Literary friendships are themselves legend-often as fascinating and as melodramatic as the literary productions of the writers: Christ and John, Johnson and Boswell, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, Hawthorne and Melville, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Hughes and Bontemps, Hughes and Hurston, Wright and Baldwin, King and Abernathy, Morrison and Bambara, Ginsburg and Totenberg. These friends often inspired, supported, informed, guided, collaborated, protected, advised, traveled, worked, partied, drank and dined together. But oftentimes several of these literary friends also conflicted, disagreed, envied, quarreled, attacked, abused, threatened, renounced, and even sued each other. Some of these relationships were long-standing, while others were relatively brief or sporadic. All these friendships were critical to the subjects themselves, to literary history, and to students and scholars of their works. Most of these relationships helped to change the course of literature, indeed to spark new movements.
REMEMBERING Paule is the compelling story of two such friends, novelist Paule Marshall and folklorist and literary critic Daryl Cumber Dance, both committed truth-tellers, teachers, cultural critics, writers, and activists who wielded their pens to revolutionize their literary world. Marshall is often hailed as the matriarch of the Black Women's Literary Renaissance. Morrison and Walker, who have often been acclaimed that honor, have both insisted that the distinction is due to Marshall. Marshall, herself, often acknowledges the earlier work of Brooks. All these women are notable trailblazers, but there is no doubt that Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones signaled a new day in African Diasporic women's writing. Daryl Dance has been dubbed "the Dean of American folklore" for her work in African American and Jamaican folklore. In Japan, she was greeted and celebrated by professors and scholars for providing them their "Bible, " rare resources for the study of Caribbean literature. In their 2022 Black Facts, Tim and Deb Smith celebrate Dance as one of the four "Original Ladies of Black Comedy."
Following the death of Marshall, Dance details their thirty-five-year friendship, a congenial relationship lacking all of the drama, melodrama, and tragedy of a number of other literary friendships, but notable for their years of amiably working, traveling, lecturing, walking, dining, drinking, laughing, talking, and sharing together. Dance presents that friendship in what Alvin Schexnider has labeled "an exquisite, meticulous and warmhearted paean to her dear friend." Lauren K. Alleyne declares, "Paule Marshall lives on-vibrantly, vividly-in Daryl Cumber Dance's detailed and precious memories.