PSAT Writing and Language Practice Test 38: Punctuation Questions
Questions 1-10 refer to the following information.
Recovering History
The title of Erna 1 Brodber's third novel, Louisiana, has a triple meaning: it refers to a state in the United States, a place of the same name in Jamaica, and the name taken by Ella 2 Townsend the novel's protagonist. Ultimately, the word's fluidity emphasizes the connection between African Americans and African Caribbeans, as well as between the living and dead. The eponymous 3 protagonist: a Colombian anthropology student ventures to St. Mary, Louisiana, to study Black folk life and, instead, finds herself taken over by the spirit of Mammy. Mammy, formally civil rights activist Sue Ann Grant King and more generally called Anna, is Ella's research target. A matriarch of obscure but certain significance, Mammy gradually reveals her own history (as well as Ella's) via a psychic, spiritual 4 connection that changes the young academic's trajectory in unexpected ways.
Ella Townsend earned a fellowship in 1936 to collect and record the history of Blacks of Southwest Louisiana using one of the university's first tape recorders but never returned. The text opens with a confusing transcript of multiple voices that are all but nonsense to the 5 reader, Ella, later called Louisiana, endeavors for most of the novel to make sense of the data collected on the tape recorder, confronting her own preconceptions of voodoo and acknowledging her supernatural connection with two dead women, Anna (Mammy) and Louise. 6 Ella embraces this spiritual connection only after listening through the tape recorder's reel and witnessing her own out-of-body experiences. Although she has no recollection of her interactions on the tape, she hears her voice speaking unintelligibly, a phenomenon that she must either investigate or accept as proof of her insanity.
After Mammy's funeral, Ella begins to understand the recorded transcript as a tri-party 7 dialogue an interaction among her, Anna, and Anna's long-dead friend, Louise. Louisiana then gets her name by combining those of her spiritual sisters. When Caribbean sailors visit Ella and sing folk songs to her, Ella's past is revealed to her in a trance-like vision and formally initiates her into the art of prophecy. 8 From then on: her journey is one of guiding other diaspora in reliving their pasts and speaking with Louise and Anna to recover a communal history of resistance.
9 Louisianas supernatural powers however, are not universally commended. She faces isolation from academia, her parents, and the larger Western social sphere. When she finally completes her project and sketches out Mammy's family history, Louisiana nears death. The reader accompanies Louisiana on her revelation and expansion of the original transcription, engaging with oral folk traditions to rewrite history. Brodber's novel testifies to African 10 survivals; folk traditions that have made it through the Middle Passage.