Toni Morrison's Developing Class Consciousness

TONI MORRISON’S: Developing Class Consciousness, Second Edition Doreatha Drummond Mbalia Susquehanna University Press ...

Author: Doreatha Drummond Mbalia

52 downloads 2162 Views 859KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

TONI MORRISON’S: Developing Class Consciousness, Second Edition

Doreatha Drummond Mbalia

Susquehanna University Press

TONI MORRISON’S Developing Class Consciousness

This page intentionally left blank

TONI MORRISON’S Developing Class Consciousness Second Edition

Doreatha Drummond Mbalia

Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press

䉷 1991 by Associated University Presses, Inc. 䉷 2004 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp.

All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [1-57591-068-3/04 $10.00 Ⳮ 8¢ pp, pc.]

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mbalia, Doreatha D. Toni Morrison’s developing class consciousness / Doreatha Drummond Mbalia.—2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57591-068-3 1. Morrison, Toni—Political and social views. 2. Literature and society—United States—History—20th century. 3. Women and literature—United States—History—20th century. 4. African Americans in literature. 5. Social classes in literature. II. Title. PS3563.O8749 Z77 2004 2003012222 813⬘.54—dc21

printed in the united states of america

To all people of African descent, with love and commitment


Contents Preface to the First Edition Preface to the Second Edition Acknowledgments

9 11 13 Part I

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Nkrumaism and the Novels of Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye: The Need for Racial Approbation Sula: The Struggle for Individual Fulfillment Song of Solomon: The Struggle for Race and Class Consciousness Tar Baby: A Reflection of Morrison’s Developed Class Consciousness Beloved: Solidarity as Solution Women Who Run with Wild: The Need for Sisterhoods in Jazz Paradise: A Warning Not to ‘‘Africanize’’ Exploitation A Rationalization for and an Assessment of Toni Morrison’s Developing Class Consciousness Conclusion: A Praisesong for Toni Morrison, A Call to Action for Her Readers

19 32 42 53 69 88 104 125 165 181

Part II

A Sampling of the ‘‘Bits and Pieces’’ of Toni Morrison’s Life Experiences in Her Works: In Her Own Words

187

Afterword: Love Notes Bibliography Index

212 216 237 242 7


Preface to the First Edition I FIRST BECAME AWARE OF DEVELOPMENTAL PATTERNS IN TONI MORrison’s canon after teaching her novels for a number of years. It has always been my practice to reread literary works along with the students in my classes no matter how often I might have already read them. This practice of rereading, as well as my habit of letting the classroom force me to analyze elements of works that I am otherwise too lazy to analyze, helped me to spot these patterns. In each of her novels, Morrison explores some aspect of and/or solution to the oppression afflicting African people. The Bluest Eye examines racism; Sula, gender oppression; Song of Solomon, the necessity of knowing one’s family, community, and heritage; Tar Baby, the class contradictions that keep African people divided; and Beloved, the solution that will help solve the class exploitation and racial oppression of African people. While commendable, the exploration of these various themes did not seem extraordinary until I saw the thread that runs through and connects novel after novel. One work picks up where the other one leaves off, thematically and structurally. Certainly, no one could choose and develop such themes as racism, gender oppression, the importance of knowing one’s history in determining one’s identity, class exploitation of and class contradictions within the African race, and collective struggle without herself having a commitment to struggle for African people. And certainly no one would be concerned enough to shape her works into narrative structures that enhance the themes without herself being interested in turning theory into practice. If the works didn’t tell me this, the many interviews and various critical essays on Morrison—once pieced together—did. Assured of Toni Morrison’s increasing commitment to help solve the problems of African people, I began to think about the particular nature of the evolutionary pattern—why, for example, Morrison examines problems of race and gender oppression before exploring class contradictions within the race. It became clear that Morrison 9

10

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

was gaining knowledge as she experienced life, read about it, wrote about it, and thought about what she wrote. With each succeeding novel, she herself was developing, and her works chronicle this development! Next, I wanted to know what other elements—other than the reading and writing processes—were involved in Toni Morrison’s increasing commitment to struggle for African people. Family background, historical and current events, personal and professional experiences, and literary predecessors seem to have contributed to her development. Accepting Morrison’s comment—if there were better critics, there would be better writers—as an invitation, I thought it necessary to devote the final part of the study to exploring elements of Morrison’s canon that are left undeveloped. The exploration is undertaken only in an attempt, like Morrison’s, to struggle for a solution to the plight of African people.

Preface to the Second Edition THERE IS A QUANTITATIVE AND QUALITATIVE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN the first edition and this revised edition. Three additional chapters and a Part II have been added: a chapter on Toni Morrison’s Jazz: ‘‘Women Who Run with Wild: The Need for Sisterhoods in Jazz’’; a chapter on Paradise: ‘‘Paradise: A Warning Not to ‘Africanize’ Exploitation’’; a concluding chapter: ‘‘A Praisesong for Toni Morrison, A Call to Action for Her Readers’’; and Part II: ‘‘A Sampling of the ‘Bits and Pieces’ of Toni Morrison’s Life Experiences in Her Works: In Her Own Words.’’ That’s the quantitative difference. Qualitatively, the style has changed, most noticeably in the Paradise chapter. I’m not the person I was twelve years ago. (Textnote: The arrogance of the other me! I wish I could remove all of the arrogant statements about Morrison’s ‘‘lack of this and lack of that’’ from the first edition.) I have lived and I have learned, as the elders say. And so hopefully I’m wiser. One thing for sure: I now understand more clearly than I did then that if you are writing for a dying people, not only should you deliver a life-saving message, but also you must do so in a language that is clear and a style that is decipherable. Otherwise, how will the people receive, and act, on the message? It’s a matter of life and death. ‘‘Women Who Run with Wild: The Need for Sisterhoods in Jazz’’ first appeared as an article in Modern Fiction Studies. It was written in1993 and its style mirrors that found in the chapters that appear in the first edition. The Paradise chapter, written in 2002, uses the language of conversation, everyday talk, and a style that is devoid of complexity, a hip-hop style. Endnotes are abandoned in favor of textnotes. Why force the reader to choose between searching out additional information or not? If there is something worthwhile to say, place it in the text. Otherwise, omit it. The conclusion was added for three reasons. First, it was impossible to bridge the twelve-year gap in language and style between ‘‘A Rationalization for and an Assessment of Toni Morrison’s Developing Class Consciousness’’ and that of my twenty-first century lan11

12

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

guage and style. Second, the ‘‘Rationalization’’ chapter’s unity appeared impenetrable. Third, and most importantly, the conclusion afforded me an opportunity to praise Toni Morrison’s unwavering commitment to the liberation struggle of African people and to entreat her readers to follow her example by coming to the aid of ‘‘the masses’’ during a time when those with money and power refuse to do so. In analyzing Morrison’s canon, I have always attempted to trace ‘‘bits and pieces’’ of her life experiences to her fiction. Part II, ‘‘A Sampling of the ‘Bits and Pieces’ of Toni Morrison’s Life Experiences in Her Works: In Her Own Words,’’ follows in that tradition by spotlighting some of the autobiographical kernels that appear in each of her novels. Overall, this new edition reflects my own continued struggle to contribute to the liberation of African people. I hope the twelveyear interval reveals a strengthening of my commitment, an unwavering and humbling march on behalf of the people, a transition from breeze to gale storm. These are troubled and troubling times, ya’ll. But I’m more convinced than ever of Kwame Nkrumah’s words: ‘‘There is no force, however formidable, that a united people cannot overcome.’’ A better world is not only possible, it’s coming. Forward ever.

Acknowledgments I WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE FOLLOWING INDIVIDUALS AND THE ORganization that made this work possible: Richard K. Barksdale, for offering guidance throughout. The Institute on Race and Ethnicity at the University of Wisconsin, for providing the necessary financial support and time. Clenora Hudson, for making available to me some of the important critical works on Toni Morrison. The Mbalia Family, for excusing my many physical, sometimes mental, absences. The struggle of African people, for giving me the ideological perspective needed to write such a study.

13


TONI MORRISON’S Developing Class Consciousness


Part I


1 Nkrumaism and the Novels of Toni Morrison FUNDAMENTALLY, THERE ARE TWO DISTINCT AND OPPOSING WORLD views: the materialist and the idealist. The materialist world view holds that matter, reality that is not conscious, is primary and existed before mind, reality that is conscious. The idealist world view holds that mind is primary and existed before matter. One’s epistemological choice between these two viewpoints has everything to do with how he or she perceives events and conducts his or her life. For example, an idealist, believing that the world was created and is guided by a supreme being, may feel unequipped to change conditions in society while the materialist, understanding that a change in the material conditions of society will bring about a change in one’s thinking, may feel obligated to struggle for change. This study is based on a materialist world view. From a materialist perspective, literature is a product of the society in which it is produced, arising from and dependent on the material conditions of the society. Documenting the dialectical relationship between the material forces in society and the ideas that pervade that society, European economist Emile Burns writes: ‘‘When the form of production changed—for example from feudalism to capitalism—the institution and ideas also changed.’’1 And when the institutions and ideas change so does the literature. According to African critic and novelist Thiong’O Wa Ngugi, literature is ‘‘given impetus, shape, direction and even area of concern by social, political and economic forces in a particular society.’’2 Of course, dialectically, literature can in turn help shape the particular society in which one lives. Again, Burns writes: ‘‘Although ideas can only arise from material conditions, when they do arise they certainly exert an influence on [people’s] actions and therefore on the course of things.’’3 Since literature is mainly born out of those ideas prevalent in society, it can either reflect a ruling-class perspective or a people19

20

1: NKRUMAISM AND THE NOVELS OF TONI MORRISON

class perspective. When that literature reflects a ruling class perspective under a capitalist economic system, it primarily focuses on the profit and well-being of only a small sector of the population. When that literature reflects a people-class perspective, it primarily focuses on the welfare of the exploited and oppressed majority. Toni Morrison’s novels are people-class oriented. All of them are concerned with the exploited and oppressed condition of African people. Just as the literary writer’s ideas arise from material conditions in society, so the critic’s methodology or tools of analysis arise from those same conditions. This methodology can reflect either a ruling-class or a people-class perspective. If it is derived out of a concern for the exploited masses, it will have a people-class orientation. It will be an analysis based on the general laws that govern both the natural and human-made environments, as well as an analysis based on the particular history of the people about whom the literature is written, in this case African people. Only then can it uncover the truisms and dispel the myths that serve to keep African people oppressed and exploited. Then, too, if used to analyze a body of work like Morrison’s, which is essentially people-oriented in nature, the methodology serves as a vehicle in which to bring together author and critic in service to the interests of African people. The method of analysis used in this study is people-oriented in general and Nkrumaist in particular. Nkrumaism is an ideology that applies the universal laws of nature to the particular conditions of Africa and African people scattered throughout the world. Specifically, it uses dialectical and historical materialism first to explain the uniqueness of the African’s oppression, an oppression grounded in race and class, and second to propose a viable solution to that oppression. Dialectical materialism asserts that matter is primary and that all things are knowable. It consists of four basic principles: (1) everything and everyone are interdependent; (2) everything and everyone change (develop); (3) these changes gradually accumulate to a point, and then a qualitatively new reality appears; and (4) such changes occur because there are internal conflicts or contradictions in nature (including human nature) and society. Historical materialism is an awareness and approach to ‘‘society not only as it exists here and now, but as it has existed in the past and as it is developing as the result of its internal contradictions.’’4 In other words, it is the


21

application of the principles of dialectical materialism to the study of society and its history. Toni Morrison’s novels reflect materialist concepts. In regard to dialectical materialism, her novels are evolutionary; they are interconnected; they reflect quantitative changes, some even qualitative leaps in the author’s consciousness; and they reflect contradictions within and between them. Her canon also documents her increasing understanding of the role of historical materialism in discovering the source of the solution to the African’s oppression. For with each succeeding novel she demonstrates her increasing clarity of the need for Africans to know their history, their historical place in society as it has developed and as it is now, before they can forge a better future. Next, her literature reveals her understanding that while the African suffers equally from class exploitation and race oppression, the latter is born out of the former. Finally, it illustrates her understanding that the gender oppression of African women is the result of the African male’s class exploitation and race oppression. Thus, as Tar Baby and Beloved clearly indicate, it is the economic system of capitalism, characterized by the exploitation of one group of people by another, that gives birth to and continues to fuel racism and sexism. It is neither racism nor sexism but capitalism that is the primary enemy of African people. As an appropriate prerequisite for appreciating Morrison’s developing class consciousness, one must first understand the nature of capitalism as Morrison herself began to understand it. Capitalism is an economic system characterized by ‘‘the concentration in a few hands of the ownership of the means of producing wealth and by unequal distribution of the products of human labour.’’5 Thus, it is a system which divides society into classes [sections of people who get their living in the same way], one which carries out the actual process of production (slave, serf, wage-worker), while the other (slave-owner, lord, capitalist employer) enjoys a part of the product without having to work to produce it.6

The class that owns and/or controls the means of production (e.g., the industries, mines, corporations) is called the ruling or capitalist class. To rule society simply means organizing it to serve the interests of only one class of people and imposing the will of this group on all other groups, whether they agree or not.7 Ultimately, the ob-

22


jective of the ruling class is to convince others that its rule is the most just. If the objective is accomplished, the ruling class secures its place in the society and thus continues its exploitation with few opposing disturbances. In any society in which the interests of only a small sector of the population are considered, gross injustices are present. Under capitalism, for example, there exists a permanent sector of unemployed people, periodic economic crises, ‘‘incredible poverty in the midst of wealth and wastage,’’ deviant behavior based on placing individual interests above group interests (social responsibility), and racism.8 It is Morrison’s growing awareness of these inherent characteristics of capitalism that helps her to understand that racism is an integral part of the capitalist mode of production and, therefore, to get rid of the latter is to do away with the former. There is ample evidence to prove that racism is a by-product of capitalism. First, Walter Rodney defuses the myth that racism was the initial cause of the enslavement of African people and, by doing so, effectively negates the argument of those nationalists who say that racism is the primary cause of their oppression today. According to Rodney, Africans were enslaved ‘‘for economic reasons, so that their labour power could be exploited.’’9 Then resulted racism, the doctrine based on ‘‘the assumption that psychological traits and capacities are determined by biological race . . . and a belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race and its right to dominion over others.’’10 In his words, [After] having been utterly dependent on African labour, Europeans at home and abroad found it necessary to rationalise that exploitation in racist terms as well. Oppression follows logically from exploitation, so as to guarantee the latter.11

The economic system of slavery, an early form of capitalism, was the cause of racism rather than the result of it. Dr. Kwame Nkrumah confirms Rodney’s analysis when he writes: ‘‘It was only with capitalist economic penetration that the master-servant relationship emerged, and with it, racism, colour prejudice and apartheid.’’12 Finally, the economist Eric Williams offers indisputable facts to illustrate that racism was the result of the exploitation of the African’s labor. He points out that the enslavement of the African had everything to do with ‘‘the cheapness of labor,’’ not the color of the laborer’s skin:


23

Racial differences made it easier to justify and rationalize Negro slavery. . . . Finally, and this was the decisive factor, the Negro slave was cheaper. The money which procured a white man’s service for ten years could buy a Negro for life.13

Williams substantiates this premise by examining the rise of capitalism. Offering convincing facts, he proves that the early European capitalists were willing to exploit the labor power of any group of people—even their own—to make a handsome profit. Two such groups of exploited laborers were the white indentured servants and the native American Indians. Neither made efficient laborers. White indentured servants, for instance, could escape and easily blend in with the rest of the population. Moreover, their supply was quite limited. On the other hand, the Indian population rapidly succumbed to the excessive labor demanded of them, the insufficient diet, the white man’s diseases, and their inability to adjust themselves to the new way of life. . . . Their constitution and temperament were ill-adapted to the rigors of plantation slavery.14

All of these factors, according to Williams, confirm that racism stems from class exploitation. However, to state that racism was the consequence of the European’s quest for greater profits is not to imply that racism did not ultimately become a concomitant reason for oppressing African people. Morrison, in Song of Solomon, seems aware of this fact. According to Rodney, ‘‘Oppression of African people on purely racial grounds accompanied, strengthened and became indistinguishable from oppression for economic reasons.’’15 Nkrumah, too, believed that the African suffered from a nation-class oppression. In analyzing the African’s plight in the United States, he wrote: ‘‘Race is inextricably linked with class exploitation; in a racist-capitalist power structure, capitalist exploitation and race oppression are complementary, the removal of one ensures the removal of the other.’’16 Rodney and Nkrumah agree, however, that while the African suffers equally from both, racism cannot exist under a nonexploitive economic system. Therefore, capitalism—in all its forms—must be the African’s primary target of attack. By the time she writes Tar Baby, Toni Morrison has become increasingly aware of capitalism as the African’s primary enemy, largely through reading the works of class-conscious Africans, ex-

24


periencing and contemplating the minimal results of the struggle against racism without regard for the system that produced it, and perceiving the negligible changes in the lives of the masses of African people. At first, like most Africans, she saw racism as the cause of the African’s dilemma in the United States. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), serves as proof of her low level of class consciousness at the beginning of her writing career. Interestingly enough, it was written during the time when African people in the United States were waging a national struggle against racism. However, like most conscious Africans who lived through and participated in the Civil Rights Struggle, she is unsatisfied with the notion that to remove signs of segregation ensures the destruction of racism. Thus, in Sula (1973), her second novel, Morrison—again like many Africans in the United States—turns her attention to securing individual rights in general and women’s rights in particular. This switch in thematic emphasis suggests that she sees the lack of individual rights as the primary cause of the African’s oppression. But as the ending of Sula suggests, Morrison rejects this assumption as well. Song of Solomon (1977) marks a qualitative leap in Morrison’s consciousness. Written just after the publication of Alex Haley’s Roots, it illustrates the importance of Africans’ awareness and acceptance of their history, for without knowing where they have been, Africans do not know where they are going.17 Song of Solomon is important for another reason. Morrison tells us that knowledge is not enough. Africans conscious of their history must assume the responsibility of politically educating their people. In the author’s words, ‘‘You can never fly away and leave a body.’’18 Written after she had edited Chinweizu’s The West and the Rest of Us, a work that condemns those petty bourgeois Africans who settle for individual handouts from their oppressors while the rest of their people wallow in poverty, Song of Solomon emphasizes that knowledge, acceptance, and commitment are needed to help liberate an oppressed people. In Tar Baby (1981), Morrison reveals her understanding of the role capitalism plays in the African’s oppression and examines one alternative—a return to a traditional African lifestyle. Unfortunately, such a solution, as the novel documents, is just as impossible as it is undesirable. For the idea of returning to a precolonial, preslavery existence is tantamount to asking the African to erase the experiences and consciousness of five hundred years, in essence


25

to metamorphose into one of the blind horsemen of the Isle des Chevaliers. With the writing of Jazz (1992) Morrison demonstrates that communication among African women is life saving, thus the need for sisterhoods in the African community. Paradise (1998) teaches us that it is the plan (i.e., the capitalist plan), not the man (i.e., European people) that is the true enemy of African people. African people can only extract the positive from their past, such as unity in struggle, in order to build the future. This is the message conveyed in Beloved (1987). The negative, appropriately symbolized by a ghost, must be rejected. As her canon demonstrates, Morrison, in learning of, experiencing, writing about, and contemplating the crisis of African people, reexamines, refines, and rejects early assumptions about the identity of the primary enemy of African people. Moreover, her continual thematic reexamination causes her to reevaluate her structure as well. Thus, Morrison’s works reflect a thematic and structural evolution that coincide with her own growing class consciousness. As her knowledge of the dialectical way in which the laws of nature apply to society increases, she will move from a weak to a strong class analysis, always recognizing the role of race and sex in the African’s oppression. Too, she will restructure her texts to reflect the societal structure that is best able to meet the needs of the African masses. It is an interesting comment on Morrison’s own increasing class consciousness that she recognizes that writing alone will not solve the African’s crisis. Tactically, she employs her novels as vehicles to incite action. They are, in fact, social and political treatises; not simply aesthetically pleasing, but, in making a social statement, they are didactic because she understands the urgency of arriving at a solution for the African’s crisis. She states that ‘‘if the race is to survive, it has to take care of its own.’’19 Her unobscured understanding of this fact determines the purpose of her writing. In alluding to Song of Solomon, Susan Willis astutely writes that the characters’ struggle ‘‘to reclaim or redefine themselves’’ results from their understanding that ‘‘it is the strength and continuity of the black cultural heritage as a whole which is at stake.’’20 Then, too, just as Morrison makes her characters struggle, she strives to make her readers struggle. According to Willis, ‘‘Morrison writes to awaken her reader’s sensitivity, to shake up and disrupt the sensual numbing that accompanies social and psychological alienation.’’21 Simply stated, Morrison’s purpose is to use her novels as tools to

26


politically educate her readers about their race oppression and class exploitation and, by doing so, to stimulate them to rejuvenate themselves in the true spirit of the new African personality, one that has the positive elements of traditional Africa as its core.22 One of her most predominant and successful methods of politically educating her readers is her practice of juxtaposing the negative elements of capitalist societies with the positive elements of the traditional African way of life. In doing so, Morrison reveals the inherent injustices of capitalism and, as a consequence, encourages her audience to embrace those positive elements of traditional Africa. In all of her novels, she incorporates the African principles of collectivism, humanism, and egalitarianism. Collectivism is the idea that individual development is conditioned by group development—the responsibility of the many for each. According to this principle, the welfare of the people, not the individual, is supreme. The traditional African concept of humanism regards the person ‘‘as primarily a spiritual being, a being endowed originally with a certain dignity, integrity and value.’’23 He or she is seen, in effect, as an end in himself or herself, not as a means to an end. The principle of egalitarianism signifies the duty and the right of the individual to work to transform his or her environment and to receive the just rewards for this service. The incorporation of these principles in Morrison’s works is pointed out by several critics as well as by the author herself. In regard to the concept of collectivism, for example, Barbara Christian writes that Morrison’s worlds ‘‘are very much like villages’’ with their emphasis on kinship.24 In an interview with Judith Wilson, Morrison emphasizes the need for the whole village to raise a child, and in an interview with Robert E. Stepto, she speaks of the value of the neighborhood and equates it with the traditional concept of the ‘‘compound’’ within the African village.25 An additional successful method of politically educating African people utilized by Morrison is her knack for making African culture in toto come alive. The incorporation of superstition, numerology, omens, herbal remedies, natural imagery, the art of naming, and language patterns such as call and response are Africanisms that imbue her work and confirm her commitment to struggle. A number of critics have astutely observed some of the thematic similarities in Morrison’s canon, and a few have remarked on the development of her canon, but none have connected the similarities with the advancement of her theme and structure; none have con-


27

ducted a careful study of this developing canon; none have seen this advancement as Morrison’s struggle to arrive at a solution for the African’s plight; and none have connected this advancement to Morrison’s own developing class consciousness. Barbara Christian, for instance, remarks that ‘‘there is a consistency of vision in [Morrison’s first] three novels, for they focus on the seemingly contradictory urges of human beings to be a part of Nature, yet distinct from it.’’26 In a later essay, this same critic writes about Morrison’s development of the class concept within her canon but does not examine this development in connection with Morrison’s own heightened consciousness.27 Jacqueline DeWeever indirectly alludes to Morrison’s literary development when she states that ‘‘The Bluest Eyes ends with Pecola’s madness at twelve years old, when she has entered maturity; Sula begins with the story of Shadrack’s madness.’’28 Grace Ann Hovet comments that ‘‘across her [first] three novels, Morrison’s characters are generally divided into three kinds of fliers.’’29 Perhaps more than any other critic, Julie Nichols comes close to observing the thematic and structural patterns in Morrison’s canon. Nichols writes: ‘‘When I read Tar Baby (1981) and searched out her earlier Sula (1973), I was impressed by the patterns in all three novels [including Song of Solomon] and with their individual and cumulative effects.’’30 Other than making this perceptive observation, however, Nichols gives no impressive evidence of these patterns. Instead, she ends her article with the stated desire ‘‘to teach all three novels to an entire class’’ and to have the class project Morrison’s ‘‘next novel’s plot and structure, theme and images.’’31 Clearly, there is thematic and structural development found in Morrison’s works. Morrison uses each novel as a framework for investigating various solutions to the African’s dilemma. Each successive novel reflects her growing understanding of what the solution cannot be (the destruction of racism and sexism) and, thus, like a scientist she moves closer to discovering what it can be (the destruction of capitalism). Dialectically, as she investigates the nature of the African’s oppression through her primary theme—the search for identity—her narrative structure develops as well. She learns to artistically shape her theme so as to provide accurate presentations without the aid of artificial props and gimmicks. Moreover, these presentations become more and more collectivized, reflecting her growing con-

28


sciousness of the negativity of that selfish, devil-may-care individualism promoted by capitalism. A brief description of the interrelationship between theme and structure in the Morrisonian canon will prove valuable at this point. The Bluest Eye reveals the extent of the crisis of the African personality when an African child born in the United States falls prey to the teachings of the dominant society. Believing that she is an ugly ‘‘black e mo,’’ Pecola Breedlove thinks that having the blue eyes of Shirley Temple will make her beautiful and lovable. While class oppression, the primary cause of the African’s oppression, is treated in the novel, it is overshadowed by Morrison’s emphasis on racism. Just as the theme of The Bluest Eye is unnatural in its limited focus on the African’s dilemma, so the structure is inchoate, relying on external gimmicks such as the inclusion/omission of storybook-passage headings to help develop the theme. Overall, the structure is like a puzzle, enigmatic and difficult to piece together. In Sula, Morrison grapples with the idea of individual or gender freedom as the African’s solution: the answer to Sula’s dilemma of being born ‘‘black and female’’ seems to lie in her simply rejecting the traditional role ascribed to women and becoming an artist. Clearly, Morrison’s investigation of equal opportunities for women is a logical next step after her examination of racism in The Bluest Eye. Sula, in effect, takes up where The Bluest Eye leaves off: when Sula opens, the heroine is the twelve-year-old Pecola, isolated and oppressed. Nevertheless, Morrison’s belief that the primary cause of Sula’s demise is gender oppression is incorrect and the solution—becoming an artist—a reflection of the author’s own immature consciousness. Morrison, and thus her protagonists of later novels, will come to understand that sexism and racism can only exist and blossom in a society that is inherently unjust, one based on the profitable exploitation of humankind, and one that, as a consequence, sets up notions of inferiority and superiority. Such an understanding of capitalism is reflected to some extent in Sula, but it too is overshadowed by Morrison’s stress on the gender oppression of women. Like that of The Bluest Eye, the structure of Sula is artificial, yet it does demonstrate Morrison’s growing confidence in her writing ability, a confidence that to some extent must be credited to her increasing awareness of the plight of African people. Certainly, it is a development over the structure of The Bluest Eye. For example, instead of relying on passage headings and an introductory page


29

filled with a quote from the Dick and Jane primary reader, Morrison relies only on a short passage from the ‘‘Rose Tattoo’’ and dates to develop the storyline of Sula. By doing so, she is forced to rely on her own storytelling ability. Song of Solomon reflects a qualitative leap forward in Morrison’s growing consciousness, for she understands that the African in the United States suffers equally from race and class oppression. Thus, in this novel, the protagonist realizes that to overcome his crisis he must first understand how he became crisis-ridden. He must know his history, knowledge that will awaken him to the common plight of African people. Milkman Dead, as a consequence, learns to identify with the African masses, not, like Sula, to distinguish himself from them. However, while such a realization and an identification are valuable, they are not enough. Milkman must understand that his awareness of the common oppression of African people as manifested in their history and in their present is relevant only if it is used to struggle against the cause of that oppression. Both knowledge and commitment are needed. Song of Solomon is free of the structural props that the novice writer relies on to help her tell her story. Morrison is mature enough to recognize the benefit of allowing a story to grow without external, obtrusive introductions and chapter headings, just as a people must be allowed to grow without external interference. Tar Baby is an assimilation and advancement of the primary theme of her three earlier novels. For the first time, Morrison frees her work from the narrow geographical boundaries of American society. Recognizing that people of African descent, no matter where they live, share a common identity, a common history, and a common oppression, she uses an island in the Caribbean as the dominant and pivotal setting for her novel. In doing so, Morrison reflects her own maturing consciousness of the fact that African people must seek a common solution to their plight. She herself states that ‘‘Black culture survives everywhere pretty much the same’’ and that ‘‘Black people take their culture wherever they go.’’32 Furthermore, in Tar Baby Morrison creates a revolutionary protagonist, Son, who realizes that he cannot run away and leave a body. Having discovered first the importance of knowing one’s history and one’s relationship to his people, Son commits himself to sharing this knowledge with other Africans. Thus, by struggling to politically educate The´ re`se, Gideon, Sydney, Ondine, and, in particular, Jadine—symbols of the larger Pan-African society—Son

30


becomes a disciple for African people, a modern-day revolutionary. Unfortunately, although his goal is a noble one, indeed Christ-like, his solution of a return to a traditional lifestyle is based on idealism, rather than Nkrumaism. If we accept the Nkrumaist view that everything develops to some higher state and that African people have their own particular history and culture, ‘‘Then African thought in the mid-20th century cannot escape powerful influences which have permeated’’ the African’s psyche.33 Moreover, what Son fails to realize is that there are some Africans, like Jadine, who—because they share the aspirations of the ruling class and receive handouts from it—will refuse to struggle against capitalism even though they are conscious of the fact that it is the primary enemy of African people. Despite its weaknesses, the novel’s theme and narrative structure reflect Morrison’s heightened class consciousness. Structurally, she has embraced the traditional African concept of collectivism, for each of the major characters, as well as the omniscient narrator, contributes to the organic world of the novel. The story is told, in effect, by taking individual threads and sewing them into a whole, a wholeness that she so ardently wishes for African people. After reading the first four novels as evolutionary, the Morrisonian critic becomes convinced of the author’s knack for self-criticism, her habit of reexamining earlier theories and assumptions. Thus, it is reasonable for the critic to think that Morrison’s next novel would examine, as a solution to the African’s crisis, the African’s collectivized struggle against capitalism. Beloved does just that. It examines a critical historical period in the African’s life in order primarily to demonstrate that African people have and thus can survive the most oppressive conditions by collectively struggling against them. Structurally, in her efforts to juxtapose what was done with what can be done, Toni Morrison manipulates time by continually jettisoning the reader back and forth from past to present. Surely, the message is that if it was done before, it can be done again. African people can survive their present day crisis through organization. A worthwhile message indeed. In Jazz Morrison’s genius lies in erasing the seams between theme and structure. In fact, the theme, ‘‘we are all connected as African people,’’ is at times difficult to separate from the narrative structure. The most significant example of this is Morrison’s creation of the narrator, a hybrid creature who is half character, half omniscient narrator. Just as with jazz the storyteller is not distinct


31

from the story he is telling, so in Jazz the storyteller (the narrator) is not distinct from the story she is telling. The narrator affects, and is affected by, the story she tells. Most poignant, however, is Morrison’s emphasis on sisterhoods. African women must create channels of communication among themselves in order to nurture, heal, save themselves. Paradise is Morrison’s warning to her people not to ‘‘Africanize’’ exploitation. It is the author’s clearest, most conscious novel concerning class struggle. The Africans in the novel have survived slavery and endured the topsy turvy reality of Reconstruction; they have a unique opportunity of fashioning an all-African society that is fair and egalitarian. Rather than take advantage of this opportunity, however, they imitate their oppressor by setting up the same kind of exploitive economic structure that enslaved them! Why? They think that their enemy is the ‘‘white man’’ when in fact it is the economic systems of slavery and capitalism. Paradise teaches Africans that the objective of liberation is not simply to install ‘‘Black Power.’’ The objective of liberation is people power. Unfortunately, Morrison’s structure obscures her message. There’s too much clutter in the writing. Far too many admirers of Morrison appreciate her words second hand, from the critics of Morrison’s canon. Many Africans—the audience with whom the messages will resonate the most, will in fact help to save—have little time or patience to piece together her esoteric language and complex narrative form in order to discover her liberating themes. Perhaps it’s me. African people are dying and I guess I think that it’s time for the people to know the truth. Straight, no chaser.

2 The Bluest Eye: The Need for Racial Approbation IN THE BLUEST EYE, TONI MORRISON’S EMPHASIS IS ON RACISM. SPECIFically, she investigates the effects of the beauty standards of the dominant culture on the self-image of the African female adolescent. The role of class, the primary form of exploitation experienced by African people that will become the focus of later works, is only relevant insofar as it exacerbates that self-image. Of the three main characters—all African female adolescents—it is Pecola Breedlove who is the primary focus. It is she who is most affected by the dominant culture’s beauty standards because it is she who is the poorest and, consequently, the most vulnerable. Thus, even with this early work, Morrison is conscious of the role economics plays in the African’s having a wholesome self-image. For it is the Breedloves’ fight for survival that weakens the family structure and makes the family members more vulnerable to the propaganda of the dominant culture. Still, it is clear that in The Bluest Eye Morrison regards racism as the African’s primary obstacle. Describing the Breedloves, she writes: ‘‘Although their poverty was traditional and stultifying, it was not unique. But their ugliness was unique.’’1 This comment demonstrates that in the late 1960s, when this novel was written, Morrison’s level of consciousness about the primary cause of the nature of the African’s oppression in the United States as well as in the rest of the world was considerably weak, for she not only subordinates the role of economics to racism, but also neglects to show a causal relationship between them, that an exploitative economic system gives rise to racist ideology. The thesis of the novel is that racism devastates the self-image of the African female in general and the African female child in particular.2 Toni Morrison’s emphasis is on the society, not the family unit. According to her, the African’s self-image is destroyed at 32

2: THE BLUEST EYE: THE NEED FOR RACIAL APPROBATION

33

an early age as a result of the ruling class’s (i.e., the European capitalist class’s) promotion of its own standard of beauty: long, stringy hair, preferably blond; keen nose, thin lips; and light eyes, preferably blue. By analogy, if the physical features of the European are accepted as the standard of beauty, then the African must be ugly. This is the type of logic that the Breedloves use to convince themselves of their ugliness: They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. ‘‘Yes,’’ they had said. ‘‘You are right.’’ And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.3

Although Morrison clearly and correctly understands that the concept of beauty is a learned one—Claudia MacTeer learns to love the big, blue-eyed baby doll she is given for Christmas; Maureen Peal learns she is beautiful from the propaganda of the dominant society as well as from the African adult world; and Pauline Breedlove learns from the silver screen that every face must be assigned some category on the scale of absolute beauty—Morrison does not yet understand that this concept will change depending on the racial makeup of the dominant class. That is, her immature class consciousness at this point in her writing career precludes her understanding of three important facts: first, that the ruling class, whether of European, African, or Asian descent, possesses the major instruments of economic production and distribution as well as the means of establishing its socio-cultural dominance (i.e., all forms of media including books, billboards, and movies); second, that possessing such means, the ruling class uses and promotes its own image as a measurement of beauty for the entire society; and third, that the success of this promotion ensures the continual dominance of this ruling class. Although her class analysis is immature at this point, Morrison is at least conscious of a limited role that economics plays in the exploitation of African people. For example, Morrison begins The Bluest Eye with a page and a half of one passage repeated in three different ways. Each of the passages reflects the three primary families in the novel: the Dick-Jane primary reader family, the MacTeer family, and the Breedlove family. The first family is symbolic of the ruling class; it is an economically stable family. Both the Mac-

34


Teers and the Breedloves symbolize the exploited class although the Breedloves are less economically stable than the MacTeers. In fact, the spacing of the passages reflects the varying economic levels of these families. Although the MacTeers are poor, the father works and provides some shelter, food, and clothing for the economic survival of the family. On the other hand, the Breedloves are dirt poor, and it is the extent of their poverty that strips them of their sense of human worth and leaves them more vulnerable to the cultural propaganda of the ruling class. Their house, significantly a rundown, abandoned store, reflects no stability. The family members come and go like store patrons, having no sense of family love and unity. That Morrison takes the time to describe and explain the poor economic conditions of the Breedlove family, and the effects of these conditions on it, reflects her awareness of the class question. At least she informs the reader that the MacTeers and Breedloves do not suffer simply because of racism, but because of poverty as well. Additionally, Morrison reveals her class consciousness by exploring the intraracial prejudices caused by petty bourgeois Africans, those who aspire for the same goals and aspirations of the ruling class. In The Bluest Eye, she creates three ‘‘minor’’ African families who, because they benefit economically, politically, and/ or socially from the exploitation of their own people, disassociate themselves from poor Africans and associate themselves with the ruling class. One such family is the Peals. Although the reader is introduced to only one member of this family, Maureen, her appearance, behavioral patterns, and remarks about the nature of her family’s ‘‘business’’ offer sufficient glimpses of the Peals to reflect their class interests. Physically, Maureen looks and dresses like a little European-American girl, the storybook Jane or the child actress Shirley Temple. Her hairstyle, ‘‘long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back’’ resembles that of little European girls. In fact, the description of her hair as lynch ropes clearly associates her with the African’s oppressors.4 Her ‘‘high-yellow’’ complexion and her clothes make this association even more pronounced. She wears ‘‘Kelly-green knee socks,’’ ‘‘lemon-drop sweaters,’’ ‘‘brown velvet coat trimmed in white rabbit fur, and a matching muff.’’5 Socially, Maureen’s behavior patterns reflect the way in which some within the dominant class relate to poor African people. She


35

pities Pecola when she is humiliated by Bay Boy and Junie Bug, and she humors Claudia by speaking to her on one occasion after neglecting her on many others. Economically, the Peal family appears to make money by exploiting the race issue. They initiate suits against European-American establishments (e.g., Isaley’s ice cream store in Akron) that refuse to serve Africans. Although, according to Maureen, her ‘‘family does it all the time,’’6 apparently these suits are benefitting financially no other African family but the Peals. Still, Morrison is more interested in developing the skin-color conflict (race) than the class conflict (capitalism). For the emphasis in the Peal section is on ‘‘unearned haughtiness,’’ Maureen’s physical appearance. She looks like the doll that Claudia has had to learn to love; she is the person whom the teachers smile at encouragingly, the parents talk to in honey-coated voices, the boys leave alone; she is Shirley Temple; she is Jane. Moreover, Maureen’s last appearance in the novel is clearly associated with the question of intraracial prejudice based on skin color. When Maureen is verbally attacked by Claudia, she responds by using the same dehumanizing name calling that Bay Boy used against Pecola: ‘‘I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!’’7 Clearly, Maureen sees herself as superior because she looks more like her oppressors.6 By disassociating itself from the African community, the second family—Geraldine, Louis, and Louis Junior—also reflects ruling class aspirations. The family members consider themselves to be colored, a term that for them signifies some nebulous group of Africans who are neither European nor African: ‘‘Colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and loud.’’9 So Louis Jr. plays with European-American children; his hair is cut short to deemphasize its woolliness; his skin is continually lotioned to keep him from revealing his ashy Africanness. When Geraldine sees Pecola, she is reminded of everything she has sought to escape—everything associated with the poor, struggling African masses: their physical appearance, their behavioral patterns, their lifestyle, and their speech patterns. Her calling Pecola, a little girl of ten, a ‘‘nasty little black bitch’’ and commanding her to ‘‘get out of my house’’ illustrate the extent of Geraldine’s isolation from her people and her association with her oppressors. Perhaps even more significant is the fact that she showers love on her black cat, but not her ‘‘black’’ son. Clearly, for her, the blue eyes of the cat make it easier to love the animal

