Three Sisters
Shange, Ntozake
Three Sisters SASSAFRASS, CYPRESS & INDIGO by Ntozake Shange St. Martin's Press. 266 pp. $10.95. Once you have heard Ntozake Shange read, it is impossible not to hear her voice in anything she...
...She's a sensuous, widehipped dancer whose physicality is overwhelming, even to herself...
...She lives in a world surrounded by fifteen dolls...
...The impression this paragraph gives is one of the remarkable openness and power of womanhood, perhaps because of all the o's in the sentences, perhaps because of the sharp imagery, perhaps because of the strong and clear way in which Shange, who is also a poet and playwright, is able to express herself...
...Nor does she explain why Cypress moves from women to men...
...Her voice itself has a power few oral readers bring to their work...
...Esther Cohen (Esther Cohen is a free-lance writer and an editor for a social-issues publishing house...
...Once you have heard Ntozake Shange read, it is impossible not to hear her voice in anything she writes...
...Sassafrass weaves, joins the New Afrikans spirituality movement, leaves Mitch but comes back, gets pregnant, and has a baby named Ella Mae...
...She joins a gay women's dance collective called Azure Bosom, whose workplace was Ovary Studio in the Bowery...
...Shange was the most impressive, not because of what she read but because of the way she was able to give emotional weight to her words through the wonderful timbre she projects...
...She made them herself from socks stuffed with red beans, raw rice, bay leaves, and sawdust...
...She lives with Mitch, a musician-junkie...
...Indigo is the youngest—a wildly imaginative patchwork child, attracted to velvets, ribbons, and dreams...
...prescriptions for life such as Numbers for Prosperity and Furthered Independence of the Race...
...Overall, though, the novel doesn't hold together...
...She makes it possible for us to see them, but not to understand...
...She began with the opening lines from her new novel, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo: "Where there is a woman there is magic...
...It's a rich and evocative ringing that lasts even longer than the images she describes...
...In the midst of the novel there are recipes for foods like Cypress's Sweetbread, Barbequed Lamb Manhattan, and Turkey Hash...
...Indeed, more than half the story is given over to her...
...Sassafrass, the eldest, is a vague character...
...A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits...
...In separate stretches, in paragraphs here and there, Shange's writing overtakes any objections, and the power of her language is enough...
...Even so, many of the fragments make the book worth reading...
...Her writing is not explanatory: She doesn't tell us why Sassafrass, for instance, insists on staying with Mitch even though he is destructive, why she is compelled suddenly to lead a spiritual life, why she spends her life weaving...
...She falls in love with Idrina, another dancer, then follows that liaison with a more lasting one...
...Later Cypress joins Leroy, a successful jazz musician, and they decide to marry...
...suggested potents and brews to make, poems, and letters...
...In a way, it's as though Shange is asking us to see what the lives of those black women look like onstage, but not to participate vicariously in the lives: We don't become emotionally involved with the women because they are shown more as exotic bits and pieces than evolving, real people...
...Cypress is the most fully developed character...
...They go with her everywhere...
...While the imagery is indeed potent, and much of the language is compelling, the narrative problems are great...
...Hilda Effania, the girl's mother, and Aunt Haydee the midwife help with the birth...
...The novel tells the stories of three sisters and their mother, black women in Charleston, South Carolina...
...Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is more like a pastiche, a collage of elements taken from a highly textured existence, than it is a novel...
...In fact, the strong sense the book gives is that the reader is not reading but seeing pictures, hearing voices, watching an unusual narrative presentation...
...At a 1982 convention of the American Booksellers Association, Shange was a keynote speaker, along with Jimmy Carter and Calvin Trillin, all of whom talked about their books...
...If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers...
Vol. 47 • January 1983 • No. 1
