them disappear and put the produce on the vegetable wagons that went round to the Colored. There wasn't enough for Indigo in the world she'd been born to, so she made up what she needed. What she thought the black people needed." P. 4

While Sassafrass, eldest, and Cy- press, middle sister, sit at the looms of their weaver mother, Hilda Effania, while the three older women throw shut- tles and spin yarn and stir vats of dye, Indigo is sent off to her dolls. No one else has time to talk to her, or to lis- ten. So we follow Indigo on her adven- tures around black Charleston. She

plays her violin, banned from Hilda's house and ears, in Sister Mary Louise's gardening shed. We go to the drugstore with Indigo when she buys her first box of sanitary napkins. Once home, we watch her fashion more elegant ones for her dolls from her Mama's best velvet and argue for Hilda Effania's best china to be set for a feast of celebration.

Child becoming woman, Indigo feels her power and shows little fear in using it. Her two elder sisters come across as less clearly formed, each more moved than moving: events happen to Sassaf- rass and Cypress. And it is their stor- ies which lack the strong center, the solid confidence that mark Indigo's. Indigo is Indigo, whether she is puzzl- ing over the mysteries of love between Sister Mary Louise and Uncle John Hen- derson or establishing her right to join the Junior Geechee Capitans, until In- digo's appearance, its membership re- served exclusively for boys. One won- ders if Sassafrass and Cypress, older but seemingly less wise than their baby sister, lost their power, their sense of who they are, because they expected to lose it once men entered their lives, because it is around men that both sis- ters display confusion, aimlessness and ambivalence.

For a time, Cypress finds love and comfort in the arms of a woman. But she soon drifts back to men, why is not clear. Sassafrass plays yo-yo with her lover Mitch, leaving him, returning, leaving. We have no idea why.

Shange weaves words with the sure touch of a gifted poet, but here she gives her characters too little support to withstand the expectations of motiva- tion, growth and progression demanded of the traditional novel form. We under- stand why Indigo writes spells and talks to her dolls. Indigo's world is shown to us through Indigo herself, not by Shange as Indigo's creator. In compar- ison, Sassafrass and Cypress' worlds seem more collections of details, poet- ic and evocative though they are, rath-

The

er than fully developed worlds in which the women actually live. A dancer, Cy- press executes a plié, jeté and a tendu across the pages but rarely does her self as dancer rise from the paper. kinesthetic sense of a body moving through space cannot speak through a cal- culated recitation of ballet terms. Sas- safrass, poet and writer, keeps her hands busy with cloth, thread, skeins of wool. She sews Mitch's shirts, she crochets him caps. And when the terrors of mak- ing words, of actually writing, become overwhelming, she cooks for him.

"And Sassafrass couldn't a- void the truth: the man she loved was not happy with her charade of homebodiness, be- cause all this weaving and crocheting and macrameing she'd been doing all her life, and Sassafrass was supposed to be a writer."

p. 79

We are presented with this irony of Mitch, the man for whom Sassafrass gives up her own power, forcing her to look at what she's doing but never discover why or how she came to do it.

It's not that we never catch glimp- ses of the full, rounded women who are Cypress and Sassafrass. Coerced into listening to one of Mitch's friends re- cite a piece of black woman-hating trash masquerading as a love song to Black Womanhood, Sassafrass takes care of bus- iness in no uncertain terms. And on late nights, in Cypress' house in San Francisco, the two sisters talk, eat, giggle and share their strength. We see

too little of those sisters.

If Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo spins a thin novelistic thread, it cre- ates a beautifully strong poetic patch- work. In the letters Hilda Effania writes to her daughters, in the spats between the sisters, on a Christmas Day when all the women of this black family are together, we recognize and love so much of who we are as black women. And we look to baby sister Indigo who knows it all and shares it.

"Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits. p. 3

*Ntozake Shange's three plays are "Spell No. 7"; "A Photograph: Lovers in Motion" and "Boogie Woogie Landscapes". They are all contained in her book Three Plays, also published by St. Martin's Press and available at local public libraries.

C 1983 Paula Ross

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