36


than her own son. All in all, her thoughts, words, and actions parrot those of the ruling class. The third family, the Elihue Micah Whitcombs, are so obsessed with the physical appearance of Europeans that they jeopardize their mental stability by intermarrying to maintain some semblance of whiteness. They are grateful that their ancestor, a decaying British nobleman, chose to whiten them, and they enthusiastically separate themselves ‘‘in body, mind, and spirit from all that suggested Africa’’ while developing ‘‘Anglophilia.’’10 They are, in fact, convinced of DeGobineau’s hypothesis that ‘‘all civilizations derive from the white race, that none can exist without its help, and that a great society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble group that created it.’’11 Not only do the Whitcombs strive for the ‘‘whiteness’’ of the ruling class, but they imitate the exploitive nature of this class as well; they exploit their own people, the Africans who live in the West Indies: ‘‘That they were corrupt in public and private practice, both lecherous and lascivious, was considered their noble right.’’12 Clearly, Morrison’s class consciousness, however weak, is reflected in her condemnation of these families who share the class aspirations of their oppressors. All suffer from what Kwame Nkrumah called the crisis of the African personality—Africans so bereft of their own national identity that they exhibit distorted, even psychopathic, behavioral patterns. Morrison is certainly aware of this crisis, for in this work as in later ones, she harshly criticizes those characters who divorce themselves from the African community. In fact, she considers this petty bourgeois sector of the African population the living dead, a buffer group between the ruling and the oppressed classes who are always portrayed as abnormal in some sense. In The Bluest Eye, Geraldine lavishes love on her black cat, but withholds it from her son; the Whitcombs become a family of morons and perverts. Quite appropriately, Elihue is donned Soaphead Wilson by the community for he is a pervert who is incapable of healthy love. Instead, he loves worn things and little girls; Pecola is both worn (loss of virginity) and a little girl. Morrison’s characterization of these three ‘‘minor’’ families—the Peals, the ‘‘Geraldines,’’ and the Whitcombs—certainly substantiates the premise that she does possess some class consciousness even in this first novel. However, that these are not major families in the novel indicates that her class consciousness is decidedly weak. Moreover, even though Morrison is conscious of the role class aspi-


37

rations play in these minor families, she often discusses these aspirations as if they were intraracial prejudices based on skin color rather than class conflicts. That is, her discussions of class conflicts are couched within, and thus overshadowed by, her discussions on racial prejudices. Indeed, it is interesting to note that just as Africans in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s viewed the primary enemy of African people as ‘‘the white man,’’ so does Morrison, writing The Bluest Eye in the late 1960s, see the issue as one of European versus African. However, as she continues to think about, write about, and experience the ongoing oppression of African people despite the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, she will become more conscious of the fact that capitalism, not racism, is the African’s greatest enemy. It is interesting to surmise that the limited focus on the issue of class as the primary problem confronting African people in The Bluest Eye and the primary focus on racism as the major concern may be dialectically related to the novel’s inorganic structure. The structural limitations of the novel can be gleened through the many artificial props that Morrison relies on to help her develop her theme. First, she includes two prefaces, one to inform the reader of the conflict in the novel, the other to present the outcome. The first preface, extracted from the Dick-Jane primary reader, presents the three dominant families that will be contrasted in the novel: the Dick-Jane family, the MacTeers, and the Breedloves. Each is represented by one of the three storybook passages that Morrison places at the beginning of the novel to give the reader his or her first clue as to the economic and social well-being—or lack thereof—of the families. The structure of the first passage, representing the DickJane household, is correct according to the double spacing and punctuation requirements of a standard typewritten passage. The next passage lacks the traditional structure of the first. It is single spaced. Representing the MacTeer household, it signifies neither the ideal nor complete chaos. Rather, it reflects a struggling household, one that manages to survive despite its economic hardships. The third passage is completely devoid of spacing and punctuation. Its words are run together, reflecting the chaos found in the Breedlove household. Therefore, just as the second two passages are presented to enable the reader to compare and contrast them with the first, so the MacTeer and Breedlove families are presented to enable the reader to compare and contrast their condition in society with that of the standard or ideal European-American family, the Dick-Jane

38


family. The structural layout of the passages enhances the theme that as Africans born in a racist society, neither the MacTeers nor the Breedloves enjoy the benefits of America that their European counterparts do. The second preface, the marigold page, presents the outcome of the novel—the unfortunate and irreparable demise of Pecola Breedlove in particular and of the Breedlove family in general. It also reveals the reason for this demise; the infertile soil of Lorain, Ohio, symbolic of the United States, precludes the healthy, normal growth of the marigolds, symbolic of African-American people. Another prop used by Morrison to help her tell her story is the use of three different levels of time. First, the reader is introduced to a present that exists outside of the novel proper, the present of the adult Claudia. Second, the reader is given a glimpse of the future within the context of the novel, the marigold preface. Third, the story proper actually begins in the present on page twelve. However, by page seventeen, with the introduction of Pecola, and certainly by page thirty, with the description of the Breedlove’s store house, the reader does not know what time period exists. Does Pecola come to live with the MacTeers after the Breedlove’s abandoned store house is burned, or does Cholly burn some other, prior dwelling place, and then the Breedloves move into the abandoned store? Such questions arise because of Morrison’s clumsy handling of time throughout the novel. She is not yet skilled in structuring plots. The use of names of seasons to indicate the major parts of the novel also aids Morrison in telling her story. By beginning the novel with autumn, she informs us that the world of the novel is topsy turvey. Spring usually symbolizes the beginning of things, the time of birth and rebirth. Autumn, in contrast, is the time of death and decay. Summer, commonly associated with life in full bloom, ripeness, is a time of death, life in its final moments. These seasonal divisions aid the reader in understanding the fundamental decadence of life for the African living in the United States. They help tell Morrison’s story of the warped psyche of an adolescent African female living in a racist society.13 A fourth structural crutch is Morrison’s reliance on a series of passage chapter headings primarily to let the reader know that the Breedlove family will be the focus of the chapters and, secondarily, to let the reader know what specific aspect of the family will be the focus. For example, chapter 2, the first section that concerns the


39

Breedloves, has as its heading a run-together passage describing the house of Dick and Jane. By using this particular passage as the heading, Morrison informs the reader that the contents of the chapter will be devoted to a description of the Breedlove house. When a heading includes all the members of the Dick-Jane family, as in chapter 3, the reader knows that all the Breedloves will be discussed. Admittedly, Morrison has created an interesting and unique structural device. Still, these headings do in fact simplify her task as a writer, for she can rely on them to help organize her material, i.e., to help develop the plot of The Bluest Eye. In later works, such devices are omitted because they are unnecessary. Moreover, they distract the reader from concentrating on the narrative itself. In later works, Morrison demonstrates her developed consciousness, her developed writing ability, and her developed confidence by relying only on the narrative to tell her story. In other words, the act of writing itself helps her class consciousness develop, and her developed class consciousness enhances her writing skills. The two are dialectically related. Morrison’s reliance on three narrators—Claudia the child, Claudia the adult, and an omniscient narrator—is problematic as well.14 For instance, as narrator, Claudia the adult at times ascribes her adult feelings and adult analytical ability to Claudia the child. The reader is amazed, for instance, that a nine-year-old can understand that U.S. capitalist society is to blame for creating the standard of beauty: ‘‘And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.’’15 For most, this realization does not come until adulthood. Phyllis Klotman attempts to offer a logical explanation for this shift in point of view from the child to the adult Claudia when she writes: ‘‘The narrative voice shifts . . . when the author wants us to have a more mature and objective view of the characters and their situations. . . . There is not only a progression in Claudia’s point of view from youth to age, but also from ignorance to perception.’’16 Contrarily, Morrison’s narrative structure is more illogical than logical since Claudia the child thinks like an adult at times and a child at others. There is not what Klotman refers to as ‘‘a progression in Claudia’s point of view.’’ Throughout the novel, the reader constantly asks the following question: Is Claudia, the adult narrator, looking back on her childhood and telling the story, or is she telling the story as a nineyear-old participant and an adult observer?

40


The use of the omniscient narrator adds to this narrative confusion and awkwardness. It is the omniscient narrator who tells the Breedlove’s story; Claudia, the child and/or adult, relates the events within the remaining chapters. What prevents the reader from being totally confused by this arrangement is the inclusion or omission of chapter headings. Chapters without headings are told by Claudia; those with headings are told by the omniscient narrator. However, this understanding of Morrison’s narrative structure does not rid it of its awkwardness. On the contrary, the division of the story in such a way contributes to the reader’s impression that Morrison, at this early stage in her writing career, must rely on artificial or external textural devices to organize her material. Just as there are organization weaknesses between chapters, so are there weaknesses within chapters. In interviews with both Jane Bakerman and Robert Stepto, Morrison admits that she had difficulty with the Pauline Breedlove section of the novel. Unable to have either of her three narrators—the omniscient narrator, the adult Claudia, or the child Claudia—tell Pauline’s story, Morrison is forced to use italics to symbolize Mrs. Breedlove’s own thoughts. Morrison admits this writing weakness to Bakerman: When I wrote the section in The Bluest Eye about Pecola’s mother, I thought I would have no trouble. First I wrote it out as an ‘‘I’’ story, . . . then I wrote it out as a ‘‘she’’ story. . . . I was never able to resolve that, so I used both. The author said a little bit and then she said a little bit. But I wish I had been able to do the ‘‘I’’ thing with her. I really wanted to.17

To Robert Stepto, she says: ‘‘I sort of copped out . . . because I used two voices.’’18 Having to oscillate between Pauline’s thoughts within italics and the omniscient narrator’s comments within a single chapter is only one instance of Morrison’s inability to make her text cohere. The introduction of Pecola is another. At the end of one paragraph, Morrison completes a discussion of Mr. Henry Washington, the MacTeer’s new boarder. At the beginning of the next, Pecola is introduced by the following nebulous statement: ‘‘She slept in the bed with us.’’19 There is no transition from the discussion on Mr. Henry to that on Pecola. Neither is there a legitimate stylistic reason for this textual gap since for the reader it creates confusion, not clarity.


41

Too, there is at least one chapter—the Geraldine-Junior chapter— that seems superfluous to the rest of the text because it is not clearly integrated with the other chapters. Unlike the Maureen Peal section, which clearly helps to explain the effects of racism within the African race, and unlike the Soaphead Wilson section, which is relevant in providing the conditions under which Pecola imagines she has blue eyes, the Geraldine-Junior section seemingly does not advance the plot of The Bluest Eye. At first glance, it appears merely as a repetition of an already established fact: Pecola has an allconsuming desire to have blue eyes. However, it actually moves beyond repetition by relating the circumstances under which Pecola becomes convinced that she can be ‘‘black’’ and have blue eyes and, by convincing her of this fact, helps to seal her fate. But for Morrison to use an entire chapter to make this point (and then to make it so unclearly) is a mark of her undeveloped writing skills. Later works evidence a symbiosis between text and structure, for as Morrison better understands capitalism/imperialism—the exploitation of one class of people by another class—she will structure her text to represent the type of economic system that condemns exploitation and promotes collectivism: socialism. Thus, by the time she writes Tar Baby, her story will be told equally by all of the main characters in the novel as well as by the omniscient narrator. Each will have the opportunity and the responsibility to contribute to the organic whole. And by the time she writes Beloved, she will so expertly manipulate past, present, and future as to demonstrate to African people that there is no significant difference between the quality of their life now and that experienced in slavery. This devotion to creating a dialectical relationship between text and structure will, in turn, point the way to the solution: collectivism.

3 Sula: The Struggle for Individual Fulfillment AS THE INTRODUCTORY QUOTE FROM THE ROSE TATTOO SUGGESTS, IN Sula Toni Morrison is more interested in the struggle for individual rights in general and women’s rights in particular than with the rights of African people as a collective. The quote is especially interesting when juxtaposed with the introductory pages of The Bluest Eye. The lines ‘‘Nobody knew my rose of the world but me. . . . I had too much glory’’ connote the plight of the individual who is at odds with society. In contrast, the Dick and Jane passages that frame Morrison’s first novel stress the African people’s struggle against racism in the United States. Interestingly enough, the thematic thrust of each novel chronicles the historical struggle of African people: The sixties marked the Civil Rights Struggle; the seventies emphasized rights for the individual, in particular the woman. The latter was a consequence of the former, for out of the struggle for civil rights came an awareness of self, and dignity and pride in self. Unfortunately, during the time she was writing Sula, Morrison made the same mistake as did many Africans: She wrote about these struggles as if they were independent and unrelated episodes, rather than steps, in the African’s struggle for equality, and she saw them as causes, rather than effects, of the African’s oppression in the United States. Thus, with Sula as with The Bluest Eye, sex, race, and class oppression are explored; however, the primacy of each changes. It is not until her fourth novel, Tar Baby, that the question of class as it relates to capitalism is investigated as a primary theme. Morrison’s weak class analysis at the time she writes Sula forces her to create a female character who, because of her oppression, makes individualism supreme over the collective, rather than a female character who struggles to change the oppressive nature of so42

3: SULA: THE STRUGGLE FOR INDIVIDUAL FULFILLMENT

43

ciety in order to ensure the full development of each individual, whether male or female. In the words of Karen Stein, in Sula, ‘‘The truest heroism lies not in external battle, as in the wars which destroy the novel’s men, but in confrontation with the self.’’1 Indeed, Morrison’s weak analysis precludes her understanding of the symbiosis that exists between the individual and the group: Individuality is rewarding only if it is achieved within the context of the community well-being. Sula struggles for a niche of her own, unconscious or unmindful of the fact that the free development of each is conditioned by the free development of all. The oppression of African women in the United States, especially in the first quarter of the twentieth century, is documented throughout the novel. Morrison’s most articulate statement in regard to the female’s degradation comes in a passage that appears after Nel and Sula first meet: ‘‘Because each had discovered years before they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.’’2 Within this statement are found both the dilemma of the novel and the solution to the dilemma: African women are oppressed, and to escape their oppression, they must become self-propagators. Accordingly, Sula rejects the traditional role ascribed to women, telling Eva, ‘‘I want to make myself.’’3 However, since her oppression as a woman is the result of an oppressive economic system, not men, Sula finds it impossible to escape all of the traditionalisms associated with women. When she becomes intimately involved with Ajax, she discovers, for example, that she knows no other postures other than the ones traditionally associated with women who are in love: feminine meekness, ‘‘prettiness,’’ and possessiveness. In fact, no others are nurtured by the society. Thus, to escape, to recreate self within the context of this novel, Sula has only two options: to become a ‘‘man’’ or to die. She chooses death.4 The manner in which Morrison chooses to explore the nature of the woman’s oppression is unique. She develops two female characters, neither of whom is complete in herself. Although Morrison does not yet demonstrate full consciousness of the facts that the full human development of a woman is precluded under capitalism and that to be fully, wholesomely developed her characters must come together as one, these facts seem to be embedded in her subconscious. Interviewed by Jane Bakerman, Morrison states: ‘‘If they were one woman, they would be complete.’’5 As they are, Nel and Sula represent two extremes; their surnames are indicative of each.

44


In Nel Wright’s household, too many directions are given: Nel’s house is ‘‘incredibly orderly.’’6 In Sula Peace’s household, none are given: ‘‘It is a household of throbbing disorder.’’7 To be right (Wright) means to follow the path that has been laid out for you by society; to be at peace is to be left alone to pursue whatever path you wish. Thus, ‘‘the two of them together,’’ according to Morrison, ‘‘could have made a wonderful single human being.’’8 This idea that Nel and Sula represent two halves of one person reverberates throughout the novel. As children, they often decide to perform some act or play some game ‘‘in concert, without ever meeting each other’s eyes.’’9 Eva, in response to Nel’s shocked reaction to being called Sula, says: ‘‘You. Sula. What’s the difference?’’10 When Sula returns to the Bottom, Nel thinks that her friend’s return ‘‘was like getting an eye back’’ and that talking to Sula ‘‘had always been a conversation with herself.’’11 Significant too is Morrison’s statement: ‘‘Their friendship was so close, they themselves had difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s.’’12 Perhaps what is most insightful is the particular halves that each represents: Sula, the mind; Nel, the body. Nel’s mind dies when Sula leaves Medallion, but her body continues to perform the routine, necessary chores traditionally associated with women. In contrast, Sula’s mind continues to function after her body ceases to do so: ‘‘Well, I’ll be damned . . . it [death] didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel.’’13 Her status as only one half person launches Sula on a quest to become whole. She rejects Eva’s advice of settling down and having babies, replying, ‘‘I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.’’14 But because Sula’s struggle to enjoy her fullest potential as a human being is a struggle waged against the Bottom community instead of capitalism, she struggles alone and unsuccessfully. Unfortunately, she does not connect her oppression with the oppression of the entire community. And without such a connection, her struggle is doomed.15 Interestingly enough, although Sula is like Shadrack—they are both pariahs—her goal is at variance with his. Both recognize the oppressive plight of African people caused by the dominant society. However, their solutions to that plight are quite different. Shadrack, who has ‘‘no past, no language, no tribe, no source,’’ longs for a place in the community.16 It is both his longing for a viable existence within the community and his recognition of the need for collective struggle against the oppressive forces of the society as a


45

prerequisite for that existence that cause him to create National Suicide Day. On the third day of January of every year, Shadrack, leading a parade of African people, marches through the Bottom. It is on this day that Africans are supposed to demonstrate their commitment to life and their defiance of death. And life, for Shadrack as well as Sula, does not mean submitting to oppression but forging a wholesome life even if it means confronting death. On the other hand, Sula, who has ‘‘no center, no speck around which to grow,’’17 longs for a ‘‘postcoital privateness’’ in which she can join ‘‘herself in matchless harmony.’’18 Not realizing the dialectical relationship between the collective and individual interests, Sula ultimately betrays and alienates family, friends, and neighbors, thereby causing her own death. Ranking her particular individualism supreme above all else, she unemotionally watches her mother burn to death, seduces her best friend’s husband, and places her grandmother in a nursing home. She becomes a pariah, living outside the laws and mores of the community. As Nel attests, ‘‘Talking to her about right and wrong was like talking to the deweys.’’19 When Sula returns to the Bottom after a ten-year absence, she is accompanied by a plague of robins that shit all over the community and then die. Sula too shits on the Bottom community and dies. Through a series of thoughtless, cruel acts committed against the community, she will be perceived as its enemy, ‘‘The source of their personal misfortune.’’20 Her casual sexual relationships with the men of the Bottom, unlike Hannah’s, emasculate them and insult the women: ‘‘She would lay their husbands once and then no more. . . . Sula was trying them and discarding them without any excuse the men could swallow.’’21 She attends the community’s church suppers without underwear and, so the community thinks, sleeps with white men—the most filthy act in which any African woman can engage. By the time Sula dies, she is completely isolated from the community: she is confined in Eva’s boarded up room, symbolizing that a person outside of the collective is like a head cut off from a body; she is visited by no one except Nel, on one occasion; and, after death, she is prepared for burial by white folks, since no one in the community would ‘‘do’’ for her. Interestingly, her rose-shaped birthmark symbolizes her increasing degradation and isolation. In the mold of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Sula’s birthmark darkens with each successive violation of the community’s taboos. Significantly, when she sees Sula after ten

46


years, Nel thinks that her friend’s birthmark is darker than Nel remembered.22 In accordance with the principles of dialectics, the consequence of Sula’s thoughtless, often cruel, acts against her people have both negative and positive effects. Although these acts anger and frighten the community, causing them to lay broomsticks across their doors at night and sprinkle salt on their steps, they see in Sula someone against whom they can unite; they ‘‘band together against the devil in their midst.’’23 Betty, Teapot’s mother, becomes a better parent, ‘‘sober, clean and industrious’’;24 the women ‘‘cherish their men more’’;25 and the community begins to love one another.26 Despite these positive effects, the community perceives Sula as the enemy, a perception that is incorrect. Barbara Christian agrees: ‘‘Rather than focusing its attention on the pervasive evils of racism and poverty that continually threaten it, the community expends its energy on outlasting the evil Sula.’’27 The enemy is the society, not Sula, not men, not the Bottom community. It is the world of the novel—a microcosm of the United States—that conditions the thinking of, indeed, creates Sula, the men, and the community. All of them—Sula, the Bottom community, and Morrison herself—seem to come to this realization of who the enemy is, or at least who it is not, by the end of the novel. However, for each this awareness seems to be in embryo form. For instance, Sula’s last words reflect a surprised recognition of her need for the community, since her address to Nel represents Sula’s need of the Other: ‘‘‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ she thought, ‘it didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel.’’’28 By admitting her need for this Other, Sula helps to redeem herself. The community is not her enemy, but her much needed friend. Then, too, the community instinctively marches to the New River Road, a place associated with the Europeans’ broken promise of jobs for the Africans of Medallion. By its actions, the community acknowledges its perception of Europeans, not Sula, as its enemy. And by presenting no viable solution for the individual African’s struggle for freedom—Sula can neither survive without the community nor fly away and leave it—Morrison unconsciously points to society as the enemy. While it is true that the African people’s struggle for individual freedom is the primary focus of Sula, it is also true that African people’s struggle for national freedom is a secondary focus. Issues of race are interwoven throughout the fabric of the novel. Having its basis in racism and having its roots in slavery, the origin of the


47

Bottom is the novel’s starting point. When a slavemaster gives hilly land instead of the promised fertile valley land to his faithful slave, the slave ‘‘blinked and said he thought valley land was bottom land. The master said, ‘Oh, no! . . . That’s bottom land, rich and fertile. . . . It’s the bottom of heaven—the best land there is.’’’29 Once again, it is the Europeans who decide the destiny of African people, in this case by misnaming. The deweys’ lack of development is another example of racism. Each of the deweys has physical characteristics completely distinct from the others. Yet they appear to look alike, reminding the reader of the stereotype, ‘‘All niggers look alike,’’ and they never grow, suggesting that living in a racist society thwarts the natural development of African people. Also, Tar Baby’s and Ajax’s arrest symbolizes just one more incident in which African people or anyone associated with them are routinely arrested and beaten. Ajax calls this cycle of opppression ‘‘the natural hazards of Negro life.’’30 Finally, the events surrounding and following National Suicide Day (1941) are racially motivated. Frustrated by their exploitation and hopeful of a better life, the community, in January 1941, participates in this annual event for the first time: The same hope that kept them picking beans for other farmers; kept them from finally leaving as they talked of doing; kept them knee-deep in other people’s dirt; kept them excited about other people’s wars; kept them solicitous of white people’s children; kept them convinced that some magic ‘‘government’’ was going to lift them up, out and away from that dirt, those beans, those wars.31

Reminiscent of the protest marches and riots of the late 1960s, the 1941 march consisted of participants—the old and the young, the lame and the hearty, the women and the children—who were ‘‘aggressive and abandoned’’; they ‘‘smashed the bricks,’’ ‘‘split the sacks of limestone,’’ ‘‘tore the wire mesh, tipped over wheelbarrows and rolled forepoles down the bank’’; they had a ‘‘need to kill it all.’’ Also reminiscent of the 1960s, ‘‘A lot of them died there’’ so that others could progress.32 It is significant that this event occurs right after the death of Sula, for it points up another example of the dialectical relationship between Sula and the community. Not only does Sula cause the people of the Bottom to unify, albeit temporarily, but also she injects

48


them with a dose of defiance, resistance, and aggressiveness. At first, they equated living with surviving. According to their philosophy, ‘‘The purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it) to survive white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance.’’33 Sula’s rebelliousness teaches them to confront, then reject, their passive attitude and replace it with a revolutionary consciousness. That is, she ‘‘heats up’’ the Bottom, a heating up process symbolized by the uncharacteristic warm temperature on that day. Thus, in contrast to Barbara Christian’s belief that ‘‘they do not take from Sula what she has to offer them; the leap into the living, . . . the urge to experiment and thus move forward,’’34 the community people’s participation in National Suicide Day (1941) reflects their ‘‘leap into the living’’—thanks to Sula. Although she limits her analysis to Nel instead of applying it to the entire Bottom community, Karen Stein’s comment is more apropos than Christian’s: ‘‘Nel is symbolically reborn as the surviving self, continuing the process of growth and self-awareness that Sula began.’’35 Additionally, as Nel represents the traditional thinking of the community, her recognition of the worth of Sula symbolizes the community’s increased consciousness. The community is indeed reborn.36 Despite Morrison’s effort to disguise the dates, the parallels between the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1960s and the struggle of the Bottom community in 1941, some of which have been noted, are striking. Indeed, it is significant that the chapter following ‘‘1941’’—‘‘1965’’—begins, ‘‘Things were so much better in 1965. Or so it seemed.’’37 Just as Africans who participated in the Struggle thought that their efforts would defuse the racism raging rampart in the United States, so those of the Bottom, symbolized by Nel, felt that their efforts brought significant changes. Thus the words ‘‘or so it seemed’’ accurately reflect the hopes of both the real and the fictionalized groups. Another echo of the historic struggle of the sixties is Nel’s impression of the youth who in 1965 remind her of the aggressive deweys. As the chorus for the Bottom, she also comments on the ‘‘fruits’’ of the struggle. The struggle has enabled a few Africans to progress, that is, to be as much like their oppressors as they can, while the masses of African people continue to struggle for survival: ‘‘Everybody [every African] who had made money during the war moved as close as they could to the valley.’’38 This comment on the petty bourgeois element of the African population is one of the few in which Morrison alludes to the role of


49

class in the oppression of African people. The events surrounding the origin of the Bottom represent another such allusion. In Sula, the concern of class, whether of the capitalists or the masses, ranks third after sex and race. The few references that are present are made in connection with Helene Wright. However, like the sections on capitalism in The Bluest Eye, the passages in reference to Helene’s class interests are relatively insignificant in comparison to those on sex and race. Yet they at least show that Morrison was aware of the role class interests play in the lives of African people. In emphasizing to the community that her name is Helene rather than Helen, in severing her roots with her family, in stifling the imagination of her daughter, in making Nel pull her broad African nose in an effort to make it aquiline, in joining the most conservative church in Medallion, and, most important, in disassociating herself from the African masses (represented by the soldiers) and aligning herself with the white racist train conductor, Helene Wright exposes her class interests. They are the same as those of her oppressors: wealth and status. Helene Wright’s disassociation from her people, the clearest example of which occurs during her train trip to New Orleans, is the most significant of these acts. Calling her ‘‘gal’’ and telling her to ‘‘get your butt on in there,’’ the white train conductor divulges his belief in Helene’s inferiority. For him, ‘‘a nigger is a nigger’’ despite her speech and dress habits, despite her class association. Still, ‘‘for no earthly reason’’ and ‘‘like a pup that wags its tail at the very doorjamb . . . he has been kicked away from,’’ Helene Wright ‘‘smiled dazzingly and coquettishly’’ at the conductor while ignoring the two African soldiers who witnessed the incident.39 The only interaction she has with the masses on an equal basis is one that is inescapable; she is forced to ask an African woman the whereabouts of the toilet: ‘‘So intense was her distress she finally brought herself to speak about her problem to a black woman with four children who got on in Tuscaloosa.’’40 Unfortunately, it is not until Helene’s need to relieve herself in a hostile, segregated environment is so acute that she relates to another African. Living in a racist society, Morrison informs the reader, Africans—regardless of their wealth and status and regardless of their wish to escape their identity—are seen as one people: All of them, the fat woman and her four children, three boys and a girl, Helene and her daughter, squatted there in the four o’clock Meridian

50


sun. They did it again in Ellisville, again in Hattiesburg, and by the time they reached Slidell, not too far from Lake Pontchartrain, Helene could not only fold leaves as well as the fat woman, she never felt a stir as she passed the muddy eyes of the men who stood like wrecked Dorics under the station roofs of those towns.41

The role of class interests will become more pronounced in Song of Solomon and even more in Tar Baby as Morrison’s consciousness about the nature of the African’s plight in the United States increases. With the writing of her second novel, however, the issue of class is only incidental, playing third fiddle to sex and race. That individualism, especially that of the African woman, is Morrison’s emphasis in Sula is clarified and substantiated considerably when one analyzes the structural framework of the story. Despite its periodic inclusion of racial concerns and its incidental incorporation of class-related issues, the novel begins and ends with an exposition on individual rather than group fulfillment. The unrecognized worth of Sula is the message conveyed both by the quote from The Rose Tattoo and by Nel’s final words: ‘‘O Lord, Sula, . . . girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.’’42 Although at times Morrison seems to doubt her own solution to the African female’s exploitation,43 she ultimately avows that the African woman can obtain freedom from oppression by having an art form: Had she paints, or clays, or knew the discipline of dance or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.44

Unfortunately, this solution does not take into account the roles of race oppression and class exploitation. It is an idealistic solution that reflects Morrison’s own idealism, her own immature analysis of the role of capitalism. She herself will realize the onesidedness of her proposal; she herself will realize that individual fulfillment is dialectically related to group fulfillment. The former is conditioned by the latter: The individual’s free will, freedom of action and thought and the full enjoyment of his/her personality should be led by a social consciousness which takes into consideration other people and society in absolute respect of common values, interests and duty.45


51

In contrast to Sula, Song of Solomon explicitly reveals the suicidal nature of the individual who cuts himself off from his roots, that is, from family, community, and heritage. In effect, Nel and Sula will come together as one balanced individual in the character of Milkman. Structurally, in its straightforward, largely uncomplicated narrative form, Sula is a development of The Bluest Eye. Unlike the first novel, Sula is not complicated by three narrators. Like the individualist who does not depend on or consider others around her, but leads a life in complete disregard of the other, primarily one narrator relates the story of Sula. The story begins in the present tense, relating the history of Medallion. This present of the novel is the preface or introduction, the untitled first four pages. The events of the rest of the novel, beginning with the chapter entitled ‘‘1919,’’ occur in the past. Additionally, the reader is unhampered by passage chapter titles that must be deciphered like codes, and then applied to the chapter contents. Instead, Morrison uses time to organize her narrative. Dates appear as chapter titles that clearly and concisely advance the plot. And unlike the first novel, Sula provides us with sufficient and necessary transitions so as to help ideas flow together smoothly and clearly. A case in point is the transition connecting a description of Sula’s and Nel’s first meeting with one of their visits to Edna Finch’s ice cream parlor. The transition device used is the repetition of the word dreams: Somewhere beneath all that neatness, lay the thing that clothed their dreams. Which was only fitting, for it was in dreams that the two girls had met.46

Such a skillful use of transitions is largely absent in The Bluest Eye. As a result, the reader must perform the task of mentally providing necessary transitions for the author. Another skillful method of bringing coherence to her text is Morrison’s name or word dropping: Often, she will simply mention a name or word that will later have significance for the reader. For instance, by mentioning the word smoke, the reader is informed of Hannah’s burning forty pages and two chapters before the actual event. As Barbara Lounsberry insightfully notes, this ‘‘narrative technique of gradual disclosure forces the reader into the habit of ‘new seeing.’’’47 Clues, forebodings, superstitions, and repetition

52


are all used as transitions. Robins’ shitting on the Bottom community, for example, portend Sula’s future relationship with it. All in all, Morrison’s structural manipulation of her text will develop as her thematic investigation of the dominant cause of the African’s oppression advances; there exists a symbiosis between the two. Structurally, she will become more adept at extirpating unnecessary information that tends to impede the smooth presentation of ideas. Such a weeding-out process is noticeable in Sula, for this work omits much of the impotent verbiage of The Bluest Eye. The Chicken Little episode seems the only section of Sula that does not clearly advance the novel’s theme.48 Thematically, her developing consciousness allows her to perceive the selfish, exploitive nature of individualism under capitalism. Thus, she will never again give her stamp of approval, however tentative, to a character like Sula who has a natural desire for freedom, but who sees it unnaturally as a freedom divorced from the freedom of her people.

4 Song of Solomon: The Struggle for Race and Class Consciousness TONI MORRISON’S LITERARY CANON IS A TESTIMONY TO THE PRINCIples of dialectics: it develops; it is interconnected; it reveals contradictions; and it reflects quantity and quality. Her canon also substantiates the premise that literature is a reflection of the society in which it is produced. The Bluest Eye, her first novel, explores the question of what it means to be an African in a racist, capitalist society, in this case, the United States. Specifically, Morrison’s interest is in exposing the vicious, genocidal effects of racism on the African child. The major shortcoming of the novel, if measured in light of her developing class consciousness, is the solution proposed for eradicating these effects: racial approbation. Despite its weakness, the question posed by The Bluest Eye, ‘‘Why am I considered inferior?’’ and the answer, ‘‘Because I am an African born in a racist society,’’ are natural starting points for any concerned African struggling for a solution to her people’s plight. In many ways, Sula picks up where The Bluest Eye ends. Sula reflects the evolutionary process that is the trademark of Morrison’s canon: the three whores—the Maginot-Line, China, and Poland reappear as Eva, Hannah, and Sula; Pauline Breedlove is Mrs. Helene Wright; Pecola becomes Shadrack; and Claudia is Sula. Of particular interest is Morrison’s change in thematic emphasis from her first novel to her second; Sula searches for self-identity, not group identity, a change that mirrors the developmental stages of the consciousness of the African masses. Once the African knows who she is, often her struggle becomes one for individual rights. Unfortunately, this struggle for self-development leads some Africans to see themselves in isolation from their people, from the community that has in fact shaped, protected, nurtured, and guided them. This 53

54

4: SONG OF SOLOMON

selfish quest for individual fulfillment is certainly that of Sula. Not responsible individualism, hers is a ‘‘socially disintegrative version of individualism, that possessive individualism or sanctified rapacity which is extolled by capitalist societies.’’1 By the time she writes Song of Solomon, Morrison seems fully conscious of the relationship between the individual African and his community.2 Evidently, after writing and considering the dilemmas presented and the solutions posed in The Bluest Eye and Sula, after witnessing and participating in the historic, valiant struggle waged by Africans in the sixties and early seventies, and after being in contact with and editing the works of conscious, revolutionary Africans such as Chinweizu, Morrison has become more aware of the dialectical relationship between capitalism, racism, and sexism.3 In Song of Solomon, she subordinates sexism to both racism and capitalism, realizing that the exploitation of the African woman by the African man is the result of his national and class oppression. That is, sexism is correctly viewed as the consequence of the African’s lack of race and class consciousness. Morrison’s awareness of these relationships empowers her to create a protagonist whose survival depends on his development of a people consciousness, which, once gained, permanently alters his view of women. One has only to contrast Milkman’s relationship with Hagar and Sweet to appreciate the veracity of this statement. After Song of Solomon, Morrison will never again only create male characters in her novels whose race and class consciousness is so underdeveloped that they exploit and oppress African women. If one such character is created, another conscious male character is created for balance. In fact, this work marks a qualitative leap in Morrison’s consciousness as an African and as a writer (for her, the two are inextricably related) in several other regards: she is more aware of the principles reflected in the concept of dialectical and historical materialism; she is more aware of the role capitalism plays in the African’s exploitation and oppression; she is more aware of the need to create a protagonist who develops during the course of the novel; and she is more aware of the importance of creating a text that allows theme to dictate structure.4 To fully appreciate the qualitative leap that Morrison makes in regard to the nature of the African’s oppression in the United States and in regard to her artistic dexterity, her protagonist’s growth should be viewed as three distinct yet interconnected developmental stages that lead to his increased race and class consciousness: the

4: SONG OF SOLOMON

55

preliminal stage, the liminal stage, and the postliminal stage.5 There are general characteristics peculiar to each as well as particular characteristics associated with the protagonist’s heightened consciousness. In the opening chapters of the novel, Milkman’s low level of consciousness in regard to his people’s race and class oppression manifests itself in his nickname. Ironically, Macon Dead III acquires it as a result of his extended nursing period, for instead of helping him to become more attuned to his mother and her needs, this lengthy bonding period proves ineffectual in a society that promotes selfish individualism above love and concern for humankind: Milkman is emotionally estranged from Ruth Dead as he is from all women with whom he interacts. As his nickname suggests, he milks women, pilfering their love and giving nothing in return. Even at age thirty-one, he knows very little about women, an ignorance made evident by his inability to distinguish his sisters from his mother.6 Nor can he conceive of women as human beings, not even his mother: ‘‘Never had he thought of his mother as a person, a separate individual, with a life apart from allowing or interfering with his own.’’7 Women, in general, have value only as ‘‘need providers’’ for Milkman. Therefore, his act of urinating on Lena becomes an act symbolic of his pissing on all women, Hagar in particular. It is Hagar who is most exploited. While she genuinely loves Milkman, he loves her solely as a receptacle in which to empty his lust, seldom taking her anywhere except the movies and considering her his ‘‘private honey pot.’’8 Eventually, even sex with her becomes a bore, being ‘‘so free, so abundant.’’ So, as a pimp taking leave of his whore, Milkman pays Hagar for twelve years of service and writes her a thank you letter, reminding her that they are first cousins and self-righteously telling himself that he is performing a selfless act. Like Sula, Milkman—in this liminal stage—shits on those around him, particularly the women of the novel.9 Pilate is no exception. From her, as from Hagar, he receives a love both free and abundant. Wallowing in it, Milkman feels for ‘‘the first time in his life that he remembered being completely happy.’’10 Most important, it is because of Pilate—the pilot—that he is steered in a conscious direction. Through her acknowledgment of, dignity in, and proudness of her Africanness, despite her lack of material wealth, Milkman gets his first lesson in race and class consciousness: ‘‘While she looked as poor as everyone said she was, something was missing from her eyes that should have con-

56

4: SONG OF SOLOMON

firmed it.’’11 Like Pilate, Milkman must learn to respect his African self and to realize that money does not ensure happiness. Instead of killing the potential savior of his people as does her biblical namesake, Dead Pilate breathes life into Milkman.12 It is she who first forces him to confront his identity as the living dead who sucks the life force from his people; from her he learns the essence of life. Devouring the fruity, yolky core of life and speaking in a voice that reminded Milkman of little round pebbles that bumped against each other, Pilate is nature personified. She is, in fact, earth mother. What Milkman gives her in return for life is the murder of her daughter and the theft of her father. Significantly, it is not until the Shalimar Hunt, when he learns the importance of whispering to the trees and the ground, touching them, ‘‘as a blind man caresses a page of Braille, pulling meaning through his fingers,’’ that Milkman appreciates the life that this earth mother provides him.13 It is quite apropos, in light of his surname, that Milkman at first reciprocates Pilate’s love with death. Like all the members of the Macon Dead household, he is dead. Even the family car, a spotlessly clean Packard, is regarded by the community as a hearse, a car that cauterizes the ties between the living (the community) and the dead (the Dead family). As the community voice of the novel, the Greek chorus, Freddie’s evaluation of the Dead is valid: ‘‘A dead man ain’t no man. A dead man is a corpse.’’14 At this point in his life, Milkman Dead is neither a man (exploiting all women with whom he comes into contact), nor a human being in general. He is both psychologically and emotionally dead. Additional manifestations of Milkman’s low level of consciousness are his overall state of confusion and his association with things behind him. His disconcertedness is best exemplified by his obsession with flying. Yet while he seems bombarded with images of flight and imbued with a natural sense of flying, he experiences feelings of flying blindly. And, of course, he is. Not knowing his past, he is unsure of the future: ‘‘Infinite possibilities and enormous responsibilities stretched out before him, but he was not prepared to take advantage of the former, or accept the burden of the latter.’’15 Unconscious of the fact that responsibilities are an integral part of life, Milkman lives the limbo life of the living dead, always struggling ‘‘to make up his mind whether to go forward or to turn back.’’16 His face reveals the confusion he feels, for ‘‘it was all very tentative,’’ and ‘‘it lacked a coherence, a coming together of the features into a total self.’’17 This confusion will last until Milkman im-

4: SONG OF SOLOMON

57

merses himself in the life of his people; it is a confusion symbolized by a short limb because, as the narrator makes clear, this short limb is more the creation of his own mind than an actual fact: By the time Milkman was fourteen he had noticed that one of his legs was shorter than the other. When he stood barefoot and straight as a pole, his left foot was about half an inch off the floor. So he never stood straight; he slouched or leaned or stood with a hip thrown out, and he never told anybody about it—ever. . . . The deformity was mostly in his mind.18

In spite of Milkman’s lack of consciousness, he seems instinctively aware of the importance of the past, for he is obsessed with things behind him. In fact, ‘‘it was becoming a habit—this concentration on things behind him.’’19 Moreover, he is aware that everyone moves in the opposite direction as he, ‘‘going the direction he was coming from,’’20 a suggestion that they already have knowledge of their past, or at least know the importance of acquiring it, which directs them to their future. However, he is not yet prepared to turn his instinctual awareness into a conscious search for his history. Not only do the general characteristics associated with Milkman help the critic to assess the protagonist’s level of consciousness in the opening chapters of the novel, but also particular characteristics in regard to his race and class consciousness prove invaluable clues. In regard to race, the extent of Milkman’s consciousness can be gauged by several factors—his relationship with the local community as well as his awareness of national events that affect African people. So isolated is he from his people that he is the last to know about the relationship between Henry Porter and his sister, First Corinthians; he is the last to know about the Seven Days; and he is the last to know about Emmett Till’s murder. Once he is aware of these occurrences, he at first shows little concern for all except that which affects him directly, the courtship between Henry Porter and First Corinthians. Milkman is bored by all other events, revealing his complete estrangement from the community. When informed of the vicious murder of the fourteen-year-old Till, a murder which elicited the sympathy of both Europeans and Africans worldwide, Milkman replies: ‘‘Yeah, well, fuck Till. I’m the one in trouble.’’21 Such statements as this reflect Milkman’s need to develop the race consciousness that will allow him to see himself and other African people as one, having a common identity, a common history, and a common struggle.

