EDGE Boston

Next to the altar in a Barbados parish church gleams a sankofa bird, carved from the same polished reddish-brown wood as the chancel. The mythic bird that flies forward with an egg in its beak, as the bird looks backward, sits in the direct view of the congregation. The parishioners are reminded of their ancestors brought to this island chained in the hold of a slaver while simultaneously encouraging them to achieve their full potential as they move forward.

Paule Marshall’s enthralling, yet sparsely written Triangular Road (165 pages) intermingles personal memoir with race history, the author telling her story as a sankofa.

Her sweeping flights of passionate writing take the reader into the African Diaspora past, while also telling the story of how she grew as a writer who is in tune with her identity as a person of color.

Her elegant writing style, devoid of frills, permits her to impart a density of information without bogging down the reader; it is as if you are viewing the scenes she portrays from a veranda rather than through a window.

Her parents, by the way, emigrated from Barbados, as did a sizeable number of their fellow islanders in a voluntary dispersal, to cities along the Eastern seaboard.

Most notably for Marshall’s story, many of them came to Brooklyn where her first novel is set, "Brown Girl, Brownstones" (1959).

Marshall has written five novels in all and published two collections of short fiction. She is a MacArthur Fellow and the winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

As Marshall, now age 80, looks back at her development as a writer in a literary career that has spanned some 50 years, she recounts scenes from her Brooklyn youth and her returning to her parent’s homeland which jogged her imagination as a writer.

The title of her new book, however, refers to the dispersal of African people through the slave trade which typically brought them as chattel first to Barbados and some other Caribbean islands to clean them off before shipping them to Central and South American, and of particular interest to Marshall, to the United States.

Paule Marshall, who gave herself her first name and insists it be pronounced "Paul," begins the book with an homage to Langston Hughes.

The beloved African American writer’s own career blossomed during the Harlem Renaissance but he was writing and giving talks through the mid 1960s.

Mr. Hughes was known for his support and encouragement of a generation of younger writers but it was still a stunning moment for Marshall when he appeared unexpectedly at a book party in a Harlem storefront celebrating the publication of "Brown Girl, Brownstones." (Academics and biographers today believe that Hughes was a homosexual and, in the 1989 film "Looking For Langston," Isaac Julien memorializes Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance from a black gay perspective).

In 1965, Mr. Hughes requested that Marshall accompany him on a State Department sponsored tour, as she describes "a once-in-a-lifetime plum of an invitation," which took them to Oxford, Paris, and Copenhagen.

She places this fascinating account at the beginning of "Triangular Road" probably because by her book’s conclusion she has become an elder statesman of black letters.

Her history of activism dates to the Civil Rights Movement while Hughes’s was the era of Jim Crow with its lynchings. The point being that he passed off the mantle of race obligation to her and other younger writers and with "Triangular Road" she is doing much the same.

She is telling the next generation of writers - and all of us, really - to be connected with this African Diaspora past which is everywhere around us.

By internalizing this past, we can look with renewed purpose to making a better future