Triangular Road

In a series of essays that artfully fuses personal, cultural, and political histories, Paule Marshall's memoir, Triangular Road, offers a moving meditation on her development as a writer. Taking a line from the Langston Hughes poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," as a starting point, Marshall examines the shaping influence of rivers and oceans on the people's history of the Americas. Within the context of a Labor Day weekend hike in Virginia, Marshall reflects on the wicked business of shipping slaves up and down the James River, while simultaneously observing a group of whitewater rafters frolicking in its heavily polluted waters. In another essay, she provides an intimate history of the ocean-crossing West Indian immigrants who settled in the Brooklyn neighborhood she grew up in, and who helped make her a chronicler of the lives and cultures she was surrounded by. Using graceful, impassioned prose to build and maintain momentum, Marshall effortlessly pulls the reader into the swift and potent currents of her stories. Her first and last essays, one of which tells of a government-sponsored trip to Europe with Hughes early in her career and the other of a trip to Nigeria nearly 20 years later, unfortunately come off as either mannered or self-promoting. But when Marshall's writing is focused and at its best, it raises the question of why she remains such an overlooked figure in contemporary literature.