58

4: SONG OF SOLOMON

The protagonist’s class consciousness is just as weak as his race awareness. Believing in his father’s capitalist philosophy that to own things is the essence of life, Milkman has little regard for the masses in the community, and, consequently, they have little regard for him.22 Being one of those masses, Feather throws Milkman out of his pool hall, rightfully associating the young Macon with his father. If Milkman is to establish close ties with the community, he must rid himself of dead weight—that Macon Dead mentality. He must begin to love his people more than his money, which will require that he, like Pilate, commit class suicide: ‘‘She gave up, apparently, all interest in table manners or hygiene, but acquired a deep concern for and about human relationships.’’23 As for now, Milkman’s interest in life is ‘‘wherever the party is,’’ and his associations, with the exception of Guitar, are with the petty bourgeois Honore´ crowd.24 It is not until Milkman begins to question the people and events around him that his consciousness begins to develop, that he enters the liminal stage of discovery and growth. Although this period of liminality actually begins in chapter 3—‘‘Now he questioned them. Questioned everybody’’25 —it is not sufficiently developed until chapter 5 when he has discovered the answers to crucial questions of identity. Chapter 5 begins with Milkman’s death wish, an attempt by him to renounce all that he has learned thus far because such knowledge brings with it an acceptance of the responsibility of adulthood in general and Africanhood in particular: Above all he wanted to escape what he knew, escape the implications of what he had been told. And all he knew in the world about the world was what other people had told him. He felt like a garbage pail for the actions and hatreds of other people. He himself did nothing. Except for the one time he had hit his father, he had never acted independently, and that act, his only one, had brought unwanted knowledge, too, as well as some responsibility for that knowledge.26

In his determination to renounce all, Milkman patiently, resignedly awaits the revengeful, deadly rage of Hagar, laying in ‘‘Guitar’s bed face-up in the sunlight, trying to imagine how it would feel when the ice pick entered his neck.’’27 Pregnant with images of death— words such as indifference, silence, fatigue, and lazy righteousness are used throughout—this chapter reflects Milkman’s readiness to

4: SONG OF SOLOMON

59

‘‘roll over and die,’’ his readiness to become an egg, easily cracked and easily eaten, because ‘‘afterward there would be no remembrance of who he was or where.’’28 Milkman’s death wish is a necessary phase in his development, for his confrontation with and subsequent defiance of death teach him both sensitivity and sympathy, allowing him to look beyond self. In actuality, this attempted physical suicide prefaces and prefigures his class suicide. It is in this liminal state, a period of growth though not a full state of consciousness, that, for the first time, Milkman ‘‘rubbed the ankle of this short leg,’’ feeling a sensation that is dialectically related to his increased consciousness.29 To the extent that his race and class consciousness develop, so does his leg develop, for Milkman’s belief in his short limb, remember, was ‘‘mostly in his mind.’’ It is in this liminal state that he feels ‘‘a quick beat of something like remorse’’ when he remembers Guitar’s story about a doe, that one should never kill a female deer.’’30 Such physical and emotional occurrences are clearly indicative of Milkman’s maturing consciousness. Extending from chapters 3 to 9, from his attempted suicide to his recognition of his wish to live, a wish that brings with it responsibility, Milkman’s liminal stage of development can be documented in particular by his increasing race and class awareness. With his newly gained sensitivity, Milkman asks Guitar questions about his best friend’s strange behavior: ‘‘We’ve been friends a long time Guitar. There’s nothing you don’t know about me. I can tell you anything—whatever our differences, I know I can trust you. But for some time now it’s been a one-way street.’’31 Of course, Milkman, blinded to all people and all things except himself, created the oneway street. In point of fact, this occasion marks the first in which he has asked his friend questions that have not concerned the Dead family. Not just questioning his friend’s lifestyle, Milkman argues with Guitar about the morality of the Seven Days’ philosophy, saying, ‘‘But people who lynch and slice off people’s balls—they’re crazy, Guitar, crazy,’’32 and asking, ‘‘What about the nice ones? Some whites made sacrifices for Negroes. Real sacrifices.’’33 When juxtaposed with ‘‘Fuck Till,’’ these concerns in regard to racial issues reflect a different, more sensitive Milkman. They do not, however, reflect a fully conscious protagonist. For Milkman is only questioning the philosophy of people who ‘‘sound like that redheaded Negro named X,’’34 not proposing an alternative solution for eradicating the oppression of African people.

60

4: SONG OF SOLOMON

Milkman’s awareness of race is made more poignant by his personal confrontation with the police. Stripped of his dignity, emasculated like millions of other African men throughout the world, Milkman is overwhelmed with shame: Shame at being spread-eagled, fingered, and handcuffed. . . . But nothing was like the shame he felt as he watched and listened to Pilate. Not just her Aunt Jemima act, but the fact that she was both adept at it and willing to do it—for him.35

This incident helps Milkman to distinguish between those Africans who assume the role of the Uncle Tom or the Aunt Jemima as a way of life and those who do so as a way of survival. While he feels proud of Pilate, who sacrifices her dignity to free him from jail even when he was prepared ‘‘to knock her down if she had come into the room while he was in the act of stealing’’ from her, he feels ashamed of his father, who ‘‘buckle[s] before the policemen.’’36 And the fact that he sees more dignity and life in the poor Pilate than in the rich Macon increases his class consciousness. That is, the incident crystallizes for him the way in which capitalism, with its emphasis on money and status, affects African people who ascribe to its values: they will always be petty capitalists, puppets ‘‘with an accomodating ‘we all understand how it is’ smile.’’37 This incident with the police is the second that contributes to Milkman’s developing class consciousness. The first results from the appearance of a white peacock, symbolizing both the race and the wealth of the ruling class in the United States. Ironically, this peacock appears while Guitar and Milkman are planning to rob Pilate’s ‘‘gold.’’ Significantly, it is Milkman who first sees it, ‘‘poised on the roof of a long low building that served as headquarters for Nelson Buick.’’38 Equating both flight and money with freedom, Milkman asks Guitar why a peacock can’t fly. His friend replies, ‘‘Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.’’39 Although Milkman is not yet fully conscious of the connection between the diamondlike tail of the peacock and the ‘‘gold’’ he is planning to steal from Pilate, Dead weight that will only impede his search for identity, this incident does contribute to his growing class consciousness. Milkman’s postliminal stage, which marks the height of his consciousness, is characterized by his initiation into a new society, the society of the Shalimar hunters. Like the preliminal and liminal

4: SONG OF SOLOMON

61

stages, this stage is symbolized by linguistic, psychological, and physical changes. As his race and class consciousness develop so does his language. Irresponsible, individualistic statements such as ‘‘Yeah, well, fuck Till,’’ which characterize his preliminality and which symbolize his complete insensitivity to the plight of African people, are replaced by the Africanized voice of collective communion, a communion shared by all living matter.40 Psychologically, Milkman accepts the responsibility of adulthood and Africanhood: ‘‘He had stopped evading things, sliding through, over, and around difficulties.’’41 Having learned to respect the natural world more than the material one and having gained the ability to laugh at himself, Milkman has become a psychologically balanced individual: there was nothing here [on the Shalimar hunt] to help him—not his money, his car, his father’s reputation, his suit, or his shoes. In fact they hampered him. . . .42 They [the Shalimar hunters] hooted and laughed all the way back to the car, teasing Milkman, egging him on to tell more about how scared he was. And he told them. Laughing too, hard, loud, and long. Really laughing.43

After ‘‘the pain in his short leg [becomes] so great he began to limp and hobble,’’ physically, Milkman becomes balanced as well: he no longer limps; both legs are equal.44 In regard to race, his high level of consciousness is exemplified on two occasions, when he learns of his grandfather’s murder and when he participates in the Shalimar hunt. Milkman first learns of his grandfather’s murder from Pilate, but he hears these details during a time when his race consciousness is at its lowest level. When he hears of the murder a second time, from Reverend Cooper, he asks, infuriated, why the Danville Africans did not seek revenge: ‘‘‘And nobody did anything?’ Milkman wondered at his own anger. He hadn’t felt angry when he first heard about it. Why now?’’45 His anger is aroused on this occasion because of his heightened awareness of himself in connection with other African people. Eventually, this consciousness manifests itself in a sincere love for and understanding of his people, even for the slightly unbalanced Day, who comes to kill him: But something had maimed him, scarred him like Reverend Cooper’s knot, like Saul’s missing teeth, and like his own father. He felt a sudden rush of affection for them all, and out there under the sweet gum tree,

62

4: SONG OF SOLOMON

within the sound of men tracking a bobcat, he thought he understood Guitar now. Really understood him.46

During the hunt, Milkman’s class consciousness sharpens as well. Learning the insignificance of money and status when juxtaposed with a true communion with African people, Milkman commits class suicide.47 While it is true that the seeds of his decision to bond with the African masses instead of those having his wealth and status are planted when he first meets Pilate, his conscious decision to do so germinates from both his Hunters Cave and his Shalimar experiences. According to anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, one must undergo several initiation rites prior to being incorporated into a new society. In Milkman’s case, these rites are related to his increased class consciousness. First, the initiate must be stripped of all that is psychologically and physically associated with his old society. This initiation rite entails a physical descent into a cave, an enclosing or engulfing that usually signals a baptism and an imminent rebirth. Milkman experiences both. Entering Hunters Cave with all the material, artificial trappings of capitalist society—a wad of money, an expensive watch, a beige three-piece suit, a ‘‘button-down light-blue shirt and black string tie,’’ a snap-brim hat, a suitcase with a bottle of scotch, and beautiful Florsheim shoes—Milkman emerges an offspring of nature, with water-ruined suit, soggy shoes, and a broken watch. Second, the initiate must be cognizant of the mores of the new society. In Milkman’s case, he must learn that he cannot exploit the people. He can neither show nor receive gratitude with money. Because humanism is a traditional African principle valued more than money and held in esteem more by the African masses than the African petty bourgeois, Circe, Fred Garnet, and the Shalimar community are offended by Milkman’s capitalist behavior: They looked at his skin and saw it was as black as theirs, but they knew he had the heart of the white men who came to pick them up in the trucks when they needed anonymous, faceless laborers.48

Just as important as the principle of humanism, Milkman must learn egalitarianism, the inherent equality of every human being. Prior to the hunt, he thinks himself so superior to the Shalimar people that he sees them not as unique individuals, but as one large anonymous group. For instance, with the Shalimar men in hearing

4: SONG OF SOLOMON

63

distance, he condescendingly asks the storeowner (whom he only assumes to be Mr. Solomon because he never asks the storeowner his name) if one of the men can help him: ‘‘He looked at the men sitting around the store. ‘You think maybe one of them could help with the car?’ he asked Mr. Solomon.’’49 Third, he must put his newly learned humanistic theories into practice by participating in the rituals of the new society. Milkman does so by agreeing to go on the hunt, a ritual that proves to be a psychological and physical test of strength, allowing him to shed his old capitalist-oriented ideology and replace it with a new people-oriented, nature-oriented ideology. In the true spirit of baptism and rebirth, Milkman rethinks his past behavior and contemplates the new life awaiting him, a life that will allow him, like the men of Shalimar, to commune with all of nature’s children: It was more than tracks Calvin was looking for—he whispered to the trees, whispered to the ground, touched them, as a blind man caresses a page of Braille, pulling meaning through his fingers.50

His new, revolutionized consciousness enables him to confront and to regret his old way of life: ‘‘The consequences of Milkman’s own stupidity would remain, and regret would always outweigh the things he was proud of having done.’’51 Significantly, it is not until after Milkman has revolutionized his consciousness in regard to race oppression and class exploitation that he sheds his sexist views of women. Prior to this increased awareness, Milkman, as his name suggests, milks the life out of women, giving them nothing in return. As pointed out, so reactionary is his view of women that he has difficulty distinguishing his mother from his sisters and rarely thinks of any of them. Pissing on Lena, squealing on First Corinthians, spying on Ruth, stealing from Pilate, and murdering Hagar—all are evidence of Milkman’s low level of consciousness. At the time he commits these acts, he is not aware of that oneness which connects African people, that pissing on Lena is like pissing on himself, that the sexual exploitation and murder of Hagar are the sexual exploitation and murder of himself. As the prophetic Pilate explains to Hagar, all are acts of self-hatred: ‘‘How can he not love your hair? It’s the same hair that grows out of his own armpits. The same hair that crawls up out of his crotch on up his stomach.’’52 Not only actions, but also words are early reflections of Milk-

64

4: SONG OF SOLOMON

man’s lack of consciousness in regard to women. He tells Hagar, ‘‘If you keep your hands just that way and then bring them down straight, straight and fast, you can drive that knife right smack in your cunt.’’ Such backwards, genocidal acts committed and words voiced against the mothers of his race can only find life in a society that promotes profit above human welfare, the individual above the group. It is this priceless treasure of knowledge that Milkman gains by the end of the novel. Quite noticeably, his consciousness in regard to women begins to rise when he discovers some of his mother’s past and heightens even more after his participation in the hunt. Earlier, Guitar had warned Milkman against exploiting women by relating an incident in which Guitar killed a doe: ‘‘A man shouldn’t do that.’’53 This warning, however, goes unheeded until Milkman takes an active interest in his mother’s well-being: ‘‘He remembered Guitar’s story about killing one. . . . ‘A man shouldn’t do that.’ Milkman felt a quick beat of something like remorse.’’54 But like the prickly feeling he gets in his knee, this fleeting sense of sympathy reflects only the beginnings of growth and healing, not the completion of them. Significantly, ‘‘He shook it [the feeling of remorse] off and resumed’’ his old way of thinking, talking, and acting. That is, he proceeds to kill the doe. In this case, when he discovers Ruth at her father’s grave site, he kills her with words: ‘‘You come to lay down on your father’s grave? Is that what you’ve been doing all these years? Spending a night every now and then with your father?’’55 It is not until Milkman has stripped himself of the ruling class’s views of race (intraracial, in this case) and class superiority that he is able to see women as his equals. This rite of passage is not complete until the Shalimar hunt, during which Milkman first becomes conscious, then ashamed of his exploitation of Hagar, ‘‘whom he’d thrown away like a wad of chewing gum after the flavor was gone— she had a right to try to kill him too.’’56 It is only after this event that he fully understands the reciprocal nature of human relationships: She [Sweet] put salve on his face. He washed her hair. She sprinkled talcum on his feet. He straddled her behind and massaged her back. She put witch hazel on his swollen neck. He made up the bed. She gave him gumbo to eat. He washed the dishes. She washed his clothes and hung them out to dry. He scoured her tub. She ironed his shirt and pants. He gave her fifty dollars. She kissed his mouth. He touched her face. She said please come back. He said I’ll see you tonight.57

4: SONG OF SOLOMON

65

Perhaps the most significant evidence of Milkman’s awareness of the principle of reciprocity as related to women is his commitment to guide Pilate to Shalimar to bury her father’s bones, just as she had guided him to bury the Dead in him. In fact, with his revolutionized consciousness—which prizes humanism and egalitarianism—he becomes the pilot, the source of life. Thus, the name ‘‘Milkman’’ is transformed to signify that which is positive, not negative. The protagonist becomes the milkman who is capable of carrying the source of life for those in need. The emphasis here is on the word capable, for while Milkman’s race and class consciousness develop sufficiently to allow him to recreate self, it never reaches the point where Milkman moves beyond self-healing to ‘‘other-healing.’’ Still, Morrison’s creation of a character who must develop both race and class awareness prior to developing an egalitarian and humanistic view of women reflects her own increased consciousness of the dialectical relationship between the African male’s nationclass oppression and his exploitation of African women. Such a qualitative leap in her ability to analyze the nature of capitalism empowers her to structure a text that is qualitatively better than the first two. Evidently, Morrison’s understanding that an awareness of the particular nature of the African’s oppression must precede the development of a viable solution increases her awareness of the dialectical relationship between meaning and structure. The first must dictate the latter. Such a mature understanding of the role of narrative structure is reflected in Song of Solomon. The overall text, the chapters, and the sentences within the chapters reflect this symbiotic relationship between form and content. First, Morrison uses flight as structure for the overall text. Song of Solomon begins and ends with unsuccessful flight attempts: Robert Smith’s begins the novel; Milkman’s ends the novel. Richard K. Barksdale comments on the use of flight as structure when he writes, The story that is related about [the characters’] experiences does not have a definable beginning, middle and end. The novel begins with a black man attempting to fly and ends with a black man attempting to fly. In other words, the pattern of narrative is circular, not linear.58

That the structure is circular suggests the absense of a solution, the failure of the protagonist (and his precursor) to share the liberating

66

4: SONG OF SOLOMON

knowledge he has gained in order to create an environment free of oppression. That is, the unsuccessful nature of both flights reflects both men’s lack of responsibility to the African community. Through their own admission or commission, they reveal their guilt: Smith leaves a suicidal note asking forgiveness; Milkman flies away despite his new awareness that true flight for humanity in general and the African in particular is the ability to fly without ever leaving the ground.59 Moreover, the facts that Smith’s death and Milkman’s birth occur almost simultaneously enhance the structural relationship between the two characters and the concept of flight. Second, Morrison divides her chapters into two parts: the first primarily chronicles Milkman’s lack of consciousness in regard to race and class; the second predominantly concentrates on his developing consciousness in regard to them. Third, the author uses parallel sentences to reflect equal relationships or equal actions. Such is the case when the newly awakened Milkman participates in a ritual of reciprocity with Sweet.60 Balanced sentence parts are used as well to inform the reader of close relationships between characters. Referring to Pilate and Ruth, Morrison writes: ‘‘The singer, standing at the back of the crowd, was as poorly dressed as the doctor’s daughter was well dressed.’’61 Morrison’s practice of briefly describing relationships, events, and people she is not yet prepared to discuss adds to the quality of this novel; it is a skillful method of creating a coherent text. At the beginning of the novel, for example, Freddie is referred to as ‘‘a gold-toothed man’’ and Guitar, ‘‘the cat-eyed boy.’’ Both names are withheld. This narrative method requires that the reader mentally store the descriptive phases until the characters are formally introduced. In this way, the reader ceases to be a passive bystander, but becomes an active partner in creating textual coherence by sewing together an earlier section of the novel with a later one. Additionally, Morrison manipulates time much more skillfully in this work than in her first two. Transition sentences such as ‘‘That was the beginning. Now it was all going to end’’ transport the reader from the past to the present without the nauseating jolt of an air pocket. Such sophisticated use of transitions appears between chapters as well as within chapters. As a case in point, the parental role of Guitar and Pilate in relationship to Hagar serves as the transition device that cements chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 5 ends with Pilate’s effort to keep Ruth’s mind off Hagar’s attempt to kill Milkman:

4: SONG OF SOLOMON

67

Pilate would have moved on immediately except for his brother’s wife, who was dying of lovelessness then, and seemed to be dying of it now as she sat at the table across from her sister-in-law listening to her life story, which Pilate was making deliberately long to keep Ruth’s mind off Hagar.62

Chapter 6 begins with Guitar’s effort to take Hagar home after one of her failed attempts to murder Milkman: ‘‘I [Guitar] took her home. She was standing in the middle of the room when I got there. So I just took her home. Pitiful. Really pitiful.’’63 Perhaps one of the most significant gauges of Morrison’s maturation in regard to structure is her ability to match form with content. Chapter 13 is the clearest example of this ability. Coming just after the Shalimar hunt, during and after which Milkman evidences his heightened consciousness in regard to race and class, chapter 13 serves as structural proof of Morrison’s theme: ‘‘You can never go off and leave a body.’’ Thematically, it picks up in the middle of chapter 5, detailing the events surrounding Hagar’s demise after Milkman makes his most cruel, race-killing statement concerning the mutilation of her sexual organs.64 Milkman’s selfish individualism affects all Africans: Hagar’s death in general and the destruction of her reproductive capability in particular mean the death of future generations of African people. By placing chapter 13 between ones which evidence Milkman’s development, Morrison reminds the reader that the past must serve as a useful guide to the future. Thus, even though Milkman does not understand the full significance of Sweet’s question—‘‘Who did he [Solomon] leave behind’’—the reader does. Neither Solomon nor Milkman uses knowledge responsibly—to forge a better future for their kind. In structure and in theme, Song of Solomon is a more advanced work of art than either The Bluest Eye or Sula. Thematically, Morrison understands that the African in the United States experiences national and class oppression. Additionally, she is aware that the African male’s exploitation of the African female is related to this oppression; that it is, in fact, the result of it. Such clearsightedness enables her, for the first time, to create a male as protagonist, one who must first become conscious of himself in relationship to his people; then and as a consequence, reject the individualistic, vulturistic class aspirations of his oppressor before experiencing a wholesome relationship with a woman.65 Structurally, Morrison’s consciousness of the importance of discovering the cause of the Af-

68

4: SONG OF SOLOMON

rican’s oppression before proposing a solution empowers her to subordinate structure to meaning. Yet, in spite of the growth evidenced in her writing of Song of Solomon, Morrison has not yet sufficiently matured to understand that while the African is exploited both racially and economically, his economic exploitation forms the basis for his national oppression. In the words of Kwame Nkrumah, while ‘‘capitalist exploitation and race oppression are complementary, the removal of [the first] ensures the removal of the other.’’66 Without such an understanding, she cannot propose a viable solution, the eradication of capitalism. This is the thematic weakness of the novel. By the end of it, Milkman sees himself as an African exploited by capitalism and oppressed by racism, but he offers no solution to this dilemma. Instead, he surrenders to exploitation and oppression. Rather than moving beyond the act of defeatism exhibited by his forefather, he repeats it: Knowing what Shalimar knew, he surrenders to the air.67 Thus, it is interesting that Milkman possesses the knowledge, the theory needed to help abolish the exploitation and oppression of African people, needed to revolutionize their consciousness, but he chooses not to use this knowledge as a weapon of change. He fails to make his contribution to humanity.68 In contrast, Guitar does act, but his is misguided action, for he does not have the knowledge base of Milkman. Both knowledge and action are needed because ‘‘practice without thought is blind; thought without practice is empty.’’69 Milkman and Guitar must come, that is, fly, together to create the conscious action so desperately needed by African people. And they do, but the conscious, action-oriented offspring they create by such a union does not materialize until Tar Baby.70 Because they are dialectically related, not only does the theme of Song of Solomon indicate the maturation that Toni Morrison must yet develop, but so does the structure. While it is an advancement of the narrative forms of her first two novels, it does not reflect her fullest consciousness of the nature of capitalism. Once she is at her highest peak, Morrison will reject all those structural elements that reflect the injustices of capitalism, in particular the notion that one human being is superior to another. For instance, in Tar Baby she will not merely rely on an omniscient narrator, one who knows all despite his lack of involvement. Rather, she will create a structure that allows for narrative contributions from all the major characters. In this manner, she creates a text that is much more socialist in design.

5 Tar Baby: A Reflection of Morrison’s Developed Class Consciousness CLASS STRUGGLE, THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE RULING CLASS AND the subject class, is the thematic emphasis of Toni Morrison’s fourth work, Tar Baby. Racism, the primary focus of The Bluest Eye, is discussed as a coequal but consequential cause of the African’s class exploitation. The struggle between the sexes, having been explored in Sula and resolved in Song of Solomon, gets little of the author’s attention, for Morrison has sufficiently matured to understand that the fundamental cause of the African’s oppression is the exploitive economic system of capitalism and its overseas extension, imperialism.1 Thus, racism and sexism, although equally oppressive, are treated as by-products of capitalism. To eradicate the latter ensures the eradication of the former two. In Tar Baby, Morrison’s increased consciousness is reflected in her ability and commitment to explore this cause-and-effect relationship between class, race, and sex. Morrison’s heightened class awareness creates qualitative changes in both the thematic and structural development of her fourth novel. Thematically, for the first time, the author chooses a setting outside the borders of the United States—Dominique and its surrounding islands. Place, then, in Tar Baby, is just as crucial to our understanding of the novel’s dilemma and denouement, and to our understanding of the author’s own consciousness, as it is in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Place reveals both Morrison’s awareness of the innate viciousness of capitalism and her understanding that ‘‘all peoples of African descent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean or any other part of the world are Africans,’’ have a common oppressor, wage a common struggle, and need a common solution.2 Then, too, the choice of the 69

70

5: TAR BABY

Caribbean as setting allows Morrison and the reader to get a more objective view of the United States, a view not dissimilar to that of Gideon: ‘‘The U.S. is a bad place to die in.’’3 The second qualitative leap evidenced in Morrison’s theme is her use of European Americans as major characters. In earlier works, they serve as minor characters, usually invisible foes who are hinted at, referred to, laughed about, or ignored altogether. In Tar Baby their rise to prominence parallels Morrison’s rise in consciousness, for she now understands the dialectical role they play as the ruling class in the African’s exploitation and oppression, a role that can be neither ignored nor minimized. Significant, therefore, is the fact that she does not choose Europeans of the lower or middle classes, but those of the ruling class. Moreover, these Europeans have a direct connection to the exploitation of African people in Dominique and in the United States, revealing Morrison’s unclouded understanding that the capitalists and imperialists are one and the same. The nature of the struggle of African people in the novel is an additional piece of evidence that reflects the qualitative difference between this work and earlier ones. Unlike Pecola Breedlove, who struggles with the question of racial approbation, Sula, who struggles against the traditional role of African women, and Milkman, who individually struggles with the issues of race and class, the two protagonists in Tar Baby must struggle together to resolve their opposing class interests in order to unite.4 Symbolically, they reflect the schism that exists in the African community, the class conflict that African people must resolve in order to form an effective, unified force against their primary enemy, capitalism/imperialism. What Morrison does in Tar Baby is raise the question all Africans must ask themselves: Do I identify with my oppressor or my people? In light of this question, Morrison examines several other crucial ones: First, if the African rejects the capitalist way of life, what is a viable alternative? Second, can African people negate history by returning to a pre-slave-trade, precolonial existence? Third, can there exist ‘‘people’s capitalism,’’ ‘‘enlightened capitalism,’’ ‘‘class peace,’’ or ‘‘class harmony’’ between two groups of people whose interests are diametrically opposed?5 In other words, can Jadine and Son coexist in harmony? The ending of Tar Baby provides answers to all three questions. It reveals Morrison’s own clarity in regard to the irreconcilability of the interests of the ruling and subject classes. And while she clearly rejects vulturistic capitalism, she just as clearly rejects the naive prescription of Kenneth Kaunda, President

5: TAR BABY

71

of Zambia, for an African communal socialism, a way of life that seeks to return to a glorified past without the benefit of modern technology, modern science, or modern consciousness. Unfortunately, however, she does not provide a viable alternative existence for African people. This is the thematic weakness of the novel. Structurally, too, Tar Baby reflects Toni Morrison’s heightened consciousness. She produces a work that reflects the positive principles of traditional African society: humanism, collectivism, and egalitarianism.6 Each of her major characters—Son, Jadine, Sydney, Ondine, Valerian, Margaret, and The´ re`se—has an opportunity to present his or her particular views on self and others. And while there is an omniscient narrator, this narrator is not given a role superior to that of each of the others but unobstrusively highlights rather than prescribes or defines significant character thoughts and actions. Such a narrative technique offers a more balanced, more objective picture from which to judge the characters. As class struggle is the dominant theme in Tar Baby, it is useful to analyze the novel first by employing a structural framework that examines the two major forces in contention: the ruling class and the subject class (sometimes referred to as the ‘‘people class’’). It is also useful to analyze Morrison’s attempt to reconcile these forces in bringing together Jadine and Son. Valerian Street, as well as all who share his aspirations, is a symbol of American capitalism and imperialism. Indeed, he is a typical capitalist who has made his fortune by exploiting the labor of the African masses and by stealing their land. And it is quite significant that his wealth emanates from the production of candy, the main ingredients of which—sugar and cocoa—come from the Caribbean, once the sugar capital of the western world.7 This economic fact is made even more poignant after Valerian fires Gideon and The´ re`se for stealing a couple of apples. From Son’s, Morrison’s, and the reader’s perspective, Valerian ‘‘had been able to dismiss with a flutter of the fingers the people whose sugar and cocoa had allowed him to grow old in regal comfort.’’8 Quite aptly, he is named after a plant, the dried roots of which have small clusters of white or pinkish flowers used medicinally as a sedative. And as his name suggests, Valerian is asleep throughout most of his adult life, unconscious of or unconcerned by the exploitative manner in which he has accumulated his wealth, ignorant of the physical and psychological abuse of his child by his own wife, unsympathetic to the feelings of his servants, and most impor-

72

5: TAR BABY

tant for Morrison and her audience, insensitive to the plight of African people.9 Somnolently, with all of the lush, uncultured, living nature around him, he builds a greenhouse in which to incubate himself from life, but primarily, and in true capitalist fashion, in which to control life. In his words, it is ‘‘a place of controlled everflowering life.’’ So estranged from life is Valerian that he is incapable of love despite the fact that his name suggests this human emotion, for the reader may be tempted to associate Valerian with the name of that day in February on which love is celebrated. Bickering, ridiculing, and name calling constitute the extent of the communication between him and his wife. With his son, Michael, he has no communication. And after thirty years of faithful butlering and cooking, Sydney and Ondine are thought of as mere Uncle Toms.10 Responding to Valerian’s inhumanity, Ondine shouts, ‘‘I may be a cook, Mr. Street, but I’m a person too.’’11 For Valerian, however, one’s worth as a human being is measured only by nonhuman values: wealth and status. Since his desire is to control life, not live in it, Valerian uses his money to relate to other human beings. He buys Margaret expensive clothes and pays Jadine’s college tuition. In fact, it is not until he is confronted with the physical and psychological abuse of his son that he exhibits some genuine emotion, but even this emotional display reeks more of self-pity for his ignorance of the abuse than sorrow for the psychological well-being of his wife and child. For instead of seeking help for Margaret and searching for Michael, Valerian retreats to his greenhouse and to his childhood: ‘‘Valerian wanted his own youth again and a place to spend it.’’12 While it is true that the ruling class in the United States (all of whom are of European descent) consists of those who own and control the means of production, it is also true that there are those (including Africans) who so ardently wish to belong to this class that they exhibit the same behavioral patterns, dress in the same manner, use the same language patterns, and, most unfortunately, share the same ideology as those of their oppressors. Often referred to as the petty bourgeois, this group of people exists between two worlds, denied entry into the ruling class due to their lack of wealth and/or their skin color and refusing to identify with the African masses to whom they owe allegiance. Jadine, as well as Sydney and Ondine, symbolizes the African petty bourgeois. Called Kingfish and Beulah by Margaret Street, Sydney and Ondine symbolize those unconscious servants who identify more with

5: TAR BABY

73

their employers and their employers’ culture than they do with their own people and their own culture. Sydney, in the light of day, proudly refers to himself as ‘‘one of those industrious Philadelphia Negroes—the proudest people in the race’’—ignorant of the fact that in the dark of night his ‘‘refreshing’’ dreams of childhood days in Baltimore are what give him the stamina to cater to Valerian’s whims.13 Ondine, painfully reminiscent of Mrs. Breedlove in The Bluest Eye, calls the Streets’ kitchen ‘‘my kitchen’’ and does not want it violated by the African masses. Living a secondhand life, they accordingly have secondhand furniture, secondhand visitors (‘‘No visitors ever came’’ for them) and a secondhand daughter (Because Jadine was a niece, Ondine’s relationship with her ‘‘was without the stress of a mother-daughter relationship’’).14 Perhaps most significant is that they are surnamed Childs, for they are indeed the children of Valerian who do as they are told. Yet, despite the humiliation and degradation of being adults treated as children, they both share the racist, capitalist ideology of their employers. As a consequence, they recognize no bond between themselves and Gideon and The´ re`se, the other African servants who work for the Streets. In fact, Sydney and Ondine are unable to distinguish between them, an unwillingness to recognize ‘‘lower class’’ Africans as human beings with unique identities: Gideon is referred to as Yardman, and The´ re`se is thought to be several different Marys. On the whole and in true capitalist fashion, these Childses respond to the other Africans as if all African people look alike. Not only do they embrace the same racist stereotypes as do their exploiters, but the Childses use the same negative jargon to refer to people who look just like them! The poor African masses are niggers who steal; in contrast, the Childses are Negroes, respectable Africans.15 It is a respectability that prevents them from seeing themselves as a part of the African masses. For instance, in seeking to disassociate himself from Son, Sydney proudly reveals his ignorance of African culture: I am a Phil-a-delphia Negro mentioned in the book of the very same name. My people owned drugstores and taught school while yours were still cutting their faces open so as to be able to tell one of you from the other.16

Indeed, it is only by understanding Sydney’s petty bourgeois mentality that we can account for his reaction to Son’s humane and

74

5: TAR BABY

friendly greeting of ‘‘Hi,’’ a greeting that at once establishes a bond and an equality between the two men. Seemingly, Son’s ‘‘Hi’’ strips Sydney of his status as head African, and not until Son begins calling Sydney ‘‘Sir’’ and ‘‘Mr. Childs’’ does the older man begin to communicate with the younger. Morrison’s most intricate exploration of the African petty bourgeois is reserved for Jadine, not Sydney and Ondine. Significantly called Copper Venus, Jadine is a brown white woman, a Europeanized African, an art history graduate of the Sorbonne, an expert on cloisonne´ , and a cover model for Elle. She is one of the tar babies of the novel, a creation of capitalist America.17 Her behavioral patterns, dress, language, associations, and ideology are all those of the ruling class and, as such, demonstrate her hatred of Africa and all that is associated with it. ‘‘To roam around Europe . . . following soccer games’’ is her goal in life; her fiance´ is a wealthy European Parisienne who will bring her wealth and unquestioned status.18 Not surprisingly, her allegiance is more to the Streets, whom she regards ‘‘like family, almost,’’ than to Ondine and Sydney, who slave for her.19 In fact, except for her aunt and uncle, whom she visits only in troubled times, her acquaintances are all Europeans or Europhiliacs like her. Ideologically, she thinks like the European, and like her aunt and uncle, she embraces the stereotypes of the African, calling Son a raggedy nigger and thinking he is about to rape her. Significantly, Son responds: ‘‘Rape: Why you little white girls always think somebody’s trying to rape you?’’20 Not only does Jadine think like a European, but also she thinks she is a European. When Son’s presence at L’Arbe de la Croix is discovered, she questions his reason for stealing as if she too owned the house: ‘‘It depends on what you want from us.’’ Surprised by her irrational, indeed suicidal, association with the Streets, Son replies: ‘‘Us? You call yourself ‘us’?’’21 Once this association is made clear, it does not surprise us that Jadine often assumes the position of adoring daughter to the Streets. At dinnertime, she ‘‘poured [Valerian’s] wine, offered him a helping of this, a dab of that and smiled when she did not have to.’’22 And thinking that Valerian’s and Margaret’s way of life is normal (‘‘Naturally they bickered and taunted one another. Naturally. Normal, even.’’),23 indeed the best there is, she belittles African art and she ridicules Michael’s attempt to politicize her as to her Africanness: ‘‘Actually we didn’t talk; we quarreled. About why I was studying art history at that

5: TAR BABY

75

snotty school instead of—I don’t know what. Organizing or something. He said I was abandoning my history. My people.’’24 It is this attempt to be other than herself that causes Jadine’s insecurity throughout the novel. As a Europhiliac, she feels threatened by African women who are unashamed of their identity and culture and beautiful not simply because they are, but also because they possess pride and dignity in themselves. The African woman in yellow is an example of one such woman. When Jadine meets her, it is quite significant that Jadine is experiencing one of the happiest times of her life because, as Morrison implies, such happiness can never equal the true happiness felt when one celebrates self. Just chosen for the cover of one of France’s most fashionable magazines, courted by ‘‘three gorgeous and raucous men,’’ and told that she had passed her orals, Jadine was at her zenith. Yet this, the most important day of her life, is not sufficient to erase the insecurity that lies behind the facade of any one who abandons self—in the African’s case, all things associated with Africa. It is for this reason that the woman in yellow—beautiful, self-confident, proud, and dignified—is such a disturbing and haunting image for Jadine: The vision itself was a woman much too tall. Under her long canary yellow dress Jadine knew there was much too much hip, too much bust. The agency would laugh her out of the lobby, so why was she and everybody else in the store transfixed? The height? The skin like tar against the canary yellow dress? She walked down the aisle as though her many-colored sandals were pressing gold tracks on the floor. Two upsidedown V’s were scored into each of her cheeks, her hair was wrapped in a gelee as yellow as her dress. The people in the aisles watched her without embarrassment, with full glances instead of sly ones.25

What so mesmerizes Jadine and the others, who we assume are Europeans, is the natural beauty of the African woman in yellow—a beauty based on the African’s own unique features, not based on those of another race; a beauty that subconsciously forces Jadine to confront her unnatural, imitative beauty, which comes from distorting self. Isn’t it interesting that she studies art history, European art history, instead of natural, untamed art? Clearly, she does not have that ‘‘genuine talent in her fingers’’ that would allow her to paint and draw. Neither does she have that genuine beauty, that confidence in self that would prevent her from destroying her natural self in an effort to become as much like a European as possible.26 So,

76

5: TAR BABY

‘‘along with everybody else in the market, Jadine gasped. Just a little. Just a sudden intake of air.’’27 Evidence of Jadine’s obsession with European looks and culture and her own repugnance of all things African is apparent in her responses to Son, indeed to anyone and anything that has not been tampered with by the European. For example, her recognition of Son’s beauty comes only after he has cut off his dreadlocks and shaved his beard. With them, Son is too African, too unlike the European for Jadine: ‘‘In a white shirt unbuttoned at the cuffs and throat, and with a gentle homemade haircut, he was gorgeous. He had preserved his mustache but the kinky beard was gone along with the chain-gang hair.’’28 Then, too, her love of the Dominican island is reserved only for the tamed land surrounding L’Arbre des la Croix; the other, dark and untamed land ‘‘was the ugly part of the Isle des Chevaliers—the part she averted her eyes from whenever she drove past.’’29 Sharing Valerian’s need to control life instead of living it, Jadine persistently holds onto the reins of dark dogs galloping on silver feet and, at first, obstinately refuses love-making with Son (‘‘He wasn’t manageable’’) as a way of controlling her emotions.30 Interesting enough, this image of dark dogs on silver feet continually associated with Jadine suggests the model’s concerted effort to hold back the African that is within. Her continual struggle to keep in check her natural hair is only one example.31 Until Jadine runs toward self rather than from self, she will never experience the genuine feeling of pride and dignity felt and exuded by the woman in yellow. In fact, the pervasive image of tar, associated with Jadine throughout the novel, illuminates her lack of self-esteem and, more importantly, serves as a measure of Jadine’s consciousness of herself as an African. In a negative respect, tar, the sticky material from which the tar baby is built, is the substance of Jadine; she represents that which is inhuman, built by the European as a trap for other Africans, an artificial lure to tempt them to a Europeanized lifestyle. In a positive respect, serving as a symbol of the Africanness Jadine rejects, tar is that which she must internalize. Without this internalization, Jadine is a mere infant, a (tar) baby in her awareness of herself as an African. Thus, the tar must not merely clothe, but be absorbed; it must be accepted with a full consciousness. Only then, Morrison warns us, does it assume value, beauty, and healing properties. Unfortunately, Jadine never becomes fully

5: TAR BABY

77

aware of herself as an African. Indeed, she does not even want to be associated with anything African, for when she sinks in the dark, wet, sticky, mossy floor of the untamed woods of the Isle des Chevaliers, she struggles to rid herself of the tar-like substance enveloping her; she clings in desperation to a nearby tree rather than ‘‘cleave like lovers to caress his bark and finger his ridges. Sway when he sways and shiver with him too.’’32 In fact, Jadine has so absorbed the capitalist values of making money and acquiring status that she is ignorant of the traditional African principles that have ensured the survival of African people despite their dehumanized conditions. Unequipped with a sense of humanism, collectivism, and egalitarianism to inform and guide her, she allows her aunt and uncle to wait on her, plays daughter to them instead of being daughter to them, and abandons them to the caprices of Valerian, not knowing what their fate might be. When they most need her, she prays that they don’t. And she ignores Ondine’s wise words that a girl has to be a daughter first. She have to learn that. And if she never learns how to be a daughter, she can’t never learn how to be a woman. I mean a real woman: a woman good enough for a child; good enough for a man—good enough even for the respect of other women.33

