Free Triangular Road: A Memoir by Paule Marshall

were. We were only in our early twenties, after all. Truthfully, even when we finally had a child some nine years later (the book-party baby that arrived with the publication of that first novel), I still wasn’t
suited for the settled, stay-at-home married life. And this eventually, inevitably, led to a divorce.
    Portable typewriter in one hand, overweight manuscript in the other and the two Delancey Street suitcases in tow, I left for Barbados in a matter of days, there to remain for almost a year. On a practical level it was the right choice. Tourism had not as yet descended on the little wallflower island off by itself in the Atlantic, so that my modest advance had almost the exchange rate of gold when compared to the local dollar. The other and more important reason for choosing Barbados was, of course, Adriana and Sam Burke. Perhaps living in their birthplace might help me to better understand them—and understanding might, in turn, bring about the forgiveness I as yet could not fully give.
    With my American dollars, I quickly found room and board in a large, newly built manor-style house near the capital, Bridgetown, on the Caribbean, or leeward, side of the island. The owner of the house was a somewhat dour, taciturn old Bajan, a bachelor who had retired back home
after fifty years spent working two jobs in Hartford, Connecticut, where he had also acquired considerable rental property. Once back in Barbados he had used his life’s savings to build this replica of a white planter’s great house, exhausting, it’s said, all his savings in the process. In fact, his grudging willingness to have me as a boarder was to help with the upkeep the place required. Mr. Watson was his name. In his youth he would not have dared to set foot near a house such as the one he now possessed—except, perhaps, to beg for a job as a yard boy.
    I would later write a story about old Mr. Watson and his colonial showpiece. It would be part of a collection of stories about old men called Soul Clap Hands and Sing, the title taken from a poem by W. B. Yeats on the subject of aging.
    Once settled, I got down to work overhauling the bloated baby tome of a novel. Using Hiram Haydn’s notes and suggestions, as well as my own instincts, I began eliminating what I soon came to see were the excesses burdening the narrative, impeding its pace. All that highly decorative prose
that called attention to itself! Style overwhelming rather than serving the story! Worst was the surfeit of details! Three or more qualifiers to describe an object when one alone would do! Long hours were spent painstakingly cutting away the fat. Some days the revising felt like a wrestling match that had unfairly pitted me, a rank amateur, against an opponent, my sumo-sized manuscript, that was far superior in weight, strength and skill. It was somehow up to me, the underdog, the weakling, to pin the behemoth to the mat and strip it of every superfluous word.
    Days—long, solitary days, weeks and then months spent learning the painful but necessary lesson of every novice: that writing is rewriting, is honing, pruning, refining, is becoming, essentially, one’s own unsparing editor.
    At times when the work became too punishing or I simply needed a break from the loneliness and the routine, I would flee Mr. Watson’s plantation house and treat myself to a swim—or what the local folk called “a sea-bath.” Bajans never used the word “swim.” Rather, on Sunday mornings usually,
an entire family might go for a sea-bath, with everyone swimming but also standing and washing themselves down in the surf, especially the older folk. According to them, “a sea-bath” in the waters surrounding their little coral gemstone of an island had the power to heal whatever ailed you. I could have used those healing powers years earlier when I came down briefly with tuberculosis while at Hunter College, the disease brought on in part by my taking a full academic program while working two