Estelle but also the hostility of many islanders toward new ways and new ideas.

The novel begins in the 1980’s and is not a straightforward chronological account. Paule Marshall uses a variety of narrative techniques to tell her story. In the process of moving Ursa’s story forward, Marshall often relies on flashbacks to recount the lives of Primus, Estelle, Celestine, Viney, and Ursa. Marshall also uses an epistolary approach to reveal Estelle’s thoughts and experiences. She permits intimate looks at Celestine through her first-person accounts of her life, along with providing deeply personal narratives by Astral Forde.

In order to understand the present, readers must know a character’s past. His pampered and privileged upbringing has turned Primus into a domineering man. Ursa’s childhood memories of him are larger than life, recalling him as a man whose “head would be in the way of the sun.” Celestine’s complete and unquestioning devotion to him reinforces his behavior, much to Estelle’s dismay. Celestine will not accept Estelle’s American ways of doing things—wanting air conditioning and louvered windows, dressing her child in overalls with ducks on the bib rather than in starched pretty dresses and gold bangles, and transforming Mis-Mack’s store into an office where Primus can meet his constituents. She can even take Primus’s side in his long-standing affair with Astral Forde since, she rationalizes, all Triunion men have at least one “keep-miss.” Primus, however, is devoted to his wife and child. After wondering why Estelle did not leave her father when she discovered his affair with Astral, Ursa finally concludes that what she has “tried for years to understand about these two is perhaps none of her business.”

In her letters to the “homefolks,” Estelle provides an account of her life on the island and her reflections on events back in the United States. Living in two places, she provides perspectives on both: on the new independence of Triunion and the island’s corruption as well as on American historical facts including the Jim Crow laws that her parents endured while traveling in the South in the early 1950’s, the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the marches through the South in the 1960’s (during which her brother’s hip is broken by the police in an Alabama jail), the 1963 March on Washington, the Black Power movement, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. She tells Ursa, “I decided to write off the eighties the day Bonzo’s friend was sworn in.”

Astral Forde’s embittered narrative helps readers to understand the silent woman who watches young Ursa swim laps in a hotel swimming pool and who greets her as if she were a maid. Ursa later apologizes for treating Astral this way. Astral and her best friend, Malvern, hoped to improve themselves by moving from Spanish Bay to Fort Lord Nelson. Malvern finds a kind, broad-faced bus driver who gives her more children than can be accommodated in their poor excuse of a shack perched on a hill in Fort Lord Nelson’s shantytown. When she dies of cancer, though, she has husband, children, and Astral to note her passing. Astral has only Malvern, whom she sees when she needs someone upon whom to unload her selfish and obsessive concerns. Even at Malvern’s deathbed, Astral’s most pressing need is to rail at the half-conscious Malvern over Primus’s intention of selling his hotel, which Astral manages. It is the only thing in the world that Astral has left.

Ursa, like her mother, is a woman of two cultures trying to reconcile them. She is also a woman of two identities—an independent New York career woman and a daughter tied to her family in Triunion. It is Lowell who makes her confront that dependent daughter, eventually forcing her to return home after a four-year absence to face the island, her parents, and herself. It is her mother who pushes her to break Triunion’s and Primus’s stasis by giving the resort prospectus to her father’s political opponent, a young idealistic schoolteacher who reminds Estelle of the young Primus. It is Viney’s suggestion that Ursa reconcile with Lowell, combined with the Triunion memorial to Congo Jane and Will Cudjoe—slave rebellion heroes about whom Ursa has spent twelve years of her life trying to write—that makes Ursa realize the importance of black men and black women together.