But why should we expect Jadine, one who shuns all association with the poor and struggling African masses, to stoop to being a real daughter to a cook, a real woman for a son (i.e., Son) or a real sister to an almond (i.e., Alma)? Revealingly, her Christmas gift of high heels for Ondine, a gift that is more suited for Jadine than for her aged, sore-footed aunt, reflects the extent of Jadine’s estrangement from the African masses, for if she is unmindful of her aunt’s reality (Ondine’s ‘‘feet were too tender and her ankles too swollen’’), she is certainly unaware of those of the masses.34 Unlike Jadine, Son reflects a people-class mentality. He possesses socialist, not capitalist, tendencies. Having learned the principles of humanism, collectivism, and egalitarianism in Song of Solomon, he is the Milkman who leaped into the air, stripped of material possessions but clothed with a sense of self: ‘‘He had no things to gather—no book of postage stamps, no razor blade or key to any door.’’35 Having learned that you cannot fly away and leave a body, the newly conscious Milkman swims away toward the Isle des Chevaliers to struggle for his people. He becomes the Christ-

78

5: TAR BABY

like figure on the L’Arbe des la Croix who saves his people, the revolutionary who politically educates his people, the son, everyone’s son—Franklin Green, William Green, Herbert Robinson, Louis Stover—devoid of selfish individualism and conscious of himself as an African.38 Like a Rastafarian, he comes to D’Arbe des la Croix with dreadlocks, ‘‘hair untampered with by man,’’ ‘‘living hair’’ described as ‘‘long whips or lashes,’’ ‘‘wild, aggressive,’’ ‘‘Mau-Mau, Attica, chain-gang hair.’’37 The strong, powerful, rebellious hair represents the free-spiritedness, the pride and dignity of the African who has been exploited and oppressed by, but not yet processed by, capitalism. Unfortunately, like a Samson, he leaves L’Arbe des la Croix with cut, processed hair, hair conditioned by the corruptness of the capitalist mentality of Jadine. Unlike Valerian and Jadine, Son has a sincere love for living things in general, African people in particular, and the African poor especially. He feels at home in natural environments and, as a consequence, is attuned to nature, plucking Valerian’s plant to make it bloom and telling Ondine to place banana leaves in her shoes to soothe her sore feet.38 For the African masses, he has a special love, despite his feelings of ‘‘disappointment nudging contempt for the outrage Jade and Sydney and Ondine exhibited in defending property and personnel that did not belong to them from a black man who was one of their own.’’39 Unlike Jadine, Sydney, and Ondine, who harbor no love for the struggling African masses, who, in fact, see them as nebulous entities struggling and suffering while they themselves receive only the leftovers of capitalism, Son looks at Gideon and compares this yardman with himself: [Yardman] was kneeling, chopping at the trunk of a small tree—while he himself was so spanking clean, clean from the roots of his hair to the crevices between his toes, . . . now he was as near to crying as he’d been since he’d fled from home. . . . ‘‘Thanks,’’ whispered Son.40

So conscious is Son of the plight of the African masses that on two occasions the overwhelming oppressiveness of their existence brings him close to fainting. The first occasion occurs when he hears the story of the slaves struck blind when they saw Dominique;41 the second occurs when he realizes the magnitude of the African’s self-hatred caused by race and class oppression, a hatred that compels Alma Estee to wear a wig the color of dried blood: ‘‘He grew dizzy as soon as he saw her. . . . ‘Oh, baby baby baby

5: TAR BABY

79

baby,’ he said, and went to her to take off the wig.’’42 And when he observes an African sister stripped of all dignity and pride, ‘‘word whipping a man on down the street,’’ he is ‘‘made miserable by the eyes inside her eyes, and goes to her, arms wide open and says ‘Come here.’’’43 Such examples of Son’s sincere love for African people are present throughout the novel, revealing his sensitivity to his people’s oppression and establishing his position as an African revolutionary in the mold of Garvey, Malcolm, and Nkrumah.44 Not only is Son race conscious, but also class conscious. He sees himself as a member of the exploited class, although he himself is not directly exploited: ‘‘He saw the things he imagined to be his, including his own reflection, mocked. Appropriated, marketed and trivialized into decor. He would not give up the last thing left to him—fraternity.’’45 Clearly, he understands that if African people in general are exploited, then he too is exploited, that if African people are not free, then he is not free. Nowhere is his consciousness of himself as a part of the masses more revealing than in the moment he returns to the United States: African women are crying; African children are mere short people without the vulnerability or laughter associated with them; African men are either avoiding African women, blinding themselves to the woman’s pain, or becoming African women, having ‘‘snipped off their testicles and pasted them to their chests.’’46 If the psychosis of Africans in America is not manifested in either of these ways, notices Son, it is manifested in a type of Jadism—an abandonment of self, brother, and sister to join forces with the oppressor, becoming ‘‘black people in whiteface playing black people in blackface.’’47 With his unobscured race and class consciousness, Son understands that the primary enemy of African people—that is, the primary cause of the African’s plight—is capitalism/imperialism: Son’s mouth went dry as he watched Valerian chewing a piece of ham, his head-of-a-coin profile content, approving even the flavor in his mouth although he had been able to dismiss with a flutter of his fingers the people whose sugar and cocoa had allowed him to grow old in regal comfort; . . . he turned it into candy, . . . and sold it to other children and made a fortune . . . and buil[t] a palace with more of their labor and then hire[d] them to do more of the work he was not capable of and pay them again according to some scale of value that would outrage Satan himself.48

This passage substantiates Son’s people class-sightedness. He knows that it is the African’s land and labor, not his skin color, that

80

5: TAR BABY

primarily results in his exploitation. It is the African’s skin color that facilitates, not causes, his exploitation. Too, he understands that the United States is the capitalist capital of the world and, therefore, the African’s worst enemy: ‘‘When he thought of America, he thought of the tongue that Mexican drew in Uncle Sam’s mouth: a map of the U.S. as an ill-shaped tongue ringed by teeth and crammed with the corpses of children.’’49 Conscious of both the plight of the African and the cause of this plight, Son attempts to launch a political education campaign with his primary target being Jadine and his indirect target, the entire Street household. In his presence, lies are uncovered; aspirations are revealed; confessions are made. Perhaps the best example of Son’s Christ-like knack for extracting confessions occurs, appropriately enough, during Christmas dinner—in a sense the last supper, during which old myths prevail. It is during this occasion that Valerian reveals his true capitalist nature by firing Gideon and The´ re`se for stealing a few apples while he himself has stolen both their land and their labor, and by responding to Sydney and Ondine as mere servants despite the fact that they have lived with him, and for him, for thirty years. It is also during this occasion that Ondine reveals the secret of Margaret’s mutilation of baby Michael and Ondine’s own playmothering of him. But most significant for Son and for us is Jadine’s revelation of her unequivocal ruling class aspirations, her petty bourgeois tendencies, for while Valerian abuses all present—including her aunt and uncle—she ‘‘had defended him. Poured his wine, offered him a helping of this, a dab of that and smiled when she did not have to’’ as if he were Christ Himself at the Last Supper.50 It is because she so blindly accepts the capitalist lifestyle and, more importantly, because Son so ardently loves her that Jadine becomes Son’s main target for political education. Significantly, Morrison makes Son a wife/woman killer: He attempts to kill Jadine’s old capitalist-class affiliations and instill new people-oriented ones. And while he never gets her to forsake her capitalist ideology, Son does help Jadine become more conscious of herself as an African, largely because he, like the woman in yellow, exudes a pride and dignity in his Africanness. The first indication of her self-rumination is Jadine’s thoughts about the game she has to play with Europeans in order ‘‘to make it’’: ‘‘She needed only to be stunning and to convince them she was not as smart as they were. Say the obvious, ask stupid questions,

5: TAR BABY

81

laugh with abandon, look interested, and light up at any display of their humanity if they showed it.’’51 A second indication is Jadine’s questions about her past and future: ‘‘Work? At what? Marriage? Work and Marriage? Where? Who? What can I do with this degree? Do I really want to be a model?’’52 For Jadine, as with most of Morrison’s protagonists, the act of questioning signals a psychological maturation, an increased consciousness that is reflected in Jadine’s relationship with Margaret: ‘‘Any minute now, Margaret would be reaching out her hand and saying ‘What’d ja do to yer hay—er? What’d ja do to yer hay—er?’ like white girls all over the world, or telling her about Dorcus, the one black girl she ever looked in the face.’’53 This increased consciousness is noticeable in her language pattern as well. To Son, when she thinks he will make love to her if they sleep together, she says: ‘‘You’re going to meddle me and all I want is rest.’’54 But these are little, convenient changes for Jadine. They do not require her to commit class suicide by forsaking her lifestyle. Jadine resists any efforts on Son’s part to sensitize her to a more mass way of life. Her resistence is symbolized in her struggle to free herself from the swamp pitch of the Isle des Chevaliers, a physical struggle that reflects her psychological struggle to ward off any significant ideological change: ‘‘She twisted with a giant effort around to the road side of the tree—the part of the trunk that leaned out of solid ground.’’55 Of course, the ‘‘road side’’ is the Street side, the solid ground, the right of way (the right way), the way of life to which she had become accustomed. And if either Son or Morrison’s readers harbor hopes that Jadine is undergoing an ideological renaissance, those hopes are quickly dashed in light of her response to being back in New York. It is a reaction just the opposite of Son’s, for whereas he is in tune with the devastating plight of the African people there, she responds to its material convenience, its personal benefits for her: ‘‘If ever there was a black woman’s town, New York was it.’’56 Of course, she is referring to African women like herself, petty bourgeois African women, because for women like Nommo, for the masses of African women, New York is hell. It is the place where all the negativisms of capitalism converge and blossom. It is, in fact, symbolic of the capitalist world, reflecting the two extremes of capitalism—the poor, struggling African masses and the rich European finance bankers and corporate magnates. Here, Jadine can wallow in selfishness. And she does. Son becomes ‘‘her fine frame, her stag, her man,’’ a show piece for her

82

5: TAR BABY

friends. Here, Jadine can consume all the delicacies and experience all the sensations of bourgeois life, ‘‘eat bean pie on 135th Street, paella on Eight-first Street; . . . eat yogurt on the steps of the Fortysecond Street library; listen to RVR and BLS, buy mugs in Azuma’s, chocolate chip cookies in Grand Central Station’’—in fact, live the life of the Streets.57 Since Jadine loves New York, it is not surprising that she hates Son’s Eden, Eloe. It is just the opposite of New York. In Eloe, Jadine’s capitalist lifestyle is crystallized. She acts like a typical European tourist, taking the people’s pictures and insulting them, like Sula, by sleeping naked in full view of the Eloeans. Moreover, because she has long associated with Europeans more than with Africans, her ways are, in fact, more European than African. For instance, she neither understands nor speaks the Eloean’s language, down-home English. In fact, figuratively and literally, Eloe is the blackest thing she ever saw: ‘‘She might as well have been in a cave, a grave, the dark womb of earth, suffocating.’’58 Indeed, it, and by extension Son, is too black, too much like Africa and its culture for Jadine. She can upbraid Margaret for Margaret’s stereotyping and ignorance of the African masses, but Jadine herself adamantly refuses to become a part of the masses. She refuses to become or even, what might be more reasonable, to extract the positive from the African women who come to her in the Eloe night, who pull out a baby-sucked tit and show it to her. She does not have to repeat the destiny of these women but to learn from it. However, for Jadine, like for Sula, these women ‘‘were all out to get her, tie her, bind her. Grab the person she had worked hard to become and choke it off with their soft loose tits.’’59 Thus, her willingness to share her life with Son, an African man attuned to his culture, becomes contingent upon his willingness to change, his willingness to embrace the capitalist ideology that she holds so dear: ‘‘He needed a job, a degree. . . . He should enroll in business school.’’60 And it is not any job or any degree; Jadine wants Son to become a lawyer. For, in the long run, happiness with Son is preconditioned by his status and wealth, not the love and happiness she feels in his presence. This is true despite the unhappiness and the psychological disorientation she perceives in the lives of the Streets. And because she opts for human, woman-made products over natural ones, she recognizes both the inner and the outer beauty of Son only after he has discarded his outer Africanness—cut his dreadlocks (hair that is ‘‘definitely alive. Left alone and untended it was like foliage and

5: TAR BABY

83

from a distance it looked like nothing less than the crown of a deciduous tree’’) and put on Valerian’s three-piece suit.61 She accepts him only if he allows her to remake him into an acceptable product of capitalist America, stamped Made in the U.S.A. Kwame Ture once stated that either you are a part of the problem or a part of the solution. What he meant was that as an African you can either identify with and struggle for the oppressor or you can identify with and struggle for the oppressed. And because the oppressor and the oppressed have opposing, antagonistic interests, to do both is impossible. From the moment that Jadine and Son meet, we are aware that the relationship between them is antagonistic, for Jadine struggles in behalf of the interests of the ruling class; Son struggles in behalf of those of the people class. Since these interests are diametrically opposed, their relationship can only survive if one of them commits class suicide by shedding old interests for new ones. It is Son’s hope that he can make Jadine so conscious of the plight of her people that she will see the vicious nature of capitalism and, thus, commit class suicide. Just the opposite is true. Son is so mesmerized by Jadine and so surrounded by ruling class interests that he is corrupted by the capitalist lifestyle: He had it straight before: the pie ladies and the six-string banjo and then he was seduced, corrupted by cloisonne and raw silk and the color of honey and he was willing to change, to love the cloisonne, to abandon the pie ladies and the nickel nickelodeon and Eloe itself.62

He becomes the rabbit entrapped by the tar baby that is Jadine.63 In fact, from the novel’s beginning, there are clues that Son, not Jadine, will be the one to commit class suicide. First, it is Jadine who is surrounded by ideological reinforcements; she is surrounded by the lifestyle, the values, the food, the clothes, and the language and behavioral patterns of the Streets. Son, a loner, struggles to take Jadine to a higher level, a new state of awareness in regard to African people while in the midst of capitalist surroundings. Second, and consequently, it is Son who changes his dress habits to those of his oppressor. Jadine, sometimes wearing a seal-skin coat, skintight jeans, or a Cheech and Chong T-shirt, never once clothes herself in the geleelike garb of the African masses. Third, and most important, Son is not equipped to change Jadine’s consciousness, for, despite his good intentions, his solution, his new and better society, his alternative to the capitalist way of life, is a return to Afri-

84

5: TAR BABY

can traditionalism as represented by Eloe.64 Not until Jadine leaves him, opting for cloisonne rather than Son, does he begin to realize the utopian nature of his solution: Out came the photos [Jadine] had taken in the middle of the road in Eloe. Beatrice, pretty Beatrice, Soldier’s daughter. She looked stupid. Ellen, sweet cookie-faced Ellen, the one he always thought so pretty. She looked stupid. They all looked stupid, backwoodsy, dumb, dead.65

Eloe is a backwoodsy community, largely illiterate and certainly economically underdeveloped. After experiencing the exploitive systems of slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, and domestic colonialism, and after being exposed to the ideologies associated with the teachings of Islam and Christianity, neither Son, Jadine, nor African people in general can return to this past, highly romanticized way of life. In the words of Aime´ Ce´ saire, ‘‘If the African . . . were merely to copy his past, failure would be the inevitable result.’’66 Instead of a return to woebegone days, Son and Jadine in particular and all African people in general must extract the positive from traditional Africa and modern capitalism with Africa as the center in order to forge a new society.67 Eloe, with all of its positive elements—humanism, collectivism, and egalitarianism—has its negative characteristics: it is a poor, underdeveloped, uneducated community.68 Unfortunately, when Son does realize the inadequacy of his solution, he does not try to replace it with a more realistic one. Instead, he willingly forsakes his role as revolutionary and chases Jadine to share hers as reactionary. In this respect, he resembles the blind horsemen who, so devastated by their transition from freedom to slavery, gave up on life by blinding themselves to their oppressive environment. Son’s association with these blind men is made from our first introduction to him. Gideon and The´ re`se have always referred to him as the rider or the horseman.69 Moreover, The´ re`se ‘‘had seen him in a dream smiling at her as he rode away wet and naked on a stallion.’’70 Once again, Toni Morrison creates an unsatisfactory ending, despite her new awareness that the primary cause of the plight of African people is capitalism and despite her knowledge that a return to a past way of life is impractical. Once again, her protagonist escapes reality, this time by blinding himself to the role he must play in liberating African people: ‘‘Looking neither to the left nor to the right. Lickety-split. Lickety-split. Lickety-lickety-lickety-split.’’71

5: TAR BABY

85

As with her previous novels, the structure of Tar Baby is dialectically related to the thematic development of her canon. It is testimony to Toni Morrison’s increased class consciousness. Certainly, it is not by accident that the narrative form in this work is more socialist in nature since in the work she reveals her awareness of the selfish individualism promoted by capitalism and its devastating effects on African people. So, just as Morrison searches thematically for a viable solution to the problem of having a system whereby a few people exploit the majority, she searches structurally for an artistic form, a system that will allow her characters to participate equally in the telling of the story. What is interesting is that while she ignores such a thematic solution, she embraces it structurally. There is not one single narrative voice in the novel but many, each belonging to a major character and each contributing to the universal truth of the work. And while there is an omniscient narrator, it serves merely as the glue to solidify the novel’s disparate narrative voices, a type of central committee that consolidates, but does not override, the decisions of its democratic body. Chapter 2 serves as a significant example of Morrison’s restricted use of the omniscient narrator. Intent on presenting an unbiased picture of the petty bourgeois mentality, Morrison has her narrator move systematically from the telling of Jadine’s story to Valerian’s and, finally, to Margaret’s. However, in its presentation, this allknowing narrator does little more than describe the actions of the characters (‘‘a young woman barely twenty-five years old is wideawake’’), state some obvious, undisputed fact (‘‘A house of sleeping humans is both closed and wide open’’), or relate a past event (Jadine’s confrontation with the woman in yellow). In Chapter 4 Morrison uses a different but just as successful method of limiting the role of the omniscient narrator. She employs a product of nature, emperor butterflies, as unifying principle. In allowing these butterflies to serve as thread, weaving together all the disparate narrative statements, Morrison, on the one hand, is able to shift her focus from the introduction of the chapter to Margaret Street’s need for love and security: So mulled the occupants of L’Arbe de la Croix that noon the day after a man with living hair stayed for dinner. Outwardly, everything looked the same. Only the emperor butterflies appeared excited about something. Such vigorous flapping in blazing heat was uncommon for them. They hovered near the bedroom windows but the shutters had remained

86

5: TAR BABY

closed all morning and none of them could see a thing. They knew, however, that the woman was in there. Her blue-if-it’s-a-boy blue eyes red-rimmed with longing for a trailer softened by columbine and for her Ma.72

In this instance, the utilization of the butterflies in addition to the voice of the omniscient narrator creates a text that is as unbiased as possible. For apparently it is the butterflies—just as much a part of nature as humankind—that peer in the windows of the major characters, not some supernatural, omnipotent creation of the author. Moreover, in employing them she creates a more objective work of art, for they force a chasm between the omniscient narrator and the characters, stripping the text of any unnatural interference between character and audience and conveying the impression that the readers are seeing, hearing, and understanding the characters for themselves, that is, participating in the world of the novel.73 Another structural example of Morrison’s heightened consciousness of the role of capitalism is her organization of the chapters in the novel. Although there are no words to signal divisions in the novel, Tar Baby is divided into two parts, both of which are dialectically related to Morrison’s most conscious protagonist, Son: BC (before the coming of a new consciousness, i.e., Son) and AD (after the death of the old consciousness). For certainly the Street household is a more conscious one after Son arrives. Ondine’s comment that things have changed since the coming of Son is indeed true. In fact, his presence turns the household topsy turvey, replacing myths with truths. All in all, it is quite significant that Morrison arranges her text around her most conscious, indeed Christ-like character, for it is Frank G. Green, alias Son, who is trusted most to be as naturally frank as possible. He is every African’s son—every African man, woman, and child—and as such his authenticity is assured.74 Perhaps the most important revelation of Toni Morrison’s increased class consciousness in regard to structure is her use of clear, concise literal diction throughout the text. In Tar Baby Morrison has discarded the intricate writing style that characterizes Song of Solomon, a style which reminds the reader of the writings of those African intellectuals who try to emulate the complexity of some of their European counterparts. The complex symbolism and the pervasive mysticism, impressive as they are, are refreshingly absent from his work. Her use of crisp and lucid language patterns to ren-

5: TAR BABY

87

der her tale reflects her determination to create a story that is readable for all audience levels, mass as well as petty bourgeois. As well, her style reveals that she has more of a commitment to discover a solution to the African’s plight than to impress her critics with her dexterity in using the English language. Structurally as well as thematically, Morrison reflects her heightened consciousness in Tar Baby. Unfortunately, this increased awareness is not sufficient to enable her to propose a viable solution for eradicating the plight of African people—a unified African people who control their own destiny, who see Africa at the core of their existence, who abide by the principles of humanism, collectivism, and egalitarianism, and who extract and utilize only those positive elements from traditional African culture as well as other cultures. Fortunately, with Beloved, it seems as if Morrison has digested the ideas posited in Tar Baby because for the first time, she proposes the fundamental part of a solution to the African’s nationclass oppression: African solidarity.

6 Beloved: Solidarity as Solution ONE PEOPLE, ONE STRUGGLE ONE SOLUTION—THIS IS THE THEME OF Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved. In her four earlier works— The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Tar Baby—Morrison demonstrates a keen awareness of, concern for, and dedication to African people. Like a scientist, she uses each work as a laboratory in which to research a hypothesis as to the nature of the oppression experienced by African people and to posit a solution to it. Starting with the issue of race as our most visible form of oppression (The Bluest Eye), next demonstrating that a person alone is only half a person (Sula), adding the problem of class exploitation to that of race (Song of Solomon), and then refining that idea in recognition of capitalism/imperialism as the primary target against which we must struggle (Tar Baby), Toni Morrison uses Beloved as a vehicle in which to propose solidarity as the only viable solution possible for African people. The ambivalent, uncommittal endings of the first four novels and the clear, confident ending of Beloved can be used as examples to gauge the author’s own developing consciousness in regard to both the nature of the African’s oppression and the solution.1 The Bluest Eye ends with the demise of the main character: Pecola Breedlove becomes a mentally unstable twelve-year-old who has miscarried her sibling and her child. Sula, twelve years old when Morrison’s second novel begins and thirty years old when she dies, prefers selfish individualism, which brings death, over individuality with social responsibility, which brings life. In Song of Solomon Milkman, having gained consciousness about himself and his people, flies away instead of passing on this political consciousness. In Tar Baby, a conscious, socialist-oriented Son tries unsuccessfully to politically educate the selfish, capitalist-oriented Jadine. His failure to 88

6: BELOVED: SOLIDARITY AS SOLUTION

89

do so is in part due to his own seduction by the capitalist way of life. Ultimately, he runs off to the briar patch as did the blind horsemen and as do the burnt-out revolutionaries. While each of these novels concentrates on a different but related factor in the exploitation and oppression of African people, all are symbiotically related. In fact, each serves as a stepping stone that enables Morrison to move to the next level of discovery. For example, in Morrison’s novels each character is a development of the preceding one: The twelve-year old Pecola becomes the twelve-year old Sula; the thirty-year old Sula becomes the thirty-one year old Milkman; the conscious Milkman who flies away unburdened by the material objects of the capitalist world (i.e., the heavy tail of the peacock) becomes the Son who unemcumbered and single-handedly tries to politically educate the people of L’Arbre de la Croix; the unsuccessful Son becomes the Paul D who defies defeat by returning again and again to struggle for his people. Significantly, Paul D is part of a struggling collective. But while these novels are developmental, pursuing the answer to one question in building-block fashion, there are observable qualitative differences. Just as Song of Solomon, in theme and in structure, represents a dialectical change, indeed a categorical conversion, in Toni Morrison’s consciousness of herself as a part of the oppressed nation of African people, Beloved marks another leap in Morrison’s consciousness. It is her goal in this work to demonstrate to her reader (always an African audience) that collectivism is only the first step in eradicating the national oppression and class exploitation of African people. Although never primary until this work, the intrinsic value of collectivism to the African community has always been a part of the Morrisonian canon. The use of bird and flight symbolism in most of her novels reveals the author’s belief in that value. In Sula Morrison chooses robins—birds of harmony and unity—to portend the protagonist’s return to the Bottom and her effect on that community. In Song of Solomon, the peacock represents unity, containing all of the colors of the world, as it does worldly goods. Just as crucial, the suicidal or homicidal nature of those Africans who divorce themselves from other Africans has also been a recurring theme.2 Such characters as Geraldine and Soaphead Church in The Bluest Eye, Sula, Macon Dead, Jr., and the unconscious Milkman of Song of Solomon, Sydney, Ondine, and Jadine of Tar Baby—all demonstrate some unnatural, suicidal, or perverted char-

90


acteristics that are often illegal and always genocidal for the African community. In an interview with Thomas LeClair, Morrison uses such terms as village and tribe to make clear her belief in an organic, Pan-African view of the race: I write what I have recently begun to call village literature, fiction that is really for the village, for the tribe. Peasant literature for my people, which is necessary and legitimate. . . . My work bears witness and suggests who the outlaws were, who survived under what circumstances and why, what was legal in the community as opposed to what was legal outside it. . . . My people are being devoured.3

To show them the historical truth that collective struggle is the only practical solution for African people, Morrison writes a historical novel, one that explores the most oppressed period in the history of African people: slavery. By doing so, she demonstrates her clear understanding that conditions that existed then are not significantly different from those which confront African people today. That is, because Africans are faced with circumstances equally oppressive or genocidal as those in slavery, Toni Morrison shows them the life-saving benefits of uniting as one to confront a common enemy, the same enemy they struggled against more than one hundred years ago: an embryo form of capitalism. Certainly she has come to understand that ‘‘capitalism is but the gentleman’s form of slavery.’’4 Stated differently, the message conveyed in Beloved is as follows: No longer should African people be physically intimidated by Europeans as in The Bluest Eye; no longer should African people indulge in the selfish individualism of Sula; no longer should African people ignore their duty to pass on the knowledge of their history as in Song of Solomon; and no longer should African people attempt to wage struggle alone and, thus, unsuccessfully as in Tar Baby. Solidarity, the theme of Beloved, is the solution for African people. As in previous works, Morrison’s thematic astuteness is reflected in her narrative structure. In Beloved, on the one hand, she creates a text unencumbered by symbols indicating divisions and defiant of the linear tradition of the Western world in order to create in form what she does in substance: the qualitatively unchanged status of African people. On the other hand, she creates such a text in order to point to our solution: collectivism. To crystallize the dire necessity of collective action to the sur-


91

vival of African people, Morrison juxtaposes isolated struggle with collective struggle and selfish individualism with individualism conditioned by social responsibility. In Beloved, most forms of isolation are genocidal for the race. Denver’s isolation in life, 124’s isolation in the community, and Beloved’s isolation in death all serve to further divide the African community and, as a consequence, leave it vulnerable to the exploitation and oppression of the slave society. For instance, when Baby Suggs labors alone to feed the community, she insults it: Too much, they thought. Where does she get it all, Baby Suggs, holy? . . . and loving everybody like it was her job and hers alone. . . . Loaves of bread and fishes were His powers.5

Since it is usually best for all, that individual needs and desires be conditioned by those of the collective, Baby Suggs’s self-oriented behavior is tantamount to heresy. Indeed, the repercussions of this God-like action—this attempt to do alone that which should be done together—is felt for two generations. For the community, in spite, refuses to warn Baby Suggs that slave trappers are approaching, setting in motion the conditions under which Sethe murders Beloved: The good news . . . was that Halle got married and had a baby coming. [Baby Suggs] fixed on that and her own brand of preaching, having made up her mind about what to do with the heart that started beating the minute she crossed the Ohio River. And it worked out, worked out just fine, until she got proud and let herself be overwhelmed by the sight of her daughter-in-law and Halle’s children—one of whom was born on the way—and have a celebration of blackberries that put Christmas to shame. Now she stood in the garden smelling disapproval, feeling a dark and coming thing, and seeing high-topped shoes that she didn’t like the look of at all. At all.6

Interestingly enough, Beloved becomes the symbol by which African people are to measure the devastating effect of isolation—selfimposed or forced. Isolation literally tears apart the family—the nuclear, the extended, and the nation. The personification of isolation and all things inherent in it, including selfish individualism, greed, and destruction, Beloved succeeds in dividing 124 from the rest of the African community. It is she who drives Howard and Burglar from home—‘‘as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it

92


(that was the signal for Burglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard).’’7 It is she who separates Paul D, Sethe, and Denver just when their three shadows were holding hands and just when they were erecting bonds with the African community: Paul D made a few acquaintances; spoke to them about what work he might find. Sethe returned the smiles she got. Denver was swaying with delight. And on the way home, although leading them now, the shadows of three people still held hands.8

Not until the cause of the separation is clarified, is out in the open, struggled with and struggled against, can African people come together again. Beloved must materialize into a visible, tangible entity of which the community is aware, instead of an amorphous apparition, an oppression of which the community is unconscious. Paul D gives this apparition substance; he is the Son who does not give up but returns to struggle again and again, the Malcolm who teaches his people the value of struggle.9 His presence sets in motion the necessary purgative confrontation between Sethe, Beloved, and the Cincinnati African community. Significantly, when he comes, ‘‘Things became what they were,’’ not what Sethe and the African community imagined.10 Once the enemy is identified, once it is out in the open, the community struggles collectively against that which divides them. And it is only through the collective will and action of the people that Beloved, the enemy, dies: ‘‘Unloaded, 124 is just another weathered house needing repair.’’11 By and by, all trace of Beloved is gone. She is not even remembered by those ‘‘who had spoken to her, lived with her, fallen in love with her.’’12 Thus, the stress on shared relationships, community, and race responsibility—the traditional African principle of collectivism—is the dominant theme of the novel. In Beloved life is hell, but togetherness, shared experience, and brotherly/sisterly love help the characters to survive, if not to forge better lives for themselves. This emphasis on social responsibility, the unselfish devotion of Africans helping other Africans, makes Beloved Toni Morrison’s most conscious novel to date. Stamp Paid, Baby Suggs, and Hi Man are examples of Africans who have struggled to internalize the principle of collectivism and who—through their theory and practice—struggle to set the example for other Africans to follow. Deciding that he and other slaves


93

had paid more than enough already for whatever had come in life and whatever was to come, Stamp Paid extends a debtlessness to other Africans ‘‘by helping them pay out and off whatever they owed in misery. Beaten runaways? He ferried them and rendered them paid for; gave them their bill of sale, so to speak.’’13 For this unselfish dedication to his people, he is welcomed in the houses of Africans throughout the community. Always. Although Baby Suggs ‘‘forgets’’ the necessity of collective responsibility in celebrating her daughter-in-law’s safe arrival out of slavery, her actions overall are characterized by a selflessness. Bought out of slavery by her son Halle, she becomes an unchurched preacher, dedicating her life to loving African people and encouraging them to love themselves: Here in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them. . . . You got to love it, you!14

Baby Suggs’s sermons in the clearing are political education sessions in which she clarifies the roles of oppressor and oppressed. The oppressor has no love for the oppressed; the oppressed must love themselves and one another. In the spirit of the flying African of the Virginia Hamilton myth, Hi Man takes the responsibility for the collective.15 One more experienced with the hardships of slave existence, he teaches other Africans that ‘‘a man could risk his own life, but not his brother’s.’’ And, most important, he teaches that all must be freed from oppression or none, ‘‘one lost, all lost.’’ This lesson is begun in Song of Solomon, learned in Tar Baby, and acted out in Beloved. Focusing on the postslavery convict lease system, Morrison uses the chain as a literal symbol of the spiritual link (i.e., the faith and trust) necessary between African people: ‘‘They trusted the rain and the dark, yes, but mostly Hi Man and each other.’’16 This kind of bond between African people is not found in any other work by Morrison. It is the kind of bond that she hopes will once again exist between African people.

94


Crucial in her exploration of the collective solution to the African’s oppression is the slave setting, for it serves to enhance the theme of Beloved by pointing up the dialectical relationship between problem and solution: that the solution to the problem arises from the condition (or conditions) that creates it. Simultaneously, Morrison’s setting had to be one in which the strategy for solving the problem was not only clearly evident but also inevitable. For she understands that the solution then is the solution now.17 The most skilled method of unveiling this truth is by choosing a historical period in which the African’s primary enemy, the slave system (i.e., an early form of capitalism), is unobscured by its secondary and consequential effects: race and gender oppression. In Beloved, gender oppression is not a visible problem that exists between African men and women, but it is one that exists within the context of the economic relationship between master and slave, and race is only a later justification for the oppression of African people.18 Clearly, then, Morrison’s choice of setting is germane in crystallizing the nature of the African’s oppression, for the economic source of both race and gender oppression is unobscured in slavery. Refreshingly, the relationship between African men and women is generally positive. Paul D is the Son who returns to the struggle, wiser and more committed. In regard to women, he is characterized as a man who has never mistreated a woman in his life and as a man who is grateful to women for his life.19 He is described as Christlike on occasion, at least in his manner toward women: ‘‘There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep—to tell him that their chest hurt and their knees did too.’’20 Not long after he sees Sethe for the first time in many years, ‘‘He rubbed his cheek on her back and learned that way her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches.’’21 It is his presence at 124 Bluestone that forces the necessary purgative confrontation between Sethe, the community, and Beloved. When he becomes a part of the household, ‘‘Things became what they were.’’22 He is, in fact, the only major male protagonist in the Morrisonian canon thus far who has a positive relationship with a female and, furthermore, who struggles with a female to forge this positive relationship.23 He believes that ‘‘only this woman Sethe could have left him his manhood like that. He wants to put his story next to hers.’’24 It is a mark of Toni Morrison’s heightened consciousness that she depicts the life that Paul D struggles to build with Sethe as one based on a common history and a common struggle that both shared


95

on Sweet Home. It is not based on sex, such as the Milkman-Sweet affair of Song of Solomon, nor based on physical appearance, such as the Son-Jadine affair of Tar Baby. Unlike Copper Venus, Sethe is the woman in yellow, an African woman, chokeberry tree and all. She is satisfied with the real happiness love brings, not with the artificial contentment bought by status and wealth: Perhaps it was the smile, or maybe the ever-ready love she saw in his eyes—easy and upfront, the way colts, evangelists and children look at you: with love you don’t have to deserve—that made her go ahead and tell him what she had not told Baby Suggs, the only person she felt obliged to explain anything to.25

Together, Paul D and Sethe must struggle to forge a positive life under the most oppressing conditions. And, of course, since the novel is to serve as a lesson for Morrison’s people, the same struggle must be waged between African men and women today.26 Like gender oppression, race oppression is examined as a consequence of the economic exploitation of African people. The thesis of Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery is threefold: that the economic demands of the budding capitalist nations led to the slave trade and slavery; that the African was enslaved primarily as a consequence of this demand (i.e., because he was a good agricultural worker, not because he was an African); and that out of the need to justify the enslavement of human beings, these nations institutionalized racism. According to him, ‘‘Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.’’27 Toni Morrison seems in agreement with Williams’s thesis, for Beloved—while revealing that today African people are oppressed equally because of the color of their skin and their poverty—clearly proves that race was a later justification for the enslavement of African people. To accomplish her goal of clarifying the dialectical relationship between race oppression and class exploitation, Morrison—as do Williams and others—documents history by showing that the European and the Native American Indian were enslaved before the African.28 The European slave (indentured servant) is represented by Miss Amy Denver of Boston. According to Denver, ‘‘My mama worked for these here people to pay for her passage. But then she had me and since she died right after, well, they said I had to work for em to pay it off.’’29 The parallels between her experiences and those of Africans are similar. Her mother is dead and her father,

96


unknown—perhaps the slavemaster. She shared the same work experience and punishment as those of Africans: ‘‘I used to be a good size. Nice arms and everything. Wouldn’t think it, would you? That was before they put me in the root cellar.’’30 She too is denied education, making her English vernacular almost indistinguishable from that of the African slave: ‘‘Be so pretty on me’’ and ‘‘Mr. Buddy whipped my tail.’’ Of course, the significant difference between the two is skin color. Amy can and does run away from the slave plantation to blend in with other Europeans in Boston. Thus, while a runaway slave herself, it is quite significant that Amy is capable of saying: ‘‘[I] wouldn’t be caught dead in daylight with an African runaway.’’31 This difference in skin color, according to both the economic historian Eric Williams and the historic novelist Toni Morrison, was for the early capitalists an overwhelming economic motivation for securing a non-European slave population. The Native American Indian was a better alternative for that reason. However, as Morrison documents, the Indians soon proved disadvantageous as well. Weakened by labor exploitation and the European’s diseases, millions of Indians sickened and died. The genocidal effects of slavery on the Indian is clearly documented in the following passage from Beloved: In between that calamity and this, they had visited George III in London, published a newspaper, made baskets, led Oglethorpe through forests, helped Andrew Jackson fight Creek, cooked maize, drawn up a constitution, petitioned the King of Spain, been experimented on by Dartmouth, established asylums, wrote their language, resisted settlers . . . All to no avail. The forced move to the Arkansas river, insisted upon by the same president they fought for against the Creek, destroyed another quarter of their already shattered number. . . . The disease they suffered now was a mere inconvenience compared to the devastation they remembered.32

Also clearly documented is the bond forged between the African and the Indian based on their common oppression. Accurately, Morrison shows the Indian’s willingness to make a home for runaway African slaves, allowing them to become a part of the tribe or to leave as they pleased: Buffalo men, they [the Indians] called them [the runaway slaves] . . . Nobody from a box in Alfred, Georgia, cared about the illness the Cherokee warned them about, so they stayed, all forty-six, resting, planning


97

their next move. Paul D had no idea of what to do and knew less than anybody it seemed. He heard his co-convicts talk knowledgeably of rivers and states, towns and territories. Heard Cherokee men describe the beginning of the world and its end. Listened to tales of other Buffalo men they knew—three of whom were in the healthy camp a few miles away. Hi Man wanted to join them; others wanted to join him. Some wanted to leave; some to stay on.33

The primary enemy of all three groups—the exploited European indentured servant, the Native American Indian, and the African— was and is capitalism. First the theft of raw materials for developing industrial countries and then the theft of a labor force to work within these countries gave birth to notions of inferiority and superiority that would lead to race and gender oppression. According to Walter Rodney, The simple fact is that no people can enslave another for centuries without coming out with a notion of superiority, and when the colour and other physical traits of those peoples were quite different it was inevitable that the prejudice should take a racist form.34

Of course, Morrison is most interested in documenting the history of the African in slavery. And in so doing she is at her best. Slavery, and its aftermath, come to life for the reader. First, all the history that the reader has learned about slavery is sketched out on a giant canvas: the separation of women and children from men; the treatment of slaves—both male and female, children and adults—as beasts of burden; the sexual exploitation of African women by European men. Like horses, Paul D and others like him are hitched to wagons with ‘‘bits’’ in their mouths. Like a cow, Sethe is milked by her slavemasters. Women, children, and men are whipped mercilessly. Stamp Paid’s wife and Ella become the sexual playthings of the slavemaster. Perhaps the most vicious and cruel of all these acts was the dispersal of the race: The last of her [Baby Suggs’s] children . . . she had barely glanced at when he was born because it wasn’t worth the trouble to learn features you would never see change into adulthood anyway. Seven times she had done that: held a little foot, examined the fat fingertips with her own—fingers she never saw become the male or female hands a mother would recognize anywhere.35

98


And perhaps more important than her skillful way of bringing to life the facts about slavery is Morrison’s adeptness at correcting myths about slavery, the foremost of which is that slave life for some was good. Slavery was slavery, on Sweet Home as well as any other plantation. Baby Suggs testifies to this truism when Mr. Garner takes her to the European abolitionists, the Bodwins, after she is bought out of slavery by her son Halle. Mr. Garner’s attempts to distinguish himself from the collective of slaveholders is regarded as a hypocritical distinction: ‘‘Tell em, Jenny [Baby Suggs]. You live any better on any place before mine?’’ ‘‘No, sir,’’ she said. ‘‘No place. . . .’’ ‘‘Ever go hungry?’’ ‘‘No, sir. . . .’’ ‘‘Did I let Halle buy you or not?’’ ‘‘Yes, sir, you did,’’ she said, thinking, But you got my boy and I’m all broke down. You be renting him out to pay for me way after I’m gone to Glory.36

