Paule Marshall does not let the black women in her fiction lose. While they lose friends, lovers, husbands, homes, or jobs, they always find themselves. The precocious heroine of Brown Girl, Brownstones … comes of age and rejects the class aspirations of her tightly knit Barbadian community in Brooklyn. The willful teacher of The Chosen Place, The Timeless People … is middle-aged and heading toward a sharp turn in her rocky road, one that will take her into battle with developers on her Caribbean island, and then to the unknown in Africa. The well-heeled woman approaching old age in Praisesong for the Widow finds spiritual renewal on a remote island in the Caribbean.

In exploring the stages of black women's lives, Marshall insists that the woman with enough nerve can win even when the deck is stacked and the other players are hostile. Nerve, here, means making radical choices, and...