Praisesong For The Widow

Jerome Johnson is Avey’s late husband. Early in their marriage, Jay, as Avey called him, worked in the shipping room at a small department store as an “assistant to the man in charge” (90). Though he was the assistant, he “actually ran shipping and receiving and not the Irishman in charge,” causing Jay to work “two jobs for the salary of one” (93). Once Avey is pregnant with Marion, their third child, and too far along to work, he began taking on more shifts and working longer. He was dedicated to improving his family’s quality of life, which ironically leads to the ruining of his marriage.

Increasingly paranoid about Jay’s long hours, Avey threatens to leave him. Something in Jay changes after that argument; he becomes consumed by the pursuit of material success. Avey believes his is when he stopped being Jay and became Jerome. He takes on a second and, at times, third job while pursuing two different degrees. His relentless resolution suffocates his spirit; he no longer spends time doing the things he loves, including reading poetry and dancing, and becomes emotionally and sexually distant with Avey. His path to success, though ultimately achieved, comes at the cost of his identity and his marriage. These losses are represented by Jerome shaving of his moustache: “[w]ith the moustache no longer there, it seemed that the last trace of everything that was distinctive and special about him had vanished also” (130).

Furthermore, Jerome begins to manifest an internalized racism. He becomes harshly critical of black Americans after he achieves material success because he buys into a system of racial hierarchy in which whites are in power. This change is so stark, so striking, that Avey begins to sense a “pale outline of another face superimposed on” Jay’s face, and she begins only referring to him in her head as Jerome Johnson (131).

Jerome, particularly in the demoralization of his character, represents the corrupting influence of materialism in a racist society and the false values black Americans must ingest to achieve within it. His death is tragic, but the novel paints his true death as the moment Jay metaphorically died on the night of his fight with Avey. 

Thomasina is a slightly older woman whom Avey travels with. She is “a thin-featured woman […] with a lined and hectic brow” (18). As a young woman, she was a dancer at the Cotton Club, which Avey doubts but supposes could be true: “[Thomasina] had the color to have qualified: black that was the near-white of a blanched almond or the best of ivory‘” (19). The light color of Thomasina’s skin is her most frequently described feature; it is described as both “sacred” and “profane” because it embodies light-skin privilege and provokes associations with being mixed race. The novel uses Nina Simone’s song “Four Women” to draw allusions to the sexual assault of black women by white men: “he forced my mother / late / One night/ What do they call?” (19). In doing so, Thomasina’s skin color is used to explore society’s fetishization of light skin and mixed-race people while also signifying the systematic sexual violence perpetuated by white men onto black women.

The significance of the color of Thomasina’s skin is emphasized again as, when she erupts in anger over Avey’s leaving, she cries out: “[I]t…don’t…pay…to…go…no…place…with…niggers! They’ll mess up ever’time!” (27). This shows that—perhaps because she has benefitted from having light skin—Thomasina has internalized the colorism. 

Clarice is Avey’s other travel companion and a woman she has worked with for 20 years. At 58 years old, she is the youngest of the three and the most timid. Though “her skin […] was as smooth as a girl’s,” she looked older than Thomasina “because of the worry lines furrowed deep around her mouth and the downcast, burdened expression she never completely abandoned” (21). Clarice carries this burdened look from when the difficulties with her now ex-husband began, “her mother’s demanding illness and death,” and the disappointment of her previously academically successful son dropping out of a “predominantly white college” (24). She gained weight from each tragedy and always believes that she is responsible for the things that go wrong around her. When Avey leaves, Clarice takes the decision personally. Seeing Clarice’s troubled look and the defeated fall of her shoulders horrifies Avey; for the first time in their friendship, she is angry at and fearful of her friend. Therefore, Clarice serves as an embodiment of Avey’s fears; she has been beaten down by the world and resolved to just accept it.

As a dark-skinned, plus-sized black woman, the novel depicts Clarice as overshadowed by her lighter and thinner companions, thus portraying the psychological effects of colorism and fatphobia. She is clearly Thomasina’s foil. Where Thomasina is hot-headed, confident, and thin, Clarice is timid, self-conscious, and plus-sized. Both women, because of their parallel rendering, exemplify two poles of the social implications and cultural meanings connected to size and skin color.