Not only were conditions in slavery qualitatively indistinguishable no matter whether you had a ‘‘good’’ master or a ‘‘bad’’ master, but also, in or out of slavery, Baby Suggs reveals that life for her has been one continuous cycle of oppression: ‘‘Her past had been like her present—intolerable.’’37 For a ‘‘free’’ African living in a slave society, life is not qualitatively different either. In fact, it is to Morrison’s credit that she wants the reader to make no such distinction between slavery, its aftermath, and now. In the 1870s there were ‘‘whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eightyseven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken.’’38 One hundred years later, in the 1970s when Tar Baby was written, The old people were in kennels and childhood was underground. But why were all the black girls crying on buses, in Red Apple lines, at traffic lights and behind the counters of Chemical Bank. Crying from a grief so stark, you would have thought they’d been condemned to death by starvation. . . . It depressed him, all that crying, for it was silent and veiled by plum lipstick and the thin gray lines over their eyes. Who did this to you? Who has done this thing to you? . . . The street was choked with beautiful males who had found the whole business of being black


99

and men at the same time too difficult and so they’d dumped it. They had snipped off their testicles and pasted them to their chests.39

With the qualitatively unchanged status of the African, Paul D’s cry of desperation and frustration echoes into the present: ‘‘How much is a nigger supposed to take? Tell me. How much?’’40 Although Stamp Paid’s answer of ‘‘all he can’’ seems pitifully weak in light of the devastating conditions that threaten the survival of a nation of people, it is strengthened by the solution presented in this novel: solidarity. That is, Morrison demonstrates that the African’s plight is less harsh and potentially extirpated if it is seen as a collective struggle: ‘‘Days of company: knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits; where they had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, . . . at 124 and in the Clearing, along with the others, she [Sethe] had claimed herself.’’41 Unity: this is the only way African people can survive. It is only when the African, through self or forced isolation, exists outside of the collective that the struggle appears endless and the burden, unbearable. When Baby Suggs (in trying to do all the work of providing for the community by herself) and Sethe (in ‘‘trying to do it all alone with her nose in the air’’) and Africans in general are ‘‘resigned to life without aunts, cousins, children’’—these are the times when the African’s plight is intolerable.42 Structurally, Morrison matches form with substance. On the one hand, the novel’s inscription, ‘‘Sixty Million and more,’’ at once sets up the conditions with which the reader should analyze the story. Since the emphasis is on the theft of a sizable portion of a nation of people, the reader is prevented from separating one African from another. African people are to be seen as a collective. On the other hand, we are introduced to unmarked chapters throughout a Morrison novel for the first time. The absence of passages, dates, and numbers reflects a negation of time in regard to African people. Moreover, the consistent use of all capital letters for the first few words of each chapter contributes to this sense of timelessness and this feeling of running (i.e., reading) in place. Such a timelessness exists because the conditions under which African people live have remained qualitatively unchanged, reflecting a continual cycle of oppression. Morrison reinforces her theme of one people, one struggle, one solution in several ways. First, she begins each chapter in the nov-

100


el’s present, then returns to the past in order to bridge the gap between occurrences of the past and those of the present. The chapter beginning on page 114 is an excellent case in point. This chapter details Beloved’s systematic efforts to move Paul D out of 124 and out of Sethe’s life. It begins with the words ‘‘SHE MOVED HIM’’ and then shifts to the past to cite the methods Beloved uses to do so. Second, the beginnings, since they are often structured as subordinate phrases or clauses, seem more like middles, once again emphasizing the fact that oppression for the African exists as one uninterrupted continuum: ‘‘TO GO BACK to the original hunger was impossible.’’43 Thus, anywhere along the African’s life cycle— the beginning, the middle, the end—conditions are relatively unchanged. The overall message conveyed is that African people end up where they began. Another skillful structural device that Morrison uses to reflect the unchanging status of African people is the repetition of key words, phrases, or sentences. Sometimes whole chapters take up where the preceding ones left off. On page 209, the chapter ends with the lines: ‘‘She’s mine, Beloved. She’s mine.’’ The next chapter, which begins on page 210, uses a similar sentence construction and utilizes three of the same words: ‘‘I AM BELOVED and she is mine.’’ Pronouns too are used to begin chapters and have the same thematic and structural effect. For instance, by beginning one chapter on page 115 with the pronoun she, Morrison creates a textual continuum that has relevance to the uninterrupted oppression of African people.44 Arguably, there are other germane reasons for Morrison’s creation of unmarked chapters in this work. One example is that they reflect the lack of substantive differences between African people. Not only are Africans worldwide one people having the same history and sharing the same plight (the slave setting is a constant reminder of this shared history and plight), but also because they are a powerless people, they are seen as one (‘‘All niggers look alike’’) by those outside the African nation, no matter what their class status might be. Significantly, after a novel in which she has explored the class question as it relates to African people—Tar Baby— Morrison writes one in which class distinctions do not exist. Clearly, she wants African people to see themselves as one people, undivided by their class status. Also, unmarked chapters reinforce the theme of Beloved by constantly reminding the reader that collective struggle then and now


101

is the only practical way to alleviate the oppression African people experience. Since the people are one, the history is the same, and the plight remains unchanged, clearly the solution is the same. Other structural devices that bring cohesion to the text and, as a consequence, reflect the oneness that exists among African people, are Morrison’s habit of unfolding bits of information about someone or something she has already mentioned and her use of repetition within and between chapters. Before we understand the significance of Amy Denver’s life-saving role or even her name, we are introduced to her by the following dependent clause: ‘‘And if it hadn’t been for that girl looking for velvet.’’45 And before we understand to what Paul D is referring, we know his opinion of it: ‘‘Maybe shaped like one, but nothing like any tree he knew because trees were inviting.’’46 Within chapters, Morrison uses repetition to achieve structural coherence as well as to reflect, thematically, the African’s unchanging reality. The refrain, ‘‘It went on that way and might have stayed that way,’’47 helps the reader to perceive the information before and after as elements of one continuum. Moreover, the rhythm of the line, when read aloud, creates a monotone, an unchanging sound that matches an unchanging condition. Finally, unmarked chapters reflect Morrison’s desire to recognize and to embrace a part of African heritage. From the traditional African perspective, time is cyclic, not linear as in Western culture. The past, present, and future merge into one continuum, allowing African people to move forward and backward in time as they please and allowing their ‘‘dead’’ ancestors to remain among them as guiding forces. Both elements of African time are relevant to the theme of Beloved: There is no significant difference between the African’s past, present, and future, and African people cannot afford to lose forever one more of their own (e.g., Beloved, although dead, is still a part of the Sethe household). Overall, such skillful techniques as unmarked chapters and refrains unify the narrative structure of Beloved. They signify the unity among African people that is plausible and necessary in order to effect a real change. And just as Morrison is adept at reflecting the unity so needed in the African world, so is she skillful in mirroring the disunity that presently exists. The Beloved chapters serve as a case in point. As thematically Beloved represents isolation, chaos, and disunity in the novel, so structurally the sections in the novel that describe

102


and characterize her thoughts are symbolic of isolation, chaos, and disunity. Her words are out of order, or important words are omitted altogether (‘‘Tell me your earrings’’), and her names for things are incorrect (‘‘Your woman [i.e., Sethe] she never fix up your hair?’’).48 Words are not capitalized and whole passages are left unpunctuated. Furthermore, when Beloved becomes the dominant force at 124 Bluestone, communication takes on the unnatural form of poetry. The use of poetry as a narrative device simulates the unnatural state of affairs that exists at 124: Beloved You are my sister You are my daughter You are my face; you are me I have found you again, you have come back to me You are my Beloved You are mine You are mine You are mine49

Moreover, in an effort to rid the community of the presence of Beloved and any thoughts of her, Morrison repeats three times the line, ‘‘It was not a story to pass on,’’ a structural technique used to complete or end a thematic concern—Beloved.50 After five novels, Toni Morrison comes to terms with both the dilemma confronting African people and a part of the solution that must be embraced by them. The novels make clear the facts that African people suffer from a crisis of the African personality, stemming from our nation-class oppression, that our primary enemy is capitalism in all of its forms and disguises, and that the solution to this crisis lies in collective, not individual, struggle against this enemy. Furthermore, Morrison crystallizes the strategy—political education through communication—which ushers in the solution: collective struggle. For it is the lack of communication that causes the major disasters in the novel: the African community does not warn Baby Suggs and Sethe of the slave trappers’ approach (‘‘Not Ella, not John, not anybody ran down or to Bluestone road, to say some new whitefolks with the Look just rode in’’);51 Sethe does not tell Denver the reason for her murder of Beloved (‘‘All the time, I’m afraid the thing that happened that made it all right for my [Denver’s] mother to kill my sister could happen again’’);52 and nei-


103

ther does Sethe ask the community for help once she is released from jail (‘‘She returned their disapproval with the potent pride of the mistreated’’).53 Communication—the sharing of ideas through the Word—creates the unity in the novel: the songs, gestures, and signs of slaves, the word from Hi Man as well as Baby Suggs’s speaking of the Word. It is as if Morrison is advising African people to speak the Word of their common history, their common plight, their common struggle, their common destiny. And she matches her theory with practice because it is through her Word that Africans become a more conscious people. So with the words of Stamp Paid all African people say to her: ‘‘Listen here, girl, you can’t quit the Word. It’s given to you to speak. You can’t quit the Word.’’54 A luta continua. The struggle continues.

7 Women Who Run with Wild: The Need for Sisterhoods in Jazz TONI MORRISON HAS ALWAYS BEEN A JAZZ MUSICIAN, NOT ONLY BEcause she signifies, assimilates, and advances the themes and structures of great African works, but also and primarily because she signifies, assimilates, and advances the themes and structures of her own canon.1 Because Morrison is concerned with and committed to African people, she uses each of her novels as a framework for investigating various solutions to the African’s class exploitation and race and gender oppression.2 This thematic investigation is always enhanced by narrative structure. Theme and structure work together as theory and practice in an effort to highlight, and pose solutions to, the problems African people confront. Jazz continues the tradition of signifying, assimilating, and advancing theme and structure. In her latest novel, structure does not just enhance theme, it is theme. Just as in jazz, the story and the telling of the story are one, so in Jazz, theme and structure blend together to suggest the unity that must exist among African people. The reader is first made aware of this melting process in the inscription: I am the name of the sound and the sound of the name. I am the sign of the letter and the designation of the division.

Nothing is separate and distinct; everything is everything; all is one. Theme is structure; structure is theme. Just in case the message isn’t clear in the inscription, Morrison gives us another clue in the first ‘‘word’’ of her text: Sth. This ‘‘word’’ (sound), like buzz, is both the name of the sound and the sound of the name. And what better way to get this message across than jazz, a music form in which songster, song, and song telling are one. In jazz, the way of playing is 104

7: WOMEN WHO RUN WITH WILD

105

just as important as what is played. Signifying on some melody and then improvising on it is key. George Gershwin’s ‘‘Rhapsody in Blue’’ is one thing, but Duke Ellington’s is quite another! Like the great Charlie ‘‘Bird’’ Parker, Toni Morrison assimilates the best of African literature and moves the tradition forward by bursting its seams. Indeed, James Lincoln Collier’s description of a great jazz musician certainly is apropos to Morrison: Of course, the great musician brings to his improvising more than the right notes and a feeling for jazz rhythms. He brings a personal quality, his own style, to his music that makes him instantly indentifiable [sic] to the knowledgeable listener. Any jazz player or fan will recognize immediately, from just a few notes, the playing of Louis Armstrong or Charlie Parker. These great musicians have qualities which set them apart. Not only are their tones unique; they also bring startling ideas, brilliant musical inventions which avoid the obvious, and a dramatic flow which ties a whole solo together, making it a unit rather than a series of unrelated musical ideas. The truly great jazz musician is great for the same reasons that a great writer or painter is great: he can make a unified whole out of fascinating parts which join in surprising ways. And we can only explain how he does it by saying that he is a genius. (Inside Jazz, 31)

In Jazz Morrison’s genius lies in melting the seams between theme and structure. In fact, the theme, ‘‘we are all connected as African people,’’ is at times difficult to separate from the narrative structure. The most significant example of this is Morrison’s creation of the narrator, a hybrid creature who is half character, half omniscient narrator. Henry Louis Gates Jr. describes this type of narrative format as a ‘‘double-voiced narrative mode’’ (Signifying Monkey, xxvxxvi). Just as with jazz the storyteller is not distinct from the story he is telling, so in Jazz the storyteller (the narrator) is not distinct from the story she is telling. The narrator affects, and is affected by, the story she tells. Yet while the separation of theme from structure is a more difficult task in this work than in any other Morrison novel, it is nevertheless useful to do so in an effort to illustrate how Morrison takes a current problem facing African people, relates it to a problem African people confronted in the 1920’s, and shows that the solution then and now remains the same. Morrison’s solution of unity is not new. In fact, the idea that African people are one people, bound by history, culture, and current oppression, pervades all her works. In Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar

106


Baby, and Beloved, the individual who selfishly violates the collective in some way either reaps some kind of disaster or learns from his/her mistake. The price Sula pays for such a violation is death; Milkman and Baby Suggs learn to respect the collective. While the unification of all African people is not new to Jazz, the thematic emphasis on the unity of women as a solution to gender oppression is new. In Jazz, women of the 1920s, like many African women today, are wild because of the conditions in which they live. Wild, in Jazz, signifies defiance, rebelliousness, aggressiveness, and silence—all caused by class exploitation and race and/or gender oppression. Because conditions throughout the U.S., indeed the world, in the 1920s are so oppressive for African people, there are traces of Wild in everything and everyone. Jazz itself is wild. It is ‘‘the dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shameless or apart and wild‘‘ (58).3 Harlem, the City, is wild as well. It is a place where people think they can do what they want and get away with it. I see them all over the place: wealthy whites, and plain ones too, pile into mansions decorated and redecorated by black women richer than they are, and both are pleased with the spectacle of the other. I’ve seen the eyes of black Jews, brimful of pity for everyone not themselves, graze the food stalls and the ankles of loose women, while a breeze stirs the white plumes on the helmets of the UNIA men. (8)

Harlem, ‘‘Nigger Heaven,’’ as Rudolph Fisher’s King Solomon Gillis calls it, was the beacon of light for Africans all over the U.S. and the rest of the world. It promised relief from lynching, unemployment, rape, slave labor—freedom from oppression, but for many the legacy of oppression continued, creating a wildness in the people that was perhaps uglier than that in the South because it was more subtle. It is the Wild in African women which is especially alarming since they are the cultivators and nurturers of the family unit. It is their story that Morrison is most anxious to present because it is only they who experience the triple oppression of class, race, and gender. These wild traces may be submerged, but under the right (i.e., wrong) conditions, they will emerge. One is wild in the city as she is in the country. Wild is the wildest of all.4 And, of course, her child, Joe Trace, is impacted upon as a result, causing him to search most of his life for Wild, or someone like Wild. Golden Gray de-


107

scribes her as ‘‘a naked berry-black woman’’ with large eyes, deer eyes (144, 153). And he thinks ‘‘everything about her is violent’’ (153). Of course, Gray is wrong. Untamed maybe, since she bites the Hunter’s Hunter, runs around naked, and lives in the woods with four or more blue-black birds with red on their wings to mark her. But not violent. What marks Joe for life is his mother’s rejection of him. Not nursed or nurtured at all, Joe has to settle for bits and pieces of his mother: ‘‘He and Hunter and Victory had seen traces of her in those woods: ruined honeycombs, the bits and leavings of stolen victuals‘‘ (177). Or scraps: ‘‘The scrap of song came from a woman’s throat, and Joe thrashed and beat his way up the incline and through the hedge’’ (177). These traces of his mother haunt him for the rest of his life, causing him to act wild at times; indeed, Joe is marked by traces of Wild from the beginning since any fascination could mark a newborn: melons, rabbits, wisteria, rope, and, more than a shed snakeskin, a wild woman is the worst of all. So the warnings the girls got were part of a whole group of things to look out for lest the baby come here craving or favoring the mother’s distraction. (165)

Not only does Joe settle for the traces of Wild (thus the name ‘‘Joe Trace’’), but also, being marked, he craves the attention of wild young girls like his mother. Both Violet and Dorcas have traces of Wild in them. The reader is given little information to rationalize Wild’s wildness. But since there are traces of Wild in all the women characters, i.e., there is a common bond among women of African descent— they all experience a triple oppression, the reader can infer that similar conditions that cause other women to become wild also caused Wild to become wild. Intimations of those conditions are revealed through the thoughts of Alice Manfred. Women, according to her, were either armed or unarmed. The fact that they are one or the other reflects the nature of U.S. society in the 1920s. All African people were in danger of exploitive conditions caused by the changing U.S. economy, an economy that moved rapidly from slavocracy to industrialism, and the racism that this economy spawned. The results were the worst race riots in the history of the U.S., riots which kill Dorcas’ parents and drive her wild, riots which help to create a new music form—wild in theme and form: Alice thought the low down music (and in Illinois it was worse than here) had something to do with the silent black men marching down

108


Fifth Avenue to advertise their anger over two hundred dead in East St. Louis, two of whom were her sister and brother-in-law, killed in the riots. So many whites killed the papers would not print the number. Some said the rioters were disgruntled veterans who had fought in all-colored units, were refused the services of the YMCA, over there and over here, and came home to white violence more intense than when they enlisted . . . Others said they were whites terrified by the wave of southern Negroes flooding the towns, searching for work and places to live. A few thought about it and said how perfect was the control of workers, none of whom (like crabs in a barrel requiring no lid, no stick, not even a monitoring observation) would get out of the barrel. (56–57)

If conditions for all African people were barbaric, wild even, then conditions for women were downright warlike. Unlike African men, African women were also in danger from the sexism that, like racism, is spawned by capitalism. So Alice Manfred (conditions have made her afraid of men; thus, Manfred) instructs Dorcas to hide her womanliness: Taught her how to crawl along the walls of buildings, disappear into doorways, cut across corners in choked traffic—how to do anything, move anywhere to avoid a whiteboy over the age of eleven. Much of this she could effect with her dress, but as the girl grew older, more elaborate specifications had to be put in place. High-heeled shoes with the graceful straps across the arch, the vampy hats closed on the head with saucy brims framing the face, makeup of any kind—all that was outlawed in Alice Manfred’s house. (55)

Conditions for African women were no better in the South than in the North. In fact, the number one reason parents gave for sending their daughters north was fear of molestation.5 Wild, a young woman in the South, is impregnated by someone. Or perhaps a young African woman is impregnated by someone and is made Wild. Northern cities, and Harlem is the City of all the cities (young, vibrant, and wild), are not much different from the South, especially for women: ‘‘Every week since Dorcas’ death, during the whole of January and February, a paper laid bare the bones of some broken woman. Man kills wife, Eight accused of rape dismissed. Women and girls victim of. Woman commits suicide. White attackers indicted. . . . In jealous rage man’’ (74). So while migrating Africans thought they were coming to a tame place, a place free of


109

exploitation and oppression (‘‘want and violence’’), they were actually coming to a wild place, perhaps even wilder than the South since not only was racism alive and well, but also the North was a colder place, literally and figuratively. There, you forgot the necessity of communication and you lost the value of collectivism. Silence and selfish individualism sprouted in their place: The wave of black people running from want and violence crested in the 1870s; the ’80s; the ’90s but was a steady stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined it. Like the others, they were country people, but how soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city, it is forever, and it is like forever. . . . There, in a city, they were not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves. And in the beginning when they first arrive, and twenty years later when they and the City have grown up, they love that part of themselves so much they forget what loving other people was like. (33–34)

Violet is both selfish, ‘‘my parrot’’ and ‘‘My Joe Trace,’’ and silent. The strongest traces of Wild are present in Violet. One half of her is Wild, the one half that is called that Violet. Like Joe’s mother, she is described as being black and skinny. According to Felice, Violet ‘‘herself is very very dark, bootblack, the girls at school would say. And I didn’t expect her to be pretty, but she is. She’s what my grandmother calls pick thin’’ (206). Like Wild, Violet falls in love with Golden Gray more than or instead of Joe. Though Violet never sees Gray, he ‘‘tore up my girlhood as surely as if we’d been best of lovers? Help me God help me if that was it, because I knew him and loved him better than anyone except True Belle’’ (97). Like Wild, Violet is associated with birds. By the end of the novel, when Joe has stopped searching for Wild, a redwing bird hovers around Violet (225). Like Wild, Violet is silent with Joe (‘‘Over time her silences annoy her husband, then puzzle him and finally depress him,’’ 24), though communicative with her birds (‘‘he is married to a woman who speaks mainly to her birds,’’ 24).6 Ultimately, these silences cause Joe to act wild just as Wild’s silences did, twice shooting off a gun without meaning to do so. And like Wild, Violet is mistakenly thought to be violent: ‘‘Violent they called her now’’ (75). There are early reflections of the Wild in Violet, what the narrator describes as the occasional habit of stumbling into cracks: ‘‘Sometimes when Violet isn’t paying attention she stumbles onto

110


these cracks, like the time when, instead of putting her left heel forward, she stepped back and folded her legs in order to sit in the street’’ (23). Before the one big act of attempting to kill dead Dorcas, there are three small stumbles: when Violet sits down in the middle of the street, when she tries to steal a baby, and when ‘‘words connected only to themselves pierced an otherwise normal comment’’ (23). While the narrator attributes Violet’s silences to her renegade tongue, the reader understands that there are material conditions which give rise to the wayward tongue. For one thing, the renegade tongue points to future happenings. Before Joe meets Dorcas, Violet’s tongue runs wild, premonitorily hinting at the future relationship between her husband and Dorcas: ‘‘who is that pretty girl standing next to you?’’ (23). At times the conditions which make women run Wild are ones that are only intimated. But, of course, that is the Wild pattern. Wild’s conditions are only intimated as well. But the suggestions are useful. And since we’re all one (there is Wild in all of us), conditions for any one of the women in the novel reflect conditions for another. Perhaps what makes Violet most Wild is her harsh childhood, a mother—Rose Dear—who after being tipped out of a chair by bill collecting men, commits suicide and a grandmother—True Belle (a woman who truly thinks like a southern Belle)—who continues the confusion the men started by feeding Violet stories of a half white boy with golden hair (208).7 What happens to Violet as a result of the breakdown of the family (first, the African Holocaust or mfekane; then, True Belle’s leaving her family to go to Baltimore to take care of Golden Gray’s mother began this breakdown) is a breakdown of her concept of African womanhood. First, Violet convinces herself never never to have children: ‘‘Whatever happened, no small dark foot would rest on another while a hungry mouth said, Mama’’ (102). Second, she falls in love with a half white boy whom she has never seen. Violet neither wants to create another in her image, nor wants to connect herself with someone in her image. Once in the City, Violet’s exploitive work conditions fuel her self-destruction. Because she does not have the necessary license to set up a hairdresser shop, she must be at the ‘‘beck and call’’ of women who want their hair done and accept lower wages as a result.8 Also, once in the City, Violet becomes more concerned with possessions than with love and communication. The parrot who squawks ‘‘Love you’’ is the one she calls ‘‘my parrot,’’ just as Joe is ‘‘my Joe Trace, Mine’’: ‘‘I picked him out from all the others. . . .


111

my Joe Trace, my Virginia Joe Trace’’ (96). But just as with the parrot, she thought of Joe as hers without bothering to communicate with him. Violet’s thoughts about her parrot are reflective of her thoughts of Joe: ‘‘Or did he get the message—that she said, ‘My parrot’ and he said, ‘Love you,’ and she had never said it back or even taken the trouble to name him—and manage somehow to fly away on wings that had not soared for six years. Wings grown stiff from disuse and dull in the bulb light of an apartment with no view to speak of’’ (93). Dorcas possesses traces of Wild as well. Although she does not resemble Wild, Dorcas is marked by Wild. The horse’s hooves that spook Wild into running blindly into a tree are the hoof marks which appear on Dorcas’ face. And with the first introduction of Dorcas, she is structurally connected with Wild: Maybe those were [Wild’s] fingers moving like that in the bush, not twigs, but in light so small he could not see his knees poking through the holes in his trousers, maybe he missed the sign that would have been some combination of shame and pleasure, at least, and not the inside nothing he traveled with from then on, except for the fall of 1925 when he had somebody to tell it to. Somebody called Dorcas with hooves tracing her cheekbones and who knew better than people his own age what that inside nothing was like. And who filled it for him, just as he filled it for her, because she had it too. (37–38)

That ‘‘inside nothing’’ that Dorcas possesses is caused by the flame of oppression she swallows when race rioters torch her house with her mother in it, on the same day, just hours after, rioters attack and murder Dorcas’ father: Back in East St. Louis, as the little porch fell, woodchips—ignited and smoking—exploded in the air. One of them must have entered her stretched dumb mouth and traveled down her throat because it smoked and glowed there still. Dorcas never let it out and never put it out. (60–61)

The East St. Louis riots—200 dead, the most devastating of all the riots, produced just the type of flame that causes African youths to become wild now and caused them to become wild (i.e., bold, aggressive, selfish) in the 1920s: ‘‘Even as a nine-year-old in elementary school she was bold. However tight and tucked in her braids, however clunky her high-topped shoes that covered ankles

112


other girls exposed . . . , nothing hid the boldness swaying under her cast-iron skirt’’ (61). Just as Joe sees Wild in Violet, so he sees his mother in Dorcas. The hoof marks on Dorcas’s face are the hoof marks that marked the soon-to-be born Joe that is in Wild’s stomach. Significant too is the fact that with Dorcas Joe feels ‘‘fresh, new again’’ (123) like a newborn baby. Finally, in Joe’s unconscious mind, Dorcas is Wild: ‘‘Not Dorcas. She’ll be alone. Hard-headed. Wild, even. But alone’’ (182). The narrator, whose perspective is more accurate by the end of the novel, confirms that Joe sees Wild in Dorcas: ‘‘All the while he was running through the streets in bad weather I thought he was looking for her [Dorcas], not Wild’s chamber of gold’’ (221). Thus, when Joe looks for Dorcas, he confuses the search with the hunt for his mother undertaken twenty years ago (183, 184, 187). And just as Joe thought/hoped his mother would welcome him, turn to him, love him if he found her, so he thinks Dorcas will extend the same welcome: ‘‘She’s so glad I found her. Arching and soft, wanting me to do it, asking me to. Just me. Nobody but me’’ (183–84). He is mistaken in both cases. There is even some of Wild in Alice Manfred, a woman whose fear of life in general and men in particular drives her to imprison herself as well as her niece. But her fear is largely caused by the confusion which results when one isolates herself from African life and culture and when one is ignorant of African history. Her interpretation of events are not just distorted, but topsy turvy. A case in point is her analysis of jazz; to her, jazz creates problems for African people instead of reflecting them: Alice thought, No. It wasn’t the War and the disgruntled veterans . . . It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shameless or apart and wild. Alice was convinced and so were the Miller sisters as they blew into cups of Postum in the kitchen. It made you do unwise disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law. (58)

Of course, Alice Manfred’s interpretation is incorrect. She confuses the effect with the cause. It is the oppression of Africans which creates the music. That ‘‘complicated anger’’ that she hears in the music is an anger caused by the race riots, the lack of economic opportunities Africans were promised would be in the Promised Land, the difference in the social reality war veterans saw in the


113

U.S. and France after being told by Woodrow Wilson they were fighting ‘‘to make the world safe for democracy,’’ the colonization of Africa beginning at the Berlin Conference in 1884–1885, U.S. imperialism in Central America—all of which caused millions of Africans throughout the world to flock to Marcus Garvey and the U.N.I.A. Jazz was an expression of the anger, not the cause of it as Alice Manfred believes. Just as Alice is confused about life for Africans, so is she confused about men, especially her relationship with them. Within the context of the novel, her one bad experience in Springfield, Illinois does not seem to justify her total isolation from them. Instead of giving vent to her anger over her husband’s affair, she swallows it; buries her Wild; jails herself and her niece from men and Wild women who wear white shoes in the winter as a way of coping with her hurt. But the Wild is still there, waiting to emerge even though Alice may be unconscious of it. Consciously, Alice thinks women who have traces of Wild in them, like Violet, are violent women. So, when Alice lets Violet (violent) in her living room, she asks her: ‘‘Don’t they fight all the time? When you do their hair, you’re not afraid they might start fighting?’’ It is Violet (violent) who teaches Alice that Wild women are ‘‘just women, you know. Like us’’ (84). Conditions make women Wild. It is Violet (violent) then who forces Alice to confront the Wild in her. When Violet (violent) asks Alice, ‘‘You wouldn’t fight over your man?’’, Alice begins to think back when in Springfield she too was just about to get violent (Violet) over a man: And maybe after galloping through seven months of nights on a horse she neither owned nor knew how to ride, over the twitching, pulpy body of a woman who wore white shoes in winter, laughed loud as a child, and who had never seen a marriage license—maybe she would have done something wild. (86)9

Since the message in the novel is that African people are connected by their history and culture, then the solution to the problem of exploitation and oppression that African people, women in particular, face is unity, the same as it is in most of Morrison’s canon.10 For the Wild women of the novel, the solution is bonding, coming together to communicate: ‘‘The woman who avoided the streets [must] let into her living room the woman who sat down in the middle of one’’ (73). If Alice Manfred does not let in Violet (i.e., if she

114


does not recognize that she too is capable of violence under the right [wrong] conditions), if the two women do not come together to communicate, to listen, to share, to care for each other—then Alice will continue to fear men, to stifle the Wild in her; Violet will continue to be silent, to distinguish that (Wild) Violet from herself. Alice needs the company of Violet just as Violet needs the company of Alice: ‘‘Take that dress off and I’ll stitch up your cuff’’ (82). Just as African people as a whole must band together (bond) to survive and to progress, so also must African women—the most exploited adult sector in the world—help one another in order to live healthy, wholesome lives. Sisterhoods, groups of African women bonding together, help clear things up: When Violet came to visit . . . something opened up. . . . The thing was how Alice felt and talked in her company. Not like she did with other people. With Violent she was impolite. Sudden. Frugal. No apology or courtesy seemed required or necessary between them. But something else was—clarity, perhaps. The kind of clarity crazy people demanded from the not-crazy. . . . Alice sighed a little sigh, amazed at herself as she opened the door to the only visitor she looked forward to. (83)

What Violet helps Alice to understand is that there is no antagonistic class difference between African women. All face a triple oppression based on class, race, and gender. The only two antagonistic classes that exist are the owner class (capitalists) and the people class (workers): ‘‘They’re just women, you know. Like us. . . .’’ ‘‘Don’t they fight all the time? When you do their hair, you’re not afraid they might start fighting?’’ ‘‘Only when they sober.’’ Violet smiled. ‘‘Oh, well.’’ ‘‘They share men, fight them and fight over them, too.’’ ‘‘No woman should live like that.’’ ‘‘No. No woman should have to.’’ (84)

Poor, uneducated (mass) African women and educated, ‘‘middleclass’’ women are all Wild or capable of being Wild. One group, the Alice Manfreds, attempts to bury its wilds; the other expresses its. Under certain conditions, however, the Wild will come out. So when Violet asks Alice, ‘‘You wouldn’t fight for your man?’’, Alice


115

is forced to remember the occasion when she was just on the brink of doing so: What she told Violet was true. She had never picked up a knife. What she neglected to say—what came flooding back to her now—was also true: every day and every night for seven months she, Alice Manfred, was starving for blood. Not his. Oh, no. For him she planned sugar in his motor, scissors to his tie, burned suits, slashed shoes, ripped socks. Vicious, childish acts of violence to inconvenience him, remind him. But no blood. Her craving settled on the red liquid coursing through the other woman’s veins. An ice pick stuck in and pulled up would get it. Would a clothesline rope circling her neck and yanked with all Alice’s strength make her spit it up? (86)

What saves Alice from becoming Wild is her husband’s death. He dies before she has the chance to be violent (Violet). Alice learns not only from Violet’s teaching, but also from her own voice. With Violet, Alice speaks her mind. She develops a Wild tongue instead of a silent one. She lets the Wild come up and out. And through this carthartic process, she learns about herself: ‘‘Alice slammed the pressing iron down. ‘You don’t know what loss is’, she said, and listened as closely to what she was saying as did the woman sitting by her ironing board in a hat in the morning’’ (87). This bonding between women, this sisterhood, not only allows African women to talk, but also to cry and to laugh. All three are signs of healing. What Alice helps Violet to do is to laugh, especially at herself; to not take herself so seriously: ‘‘Crumpled over, shoulders shaking, Violet thought about how she must have looked at the funeral, at what her mission was. The sight of herself trying to do something bluesy, something hep, fumbling the knife, too late anyway . . . She laughed till she coughed and Alice had to make them a cup of settling tea’’ (114).11 It is only after this act of seeing herself objectively as others may see her that Violet becomes one whole again instead of two halves of a whole: ‘‘She buttoned her coat and left the drugstore and noticed, at the same moment as that Violet did, that it was spring’’ (114).12 Through bonding, women become more than close friends: ‘‘By this time the women had become so easy with each other talk wasn’t always necessary’’ (112). Actually, in nurturing each other—Alice sews Violet’s raggedy clothes; Violet listens and responds to Alice—each becomes a mama for the other. What Violet,

116


Alice, Dorcas, and Felice have in common is the need for mamas. Violet’s mother commits suicide, Dorcas’s mother is killed, and Felice’s mother is absent. In times of crises, Violet, Alice, and Dorcas each says (or thinks) the word ‘‘mama’’: ‘‘‘Oh, Mama.’ Alice blurted it out and then covered her mouth. Violet had the same thought: Mama. Mama?’’ (110). When Dorcas, on her deathbed, is asked the name of her killer, she thinks: ‘‘I know his name but Mama won’t tell’’ (193). It is as if Dorcas has become the Wild who is silent in regard to her son, Joe. Fortunately, in Violet, Felice gets a mama just in time: ‘‘I can see why Mrs. Manfred let her [Violet] visit. She doesn’t lie, Mrs. Trace. Nothing she says is a lie the way it is with most older people’’ (205).13 All the women benefit from one another’s companionship. By the end of the novel, Violet communicates with Joe: ‘‘A lot of the time, though, they stay home figuring things out, telling each other those little personal stories they like to hear again and again, or fussing with the bird Violet bought’’ (223).14 Having now developed ‘‘a taste for brightly colored dresses,’’ Alice Manfred moves back to Springfield and is no longer afraid of men: ‘‘The cheerful company maybe of someone who can provide the necessary things for the night’’ (222). Felice, learning from the experiences and communication of other women, including Dorcas, grows into a strong woman, not to be used, abused, or played with: ‘‘She’s nobody’s alibi or hammer or toy’’ (222). Other women learn from this sisterhood too. What is interesting and unique in this Morrison novel is that these women are not the characters, but are the storytellers of the novel: the narrator and the author. Since there is not a clear distinction among individuals, we are all a part of one whole, the narrator and novelist too are affected by the bonding that occurs in the novel. Jazz, then, bridges the gap between theme and structure. In Jazz Morrison is a jazz musician, experimenting with technique and form, improvising on tested narrative methods.15 The theme of the necessity of sisterhoods as a result of the oppression of African women is not a new idea in the Morrison canon, but it is a jazz melody plucked anew by the guitarist who is Morrison.16 The narrator is a wonderful example of the interwoven relationship between theme and structure. Just as in jazz the songster and the song are one, so in Jazz the storyteller and the story are one. In jazz it is not enough to say I want to hear ‘‘Bye Bye Blackbird’’ or ‘‘Rhapsody in Blue.’’ The pertinent question is, ’’whose version of these songs do you want to hear?’’ In Jazz too it is difficult to dis-


117

tance the storyteller (the narrator) from the story. ‘‘Sth’’ is the first word of Jazz. And from the beginning the narrator is characterized as secretive and gossipy, more disembodied voice than omniscient narrator, a bridge between first person and third person narration.17 And why not? Jazz is improvisation. Why not improvise on traditional methods of presenting a story as well as on the story itself? That’s what jazz (and Jazz) is all about. (You do the hokeypokey and you turn yourself around.) The narrator, then, is a female character who experiences growth throughout the novel, just as the other female characters do.18 And like the other female characters, she has a little Wild in her. With this type of narrator, Morrison is teaching us to read differently. You can’t depend on the narrator for the truth. Or the author, for that matter. The narrator is a mere reflection of the author; the author, a reflection of the society—with all of its biases and oppressions—in which she lives. The reader must learn the truth for herself by gathering, marshalling, and analyzing the facts.19 The word ‘‘Sth,’’ then, lets the reader know from the start that the narrator, any narrator, is merely a reflection of her creator; the creator, a reflection of any other African woman. The narrator’s comments on herself are comments on Morrison. Remember, we are all one, with a little Wild in each of us. So, this novel requires us to read differently, watching for mistakes the narrator may, and in fact does, make; watching for signs of the Wild in her; watching for clues that may help the reader to characterize the author; watching for hints of the writing process itself. An early clue to all three— narrator, author, and process—is the following passage: I lived a long time, maybe too much, in my own mind. People say I should come out more. Mix. I agree that I close off in places, but if you have been left standing, as I have, while your partner overstays at another appointment, or promises to give you exclusive attention after supper, but is falling asleep just as you have begun to speak—well, it can make you inhospitable if you aren’t careful, the last thing I want to be. (9)

The narrator, and Morrison, has experienced problems with her mate just as have Violet and the other female characters: The Wild waiting to burst forth is the woman whose partner ‘‘overstays at another appointment’’ and falls ‘‘asleep just as [she has] begun to speak.’’ It is this similarity that makes the narrator and author

118


pseudo characters. Of course, the narrator, as disembodied voice, is all mind. And the novelist, as creative writer, may live too much in the mind. Again, a similarity that makes narrator and author a part of the narrative structure. Besides her gossipy nature, one of the early, more commendable characterizations presented of the narrator is her recognition that she is capable of making errors in judgment. In one sentence, she reveals that she is a nosey busybody, uninformed about world events: ‘‘If you have secrets you want kept or want to figure out those other people have, a newspaper can turn your mind. The best thing to find out what’s going on is to watch how people maneuver themselves in the street’’ (72). However, in the next sentence, she reveals that this process of uninformed watching is inherently flawed: ‘‘One thing for sure, the streets will confuse you, teach you or break your head’’ (72). It is the narrator’s practice of self-criticism, admitting that she has made an error in judgment, that helps the reader to ‘‘excuse’’ her mistakes: ‘‘My own opinion was that one day she [Violet] would stack up those handkerchiefs, take them to the dresser drawer, tuck them in and then go light his hair with a matchstick. She didn’t . . .’’ (118). Unnerving, unassuring as it at first feels to the reader, an unreliable narrator such as this one is ultimately reassuring. Statements such as, ‘‘Rat. No wonder it ended the way it did’’ (121), reflects her humanness. That she is like the reader—culpable—makes her more endearing and reaffirms Morrison’s theme that we’re all one. Not one of us is omnipotent. Not the narrator. Not even the author who is composing the story. In fact, the narrator’s practice of revising early, mistaken opinions reflects the revision process that any artist—musician or writer—goes through in composing a text. Ideas set forth early in the writing process are often ideas which are later purged. Perhaps the best indication that the reader has of the narrator’s tendency to make errors, especially in character judgment, is her telling and retelling of the Golden Gray story. Once again the narrator admits that ‘‘dipping and dabbing’’ in someone else’s affairs is a risky business because sometimes you may not know ‘‘what’s happ’ning’’: ‘‘Risky, I’d say, trying to figure out anybody’s state of mind. But worth the trouble if you’re like me—curious, inventive and well-informed’’ (137). It is the word ‘‘well-informed’’ that cues the reader to watch out for subsequent errors in judgment since the


119

narrator has already made mistakes; for example, thinking that Violet would light Joe’s hair with a matchstick (118). The narrator first tells Golden Gray’s story—his trip to discover his father, Henry LesTroy, and his meeting Wild—on pages 146– 47. In this version, Golden Gray is a cold-hearted, racist individualist, seeing to his horse, his trunk, and Wild—in that order: ‘‘After the horse is seen to (and he has noticed that one shoe needs repair), he returns to the carriage for his trunk. . . . After he has seen to the placement of his trunk, he goes back to the carriage to get the woman.’’ The narrator tells the story a second time on page 161. In this retelling, the narrator portrays Golden as a more humane person: ‘‘What was I thinking of? How could I have imagined him so poorly? Not noticed the hurt that was not linked to the color of his skin. . . . I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am’’ (160). Indeed, the Golden Gray episode is a real learning experience for the narrator. After the various improvisations on Gray’s encounter with Wild, the narrator evidences a qualitative leap in her development. She is more cautious. Less a voice or mind who judges others, the narrator seems more a character who has learned from her mistakes and who, as a consequence, aids other characters: Now I have to think this through, carefully, even though I may be doomed to another misunderstanding. I have to do it and not break down. Not hating him is not enough; liking, loving him is not useful. I have to alter things. I have to be a shadow who wishes him well, like the smiles of the dead left over from their lives. I want to dream a nice dream for him, and another of him. Lie down next to him, a wrinkle in the sheet and contemplate his pain and by doing so ease it, diminish it. I want to be the language that wishes him well, speaks his name, wakes him when his eyes need to be open. (161)

Like Alice Manfred who, by associating with Violet, learns that she too can run Wild, can get violent, if certain conditions exist; so the narrator learns, by associating with Golden, by lying ‘‘down next to him, a wrinkle in the sheet,’’ that he too experiences pain. The Golden Gray story also serves as a reflection of Morrison’s own writing process. The narrator is Morrison revealing, before the reader, the whole writing process involved in creating and recreating the character of Golden. People grow through struggle—Violet, Alice, the narrator, and Morrison. We’re all one. That’s the theme. That’s the structure.

