of their cultural inheritance and the obligations they have to uphold it (245).
The most significant moment of Chapter 2 is Avey joining the circle and dancing. Here, the motif of dancing facilitates Avey’s complete cultural regeneration. When Avey steps into the circle, she feels “arms made up of many arms […] draw her in” (247). The multitude of arms can represent the people physically around her as well as her family in Tatem, the Gullahs in Bear Mountain Park, and those she does not know yet embracing her. As her feet move, the novel once again conveys the ways the body remembers what the mind has forgotten, emphasizing the profound and deeply buried imprint of one’s cultural memory. In joining the circle, Avey reasserts her connection to the families she long neglected and embraces the newfound ties she has made on Carriacou. Avey’s cultural regeneration is finally complete when she reclaims her great-grandmother as her namesake and introduces herself as Avatara.
Chapter 3 demonstrates the lasting impact of Avey’s cultural regeneration and relies on the motif of storytelling to fortify her transformation. In resolving to inform the world of the excursion, Avey commits to honoring her cultural inheritance —as well as others’. This dramatic change helps her truly remember the beauty of the life she had on Halsey Street—a beauty and power almost entirely wrapped up in the influence music and dancing had in their home, how it made her and Jerome lighter and happier. Avey’s change of heart about selling her house in White Plains so she can fix up the house in Tatem is the final evidence that she has forfeited her materialistic desires in favor of her ancestral obligations, as well as her decision to focus on the things that spiritually satisfy her rather than object with bring her superficial joy. Avey is finally able to uphold her family’s legacy and fulfill her duty to Cuney by ensuring that the story of Ibos will be told to the younger generations.
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