Avey Johnson, a prosperous, widowed Black woman in her sixties, abandons a Caribbean cruise with friends after dreams and a chance encounter unsettle the orderly, assimilated life she built with her late husband in White Plains. Travelling on to Grenada and then to Carriacou, she is drawn, almost against her will, into the island's Big Drum dance and the annual excursion of the elders, rituals that reconnect her with African and Caribbean ancestors, with her Barbadian parents, and with a childhood memory of enslaved Ibos who walked home across the water. Marshall's third novel, winner of an American Book Award, is a central text of Black diasporic literature: a story of middle age and mourning in which cultural recovery, rather than escape, becomes the condition for beginning again.
Author: Paule Marshall · Original publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons (New York), 1983