120


By the end of the novel, the narrator is qualitatively different because she has learned from her mistakes. Compare the voices of the narrator at the beginning and end of the novel. Self-confidence, arrogance, and objectivity (‘‘Confused in my solitude into arrogance, thinking my space, my view was the only one that was or that mattered,’’ 220) are replaced by regret, humility, and subjectivity: Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweet tooth for it. . . . I break lives to prove I can mend them back again. And although the pain is theirs, I share it, don’t I? Of course. Of course. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But it is another way. I am uneasy now. Feeling a bit false. What, I wonder, what would I be without a few brilliant spots of blood to ponder. Without aching words that act, then miss, the mark? (219)

Isn’t the narrator Violet who gets violent—wants a few drops of blood from dead Dorcas—but who misses the mark? The narrator is Wild too, and her growth enables her to see the Wild in her. If we are all one, then Morrison too is affected by the experiences of others, even the characters she makes up, and has shared similar experiences. Remember, in jazz (Jazz) the storyteller cannot be divorced from the story she is telling. They are integrally tied together: I thought I knew them and wasn’t worried that they didn’t really know about me. Now it’s clear why they contradicted me at every turn: they knew me all along. Out the corners of their eyes they watched me. And when I was feeling most invisible, being tight-lipped, silent and unobservable, they were whispering about me to each other. They knew how little I could be counted on; how poorly, how shabbily my know-it-all self covered helplessness. That when I invented stories about them— and doing it seemed to me so fine—I was completely in their hands, managed without mercy. I thought I’d hidden myself so well as I watched them through windows and doors . . . and all the while they were watching me. (220)

So the last two lines of the quote above may not only be applicable to the narrator, but also to the author herself. First, through writing about her characters who have all the characteristics of real people—including the potential to get wild, Morrison herself learns and grows: ‘‘how shabbily my know-it-all self covered helplessness.’’ Second, the other implication is one involving the relation-


121

ship between the writer and the critic. While the writer tries to keep herself hidden in her works, the critic finds her out: ‘‘I thought I’d hidden myself as well as I watched them through windows and doors . . . and all the while they were watching me.’’ Third, if the tie that binds us together, especially African women, is the potential for each of us to get wild if subjected to oppressive conditions based on class, race, and gender—to beat us into silence when we should express ourselves, when we should let go, run wild—then Morrison too is Wild. In Jazz then the narrator’s voice is sometimes a reflection of the author’s. The last two paragraphs of the novel, in fact, can be read as the author’s own story. The italics reflect what the author wishes to say to her partner but does not: ‘‘That I have loved only you, surrendered my whole self reckless to you and nobody else. That I want you to love me back and show it to me.’’ The last paragraph reflects what the author wishes to say to her partner and does: ‘‘Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now’’ (229). If communication among African people is important for Morrison’s characters, for Morrison’s narrator, then talking is important for the author too. If women are socialized not to have a voice, it is especially important for them to communicate, with themselves and with their mates. Doing so helps each to grow; a person can be remade through her relationship with the other (‘‘Say make me, remake me.’’). Isn’t this the point of Morrison’s last lines? So Morrison takes her own advice. She communicates. She talks to her mate. Characters, narrator, author, and reader have developed by the end of Jazz.20 Morrison’s structuring of her text follows the jazz pattern as well. Jazz musicians build upon others’ works and, in so doing, discover themselves in others. The building process consists of a series of variations of a common theme whereby the artists take parts of this and parts of that. Morrison has always been a jazz artist, taking bits and pieces (i.e., traces) of someone else’s works, but more often taking bits and pieces of her own. In Jazz she not only builds onto her own canon, but also builds and revises within the work itself. First, from the beginning of the novel to page 24, an outline or sketch of the characters, including the narrator, involved in the JoeViolet-Dorcas story is presented. Then the story begins again on page 27. Perhaps the best indication of Morrison as a virtuoso is

122


her use of jazz improvisation in telling and retelling the Golden Gray story. It is the section of the novel—the jam session—where the artist lets the reader in early, before the full story has been constructed. The reader gets a treat. She witnesses the artist at work. She sees how the novelist shapes (‘‘makes’’) and reshapes (‘‘remakes’’) a work, how the jazz (Jazz) artist (novelist) creates a new melody based on an old one. In this creative process, Morrison enlists the help of the narrator and the character, Golden Gray: ‘‘. . . he is shaping a story for himself to tell somebody, to tell his father, naturally’’ (154). Each attempts to conjure up a version of the Golden Gray-Wild-LesTroy story. The narrator first gives us the basic outline of Golden’s story, just as Jazz opens with an outline of its contents. The bare facts presented are as follows: Golden Gray, the offspring of Miss Vera Gray, a southern European plantation owner’s daughter, and Henry LesTroy, an African hunter, begins a search for the father he has never known. On the way to his father’s house, he sees this wild, naked, pregnant young African ‘‘woman’’ (Wild) whom he frightens into running into a tree, knocking herself unconscious. It is raining. Reluctantly, Golden Gray decides to seek help for Wild, and so puts her in his wagon. The pivotal point of the story—the part of the story that is most difficult to render—occurs at LesTroy’s house.21 When Golden arrives there, he takes care of his horse first, his trunk next, and, lastly, Wild. Before this same story is retold on page 153, the narrator/author lets us know why this part of the story is troubling: ‘‘That is what makes me worry about him. How he thinks first of his clothes, and not the woman. How he checks the fastenings, but not her breath’’ (151). It’s Golden Gray’s humanity or humanism that is questioned, that is worrisome to the author. Can a person be that cold, that cruel? Surely not, the author concludes. So, she remakes him, gives him qualities to make him more humane or, at least, tries to show how he became the way he is. Golden behaves the way he was trained to behave. Just as the African’s material conditions makes her Wild, his material conditions as the grandson of a wealthy, European southern plantation owner socializes him to think of horse, trunk, and African as possessions, the value of each reflected in the order in which he deals with them: ‘‘No one is looking at him, but he behaves as though there is. That’s the way. Carry yourself the way you would if you were always under the reviewing gaze of an impressionable but casual acquaintance’’ (153). It is the nature of conditions in U.S. soci-


123

ety that makes him what he is. So, the narrator writes, ‘‘I don’t hate him at all’’ (155). When Golden Gray’s story is told the third time, the author, narrator, and reader understand more clearly why Gray is the way he is. Not having a father, for example, made him feel as if he had only one arm. Now, with the full story in hand (the story, LeStory), the narrator can depict him more humanely (160). Knowing the full story makes everyone more human, the person being talked about and the talker. One has to walk in someone else’s shoes to be able to tell his story, or ‘‘lie down next to him, a wrinkle in the sheet, and contemplate his pain and by doing so ease it, diminish it’’ (161). Only then can the teller ‘‘be the language that wishes him well, speaks his name, wakes him when his eyes need to be open’’ (161). The third way in which Morrison uses jazz techniques to tell her story is in flashback. One way that a listener knows that what a creative musician is playing is a version of an original melody is because the musician flashes back; from time to time, he plays the melody as it was played by the original artist. In doing so, the artist first gives credit to the originator and, second, shows the connection between the original and his version of the original. Likewise in Jazz, Morrison shows us the connection between Wild and Dorcas in her rendering of Joe’s search for Dorcas. Since Joe’s relationship with Dorcas is tied to his relationship with Wild, Morrison swings us back and forth between the two stories. As Joe searches for Dorcas, he remembers his search for Wild. Thus, when a paragraph on his search for Wild ends, one on his search for Dorcas begins. On page 182, the first paragraph begins with Joe’s search for Wild (‘‘The third time Joe had tried to find her [Wild] . . .’’); the second paragraph begins with Joe’s search for Dorcas (‘‘What would she want with a rooster?’’). Sometimes, Morrison makes the connection between the two women within one paragraph, as she does in the last paragraph on page 182. And the last ten words of that paragraph are ones that structurally link Dorcas to Wild: ’’Not Dorcas. She’ll be alone. Hardheaded. Wild, even. But alone.‘‘ Using sentence structure to enhance her theme has always been a pattern in the Morrisonian canon.22 Most often Morrison will structure sentences to show the relationship between characters. In Jazz Morrison’s syntax emphasizes the bond between Alice Manfred and Violet Trace: ‘‘‘You don’t know what loss is’, [Alice] said, and listened as closely to what she was saying as did the woman sitting by

124


her ironing board in a hat in the morning’’ (87). It is a sentence which reflects the dominant theme in the novel: there is a trace of Wild in all of us and when conditions are at their worst women will run Wild. This linking of Alice and Violet is revealed again in a similar sentence pattern: ‘‘The woman who avoided the streets let into her living room the woman who sat down in the middle of one’’ (73). Not only does this clause make a good transition between the preceding discussion on Alice and the one to follow on Violet, not only does it reinforce the theme once again, but also it shows the structural welding of theme and structure: All of us are connected; even the sentence connects. Since the goal of any great writer is to merge form and content in such a way that one enhances the other, once again, Morrison reveals herself as a virtuoso artist. Jazz marks another development in her canon because form not only reinforces theme, it is theme. Once again, Morrison reveals herself as an admirable artist because her subject matter is right on target. Conditions make people Wild, bring out the Wild in people, make women run Wild. What other topic more appropriately expresses the conditions that African people confront today. With over 60 percent of African families headed by women and nearly 70 percent of these families being in poverty; with the alarming and increasing rate of teenage pregnancy; with crack and new, deadlier chemical drugs being introduced in the African community every day; with increasing numbers of middleschool youths dropping out; with inadequate health care, poor nutrition, and increasing numbers of Africans in their thirties dying from AIDS, cancer, and heart attacks—is it any wonder there are Wilds in the African community?23 African women—in body, not in age—getting fat off of oppression. African women—in body, not in age—doing the hand jive to signal potential customers. African women—in body, not in age— ‘‘word whipping’’ anybody and everybody, including their own children, on down the street. African women—in body, not in age—becoming mamas when they are still children. African women—Dorcases—swallowing the flames of oppression. African women. Wild then and Wild now. Once again, Morrison reveals that her first priority as an artist is in arriving at solutions for the African’s dilemma. Sisterhoods are needed in the African community, and through them, communication, not silence will forge the way toward a healthy, wholesome future for all people of African descent, especially women.

8 Paradise: A Warning Not to ‘‘Africanize’’ Exploitation PARADISE IS TONI MORRISON’S MOST CLASS-CONSCIOUS NOVEL TO date. The message is clear: people who look just like you may not act in your best interest. The medium that she uses to convey this message is a set of twins: Deacon and Steward Morgan. The setting, an all-African town. For those who persist in viewing racism as the predominant problem confronting people of African descent, Morrison’s emphasis here on class struggle should spark an awakening. ‘‘The beginning of wisdom,’’ according to a West African proverb, ‘‘is to get you a roof.’’ For humans, the most fundamental concern in life is survival, the possession of food, clothing and shelter (i.e., a ‘‘roof’’). These essential elements of survival are not provided ready-made by nature; rather, humans must work to secure them. That is why the production process, i.e., the economic system, is primary in any society. Our economic systems shape our beliefs. If those in a society come together to produce in such a way that the results of the production benefit all in an equitable manner, then beliefs that flourish in the society will reflect fairness. It will be clear that those who work with you and share the profits of production with you are not substantially different from you. All make up one group or class of people who work together, share together, and make decisions collectively. If there are those in a society who produce and those who do not produce but receive the bulk of the profits from the production, ideas that flourish in the society will reflect unfairness. Those not a part of the labor process, yet who accumulate large profits, will make the decisions not only about production, but about politics, social behavior, and education, as well. Unfair beliefs flourish in societies where producers and profiteers make up two different groups or classes of people: the ruling class 125

126

8: PARADISE: A WARNING NOT TO ‘‘AFRICANIZE’’ EXPLOITATION

and the working class. The ruling class owns the factories, the banks, the technology, the oil—the resources that all others in the society need to survive. The working class works for the ruling class, producing the goods and services needed to sustain the society. There is an ongoing ‘‘struggle’’ between the ruling class and the working class because the goal of the former is to realize more and more profits primarily by paying the workers the least amount of money and providing the least amount of benefits. The goal of the workers is to realize the wages and the benefits that they justly deserve. The struggle between the ruling class and the workers is called ‘‘class struggle.’’ It is the dominant and most critical type of struggle because it involves survival: food, clothing, and shelter. However, there are other forms of class struggle which are spawned by this struggle involving production. One example is the race struggle. Since slavery in the U.S., the ruling class has been comprised primarily of those of European descent. Africans have always been a part of the working class in the U.S. This class distinction gave birth to racism, an unfair belief that one group of people is inferior to another solely based on skin color. Interestingly, the slave trade and slavery and the racism that resulted caused intraracial prejudice among African people. Since slavery, some Africans have aspired to look like, talk like, and act like the ruling class (i.e., Europeans) which oppresses them. They are people who look African, but who do not act in the best interest of African people. They are in conflict, a class struggle, with those Africans who proudly embrace their identity and who aspire to work for and contribute to the health and well-being of their people. Another form of class struggle occurs between women and men. In a society that condones the exploitation of its workers’ labor and allows the bulk of the profits from this work to go to a small percentage of its citizens (mostly males since they comprise the bulk of the ruling class), a patriarchal reality emerges. In this type of society, men are socialized to be dominant and domineering, spawning a ‘‘boss man’’ relationship between male/husband (boss) and female/wife (worker). An inequitable economic system also gives birth to a struggle between the elders who are boss men and the youths who are workers. This form of class struggle manifests itself in the elders’ resistance to change and progress. The ‘‘old way is best’’ mentality flourishes primarily because change inevitably brings about a change in the power structure. The elders who rule society, again mostly men, do


127

not want to lose their position of dominance. Such a change will result in their loss of wealth and power. Paradise is about class struggle. The Africans in the novel have broken free from an exploitive and oppressive reality and have a unique opportunity of fashioning a fair, egalitarian society. They have experienced both types of societies almost simultaneously. During slavery, because all slaves were treated equally harshly, there was no room in the slave community for one male to think himself better than another male or for one female to think herself better than a female. Then, too, women worked the cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice fields just like men. (On a plantation of three to five hundred slaves, how many slaves, whether male or female, could be house slaves?) In Angela Y. Davis’s Women, Race & Class, evidence of the egalitarian relationship between male and female slaves based on work is offered: ‘‘Men’s tasks were certainly not superior to and were hardly inferior to the work performed by women. They were both equally necessary’’ (18). Women, like men, were primarily ‘‘field’’ slaves. Therefore, ‘‘Black women as workers could not be treated as the ‘weaker sex’ or the ‘housewife,’ Black men could not be candidates for the figure of ‘family head’ and certainly not for ‘family provider.’ After all, men, women and children alike were all ‘providers’ for the slaveholding class’’ (8). Because the slave labor of men and women was equal, the salient theme emerging from domestic life in the slave quarters is one of sexual equality. The labor that slaves performed for their own sake and not for the aggrandizement of their masters was carried out on terms of equality. Within the confines of their family and community life, therefore, Black people managed to accomplish a magnificent feat. They transformed that negative equality which emanated from the equal oppression they suffered as slaves into a positive quality: the egalitarianism characterizing their social relations. (18)

The Paradise story has its origins in U.S. slavery (1619–1865) and Reconstruction (1867–1877). At the turn of the twentieth century, most Africans in the U.S. still lived in the South and still retained the values of humanism, collectivism, and egalitarianism that sustained them through slavery. In the novel, Morrison writes of this spirit of collectivism that was still manifested in 1932. It is a spirit which has been solidified even more due to the rejection that the characters have experienced by both Europeans and those Africans who have already been corrupted by money and status:

128


Families shared everything, made sure no one was short. Cotton crop ruined? The sorghum growers split their profit with the cotton growers. A barn burned? The pine sappers made sure lumber ‘‘accidentally’’ rolled off wagons at certain places to be picked up later that night. Pigs rooted up a neighbor’s patch? The neighbor was offered replacements by everybody and was ensured ham at slaughter. The man whose hand was healing from a chopping block mistake would not get to the second clean bandage before a fresh cord was finished and stacked. (108–9)

The Oven and its placement are examples of the collectivism that was once a part of the Haven/Ruby way of life. The Oven was the centerpiece of a community kitchen (99). So central to the lives of the Haven residents was the Oven that ‘‘the traffic to and from the Oven was greater than to [the two churches in Haven, the All-Citizens Bank, four rooms in the schoolhouse, five stores selling dry goods, feed and foodstuff]’’ (15). In fact, ‘‘when everything else about the town was dying; when it was clear as daylight that talk of electricity would remain just talk and when gas lines and sewers were Tulsa marvels, the Oven stayed alive’’ (15). What happens to the traditional African values of humanism, collectivism, and egalitarianism? There is a clue offered early in Paradise. A foreshadowing, if you will. The very act which solidifies the collectivism of the founders of Haven becomes the act which marks them: the Disallowing. After Reconstruction, when the Morgan’s grandfather, Zechariah Morgan, and others were forced out of political office and out of town, they searched for another home, journeying from Mississippi to Oklahoma. One hundred and fiftyeight freed men. They were turned away from each town along the way. What was especially painful and what marks them forever is the rejection by their own people. ‘‘Turned away by rich Choctaw and poor whites, chased by yard dogs, jeered at by camp prostitutes and their children, they were nevertheless unprepared for the aggressive discouragement they received from Negro towns already being built’’ (13). Why the rejection by African people? ‘‘In short, they were too poor, too bedraggled-looking to enter, let alone reside in, the communities that were soliciting Negro homesteaders’’ (14). Africans, newly freed from slavery, used the same standards that were used to justify their enslavement against their own people. This is the essence of the class struggle among African people even today. The imitation of the oppressor; black skin, white masks. The question asked by the original Haven families is a question that the


129

Convent women can ask the men of Ruby, including the Morgan twins, and a question African people can ask of one another today: ‘‘Us free like them; was slave like them. What for is this difference?’’ (14). According to Richard Misner, perhaps one of only a few Ruby residents who can at times speak for both the author and reader, ‘‘they [the Ruby men] think they have outfoxed the whiteman when in fact they imitate him’’ (306). Why do the newly freed African townspeople imitate their oppressor? Why do the descendants of the original Haven families, in turn, imitate their oppressor? (Why do Africans today imitate their oppressor?) They place money and power before their own people (corruption). Or, for most, they think that their enemy is the ‘‘white man’’ when instead it is the class systems of slavery and capitalism (confusion). As Kwame Nkrumah stated, ‘‘Capitalism is but the gentleman’s method of slavery’’ (Consciencism, 72). Wrongfully thinking that the ‘‘white man’’ is the devil, they flee from the exploitation of their labor (sharecropping for most) and the oppression based on skin color (lynching mostly) to found their own towns. These towns, however, are modeled after those they flee. They consist of a group of men who own and control the major resources needed by all to survive. The result? A patriarchal capitalist society flourishes once again. This time in Ruby. Even Misner’s solution—let’s go back home to Africa—is not the answer. In a conversation with Patricia, Ruby’s schoolteacher, Misner states: But can’t you even imagine what it must feel like to have a true home? I don’t mean heaven. I mean a real earthly home. Not some fortress you bought and built up and have to keep everybody locked in or out. A real home. Not some place you went to and invaded and slaughtered people to get. Not some place you claimed, snatched because you got the guns. Not some place you stole from the people living there, but your own home, where if you go back past your great-great-grandparents, past theirs, and theirs, past the whole of Western history, past the beginning of organized knowledge, past pyramids and poison bows, on back to when rain was new, before plants forgot they could sing and birds thought they were fish, back when God said Good! Good!—there, right there where you know your own people were born and lived and died. Imagine that, Pat. That place. Who was God talking to if not to my people living in my home? (213).

If a return home means that Africans will once again set up the same economic model, it too will become a patriarchal capitalist

130


society with Africans in power exploiting and oppressing other Africans. A bigger Ruby. A Ruby continent. It’s not the place that determines exploitation and oppression; it’s the economic structure. It’s not ‘‘the man’’; it’s the plan. When the forefathers set up Haven and the descendants, Ruby, they also set up the economic system of capitalism with all of its negative offspring: color prejudice, sexism, oppression of youths, the hunger for profits, greed over human need. The result: ‘‘From then on the fertility shriveled, even while the bounty multiplied. The more money, the fewer children’’ (193). And all the symbols of money worship are prevalent in Ruby. The leadership of the Ruby ruling class, and the main characters of Paradise, is twinned: Deacon and Steward Morgan. Both are the descendants of Zechariah Morgan who led the original eight-rock families to Haven. Both place profit and greed above human need. On a day when the ‘‘sweetest girl, named for her nature’’ (114) ventures coatless outside on a cold October day ‘‘far from the home she had not stepped out of since 1967,’’ Deacon Morgan opts to open up his bank on time rather than to come to her rescue. His rationale, ‘‘There should be no occasion when the bank of a good and serious town did not open on time’’ (114). For most of the novel, Deacon and Steward are not only twins in appearance, but also in thought: ‘‘In fact the brothers not only agree on almost everything; they were in eternal if silent conversation. Each knew the other’s thoughts as well as he knew his face and only once in a while needed the confirmation of a glance’’ (155). When the twins and the other descendants of the eight-rock families first move from Haven to Ruby (once again running away from the color white, but not from capitalism), a visible symbol of capitalism greets them. It is the embezzler’s mansion (aka the Convent), and a forewarning that isolating oneself from the outside world while amassing wealth is foolhardy: Fright, not triumph, spoke in every foot of the embezzler’s mansion. Shaped like a live cartridge, it curved to a deadly point at the north end where, originally, the living and dining rooms lay. He must have believed his persecutors would come from the north because all the firstfloor windows huddled in those two rooms. Like lookouts. The southern end contained signs of his desire in two rooms: an outsize kitchen and a room where he could play rich men’s games. Neither room had a view, but the kitchen had one of the mansion’s two entrances. A veranda


131

curved from the north around the bullet’s tip, continued along its wall past the main entrance, and ended at the flat end of the ammunition—its southern exposure. Except from the bedrooms no one in the house could see the sun rise, and there was no vantage point to see it set. The light, therefore, was always misleading. (71)

Though the fright which drove the embezzler to Oklahoma is not the fright which drove the Haven men, the result is the same: riches and isolation. In fact, what is so revolting to the Ruby men when they come hunting the convent women are their own images and idols since the embezzler’s mansion is a microcosm of Ruby itself. When making money becomes your driving force in life and when your success in doing so makes you the most powerful beings on earth, watch out. You may begin to think of yourself as Godlike. In fact, Ruby’s male ruling class does not just see some of God in themselves; they see themselves in God. God and the Ruby fathers are businessmen: ‘‘Deacon and Steward . . . behaved as if God were their silent business partner’’ (143). God, in their eyes, is the Supreme Businessman and, like the Ruby fathers, He thinks in terms of ‘‘earning’’: ‘‘You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn—by practice and careful contemplation—the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God’’ (141). God’s love must be earned. Reverend Pulliam gives this interpretation of the Bible in one of his sermons! It is mostly the women and the youths who must earn love, however. According to Billie Delia, another of Morrison’s trustworthy characters, the struggle over the Oven was really ‘‘the stallions . . . fighting about who controlled the mares and their foals’’ (150). Symbolic of the class struggle which flourishes in Ruby is the clash over the words on the Oven’s breastplate. The patriarchs are convinced that the words state: ‘‘Beware the furrow of His brow.’’ The youths think the words are ‘‘Be the furrow of His brow.’’ Is it the wish of the patriarchs that the women and youths must not only beware, but behave God? And since they think of themselves as God’s business partners, does that mean that the women and youths must also beware and behave them? This self-righteousness of the men is best exemplified in Deacon and Steward Morgan. Since they are the wealthiest men in town,

132


they are the supreme patriarchs of Ruby. In their fiefdom, the Morgan twins rule. Both, like the lords of yore, ride through their land, Deek in a car; Steward on a horse: ‘‘Every day the weather permitted, Deacon Morgan drove his brilliant black sedan three-fourths of a mile. From his own house on St. John Street, he turned right at the corner onto Central, passed Luke, Mark and Matthew, then parked neatly in front of the bank. The silliness of driving to where he could walk in less time than it took to smoke a cigar was eliminated, in his view, by the weight of the gesture. His car was big and whatever he did in it was horsepower and worthy of comment’’ (107). Speaking of horsepower. Steward feels powerful while riding around his ranch on horseback: ‘‘Saddled on Night [his horse], he discovered every time the fresh wonder of knowing that on one’s own land you could never be lost the way Big Papa and Big Daddy and all seventy-nine were after leaving Fairly, Oklahoma’’ (95). Unbeknownst (Ugh! The feudal ways of the Morgan twins must be rubbing off on me) to Steward, there is more than one type of lost. He and his twin brother Deek and all the other self-righteous men of Ruby are lost. They have lost their humanism, their forefathers’ sense of collective work and responsibility, the principle of egalitarianism which requires one to give to others an equal chance for full development. As God’s business partners, the men of Ruby have the right to make sure that law and order prevails. They even have the right to interpret the meaning of law and order, for it is their forefathers who have founded the town. Once again, the Ruby men imitate their original class exploiters and race oppressors: the U.S. founding fathers. These founding fathers take over the native people’s land without permission. They set up laws, without the voice of their female counterparts. And they resist any change that weakens their supreme leadership, and any threat of change is met with force. They cut the original path that the Ruby men walk in Paradise. The Ruby patriarchs have created the laws. And these are unalterable laws, protected by force. This triad connection between the ruling class, patriarchy, and violence is present throughout the novel. One example appears when we are introduced to the home life of one of the twins. To settle his nerves, Deacon Morgan resorts to violence: ‘‘Shooting well that morning had settled him and returned things to the way they ought to be. Coffee the right color; the right temperature. And later today, quail without their brains would melt in his mouth’’ (107). Rather than confront her husband about her objec-


133

tions to his hunting, Soane, his wife, whispers it to the darkness outside of her window: ‘‘Look out quail. Deek’s gunning for you. And when he comes back he’ll throw a sackful of you on my clean floor and say something like: ‘This ought to take care of supper.’ Proud’’ (100). (Textnote: Once again Morrison’s birds are significant. The bird that Deek hunts is a quail, a small, chickenlike (femalelike?) game bird. Quail is also defined as one who cowers. The men of Ruby tower over those who are considered ‘‘weaker,’’ less powerful than they—women and children in particular.) The Ruby patriarchs’ right to interpret the laws is best exemplified in the matter of the Oven. When the youths voice their opinion about the words on the Oven at a town’s meeting, the adult males dismiss it. The male leadership expects the youths to not only follow in their footsteps as the Morgan twins’ nephew, K.D., is doing, but also to follow their orders. When the youths do not back down, the leader of the town’s patriarchs, Steward Morgan, resorts to the threat of violence: ‘‘‘Listen here,’ he said, his voice thick and shapely with Blue Boy. ‘If you, any one of you, ignore, change, take away, or add to the words in the mouth of that Oven, I will blow your head off just like you was a hood-eye snake’’’ (87). The end. Of course, the supreme act of violence in Paradise is the male ruling class’s murder of the Convent women: ‘‘God at their side, the men take aim. For Ruby’’ (18). They commit murder with God’s approval, as they see it, since God is their Partner. And for the virtue of their womanhood, as they see it. The rationale? The innocence, the purity of Ruby (i.e., the sacrosanctity of the male ruling class’s position in Ruby) and the trashiness of the Convent women. The epitome of that trash is the ‘‘white woman,’’ the one who has defiled all others: ‘‘But the target, after all, is detritus: throwaway people that sometimes blow back into the room after being swept out the door. So the venom is manageable now. Shooting the first woman (the white woman) has clarified it like butter: the pure oil of hatred on top, its hardness stabilized below’’ (4). The righteousness of their act is confirmed: ‘‘They are animated—warm with perspiration and the natural odor of righteousness. The view is clear’’ (18). The original act of violence committed by the founding fathers of the U.S. is replicated not only by the African men of Ruby, but also by missionaries, like Mary Magna, as well. Mother Mary, the founder of the Convent, commits acts of violence against the native

134


peoples too, including Consolata. Her view of native peoples is the original founding father’s view, the exploiters’ view: ‘‘It was an opportunity to intervene at the heart of the problem: to bring God and language to natives who were assumed to have neither; to alter their diets, their clothes, their minds; to help them despise everything that had once made their lives worthwhile’’ (227). To teach someone to hate herself is an act of violence. It is a violent tool used to make the ‘‘other’’ a reflection of the ‘‘I.’’ It is a tool that the Ruby men use as well to mold the citizens of Ruby into the image of the original eight-rock families, physically and mentally. There is no room for change or difference, for change and difference will ultimately call for the change of the entire society. The old ruling class will have to go. This resistance to change, this necessity for sameness, for identical twinness runs rampart in Ruby. The necessity for physical verisimilitude is reflected in the episode involving Pat Best’s mother. According to Pat, ‘‘they hate us because [Mama] looked like a cracker and was bound to have cracker-looking children like me’’ (196). Another involves Anna’s Afro hairstyle: ‘‘She was certain the disapproval was mostly because of her unstraightened hair. My God, the conversations she had been forced to have when she came back from Detroit. Strange, silly, invasive probings. She felt as though they were discussing her pubic hair, her underarm hair. That if she had walked completely naked down the street they would have commented only on the hair on her head’’ (119). Mental verisimilitude is reflected in the murder of the Convent women. There is no room for independent (i.e., maleless) women. In Ruby, the thinking of the women must reflect that of the men. Or else they remain hidden and voiceless. Mute, as in the case of the Morgan wives. Rather than talk to her husband, Steward’s wife Dovey disagrees with him in thought: ‘‘Almost always, these nights, when Dovey Morgan thought about her husband it was in terms of what he had lost. His sense of taste one example of the many she counted. Contrary to his (and all of Ruby’s) assessment, the more Steward acquired, the more visible his losses. . . . His hairline and his taste buds faltered over time. Small losses that culminated with the big one: in 1964, when he was forty . . . . they learned neither could ever have children’’ (82). And her thoughts of Steward reflect what has gone wrong with him. They are not thoughts of love. When Deacon’s wife Soane ventures to talk with her husband, he patronizingly dismisses her: ‘‘’I don’t understand Deek.’ ‘I do.’ He smiled


135

up at her. ‘You don’t need to.’ She had not meant that she didn’t understand what he was talking about. She’d meant she didn’t understand why he wasn’t worried enough by their friend’s money problems to help them out’’ (107). However, she doesn’t challenge the dismissal. She doesn’t explain to him what she means. There’s only a one-way conversation with the twins and the one way is from them to everyone else, including their wives. They are the masters, the big bosses, the landlords, the stewards. And the wives? Quail without their brains. Dovey and Soane have no choice but to look elsewhere for comfort, companionship, and understanding. Dovey gets involved with an ‘‘invisible’’ cowboy; Soane finds friendship with her husband’s former lover, Consolata. The alternatives for women involved with ruling class patriarchs seem to be imaginative male friends or no male friends at all. Morrison does not explicitly discuss the option of lesbianism although it is implicitly present in Paradise in connection with Seneca. For most of the novel, there is only one male who is wholesome, loving, listening, and egalitarian. That is Reverend Misner and he is ‘‘taken.’’ Anna Flood, the only female in Ruby with an afro hair style, is in a relationship with him. Ruby, a microcosm of the United States of America, is the setting for the novel. The only significant difference between the microcosm and macrocosm is that the leadership of one is African; the leadership of the other, European. Otherwise, both are patriarchal, capitalist structures resistant to change. For any change may deal a deathblow to the ruling class’s hegemony. ‘‘They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.’’ It is the measure of Toni Morrison’s developing class consciousness that racism is given relatively little attention in Paradise. That the struggle between ‘‘black and white,’’ African and European, is not centralized in the novel is made clear in that first line of the novel. In fact, there is little to no presence of Europeans in the novel. They are referred to and they appear in peripheral scenes. (The European couple with the sick baby is one of few examples.) However, their presence is not required because the novel’s focus is not racism. The matter of supreme concern is the class struggle. So while the foundation upon which Ruby is born is the result of first class exploitation (i.e., the need for a labor force to exploit) and then race oppression (i.e., the use of race as a justification for the exploitation), it is the class exploitation—the true enemy of Af-

136


ricans, other people of color, poor and working class people— which commands Morrison’s attention. The enslavement of Africans such as Zechariah Morgan for the purpose of creating a cheap labor force (i.e., for economic, not racist, purposes) is the driving force for the creation of first Haven and then Ruby. It is what sets everything in the novel in motion. Racism is the consequence of the enslavement, not the motive for it. Yet, institutionalized racism becomes so much a part of the fabric of the U.S. that it leads to class struggle among Africans themselves. Their experiences with racism help to nourish their belief that racism is the primary contradiction that needs to be resolved. And the best resolution, in their eyes, is separation. When this separation does not guarantee ‘‘safety’’ (12), strong and willing men must use violence: ‘‘From Haven, a dreamtown in Oklahoma Territory, to Haven, a ghosttown in Oklahoma State. Freedmen who stood tall in 1889 dropped to their knees in 1934 and were stomach-crawling by 1948. That is why they are here in this Convent. To make sure it never happens again. That nothing inside or out rots the one allblack town worth the pain’’ (5). Unfortunately, the ‘‘inside’’ does not include the eight-rock men, the ruling class of Ruby. Their scrutinizing eye sees what is not them or theirs as the enemy. Eventually, this concentration on the offspring of class exploitation (i.e., racism) rather than on the parent (e.g., slavery, capitalism) encourages Africans themselves to think that being darker skinned somehow makes them superior to other Africans. It is this skin-color issue that so blinds the Ruby men that they lose sight of their true enemy. Instead, they become the enemy. Blinded as they are, they set up the same economic structure that was responsible for their own enslavement. When Roger Best tries to bring his wife Delia to Haven, he is blocked by the dark-skinned male ruling class. Roger’s daughter, Pat, thinks, ‘‘Their jaws must have dropped when we arrived, but other than Steward, nobody said anything directly. They didn’t have to. . . . Only Steward had the gall to say out loud, ‘He’s bringing along the dung we leaving behind’’’ (201). This appropriation of a myth and then the re-mythicizing of it reaches its most ludicrous conclusion when the Ruby community resorts to intermarrying to avoid ‘‘lightening up the race’’ or contaminating the race with European blood. Concerning incest, or near incest, in Ruby, Pat writes, ‘‘a widower might ask a friend or a distant relative if he could take over a young girl who had no prospects. Like Billy’s family. His


137

mother, Fawn, born a Blackhorse, was taken over by his grandmother’s uncle, August Cato’’ (196). Could the consequences of this practice be reflected in Sweetie’s offspring? What also reflects this aberrant behavior of the Ruby community is that while they reject the skin color of the ruling class, they accept the hair texture! Remember the town’s reaction to Anna Flood’s hair: ‘‘She was certain the disapproval was mostly because of her unstraightened hair’’? What is most tragic, and the central interest of Morrison in this novel, is that while they reject the skin color, they embrace the avarice, patriarchal, anti-youth behavior of the capitalists. Remember Reverend Misner’s words, ‘‘They think they have outfoxed the whiteman when in fact they imitate him’’? Misner goes on to state, ‘‘They think they are protecting their wives and children, when in fact they are maiming them. And when the maimed children ask for help, they look elsewhere for the cause’’ (306). Since racism is not the root of the problem confronted by African people and since it is clear that Morrison is aware of this fact and thus devotes little time and space to the struggle between Africans and Europeans in Paradise, little time and space will be devoted to it here. The youth question, however, commands a significant amount of Toni Morrison’s attention. In any society, youths are the spark for change: they are energetic, they are not in their career jobs, and they not only believe in the ‘‘rightness’’ of the world, they wish to do something to help bring this ‘‘rightness’’ into existence. The youths of Ruby are not different in this respect. They struggle for positive change and do not care that the change they are struggling for goes against the wishes of the ruling class. But the elders, especially the ruling class, resist this change, tooth and claw. The patriarchs of Ruby view the youths’ struggle for change as defiance, ‘‘backtalk’’ at best. The young Royal Beauchamp replies, ‘‘What is talk if it’s not ‘back’? You all just don’t want us to talk at all. Any talk is ‘backtalk’ if you don’t agree with what’s being said’’ (85). Typical of any oppressive ruling class’ response is Deek’s: ‘‘Nobody is going to mess with a thing our grandfather’s built. . . . So understand me when I tell you nobody is going to come along some eighty years later claiming to know better what men who went through hell to learn knew’’ (86). Rather than see the youths evolve, progress further than they, spark positive changes in Ruby, the Ruby patriarchs want to create clones. Like K.D., the

138


nephew of Deek and Steward Morgan. As his name suggests, he is undeveloped, a kid, a replica of his uncles. Richard Misner is right when he states that it’s ‘‘as though, rather than children, they [the patriarchs] wanted duplicates’’ (161). Who wants to see change if life as it exists benefits you? The patriarchs want to ensure that things stay the way they are. And they have God on their side, since they are God’s business partners. Any change is then, in essence, going against God. It is the very argument preached to the slaves from the pro-slavery church pulpits. It is an argument that the slaves resisted, that the Ruby forefathers resisted, and that the descendants of these forefathers, the Ruby youths, are resisting. If the male ruling class of Ruby cannot create duplicates, the future for the youths is prison or death. Sound familiar? Remember, Ruby is a microcosm of the U.S. Unwanted youths, those who are different and want society to be different (i.e., more humanist and egalitarian), have no place to go except prison or the grave. Steward refers to Ruby’s rebellious youths as ‘‘little illegal niggers’’ who have ‘‘no home training’’ and who ‘‘need to be in jail’’ (206). If, for some reason, his message still isn’t clear, Steward has a back-up plan—violence: ‘‘Listen here . . . if you, any one of you, ignore, change, take away, or add to the words in the mouth of that Oven, I will blow your head off just like you was a hoodeye snake’’ (87). Okay, John Wayne. Violence has never stopped change. It may stall it, but it won’t halt it. And the youths are ready for change. Their struggle for change is not just in race relations, though that is still a struggle as indicated by the ‘‘little illegal niggers’’ who go off to the ‘‘big’’ city and protest. The more immediate, more pressing struggle is a class struggle—an attempt to change the ruling class domination that exists in Ruby. It’s a struggle that the patriarchs (and the matriarchs) don’t understand: ‘‘Soane couldn’t understand it [the youths’ discontent]. There were no whites (moral or malevolent) around to agitate or incense them, make them ugly-up the Oven and defy the adults. In fact local citizens were prospering, had been on a roll for more than a decade’’ (102). According to Dovey, ‘‘young people [were] in trouble or acting up behind every door. Arnette, home from college, wouldn’t leave her bed. Harper Jury’s boy, Menus, drunk every weekend since he got back from Vietnam. Roger’s granddaughter, Billie Delia, disappeared into thin air. Jeff’s wife, Sweetie, laughing, laughing at jokes no one made’’ (82–83).


139

Conditions have to change if the town [the nation] is to be saved. The litmus test of whether or not change will occur is the struggle over the Oven’s motto. It is a struggle that reflects the mentalities of both the ruling class and the youths. Although some of the words on the Oven have disappeared, the patriarchs say that the original words were ‘‘Beware the Furrow of His Brow.’’ Beware of God’s wrath, in essence. According to the youths, ‘‘no ex-slave would tell us to be scared all the time. To ‘beware’ God. To always be ducking and diving, trying to look out every minute in case He’s getting ready to throw something at us, keep us down’’ (84). This type of God is not One that the youths are willing to accept, especially since accepting Him is synonymous with accepting Ruby’s ruling class. Rather, the youths’ God is One who expects them to act like Him. They believe the motto on the Oven reads, ‘‘Be the Furrow of His Brow’’: Destry, looking strained and close to tears, held up his hand and asked, ‘Excuse me, sir. What’s so wrong about ‘Be the Furrow’? ‘‘Be the Furrow of His Brow’? ‘you can’t be God, boy.’ . . . It’s not being Him, sir, it’s being His instrument, His justice.’’’ (85)

When the patriarchs have heard enough from the youths, their answer is violence: ‘‘See what I mean? See what I mean? Listen to that! You hear that, Reverend? That boy needs a strap’’ (86). There are some adults who are ready for and willing to make change. Misner is one; Lone is another. Her view of God is in sync with the youths’. To her, ‘‘He was a liberating God. A teacher who taught you how to learn, to see for yourself’’ (273). For Misner, the motto on the Oven simply reads, ‘‘’the Furrow of His Brow.’ There is no ‘Beware’ on it.’’ (87). But whether all the adults are ready for change or not, change will occur. During the course of the novel, the youths move from potential change agents to change agents. Toward the end of the novel, ‘‘the young people had changed its words again. No longer were they calling themselves Be the Furrow of His Brow. The graffiti on the hood of the Oven now was ‘we Are the Furrow of His Brow’’’ (298). What Morrison devotes most of her time to is gender oppression. Like God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, oppression in Paradise is a trinity: capitalism, patriarchy, and violence. The former gives rise to the latter two. Living within a society in which the

140


wealth that is being socially produced is not socially controlled leads to a lack of real human freedom. And when the control of the wealth is principally in the hands of men, institutionalized gender oppression results. Since capitalism, an economic system that allows wealth to be concentrated in and socially controlled by a small percentage of its population (at this time, mostly males), flourishes in the U.S., women of all colors are burdened by male domination. And since Ruby is just a microcosm of the U.S., it too is burdened by male hegemony. The only significant difference within the confines of this novel is that outside of Ruby, the male ruling class is European; inside of Ruby, it’s African. In essence, for women, ‘‘Everywhere is a Medallion.’’ Women outside and inside Ruby catch hell. Billie Delia understands this reality clearly. Her assessment of Ruby is that it’s ‘‘a backward noplace ruled by men whose power to control was out of control and who had the nerve to say who could live and who not and where’’ (308). It is the men of Paradise who are in control, who are in the driver’s seat. As Lone puts it, ‘‘the men never walked the road; they drove it’’ (270). And as in the U.S., when the word of the male ruling class is not sufficient to control all others, violence is the answer. So when the Ruby women and youths no longer view the word of the male as sacrosanct, he begins to search for the reason why. That search is never an internal one, for to blame himself would mean the end of his reign as ruler. The answer must lie outside—outside the Ruby ruling class and outside of its wives and offspring. That leaves only one place: the Convent. The Convent becomes that which is negative, evil, corrosive, and corrupting. And, therefore, it must be destroyed. In preparation for this destruction, the men eat blood flesh and drink alcohol-laced coffee to prepare themselves before thine enemies: thy rod and thy staff will go along with them: ‘‘Sargeant suggested beefsteaks and went in his house to get what was needed to feed the men. Priscilla, his wife, heard him and offered to help, but he sent her back to bed, firmly’’ (282). During their blood-eating time, they think of all kinds of wrongs that have occurred and blame them on the Convent women, ‘‘outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year’s Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common. . . . the one thing that connected all these catas-


141

trophes was in the Convent. And in the Convent were those women’’ (11). These coven, I mean Convent, women are not just bitches; they are witches. They deserve to die. ‘‘Bodacious black Eves’’ (18): He raises his chin and then his rifle and shoots open a door that has never been locked. It slants inward on its hinges. Sun follows him in, splashing the walls of the foyer, where sexualized infants play with one another through flaking paint. Suddenly a woman with the same white skin appears, and all Steward needs to see are her sensual appraising eyes to pull the trigger again. The other men are startled but not deterred from stepping over her. Fondling their weapons, feeling suddenly so young and good they are reminded that guns are more than decoration, intimidation or comfort. They are meant. (285)

One by one, the women of the Convent are shot. And more and more the men feel justified in their actions, mistaking the displays of the embezzler for those of the women, mistaking an act of healing for an act of Satan, mistaking the cause of the problems of Ruby as the Convent women instead of themselves: ‘‘Steward, Deek and K.D. observe defilement and violence and perversions beyond imagination. Lovingly drawn filth carpets the stone floor. K.D. fingers his palm cross. Deek taps his shirt pocket where sunglasses are tucked. He had thought he might use them for other purposes, but he wonders if he needs them now to shield from his sight this sea of depravity’’ (287). This act of violence reveals that not one of the ruling class men of Ruby is different from any of the others. All benefit from their position in society; all dominate over the women and the youths; all agree and prepare to hunt the Convent women; and all take part in the hunt. When the hunting men see Consolata, it is Deacon, her former lover, the adulterer, who volunteers to murder her: ‘‘He lifts his hand to halt his brother’s and discovers who, between them, is the stronger man. The bullet enters her forehead’’ (289). A useful approach to analyzing Morrison’s depiction of the gender question in the novel is to divide the discussion into the oppression of women on the one hand and the process of overcoming that oppression, i.e., the healing of the women, on the other. The males’ view of what it is to be female offers a panoramic view of the nature of the oppression of women in Paradise. And since the world of the novel reflects that of the U.S., the traditional North American

142


male’s view of the female as presented in Paradise is critical. This view is of the female as heterosexual, homemaker, mother, modest, voiceless, eurocentric (in values and dress, though not in skin color), isolated (not sociable with other women). Many of these are characteristics of an abused woman. Let’s examine each of these characteristics. The female as homemaker includes the notions of cleanliness and industriousness. Deek’s view is appropriate here. As he drives, not ‘‘walks,’’ through the small Ruby town, surveying his property (one could say), he thinks of the ‘‘quiet white and yellow houses full of industry; and in them . . . elegant black women at useful tasks; orderly cupboards minus surfeit or miserliness; linen laundered and ironed to perfection; good meat seasoned and ready for roasting. It was a view he would be damned if K.D. or the idleness of the young would disturb’’ (11). The men work while the women stay at home—a way of life few Africans ever knew. It is as if the whole town is filled with Macon Dead Juniors and Ruth Fosters. Earlier in the novel, Steward states that ‘‘there wasn’t a slack or sloven woman anywhere in town’’ (8), except for, of course, the Convent women. But they don’t count because they are just outside of town. After shooting open the door and murdering the ‘‘more-girl-thanwoman’’ that they associate more with being ‘‘white’’ than ‘‘black,’’ Steward and Deek size up the Convent women by their pantry: ‘‘Together they scan dusty mason jars and what is left of last year’s canning: tomatoes, green beans, peaches. Slack, they think. August just around the corner and these women have not even sorted, let alone washed, the jars’’ (51). These women not only have ‘‘no clothes in the closets, of course, since the women wore no-fit dirty dresses and nothing you could honestly call shoes,’’ but also they live a manless life which suggests to the men, lesbianism. OOOOOH! ‘‘No men. Kissing on themselves . . . Jesus! No telling what else’’ (276). What can make women behave in this fashion? This is Steward’s question: ‘‘What, he wonders could do this to women? How can their plain brains think up such things: revolting sex, deceit and the sly torture of children? Out here in wide-open space tucked away in a mansion—no one to bother or insult them—they managed to call into question the value of almost every woman he knew’’ (8). How can their plain (read: simple and inferior) brains think up such things? It must be the devil. The devil made them do it. They are more than ‘‘bitches. More like witches’’ (276):


143

There are strange things nailed or taped to the walls or propped in a corner. 1968 calendar, large X’s marking various dates (April 4, July 19); a letter written in blood so smeary its satanic message cannot be deciphered; an astrology chart; a fedora tilted on the plastic neck of a female torso, and, in a place that once housed Christians—well, Catholics anyway—not a cross of Jesus anywhere. But what alarms the two men most is the series of infant booties and shoes ribboned to a cord hanging from a crib in the last bedroom they enter. A teething ring, cracked and stiff, dangles among the tiny shoes. . . . one man directs his partner to four more bedrooms on the opposite side of the hall. He himself moves closer to the bouquet of baby shoes. Looking for what? More evidence? He isn’t sure. Blood? A little toe, maybe, left in a white calfskin shoe? He slides the safety on his gun and joins the search across the hall. (7–8)

The only solution for this Satanism is death. ‘‘Can’t say they haven’t been warned. Asked first and then warned. If they stayed to themselves, that’d be something. But they don’t. They meddle. Drawing folks out there like flies to shit and everybody who goes near them is maimed somehow and the mess is seeping back into our homes, our families’’ (276). The ways of the Convent women are like a virus that’s spreading, measles that’s catching. At least, according to the hunting men. The Ruby women and the youths are not thinking for themselves, fed up themselves, rebelling themselves. They are not looking at what’s happening to their topsyturvy world and standing up to right it. Rather, they are succumbing to a disease that emanates from the Convent. What happens to women in a society where everything and everyone is a commodity to be bought and sold, when the bottom line is how much profit will be made, when even the lowliest male sees the female as property that belongs to him, and when violence is the tactic used to keep the workers, including women, in their places? They are physically, psychologically, verbally, and sexually abused, socialized to be passive, taught to shut up, forced to be either sexless or to view themselves as pieces of meat, taught to be jealous of, and sometimes fight, one another, forced to partner with one another or to create an imaginative Other; compelled to resort to substance abuse, and, in some cases, driven to self-mutilation. It is the Crisis of the Female Personality. Pure and Simple. All of these symptoms of oppression are present in Paradise, inside and outside of Ruby. Physical abuse is Mavis’s story. Before her twins’ death, before

144


coming to the Convent, she had been a patient in the County Hospital fifteen times, only four times for childbirth. The other times were due to physical abuse from her husband, Frank. So systemic was the abuse that her daughter Sal plays the game of ‘‘abuse Mama,’’ pinching her mother’s side in the presence of the TV news people. Seneca too is a victim. She endures ‘‘playful’’ abuse from the very pretty rich Norma Keene Fox who ‘‘picks her up’’ at the bus station. Spending most of her life in foster homes, she is so accustomed to physical abuse that she thinks ‘‘the pain framed the pleasure, gave it edge’’ (137). The just-made-it-to-manhood K.D. looks ‘‘from Arnette’s [his girlfriend’s] neat shirtwaist dress to the bangs across her forehead and then into her face—sullen, nagging, accusatory—and slapped it’’ (54–55). His love and care and caresses he reserves instead for his dog: ‘‘Hey good dog; stay good dog; old good dog; my good dog. Everybody needs a good good good dog. Everybody needs a good a good a good good dog’’ (54). Women endure psychological abuse as well. This type of abuse may be more devastating than the physical abuse because one eventually knows that she should not be banged around. However, the psychologically abused woman may begin to believe her abuser’s assessment of her. Take Mavis, for example. In her case, Frank has been calling her stupid for so long that she accepts his appraisal of her: ‘‘Mavis felt her stupidity close in on her head like a dry sack. A grown woman who could not cross the country. Could not make a plan that accommodated more than twenty minutes. Had to be taught how to dry herself in the weeds. Too rattle-minded to open a car’s window so babies could breathe. . . . Frank was right. From the very beginning he had been absolutely right about her; she was the dumbest bitch on the planet’’ (37). Seneca is just a younger Mavis. From her jailed boyfriend comes this: ‘‘Can’t you get anything right? Just a small Bible! Not a goddamn encyclopedia! . . . She had known him for only six months, but already he knew how hopeless she was’’ (131). Just as in capitalist societies at their height, Paradise women are viewed as extensions of their sex organs. The consequences of this view are that women are sexually abused and sexually dissatisfied. With Mavis, it’s both: ‘‘He didn’t penetrate—just rubbed himself to climax while chewing a clump of her hair through the nightgown that covered her face. She could have been a life-size Raggedy Ann’’ (26). Many references are made to women as sex organs. Women are pussies and tits. The youngest of the Convent females,


145

Pallas Truelove, gets this lesson taught to her on two occasions, by the men who rape her and by an experienced, but psychologically damaged female who has become convinced that her worth is in her pussy: ‘‘Here, pussy. Here.’’ Pallas had heard that before. A lifetime ago on the happiest day of her life. On the escalator. Last Christmas. Spoken by the crazy woman, whom she could see now in greater detail than when first sighted. The hair at the top of her head, sectioned off with a red plastic barrette, would have been a small pompadour or a curl had it been longer than two or three inches. In the event, it was neither. Just a tuft held rigid by a child’s barrette. Two other hair clips, one yellow, one neon purple, held fingerfuls of hair at her temples. Her dark velvet face was on display and rendered completely unseen by the biscuit-size disks of scarlet rouge, the fuchsia lipstick drawn crookedly beyond the rim of her lips, the black eyebrow pencil that trailed down toward her cheekbones. Everything else about her was dazzle and clunk: white plastic earrings, copper bracelets, pastel beads at her throat, and much, much more where all that came from in the bags she carried: two BOAC carrier bags and a woven metal purse shaped like a cigar box. She wore a white cotton halter and a little-bitty red skirt. The hose on her short legs, a cinnamon color thought agreeable to black women’s legs, were as much a study in running as her high heels were in run over. Inner arm skin and a small, sturdy paunch suggested she was about forty years old, but she could have been fifty or twenty. The dance she danced on the up escalator, the rolling hips, the sway of her head, called to mind a bygone era of slow grind in a badly lit room of couples. Not the electric go-go pace of 1974. The teeth could have been done anywhere: Kingston, Jamaica, or Pass Christian, Mississippi; Addis Ababa or Warsaw. Stunning gold, old, they dated her smile while giving it the seriousness the rest of her clothing withheld. Most eyes looked away from her—down at the floating metal steps underfoot or out at the Christmas decorations enlivening the department store. Children, however, and Pallas Truelove stared. (163–64)

This woman with the dark velvet face is, or could be, any woman. She symbolizes the potential reality—given the right (wrong) conditions—of Everywoman in North America. Pallas recognizes her as her (Pallas’s) future self. And it is this recognition that makes her stare like a child. And as always in Morrison’s canon, the recognition of some profound Truth upsets and disorientates: ‘‘Pallas had stumbled off the escalator in a light panic, rushing to the doors, outside which Carlos was waiting for her. The revolting woman’s sing-

146


song merged with the carols piping throughout the store: ‘Here’s pussy. Want some pussy, pussy’’’ (163). Pallas, herself, will learn that despite her wealth and near whiteness, her worth in this society is tied up in her pussy too. Soon after this department store incident, she is raped: ‘‘Floating over the water, the whispers were closer than their calls. ‘Here, pussy. Kitty, kitty, kitty,’ sounded far away; but ‘Gimme the flash, dickface, izzat her, let go, maybe she drowned, no way,’ slid into the skin behind her ears’’ (163). That the ‘‘here, pussy’’ sounded far away is due to her remembering the ‘‘revolting woman’’ on the escalator and understanding that she too is revolting as she lays nearly drowned in black, dark water with ‘‘the things touching below.’’ It is because she has walked in the woman’s shoes that she, once enveloped in the Convent, can ‘‘see now in greater detail than when [she] first sighted [the ‘crazy woman’].’’ Grace Called Gigi will also learn this lesson. She, like the ‘‘revolting woman,’’ has accepted the society’s view of her as a piece of meat. She comes to the small hick town of Ruby dressed in ‘‘pants so tight, heels so high, earrings so large’’ (53). K.D. comes looking for her, not because of her worth as a human being, but for sexual gratification: ‘‘Gigi watched him battle his stare and lose every time. He said his name was K.D. and tried hard to enjoy her face as much as her cleavage’’ (73). Unlike Pallas’s, Gigi’s teacher is not a real live woman, but a picture of a woman: Hanging on the wall in front of her was the etching she had barely glanced at when poking around the day before. Now it loomed into her line of vision in the skinny light from the hall. A woman. On her knees. A knocked-down look, cast-up begging eyes, arms outstretched holding up her present on a platter to a lord. Gigi tiptoed over and leaned close to see who was the woman with the I-give-up face. ‘‘Saint Catherine of Siena’’ was engraved on a small plaque in the gilt frame. Gigi laughed— brass dicks hidden in a box; pudding tits exposed on a plate—but in fact it didn’t feel funny. (73–74)

And, of course, it isn’t funny. Women seen as sex objects, as pieces of meat, beaten down and beaten up aren’t funny at all. The Ruby men, and the women whom they rule (since the minds of most of the Ruby women are those of the Ruby men), are so obsessed with sex, i.e., the prevention of its manifestation in their women, that an innocent act by a three-year-old girl is thought to reflect her desire for sex:


147

Billie Delia was three years old—too little, still, for everyday underwear. . . .Then one day. A Sunday. Hard Goods [a horse] came loping down the street with Mr. Nathan astride. Billie Delia, who hadn’t seen horse or rider for a long while, ran toward them, begging for a lift. Mr. Nathan promised to stop by after service. Still in her Sunday clothes, she waited in her yard. When she saw him coming, negotiating space among the after-church crowd, she ran out into the middle of Central Avenue, where she pulled down her Sunday panties before raising her arms to be lifted onto Hard Good’s back. (150)

You see. Billie Delia was accustomed to riding Hard Goods without panties since she only wore underwear on Sunday. But it’s as if the townsmen see Hard Goods as a hard penis that three-year-old Billie Delia wishes to ride. They transfer their own deviant thoughts to those of a little girl and she pays the consequences for their deviancy. She is forever branded as the town’s slut. The women of Ruby react similarly. Unquestioningly accepting the men’s thoughts as their own, they condemn her too. Even her own mother! She got an unintelligible whipping from her mother and a dose of shame it took her years to understand. That’s when the teasing began, more merciless because her mother was the teacher. Suddenly there was a dark light in the eyes of boys who felt comfortable staring at her. Suddenly a curious bracing in the women, a looking-away look in the men. And a permanent watchfulness in her mother. (151)

This same act of transference takes place when the Ruby men go to the Convent. They see a reflection of their own deviant thoughts present in the embezzler’s mansion. Pat Best, Billie Delia’s mother, knowing her child better than any other, accepts the males’ view of her daughter. She lets that view shape her consciousness of her daughter and so begins her vigil over her. In her unquestioning acceptance of the male’s point of view, Pat Best is not the exception; she is the rule. On the move from Haven to Ruby, the women follow the men like sheep, voicelessly. They ‘‘nodded when the men took the Oven apart, packed, moved and reassembled it. But privately they resented the truck space given over to it—rather than a few more sacks of seed, rather than shoats or even a child’s crib. Resented also the hours spent putting it back together—hours that could have been spent getting the privy door on sooner’’ (103). Yet the women remain voiceless and accepting. Soane, the wife of the second most powerful man in

148


Ruby, thinks that ‘‘if the [Oven] plaque was so important—and judging from the part of the [town’s] meeting she had witnessed, she supposed it was—why hadn’t they [the men] just taken it by itself, left the bricks where they had stood for fifty years’’ (103). She thinks this, but does not vocalize it. As the most powerful female in Ruby and, therefore, a role model for Ruby women, Dovey Morgan, Steward’s wife, is also voiceless. For years, she has been burdened with a question she does not dare ask her husband, a question that keeps her awake at night: ‘‘Aside from giving up his wealth, can a rich man be a good one?’’ (93). Instead of asking her husband, she plans to ask an imaginary friend (93). Women outside of Ruby don’t speak up either. How do we know? Well, for one, Mavis tells us so. The world for all the girls who hitchhike rides from her—both ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘colored’’ is the same: ‘‘Underneath the knowing talk, the bell-chime laughter, the pointed silences, the world they described was just like her own pre-California existence—sad, scary, all wrong’’ (33). Pallas’s experiences, and especially their consequences, confirm this: she is unable to speak. After running away with her school’s custodian, a man twice her age, after losing him to her mother, and after her rape, ‘‘Pallas discovered that her vocal cords didn’t work. That for soundmaking power she couldn’t rival the solitary windmill creaking in the field behind her’’ (173). Her physical violation impacts upon her ability to speak just as the physical oppression of women in general affects their ability to voice their opinions, to speak their minds. For teenaged girls like Pallas as well as for older women like Mavis and all women in between, the world inside and outside of Ruby is the same. Take Arnette. Her thoughts on K.D. mirror older women’s thoughts which mirror the male’s view of ‘‘nice’’ girls/women. You experience one man, sexually, and you stick with that man—no matter if that man sticks with you or not: ‘‘She believed she loved him absolutely because he was all she knew about her self—which was to say, everything she knew of her body was connected to him’’ (148). Ain’t that a shame? Even Lone, once a very vocal midwife and healer, is rendered voiceless. As Fairy, the midwife who taught Lone the profession, explained: ‘‘the midwife is the interference, the one giving orders, on whose secret skill so much depended, and the dependency irritated them [the males of Ruby]’’ (272). Luckily, Lone escapes the unenviable fate of the rest of womankind because she has the ability to mind-read.


149

Since there is so little communication between males and females, and even among females themselves, mind-reading is one way to solve one consequence of gender oppression. Unfortunately, few people, male or female, have this gift. If women are to defeat patriarchy and its mother, capitalism, they must communicate. Women must talk to one another. Arnette claims that, ‘‘except for Billie Delia, no one had told her there was any other way to think of herself’’ except as an appendage to K.D. Not her mother; not her sister-in-law. No one (148). Pat Best does not even talk to her daughter, Billie Delia. In order to succeed at communication, however, women must reject the socialization that forces them to suspect one another, to hate the other on sight. Remember Billie Delia’s first reaction to Grace just as the latter steps off the bus in Ruby: ‘‘Billie Delia’s hatred of the strange-looking girl was instant’’ (152). Women must come to see one another as victims—all in the same boat. The only talking that goes on among females in the novel is that which takes place out at the Convent. Women ‘‘accidentally’’ find their way to the Convent. Once there, they eventually share their stories, their pains and sorrows. Other than with Connie, however, talking among the women at the Convent first takes the form of a hostile, at times, violent (Violet?) communication since it is the form of communication that is brought with them from outside the Convent. Witness the fight between Mavis and Grace: They couldn’t fight really well in the space available, but they tried. Seneca held Pallas in her arms and watched. Once upon a time she would try to separate them, but now she knew better. When they were exhausted they’d stop, and peace would reign longer than if she interfered. Gigi [Grace] knew Mavis’ touchy parts: anything insulting to Connie and any reference to her fugitive state. . . . The Cadillac rocked. Gigi was scrappy, but vain—she didn’t want bruises or scratches to mar her lovely face and she worried constantly about her hair. Mavis was slow but a steady, joyful hitter. When Gigi saw blood she assumed it was her own and scrambled from the car, Mavis scooting after her. Under a metal-hot sky void of even one arrow of birds they fought on the road and its shoulder. (168)

At the Convent, the violence is a precursor to other forms of communication, including verbal and telepathic. Here in Paradise violence seems to be a part of the healing process for the women inside of the Convent. It has to work itself out and, once it does, ‘‘peace

150


would reign.’’ Outside of the Convent, within the borders of Ruby, the violence exhibited between women, like that perpetuated by men, seems to have no redeeming value. Billie Delia and her mother fight (in fact, her mother ‘‘fought her like a man,’’ 152), but there’s no healing aftermath. Living in a patriarchal state warps everyone, both male and female. (Textnote: It reminds us of what Frederick Douglass states about slavery: it animalizes both the slave and the slave master. For the female, as for the slave, exploitation is most devastating, causing the Crisis of the Female Personality.) It is worth examining what the female personality is in a capitalist society. What is the true self of a woman? If she is not a wife or a mother or a whore, what is she? If she steps outside of society’s view of her, the place accorded to her, what is she? Well, she could become man, partner with another woman, or she could have an imaginary friend, a ‘‘man’’ who is different from that which is shaped in a patriarchy, someone interested in her, in what she thinks and says. Like Dovey’s imaginary friend who ‘‘looked so interested in what she was describing’’ (91). Or she could join a coven, I mean a Convent. Become a nun and take refuge in a Convent. Get thee to a nunnery, if you don’t want to deal with a male shaped by capitalism. Those women who come to the Convent in Paradise do indeed find the refuge and solace that they so ardently need. Once there, they must learn that they are not their own enemies. They must learn not to hate one another, not to fight one another, and not to hate their own selves so much that they try, like Connie, to drink themselves to death (‘‘Consolata woke to the wrenching disappointment of not having died the night before,’’ 221) or that they try, like Seneca, to carve themselves. They must get rid of the shit that weighs them down or die trying. The Convent women die trying. Although the women in the novel are all oppressed, there are many individual manifestations of oppression like Connie’s alcoholism and Seneca’s self-mutilation mentioned above that result from years of physical and psychological abuse. When we first meet Mavis, she suffers from paranoia: The rest of the night she waited, not closing her eyes for a second. Frank’s [her husband’s] sleep was sound and she would have slipped out of bed (as soon as he had not smothered or strangled her?) and opened the door except for the breathing beyond it. She was sure Sal


151

squatted there—ready to pounce or grab her legs. Her upper lip would be raised showing eleven-year-ole teeth too big for her snarling mouth. Dawn, Mavis thought, would be critical. The trap would be agreed upon but maybe not laid yet. Her sharpest concentration would be needed to locate it before it sprung. (26)

What is real and what is imagined get mingled together in Mavis’s abused mind. Is Sal really an eleven-year-old monster working in league with her father? Seneca was abandoned in the projects by her teenaged mother when she was only five years old. From that time until her arrival at the Convent, she is physically abused. At the hands of the inhabitants of foster homes, at the hands of Eddie Turtle, and in the hands of the gorgeous and rich Norma: ‘‘Norma called her many sweet things but not once asked what her name was.’’ Instead, Seneca experienced ‘‘abject humiliation . . . But the pain framed the pleasure, gave it edge’’ (137). And through it all she ‘‘took reprimand quietly, ate what given [sic], shared what she had and never ever cried’’ (135). Instead, she drew intricate maps on her body with a razor. Grace’s self-worth rests in her sexual attraction. On the other hand, Pallas’s self-worth has been destroyed not only by her mother’s seduction of the janitor whom Pallas loves and has run off with, but also by her rape. Pallas’s silence is a result of both an emotional and physical rape. Connie’s oppression is caused by her cultural estrangement and the lack of male companionship. Hers is the story of what happened to many native children. Stolen from her ‘‘primitive’’ environment and brought to the U.S. to undergo the process of civilization at the hands of Mother, Connie’s story is one which is integral to capitalism. She loses sight of the importance of her heritage and begins to decay: The first to go were the rudiments of her first language. Every now and then she found herself speaking and thinking in that in-between place, the valley between the regulations of the first language and the vocabulary of the second. The next thing to disappear was embarrassment. Finally, she lost the ability to bear light. (242)

Connie’s lack of sight reflects her lack of consciousness about her history, culture, and womanhood. It is not until she is thirty-nine that she first experiences sex! Deek, Connie’s lover, helps her to maintain some sight, but once he stops his secret visits, her ability to see vanishes all together.

152


What blinds Connie is the paternalism of capitalism. She thinks that Mother Magna is the mother or savior of all ‘‘troubled’’ females when she is, in fact, the conqueror, the oppressor. Mother’s light, ‘‘in a house with no electricity’’ (48), is blinding, not healing: ‘‘The whiteness at the center was blinding. It took a moment for Mavis to see the shape articulated among the pillows and the bonewhite sheets, and she might have remained sightless had not an authoritative voice said, ‘Don’t stare, child’’’ (46). The white is blinding, dominating and overwhelming. It is so dominating that one might, if she were not careful, think it is the color (i.e., race), not the economic system (i.e., slavery, colonialism, capitalism), that is the problem. Neither Connie nor the other Convent women begin to heal until Connie becomes a fully developed human being, Consolata, and initiates the process. In other words, neither the paternalism of ‘‘white’’ women nor men can heal women. Women must heal themselves by going through a process of recognition (of the enemy), rejection (of that enemy), and acceptance (of their own identities). Which brings us to another woman integral to the novel and suffering from the oppression emanating from a capitalist, patriarchal society: Toni Morrison. There are questions arising from the theme and structure of Paradise that must be asked: Why is the healing process orchestrated by a native American and not an African? Why Consolata, and not Lone? Why depict the Jesus or savior figures in the novel as men with long, pale hair or men sporting cowboy boots? Why not a Garvey, Malcolm, Nkrumah, or Tubman figure? Let’s examine the first question. Lone is the one who shows Connie her psychic-healing powers and then teaches her to use them: Lone, sitting at Consolata’s table, sensed rather than heard the accident: the shouts of July and Easter could not have traveled that far. She rose and grabbed Consolata’s arm. ‘‘Come on!’’ ‘‘Where to?’’ ‘‘Close by, I think.’’ When they arrived, Easter and July had pulled Scout from the cab and were howling over his dead body. Lone turned to Consolata, saying, ‘‘I’m too old now. Can’t do it anymore, but you can.’’ ‘‘Lift him?’’ ‘‘No. Go inside him. Wake him up.’’


153

‘‘Inside? How?’’ ‘‘Step in. Just step on in. Help him, girl!’’

It’s the writer’s artistic license to do what she wants, you say. But hasn’t Morrison led us to the precipice? We’ve had skeletal African healers from the beginning of Morrison’s writing career: M’Dear, Ajax’s mother, Pilate, Baby Suggs. Why not a full-fledged healer in Lone? What would it have cost the Paradise story? What would it have given to the African reader? An African who is in charge at the Convent. An African who heals the oppressed women of the novel. All the props are present. Lone is a loner, all alone in her ability to ‘‘see’’ and the lone midwife who has the power to bring life into the world, new life as well as old life. Yet, Morrison decides to make her an old woman with ‘‘eyesight too dim’’ and ‘‘joints too stiff.’’ Too bad. A missed opportunity. (Textnote: Perhaps I am wrong. Too harsh, you say. There is Piedade who reigns in the afterlife. She is ‘‘a woman black as firewood’’ who brings solace through song [318]. I guess I’m tired of African people having to wait until they die to get their rewards. There are enough examples of earthly African heroines to serve as role models for sparking revolution and salvation. Give me a Yaa Asantewa or a Harriet Tubman. Give me some hope. Please.) There is another opportunity to bring pride and dignity to the reader as well as to right history. The Christ and Savior with hair of lamb’s wool is presented in Paradise as having fresh, tea-colored hair which tumbles down, ‘‘cascading over his shoulders and down his back’’ (252). This is how He manifests himself the second time. On His first appearance, He is described as wearing ‘‘a cowboy hat that hid his features’’ (252). There is hope, at this point, that the cowboy savior is an African. However, these hopes are later dashed when he appears before Connie with tea-colored hair. Why is this ethereal figure of such importance? He is the one who sparks Connie to live up to her potential as healer, to develop to her fullest, to become Consolata, not just Connie. It is after his visit that ‘‘her colorless eyes saw nothing clearly except what took place in the minds of others’’ (248) and she begins to serve as a healing agent for the Convent women. Morrison’s choice to make Him of European descent and male are indices of her own oppression. Who can live in a whorehouse and not turn a trick every now and then? asks Audre Lorde. Who among us will cast the first stone? As products of capitalism, all of us carry some of its garbage. We cannot be both inside

154


and outside of a society simultaneously. Who as African has not wished to escape her darker skin, woolly hair, Hottentot hips, broad nose, black language, or ghetto behavior? We are all oppressed and will at one time or another reflect that oppression. The thing to do is to start the healing process, first recognizing our dilemma and then struggling against it. In the novel, there are seven steps in the healing process of the Convent women: seek refuge (i.e., come to the Convent), eat, fight, shed the ways of the old society (i.e., shave heads), create (templates), get baptized, and love thyself. The first step in any abused situation is to take refuge. Women, inside and outside of Ruby, take refuge in the Convent; it is a safe haven. Insiders like Soane and Arnette and Billie Delia seek solace in the Convent. Outsiders seem to accidentally stumble upon the Convent. Like Pallas who represents the young girl left unsupervised and vulnerable to a sick adult world. Raped. Pecola? Like Seneca who symbolizes those who internalize abuse, accept it, expect it, and eventually crave it. Polly? Like Grace Called Gigi who represents the female’s rebellion against the traditional role of women, the limiting definition of womanhood. Sula? Like Mavis who represents the extreme of the female’s passive acceptance of wifedom and homemaker in a patriarchal society, including physical abuse. Ruth? For all of these females, the Convent is a refuge. According to Billie Delia, ‘‘you can collect yourself there, think things through, with nothing or nobody bothering you all the time. They’ll take care of you or leave you alone—whichever way you want it’’ (176). Mavis ends up at the Convent when her car runs out of gas. She is the first of the women to take refuge and so her description of the Convent is one of the most detailed: It looked small but close and it took a while for her to discover it was neither. She had to negotiate acres of corn to arrive. Either the house was backwards or it had no driveway. As she drew closer she saw it was stone—sandstone, maybe, but dark with age. At first there seemed to be no windows, but then she made out the beginning of a porch and saw the reflection of huge windows on the ground floor. Circling to the right she glimpsed a driveway leading not to the front door but around to the side. (37–38).

The physical description of the Convent is important and typical of Morrison’s ‘‘positive dwellings’’ in its isolation, its darkness and


155

dampness, its lack of modern conveniences such as electricity. Its primevalness. Think of Pilate’s house. These are the Morrison dwellings in which you come to find your true self. To learn that your nickname of Milkman can signify some positive, nourishing trait. They are healing houses. (Textnote: Milkman’s descent into Pilate’s dark, damp house on the night of the robbery; Macon’s descent into the cave with Pilate; Paul D’s descent into the basement of the Holy Redeemer are all examples.) The Convent is without television, radio or newspapers. According to Connie, ‘‘any news we get have to be from somebody telling it face-to-face’’ (41). Since the point of being in the Convent is to confront self, not others, the absence of mass media seems appropriate, a blessing, a catalyst for healing. And there are certainly no men present: ‘‘The whole house felt permeated with a blessed malelessness, like a protected domain, free of hunters but exciting too. As though she might meet herself here—an unbridled, authentic self, but which she thought of as a ‘‘cool’’ self—in one of this house’s many rooms’’ (177). This is the appraisal of sixteen-yearold Pallas when she first arrives. Once the women come to the Convent, the first initiation rite involves food—the preparation and eating of food. In the world of the Convent, eating, not dieting, is healing: ‘‘Mavis had thought she would gulp the coffee when it arrived, but the satisfaction of the hot, salty potatoes made her patient’’ (40). And instead of making her ‘‘crazy,’’ as she first thinks, shelling pecans calms Mavis: ‘‘The crack of shells, the tick of nut meat tossed in the bowl, . . . .It was peaceful’’ (42). When Gigi comes, she too must eat: ‘‘Gigi was gobbling, piling more food onto her plate even while she scooped from it’’ (70). When the women are near the end of the healing process, food, once again, figures in. Unlike the beginning of the process, however, it is bloodless eating that is collectively prepared and consumed. (Textnote: Both the food preparation and the eating are healing acts. The preparation of food [for men] is an act associated with women; the eating of food is an act discouraged for women. To keep the woman as girl, someone in need of a parent [i.e., a man], to be controlled and dominated, the woman must appear girlish. Thin and small, not big and large. Of course, the reverse was true in the slave quarters where women were seen by their male counterparts as equal partners. According to Angela Davis, ‘‘Required by the [slave]masters’ demands to be as ‘‘masculine’’ in the perform-

156


ance of their work as their men, [African women] acquired qualities considered taboo by the nineteenth-century ideology of womanhood’’ [Women, Race & Class, 11]. She continues by writing, ‘‘A traveler during that period observed a slave crew in Mississippi returning home from the fields and described the group as including ‘forty of the largest and strongest women I ever saw together . . . they carried themselves loftily, each having a hoe over the shoulder’’’ [11]). The second rite is the purging of the waste—a ‘‘duking’’ it out process. You know, fighting it out. It is a vital step because the women must stop viewing one another as the enemy. Not all the Convent women fight, but all learn from the fighting, verbal and physical fighting, that they witness. Mavis and Grace Called Gigi are the Convent fighters. Their verbal fight begins from the moment that Mavis returns from her trip to secure medicine for Mother and first meets Gigi: ‘‘You put some clothes on!’’/‘‘You kiss my ass!’’ (76). At first, ‘‘they did everything but slap each other, and finally they did that’’ (77). Because they must get rid of the shit that weighs them down, the women are beating out of each other what the society has put in: superficial and sex-consumed women, voiceless women, scared women, self-mutilating women. They have to take out their oppression on somebody; it’s safer to take it out on themselves: ‘‘Pounding, pounding, even biting Gigi was exhilarating. . . . It was more proof that the old Mavis was dead. The one who couldn’t defend herself from an eleven-year-old girl, let alone her husband. The one who couldn’t figure out or manage a simple meal, who relied on delis and drive-throughs’’ (171). Seneca and Pallas watch and learn. The fighting cannot and should not be stopped. The purging must take place. The templates help to purge. They allow the women to transfer their oppression from themselves to the silhouettes of themselves that are painted on the basement floor of the Convent: ‘‘When each found the position she could tolerate on the cold, uncompromising floor, Consolata walked around her and painted the body’s silhouette. Once the outlines were complete, each was instructed to remain there. Unspeaking. Naked in candlelight’’ (263). (Textnote: It is not unusual for Morrison to make artists of her oppressed women as she does in the case of each of the Convent women. Art, for Morrison, has always been one answer, if not the answer, for oppressed women: Had Sula paints, or clays, well, she may not have been Wild or Violent [Violet]. Morrison herself is an example of the fe-


157

male artist who escapes the devastating effects of oppression. Through her writing, she has her paints and clays.) Through the use of templates, the women survive and heal. Just think. Seneca survived her years of oppression, remained a nice, quiet, well-behaved girl, by carving her body into elaborate ‘‘little streets [that] were narrow and straight’’ (260). She was ‘‘like a censored poet whose suspect lexicon was too supple, too shocking to publish’’ (261). But now she no longer has to cut a map into her body; instead, she transfers this practice of self-mutilation to her template: ‘‘When she had the hunger to slice her inner thigh, she chose instead to mark the open body lying on the cellar floor’’ (265). Pallas too is saved by art. In fact, ‘‘it was Pallas who insisted they shop for tubes of paint, sticks of colored chalk. Paint thinner and chamois cloth’’ (264). They all are saved by the creative process: ‘‘January folded. February too. By March, days passed uncut from night as careful etchings of body parts and memorabilia occupied them’’ (265). Communication, sister to sister, is vital to the healing process that goes on at the Convent. In time, the women do not have to rely on the impure form of communication—talk. Words are inadequate symbols of the mental process. Instead, the Convent women enter into one another’s thoughts: And it was never important to know who said the dream or whether it had meaning. In spite of or because their bodies ache, they step easily into the dreamer’s tale. They enter the heat in the Cadillac, feel the smack of cold air in the Higgledy Piggledy. They know their tennis shoes are unlaced and that a bra strap annoys each time it slips from the shoulder. The Armour package is sticky. They inhale the perfume of sleeping infants and feel parent-cozy although they notice one’s head is turned awkwardly. They adjust the sleeping baby head then refuse, outright refuse, what they know and drive away. . . . They stick their legs underwater, but not too hard . . . Each one blinks and gags from tear gas, . . . Runs up and down the halls by day, sleeps in a ball with the lights on at night. Folds the five hundred dollars in the foot of her sock. Yelps with pain from a stranger’s penis and a mother’s rivalry—alluring and corrosive as cocaine. (264)

They enter Mavis’s mind, then Grace’s, then Seneca’s, then Pallas’s. In the order in which the women come to the Convent. First come, first served (cured). Only now can they truly understand the other; know what she is and what she is not. Know it is not she who is the Enemy. Too many life-saving facts are hushed up in a buy-

158


and-sell society. In Morrison’s canon, communication is essential. Sethe’s horrific deed is brought about due to the community’s lack of communication. Violet and Joe’s relationship crumbles due to a lack of communication. Dovey’s ‘‘affair’’ with an imaginary man on St. Matthew Street occurs because she cannot talk to Steward. Soane finds solace in conversations with her husband’s ex-lover, Connie, because she does not talk to Deek: ‘‘If only she had talked twenty-two years ago. Just talked’’ (288). Baptism is the final rite. It is enabled by rain. Rain purges them of all the manifestations of the oppressive life in a capitalist, patriarchal society. In preparation for it, the Convent women shed themselves of that which represents patriarchal womanhood: hair. The quintessential mark of beauty in a capitalist society ruled by European men. The rain is more intensely felt as a result of the shedding: It was like lotion on their fingers so they entered it and let it pour like balm on their shaved heads and upturned faces. Consolata started it; the rest were quick to join her. There are great rivers in the world and on their banks and the edges of oceans children thrill to water. In places where rain is light the thrill is almost erotic. But those sensations bow to the rapture of holy women dancing in hot sweet rain. They would have laughed, had enchantment not been so deep. If there were any recollections of a recent warning or intimations of harm, the irresistible rain washed them away. Seneca embraced and finally let go of a dark morning in state housing. Grace witnessed the successful cleansing of a white shirt that never should have been stained. Mavis moved in the shudder of rose of Sharon petals tickling her skin. Pallas, delivered of a delicate son, held him close while the rain rinsed away a scary woman on an escalator and all fear of black water. Consolata, fully housed by the god who sought her out in the garden, was the more furious dancer, Mavis the most elegant. Seneca and Grace danced together, then parted to skip through fresh mud. Pallas, smoothing raindrops from her baby’s head, swayed like a frond. (283)

Made holy by the completion of the healing process, the Convent women are now whole, fully developed human beings, not body parts or figments of a man’s imagination or extensions of his mind, not hair or breasts or butts or vaginas, not just mothers or just wives. They are at peace and in harmony. They ‘‘sleep, wake and sleep again with images of parrots, crystal seashells and a singing woman who never spoke’’ (285). Now, the Convent is filled with ‘‘charged air,’’ a foreign feel,’’ and there is ‘‘a markedly different


159

look in the tenants’ eyes—sociable and connecting when they spoke to you, otherwise they were still and appraising’’ (256). And if by chance a friend came by, she might think, ‘‘how calmly themselves they seemed’’ (262). Because these women have undergone this rite of passage, this purging of oppression, the friend ‘‘might realize what was missing: unlike some people in Ruby, the Convent women were no longer haunted’’ (262). But they were hunted. Hunted down and murdered. But this novel is different from Morrison’s previous ones. A luta continua. [Textnote: The struggle continues.] She does not let death mark the end of her novel or of her characters’ lives. Death is the beginning. If the society that exists is an anti-woman society, then women must organize themselves, unite to protect themselves and to struggle to change conditions. Be the women that a pro-woman, egalitarian, humanist society would shape. Paradise, the afterlife, is not a resting, but a doing, place. Through their Convent experiences, the women have learned self-love, love of the Other, understanding of and sympathy for the Other. These qualities cannot be killed. They are the elements that must comprise the new society. In fact, they are the elements that should have comprised Ruby. The founding fathers of Ruby misunderstood who or what their enemy was. It wasn’t the ‘‘white man,’’ the ex-slave masters; it was the society organized around the theory of a ruling elite, separate and distinct from the workers. Such an organization can only lead to elitism, arrogance, racism, and patriarchy. Self-love, love of the Other, understanding and sympathy emanate from a collective in which work and rule are not distinct. All the Convent women, including Connie, must come down to the same level, the base level of human needs and human love. The basement level. They must share the work of the Convent and their life experiences will be shared. Only then are they able to accept one another as equal. The men’s assassinations do not stop the women. They ‘‘live’’ on in order to share the message with others. Mavis shares her knowledge, and initiates the healing process, with her daughter, Sally Albright: ‘‘Taste this, honey.’’ Mavis offered her the glass of juice. Sally took a quick swallow. ‘‘Daddy was—shit, I don’t know how you stood it. He’d get drunk and try to bother me, Ma.’’ ‘‘Oh, baby.’’ . . . Sally picked up a fork, slipped it into her mother’s plate, scooping up a buttery dollop of grits. When the fork was in her mouth, their eyes met. Sally felt the nicest thing then. Something long and deep and slow and bright. (314)

160


Grace visits her father in prison; Seneca finally meets up with her sister, Jean; and Pallas, her baby tied to her chest, returns to her mother’s house. They are all packing—armed to the teeth! For they have learned that an unarmed woman in a capitalist society is in danger, even if dead. After Grace’s visit is over, Manley Gibson, her father, ‘‘went over every detail of what he had seen of his daughter. Her army cap and fatigue pants—camouflage colors. Heavy army boots, black Tshirt. And now he thought of it, he could swear she was packing. He looked toward the lake, darkening in a lower but prettier sun’’ (310). As is Sally’s, his world is made prettier by Grace’s visit. That’s what’s most important. Pallas’s mother could have sworn Pallas was carrying a sword. Yet, ‘‘the smile on Pallas’ face was beatific’’ (311). The women are dead, but beatific for having found ‘‘themselves’’ at last. They are at peace with themselves even though the struggle to reach this state has killed them. The women get their own sections. Their stories are told, not as appendages of men’s stories, but as self-contained, holistic stories in themselves. The women do not tell their own stories, however. They are not sufficiently whole to do so. They are women who are sick, abused and bruised, and in need of healing. Someone else must tell their stories, some objective person. The narrator must be a third person. And so it is. In this way, the structure of Paradise enhances the theme. Every chapter in the novel is named after a female. The men, dominant and dominating, rulers of the real world and the fictional world, do not have chapters named after them. Too much has been named after them already. In structure, at least, the victims are promoted to positions of prominence. In this way, the structure enhances the theme’s focus on the need to give women their due. The need for women to be raised up from their degradation in order to become fully developed personalities who make their visible, recorded mark on history. That’s what is positive about the structural form utilized by Morrison in Paradise. What is negative about this form is its complexity, a complexity that may dissuade many from reading and appreciating the, once again, right-on-target message to African people. Overall, the form overwhelms the context. Takes over the text. Runs rampant. Cecil Taylor, the avant-garde jazz musician, once stated that since he had to prepare, the audience had to prepare. In response, the sax-


161

ophonist Branford Marsalis replied, ‘‘that’s self-indulgent bullshit.’’ Another jazz critic stated that ‘‘Cecil Taylor has the right to play however and whatever he likes, and I have the right to listen to someone else.’’ Both quotes are from episode ten of the Jazz series which aired on PBS. In Paradise, not only is there the usual shifting between present and past, there is also the lineage of the eight-rock families that must be deciphered. Then too there’s so much clutter in the writing. Like the passage which describes how the skeletal house where Connie and Deek meet for sex might have burnt down: She would live in the field if she had to, or, better, in the fire-ruined house that had become her mind’s home. Three times now she had followed him through it, balancing on buckled floorboards and smelling twelve-year-old smoke. Out there with not even a tree line in view, like a house built on the sand waves of the lonely Sahara, with no one or thing to hinder it, the house had burned freely in the play of wind and its own preen. Had it begun at night, with children asleep? Or was it unoccupied when the flames first seethed? Was the husband sixty acres away, bundling, branding, clearing, sowing? The wife stooped over a washtub in the yard, wisps of hair irritating her forehead? She would have thrown a bucket or two, ten, yelling to the children, rushed to collect what she could. . . . Other than what lay in the yard, all was lost. Even the sunflowers at the northwest corner of the house, near the kitchen, where the wife could see them while stirring hominy. (233)

I haven’t included every word of this long, irrelevant passage. Of what significance is it to the abuse and healing of the Convent women which is the focus of Paradise? What does it add to the women’s story? Is it helpful to the reader to know this piece of information? Better yet, look at part of the last sentence on the first page of the novel. ‘‘A mansion where bisque and rose-tone marble floors seque into teak ones. Isinglass holds yesterday’s light and patterns walls that were stripped and whitewashed . . .’’ Isn’t this language dissuading for the average reader? Or is Morrison’s virtuoso language, and structure in general, for the Morrisonian critics, most of whom are European? How can the theme be targeted to African people, yet the structure targeted to the critic? Can you have it both ways? Do you want to ‘‘save’’ the dying or dazzle the critic? Too many readers appreciate Morrison’s words secondhand, from the critics of Morrison’s canon. Too few read Morrison for them-

162


selves. Many Africans—the audience with whom the messages will resonate the most, will in fact help to save—have little time or patience to piece together her esoteric language and complex form in order to discover her liberating themes. It’s like giving a dying people a cure for their killer disease, but hiding it so skillfully that they never find it, that they die trying. It’s time to simplify. African people are dying. Uncloak the myths as well. The people need to know the truth. Straight, no chaser. (Textnote: Perhaps I’m wrong. I’ve been known to make mistakes. Who would have asked Picasso to simplify his Guernica, to draw a face straight and plain? Morrison is an artist. Is it not the job of the critic to simplify the art? It’s my job, you say?) Change is inevitable. For Morrison and for us. In the world, in the U.S., and in Ruby. Either embrace change or die. These are the only two choices. Ruby must become the opposite of that which has destroyed so many lives in the past, during the slave trade and slavery for example, and what is presently destroying so many lives in the U.S. and throughout the world. It must become humanist, collective, and egalitarian. For the children, if for no one else. It is they who suffer the most. Capitalist structures are killing them. SaveMarie is the latest victim. Misner asks, is death the only democracy: ‘‘Who could do this to a child? Who could permit this for a child? And why?’’ (296). In order for Ruby to change, class struggle must be waged. Africans must stop viewing color only (i.e., race) as the end-all in their struggle for liberation, for in some cases, one’s own ‘‘brother’’ or ‘‘sister’’ may be the enemy if he or she embraces capitalist values and behavior patterns. It is a difficult struggle to wage—class struggle, but it must be waged if Africans are to survive. It is a struggle that has been present since slavery and before, though hidden behind the race struggle. Zechariah Morgan and his twin, for example, waged it during Reconstruction: Few knew and fewer remembered that Zechariah had a twin, and before he changed his name, they were known as Coffee and Tea. When Coffee got the statehouse job, Tea seemed as pleased as everybody else. And when his brother was thrown out of office, he was equally affronted and humiliated. One day, years later, when he and his twin were walking near a saloon, some whitemen, amused by the double faces, encouraged the brothers to dance. Since the encouragement took the form of a pistol, Tea, quite reasonably, accommodated the whites, even though he


163

was a grown man, older than they were. Coffee took a bullet in his foot instead. From that moment they weren’t brothers anymore. Coffee began to plan a new life elsewhere. He contacted other men, other former legislators who had the same misfortune as his—Juvenal DuPres and Drum Blackhorse. They were the three who formed the nucleus of the Old Fathers. Needless to say, Coffee didn’t ask Tea to join them on their journey to Oklahoma. (302)

Deacon Morgan understands the necessity of waging class struggle by the end of the novel: ‘‘‘The evil is in this house,’ said Steward. ‘Go down in that cellar and see for yourself.’ ‘My brother is lying. This is our doing. Ours alone. And we bear the responsibility.’ For the first time in twenty-one years the twins looked each other dead in the eyes’’ (291). Finally, like the separation of Siamese twins, Deacon separates himself from Steward: ‘‘Their distinguishing features were eroding: tobacco choices . . . shoes, clothes, facial hair. Pat thought they looked more alike than they probably had at birth. But the inside difference was too deep for anyone to miss’’ (299). Deacon has changed for the better. He is realizing his full potential and, as was the case with Consolata, the nickname is abandoned. It no longer fits. He admits to his new friend, Misner, ‘‘I’ve got a long way to go, Reverend’’ (303). The mere admission of the need for further growth is a step toward healing; it is the recognition of one’s weakness and one’s willingness to change; it is an abandonment of the self-righteousness of the ruling class; it is the act of committing class suicide. Misner’s reply is simple and straightforward: ‘‘You’ll make it. . . . No doubt about it’’ (303). Neither Misner nor the reader has any doubts. Deacon ‘‘began to speak of a woman he had used; how he had turned up his nose at her because her loose and easy ways gave him the license to drop and despise her’’ (302). (Textnote: Sounds like Milkman’s regret of his abuse of Hagar.) He is on the road toward healing. What Paradise teaches us is that whether in a society ruled by Europeans or one ruled by Africans, exploitation and oppression will occur if the wealth that is being socially produced is not socially controlled. To state this is not to state that Africa and African people should not command our fullest attention. Racism is alive and well. In its impact on African people, racism is just as devastating as class exploitation. The fact is that African people suffer from class exploitation as well as from race and gender oppression. However, in order to rid ourselves of the latter two, African people must

164


get rid of class exploitation, i.e., capitalism, in all of its forms and disguises. For it is capitalism which spawns race and class oppression. Capitalism is our true enemy. The precondition for real human freedom is a society that exists for the sole purpose of the liberation and development of all humankind—whether European or African, male or female, old or young. Paradise teaches Africans that the objective of liberation is not simply to install ‘‘Black power’’; it is not to appoint or to elect Africans for the various economic, political, and administrative posts now held by Europeans. The point is not to ‘‘Africanize’’ exploitation and oppression. The objective of liberation is people power.

9 A Rationalization for and on Assessment of Toni Morrison’s Developing Class Consciousness A NUMBER OF FACTORS CONTRIBUTE TO TONI MORRISON’S DEVELOPing class consciousness: environment, family background, historical and current events, her Random House experience, and the writing process itself. These factors help her to become more conscious of the crisis of the African personality, the cause and effects of it, and a fundamental part of the solution needed to address it. However, to state that Morrison’s consciousness increased considerably in regard to the African’s plight and solution is not to state that she has reached full consciousness in regard to them. Crucial questions are left unaddressed in the Morrisonian canon, questions such as the importance of a land base in a people’s ability to control their own destiny and the importance of establishing the most expedient and just system of control for that land base. Still, her novels are reflections of her increasing awareness of the nature of the African’s dilemma and her increasing commitment to help solve it. Surely, with her keen awareness, sincere commitment, and unwavering persistence, a full, satisfactory solution should be forthcoming. Morrison’s early years in the steel mill town of Lorain, Ohio, during the depression years must have created within her a sensitivity toward the struggling masses in general and African people in particular. Her father’s views were to prove influential in further shaping this sensitivity. He believed that all African people were superior to Europeans because their position in society was a moral one. Like Guitar and Son in particular, he felt that harmony could never exist between the races, a position Morrison admits to having moved closer to later in life as a result of her growing consciousness that racism is an institution entrenched in the fabric of the 165

166

9: TONI MORRISON’S DEVELOPING CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

United States.1 Thus, Son seems to mouth the words of the author’s father when he tells Jadine that Africans and Europeans should not socialize: ‘‘They should work together sometimes, but they should not eat together or live together or sleep together. Do any of those personal things in life.’’2 Morrison’s mother, like her uncles, challenged segregated laws, both written and unwritten. According to Morrison, ‘‘My mother’s great thing was to go in theaters on Saturday afternoons and sit where she wished.’’3 And her uncles, like those of Maureen Peal, found it easy to file suits against people who refused to serve Africans in ice cream parlors. Moreover, the Morrison house, filled with the women friends of her mother, conjures up images of the social life of African women in Sula’s house. Both the fictional and the real were houses in which life was filled with the word of the African reality, in which the material world was colored by the spiritual.4 Karl Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, asks a profound question that has relevance to this discussion: ‘‘Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in a word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?’’5 Certainly, the material conditions that affect society in general and African people in particular helped to shape the consciousness of Toni Morrison. The civil rights and black power movements of the 1950s and 1960s were two such events that contributed to the author’s developing consciousness. Toni Morrison’s novels document the author’s awareness of and concern for the historical conditions that sparked the national struggle of African people against oppression and exploitation. Song of Solomon makes specific reference to the brutal death of the fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis ‘‘Bobo’’ Till and to the consequential, justifiable anger and outrage felt by the African community. For whistling at a twenty-one-year old European woman, Till was flogged, mutilated, lynched, shot in the head, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River with ‘‘a 70-pound cotton gin fan around his neck.’’ According to Clenora Hudson, ‘‘News of the Till incident internationally shocked, horrified, and sobered reasonable minds to the realization that something had to be done about racial injustice in America,’’ and ‘‘Till’s lynching rapidly grew into the status of a household subject in the African-American community.’’6 Significantly, Morrison uses the barbershop, the popular meeting place in


167

the African community, to show the reaction of the African community to Till’s death. The racist church bombing of four little African girls in Birmingham, Alabama, had an equal impact on Morrison’s consciousness, for it is this event that jettison’s Guitar on his quest for money. These two events, and countless others just as reprehensible, must have informed Morrison’s consciousness. It is also noteworthy that during Toni Morrison’s tenure as an instructor at Howard University (1957–64) events of significance were occurring in the Washington, D.C., area, and at least one militant campus organization was contributing to these events. The Non-Violent Action Group (NAG), founded at Howard in 1960, was instrumental in desegregating twenty-five facilities in the D.C. area in its first year alone. Moreover, during this year, ‘‘One hundred persons were arrested in connection with demonstrations conducted by NAG.’’7 Such a conscientious African as Toni Morrison could not have been ignorant of the existence of such an organization nor unmoved by the events credited to it. Interesting also is that one member of this group, Cleveland Sellars, who was a student at Howard beginning fall 1962, documents having a roommate whose disinterest in racial concerns mirrors that of the unconscious Milkman: ‘‘‘Fuck it, man,’ he said to me one night in exasperation after I asked him if he didn’t feel some responsibility to try to improve racial conditions.’’ The roommate continued by saying, ‘‘I’m interested in four things . . . A degree, a good job, a good woman and a good living. That’s all.’’ Of course, the documentation of this conversation—quoted in Sellars’s book The River of No Return—is neither proof of Morrison’s knowledge of it, nor proof of her awareness of the book (which was published in 1973, seven years before the publication of Song of Solomon), but it does serve as proof of the attitude of many of the students at Howard University during the time that Morrison served as instructor, an attitude of which Morrison was certainly aware. According to Sellars, ‘‘My roommate was typical. Although few stated their feelings so bluntly, most of Howard’s students shared his attitude.’’8 Morrison’s years at Random House must also be considered in understanding her developing consciousness. As an editor for some of the more significant works written by Africans, she was exposed to the thoughts of some who were more conscious than she of the nature of the plight confronting her people. One such African, Chinweizu, must have had a considerable impact on her. After editing his work, The West and the Rest of Us, Morrison’s own works

168


would reflect a qualitative leap in the author’s consciousness, not only of the class and race oppression of Africans, but also of the primacy of class exploitation. The dialectical connection between the ideas of Morrison and those of Chinweizu is not as farfetched as it may at first seem. Since the plight of African people has always been her foremost concern as well as her purpose for writing, and since African people serve as her audience, Morrison, as editor of Chinweizu’s work, must have had more than a passing interest in it. It is one of the most insightful works that explore the nature of the African’s oppression. The major premises of the work—that the primary problem confronting Africans is capitalism/imperialism, and that the solution lies in the unity of African people—would become major themes in works such as Tar Baby and Beloved. But even prior to these works, Toni Morrison uses Song of Solomon as Chinweizu uses The West and the Rest of Us, to demonstrate the important role that African history plays in unearthing the African’s primary problem and in unveiling a workable first step in solving that problem. Thus, the theme of Song of Solomon is self-discovery through knowledge of one’s connection to others: one’s family, community, and race. Several observations made by the renowned African historian are reflected in Morrison’s later works. First and most important is Chinweizu’s position that capitalism gave rise to racism. In Chapter 19, entitled ‘‘Global Power and the Myths of Racism,’’ Chinweizu states: ‘‘Clearly, both in the genesis of their racism and in the uses to which they put it, power was fundamental, racism one of its asides. White power gave birth to white racism, and white racism serves white power.’’9 In Tar Baby, Morrison makes clear her position that capitalism, symbolized by the Valerian Street Candy Corporation, is the African’s primary enemy. Also, like Chinweizu, she takes the time to editorialize on its vicious nature: [Valerian] had taken the sugar and cocoa and paid for it as though it had no value, as though the cutting of cane and picking of beans was child’s play and had no value; but he turned it into candy, the invention of which was really child’s play, and sold it to other children to make a fortune in order to move near, but not in the midst of, the jungle where the sugar came from and build a palace with more of their labor and then hire them to do more of the work he was not capable of and pay them again according to some scale of value that would outrage Satan himself and when those people wanted a little of what he wanted, some


169

apples for their Christmas, and took some, he dismissed them with a flutter of the fingers, because they were thieves, and nobody knew thieves and thievery better than he did.10

Also clear from this passage is Morrison’s understanding that African people are one people, for she makes no distinction between the exploited workers. The´ re`se and Gideon and all the others are referred to as ‘‘them.’’ Chinweizu’s second thesis of relevance to this study concerns African solidarity. His belief that solidarity is the only prerequisite to national liberation becomes the prominent thesis of Beloved, a novel in which Morrison uses history to show the necessity of collectivism. According to Chinweizu: We especially need a solidarity of all who wish to abolish their imperialized condition. But even within that absolute necessary solidarity, let us remember that blacks form a separate constituency.11

One other important Chinweizian idea reflected in the Morrison canon is ‘‘assimilationist individualism.’’ According to Chinweizu, some African people have been so brainwashed by European propaganda as to believe that all things European are good, all things African are bad. It is a self-hatred that particularly characterizes the African petty bourgeois: ‘‘These black universalist individualists seem to believe that by getting away from black solidarity and by applying their talents till their personal achievements shine and dazzle the white man, they will be let in on equal terms into a world elite.’’12 What the historian terms assimilationist individualism, we might term Jadism, for clearly the female protagonist of Tar Baby prefers an inauthentic European self to an authentic African one. Her resistance to all things black—hair, people, nature—is repeatedly examined in the novel. Rather than a Jadism, African people need a Sonism. Chinweizu states: ‘‘A socially responsible individualism must be applauded. An individualism that is consciously black oriented, one that recognizes that it must be practiced within the mores of a black African society, for the benefit of Black society and culture . . . and never against the interest of black people.’’13 Toni Morrison gained consciousness not only by reading and editing historical works of Pan-African writers such as Chinweizu, but also by reading literary works. According to the writer and critic

170


Annie Dillard, ‘‘The writer studies literature. . . . She is careful of what she reads, for that is what she will write.’’14 Certainly, this statement helps us to understand Morrison’s practice of borrowing bits and pieces of literary works that have a significant impact on her. This borrowing practice is not unique to Morrison. In African literary history, for example, the act of picking up a word here and a phrase there has been crucial in the development of a collective literary vision. Collectivism is the way in which African people and African literature survive and develop. One of the most profound African literary critics today, Eleanor W. Traylor, astutely refers to this collective process as ‘‘commemoration, the art of rememory, a major—but hardly documented—tradition of Afro-American letters.’’15 Morrison’s commemoration of African works of art succeeds in helping to create a literary continuum. Not merely repeating the past, but extracting the positive and building upon it (in the way that African people must extract the positive from their lives in order to build a wholesome future), Morrison advances the African literary canon and avows her belief in collectivism. It is important to preface this discussion on Morrison and the art of rememory by the following statement: Morrison’s borrowing is conditioned by three important factors. First, the bits and pieces that she picks up are not ideas en masse but choice words, names, or concepts. Second, what she does with these tidbits is usually quite different from and/or more developed than the original author’s use of them. And third, the works from which the ideas are borrowed are truly monumental works of art. Some of the writers from whom it is likely that Morrison borrowed are Ralph Ellison, Alex Haley, Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, and Middleton Harris.16 Ellison was perhaps the first major African writer born in the United States who burst the seams of traditional fiction—in context and form. He synthesized myth and reality, folklore and history, in his effort to recreate the world from the perspective of the crisis-ridden African. The protean protagonist of Invisible Man can not only change forms in minuteman fashion in order to create a different reality for himself, but also manipulate visibility. In Ellison’s world, Africans can live a life of visibility underground and invisibility above ground! Quite an impressive feat. Morrison was certainly impressed. Ralph Ellison (as well as African writers on the continent), having blazed a trail before her, served as a strong role model. Morrison’s characters rise above the harsh conditions of reality in order to recreate themselves. Ulti-


171

mately, her protagonists develop the ability to heal their schizophrenic personalities and reassert their African selves. In Morrison’s world, Africans can be born without navels, fly without wings, and die and be reborn. As did most Africans familiar with Alex Haley’s Roots, Morrison learned the dialectical relationship between discovering one’s ancestral roots and discovering one’s self. A condensed version of Roots first appeared in Reader’s Digest in 1974. It was published two years later in its entirety. On the Acknowledgments page, Haley’s last remark is as follows: ‘‘The memories of the mouths of the ancient elders was the only way that early histories of mankind got passed along . . . for all of us today to know who we are.’’17 Seemingly, this idea of the interconnectedness between past and present impressed Morrison, for it forms the theme of Song of Solomon. Morrison’s inscription to Song of Solomon reads: ‘‘The fathers may soar, And the children may know their names.’’ Clearly, the underlying premise of both books is that discovering one’s roots is a precursor to discovering oneself. Morrison, however, goes far beyond this basic premise. The plot of Song of Solomon, to take one example, revolves more around the psychological rather than the physical development of the protagonist, a growth from immaturity to maturity based on his knowledge of the past. Roots, in contrast, chronicles the generational experiences of one family. Moreover, unlike Haley’s work, Morrison has her protagonist acknowledge the role of the nuclear family and the national (racial) community—not just ancestry—in the configuration of his self-identity. Milkman Dead does not become fully conscious of who he is until he has discovered the importance of both male and female members of his family, his community, and his ancestry. Once he does, he soars toward self: As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.18

Perhaps the most significant morsel that Morrison borrows from Toni Cade Bambara is the concept of the African spirit women who haunt the female protagonist (i.e., Velma Henry) in a consciousraising effort: In the attic they came in the mirror once. Ten or more women with mud hair, strong yams in gourds and pebbles in cracked calabash. And tuck-

172


ing babies in hairy hides. They came like a Polaroid. Stepping out of the mouth of the cave, they tried to climb out of the speckled glass, talk to her, tell her what must be done all over again, all over again, all over again. But she hung an old velvet drape over the mirror and smothered them.19

Repeating three times that the struggle for self-identity must be waged over and over again, collectively, not singlehandedly, these mud women try to aid Velma in her search for a wholesome self. Velma, however, smothers them and rejects their advice, and by doing so ensures her own demise. Evidently, this concept of a haunting collective of African women who come in positive fashion to offer advice to the female protagonist significantly impacted upon Morrison, for she uses it in Tar Baby. Jadine, the female protagonist, attempts to escape her identity by becoming the ‘‘model’’ of a European female. Her struggle to escape is repeated again and again in the novel, in her encounter with the woman in yellow, her submersion in the tarlike substance of the Isle des Chevaliers, and, most germane to this discussion, her confrontation with the women ‘‘haints’’ in Eloe. Coming to her in the pitch black Eloe night, these African women shake milk-filled tits at her in their effort to direct her toward her African, woman self: ‘‘What do you want with me, goddamn it!’’ They looked as though they had just been waiting for that question and they each pulled out a breast and showed it to her. Jadine started to tremble. They stood around in the room, jostling each other gently, gently—there wasn’t much room—revealing one breast and then two and Jadine was shocked.20

Like Velma, Jadine rejects the sister-women’s advice to be what she is—African and woman. Crying out in fear, instead of thanking them, she believes that ‘‘the women in the night had killed the whole weekend.’’21 Henry Dumas, as does Toni Morrison, had a deep affection for his people and manifested that affection in his commitment to write about them in ways that he hoped would capture the positive essence of their lives and thereby help them to reclaim the African personality: ‘‘I am very much concerned about what is happening to my people and what we are doing with our precious tradition.’’22 His collection of writings, like those of Morrison, are not mere fac-


173

tual renditions of African life but art pieces that incorporate surrealism, supernaturalism, astrology, magic, and science fiction. Morrison first read Dumas’s works during the early 1970s. They so impressed her that she helped to organize a book party on his behalf in October 1974. Of him, she writes: ‘‘He was thirty-three years old when he was killed, but in those thirty-three years, he had completed work, the quality and quantity of which are almost never achieved in several lifetimes. He was brilliant.’’23 From the brilliant works of Dumas, Morrison extracts several key concepts, among them the name ‘‘Sweet Home’’ (the racist Arkansas town in which Dumas was born) and the name ‘‘Heyboy’’(the dog in one of Dumas’s most impressive stories, ‘‘Ark of Bones’’). Both of these names figure prominently in Beloved. ‘‘Ark of Bones’’ is a surreal, supernatural story about the preservation of the collective consciousness of African people. Through the dedication of the old man of the ark and his helpers, the bones of dead Africans (i.e., the history of African people’s struggle to survive in general and their history during the Middle Passage in particular) are fished out, hauled up, and preserved. Heyboy is described as a no-count rabbit dog who, like Here Boy in Beloved, mysteriously disappears. The difference between the events surrounding the disappearance of these dogs is that Heyboy’s disappearance occurs when the narrator’s friend is called to death: ‘‘We shook hands and Headeye, he was gone, movin fast with that nocount dog runnin long sidehim.’’24 Here Boy’s disappearance occurs when Beloved comes to life: ‘‘The rays of the sun struck her [Beloved] full in the face, so that when Sethe, Denver and Paul D rounded the curve in the road all they saw was a black dress, two unlaced shoes below it, and Here Boy nowhere in sight.’’25 As is her habit, Morrison extracts and modifies the Dumas name, Heyboy, as well as the dog’s involvement in mysterious circumstances, and tailors them to fit her own set of circumstances. While Dumas’s dog is associated with a character who is called to death, death for him is actually life, for he sacrifices his own life to save the lives of future generations of Africans. In Morrison’s story, Here Boy is associated with a character who comes to life, but it is a dead life, born of selfish individualism rather than social responsibility. The contradiction in name and place of Dumas’s hometown, Sweet Home, Arkansas, must have greatly impressed the sensitivity of as well as the artist and African in Toni Morrison.26 The racially

174


segregated Sweet Home was no sweet home for African people living there, especially during Dumas’s childhood years; neither is its fictionalized namesake. According to Sethe, physically, the Sweet Home plantation was as beautiful as its name, but for the African, life on it was hell: And suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy gloves.27

Perhaps the greatest influence on Morrison’s writing of Beloved was The Black Book, a compendium of newsclippings and advertisements chronicling the life of African people in the United States from slavery through the civil rights movement. From this book in general, and in particular the news article entitled ‘‘A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her child,’’ Morrison gets the kernel of her novel: the ex-slave mother so devastated by her own oppression and exploitation in slavery that she murders one of her children to prevent it from experiencing that life; the preacher mother-in-law who witnesses the event and who herself has experienced the oppression and exploitation of giving birth to eight children only to have them stolen from her and sold into slavery; and the slave setting itself, Kentucky, and its adjoining ‘‘free’’ city of Cincinnati, Ohio. Because of its importance in influencing Morrison’s consciousness and its relevance to this discussion, most of the news article follows: I found her with an infant in her arms only a few months old, and observed that it had a large bunch on its forehead. I inquired the cause of the injury. She then proceeded to give a detailed account of her attempt to kill her children. She said, that when the officers and slave-hunters came to the house in which they were concealed, she caught a shovel and struck two of her children on the head, and then took a knife and cut the throat of the third, and tried to kill the other,—that if they had given her time, she would have killed them all—that with regard to herself, she cared but little, but she was unwilling to have her children suffer as she had done.


175

I inquired if she was not excited almost to madness when she committed the act. No, she replied, I was as cool as I am now; and would much rather kill them at once, and thus end their sufferings, than have them taken back to slavery, and be murdered by piece-meal. She then told the story of her wrongs. She spoke of her days of suffering, of her nights of unmitigated toil, while the bitter tears coursed their way down her cheeks and fell in the face of the innocent child as it looked smiling up, little conscious of the danger and probable suffering that awaited it. . . . The two men and the two other children were in another apartment, but her mother-in-law was in the same room. She says she is the mother of eight children, most of whom have been separated from her; that her husband was once separated from her twenty-five years, during which time she did not see him; that could she have prevented it, she would never have permitted him to return, as she did not wish him to witness her sufferings, or be exposed to the brutal treatment that he would receive. She states that she has been a faithful servant, and in her old age she would not have attempted to obtain her liberty; but as she became feeble, and less capable of performing labor, her master became more and more exacting and burial in his treatment, until she could stand it no longer; that the effort could result only in death, at most—she therefore made the attempt. She witnessed the killing of the child, but said she neither encouraged nor discouraged her daughter-in-law,—for under similar circumstances she should probably have done the same. The old woman is from sixty to seventy years of age, has been a professor of religion about twenty years, and speaks with much feeling of the time when she shall be delivered from the power of the oppressor, and dwell with the Savior, ‘‘where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.’’ These slaves (as far as I am informed) have resided all their lives within sixteen miles of Cincinnati. We are frequently told that Kentucky slavery is very innocent. If these are its fruits, where it exists in a mild form, will some one tell us what we may expect from its more objectionable features? But comments are unnecessary. P.S. Bassett. Fairmount Theological Seminary, Cincinnati, (Ohio), Feb. 12, 1856.

With the essence of this newsclip, Morrison concocts the Beloved story.28 What she does with this story, however, is to expand, refine, and shape it so that Beloved picks up where Tar Baby leaves off.

176


Evidently, what clicked in her mind—perhaps not at first, but later while mulling over this news article—was the fact that conditions then and now as well as our reactions to them have not qualitatively changed. Revealing in Tar Baby that capitalism in all its forms, including its embryo form of slavery, is the primary cause of the African’s oppression and exploitation, Morrison uses Beloved to pose the solution which can best begin to address this crisis: collective struggle. Beloved’s haunting presence at 124 Bluestone Road is a warning to Sethe and to the entire African world that even the death of one African jeopardizes the well-being of the collective. Hi Man voices Morrison’s philosophy: ‘‘One lost, all lost. The chain that held them would save all or none.’’29 ‘‘Sixty Million and more’’ lost in slavery is enough. At least Morrison thinks so because it is with this phrase that she inscribes Beloved. One of the most conclusive pieces of evidence demonstrating Toni Morrison’s habit of borrowing kernels of ideas from historical and literary works is her practice of borrowing from herself. Evidently, writing is discovery for her, for early ideas show up, greatly expanded, in later works. The writing process itself, then, is another factor to be considered in understanding the author’s developing class consciousness. The very fact that her works are developmental suggests that Morrison discovers more about herself, her people, and her society as a consequence of the writing process. She herself substantiates this fact in an interview with Claudia Tate: ‘‘Writing is discovery; it’s talking deep within myself, ‘deep talking’ as you say.’’30 This deep talking allows Morrison to examine more closely ideas already promulgated in her works as well as to discover new ones in the work she is composing. That is, not only is she discovering self at the moment of writing, but also afterwards, during the incubation period between completing one novel and beginning another. For example, embryo ideas and characters that appear in early works appear more fully developed and/or play a more dominant role in later ones: milk as nurturing substance, the one or defected leg motif, Virginia as setting, the golden-eyed males, the flight motif, the three women, and so on. Jane Bakerman acknowledges the existence of this inbetween incubation period. However, while she offers several valid reasons for its existence, she overlooks that which is primary—Morrison’s own self-discovery: Generally, it takes Morrison about two to two and a half years to produce a novel, and there are several reasons for that time span. One is


177

that she aims for a genuinely polished beautiful whole. . . . Another reason for the substantial incubation times for the novels is the simple fact that Toni Morrison is a very busy person, busy being mother, editor, and teacher, as well as author.31

Most crucial in understanding this time span is Morrison’s own need to think about the new ideas that have surfaced during the writing process. And by taking time to read and to think, she grows more and more conscious of her thematic and structural creations. In short, she becomes increasingly aware of the problems confronting African people (the substance) and the best solution for addressing them (the form). She herself corroborates the fact that the developmental stages experienced by her are in part contributed to by the act of writing: After my first novel, The Bluest Eye, writing became a way to be coherent in the world. It became necessary and possible for me to sort out the past, and the selection process, being disciplined and guided, was genuine thinking. . . . Writing gives me what I think dancers have on stage in relation to gravity and space and time. It is energetic and balanced, fluid and in repose. And there is always the possibility of growth.32

Moreover, because writing is discovery, Morrison admits to choosing topics to which she does not know the answers: ‘‘It’s out of what I don’t know that I begin to write, not what I know. If I know it, I probably wouldn’t write about it because there is not discovery.’’33 Finally, this study would be incomplete if nothing were said about the limits of Toni Morrison’s consciousness, if, in fact, the implication of this study was that Morrison demonstrates full consciousness of the nation-class oppression of African people and the complex solution that will eliminate this oppression. One comment Morrison makes that justifies such a discussion as this is that ‘‘if there were better criticism, there would be better books.’’34 Hopefully, this assessment of her consciousness will aid her in positing a more concrete, viable plan for the national liberation of African people. With the writing of Beloved, Morrison provides African people with many of the ingredients necessary for waging a successful struggle against oppression. She has identified the primary cause of this oppression: capitalism in all of its disguises (Tar Baby and Paradise). She has explored the effects of this cause: racism and

178


sexism (Song of Solomon). She has unmasked the awful devastation caused by both the cause and the effects (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved and Jazz). She has proven that the strategies of political education (i.e., communicating the word) and African unification are essential in the struggle (Tar Baby and Beloved). However, while Morrison makes clear what African people are struggling against and while she makes clear the strategy that equips them for this struggle—solidarity, she never makes clear what African people are struggling for. That is, the question of what type of lifestyle is needed for us to revitalize the African personality is left unaddressed in the Morrison canon. One of the primary weaknesses existing in the world of Beloved is that while collectivism exists at 124 Bluestone when Sethe and Denver arrive, the enemy (in this case, the slavemaster) can at any time, and does, shatter it. One of the primary weaknesses existing in the world of Paradise is that Africans imitate the lifestyle of their oppressors. Thus, Morrison’s canon does not demonstrate the author’s full consciousness of the relation of land, and the development of it, to African people’s wholesome existence. Unlike Marcus Garvey, Eslande Robeson, Malcolm X, Shirley Graham DuBois, and Kwame Nkrumah, Morrison has not yet demonstrated a clear understanding of the fact that until Africa is free, united, and socialist no African worldwide will ever be free. Three essential ingredients necessary for the survival of the nation are omitted from Toni Morrison’s world view: the necessity for a land base, the need for international African solidarity in recognition of Africans as one people with a common struggle against a common enemy, and the necessity for planned development (i.e., scientific socialism) for the benefit of all African people, not just a handful of Africans. In Beloved and Paradise, the all-African communities reflect a type of land base operating for the benefit of all those within it. However, this type of existence is problematic. First, the land rightfully belongs to the Native American Indian, not the African (the only land that rightfully belongs to the person of African descent is Africa). Second, it is land that is easily penetrable by the enemy. Thus, instead of determining and planning for his or her destiny, the African is at the mercy of those who dominate the land, the European. Only a liberated, unified Africa would ensure a viable future, a power base from which the African can demand human justice, no matter where he or she decides to reside in the world.


179

According to W. E. B. DuBois, ‘‘Until Africa is free, the descendants of Africa the world over cannot escape chains.’’35 Marcus Garvey advised Africans everywhere to ‘‘build up in Africa a government of our own, big enough and strong enough to protect Africa and Negroes everywhere.’’36 Even Malcolm was clear on the question of ‘‘Africa for Africans, those at home and those abroad.’’ According to him, ‘‘The only hope for the black man in America [is] in a strong Africa.’’37 It is with the words of Kwame Nkrumah, however, that the land question receives its clearest articulation: The core of the Black Revolution is in Africa, and until Africa is united under a socialist government, the Black man throughout the world lacks a national home. It is around the African peoples’ struggle for liberation and unification that African or Black culture will take shape and substance. Africa is one continent, one people, and one nation.38

In choosing the Caribbean as the setting for Tar Baby, Toni Morrison comes closest to articulating the common identity of African people and the common oppression experienced by them. Clearly, she understands that international capitalism affects Gideon and The´ re` se as it does Sydney and Ondine. As Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) stated, the only significant difference between the African in the diaspora and Africans at home is that ‘‘one group was taken from the land (slavery), the second group had the land taken from them (colonialism).’’39 Certainly, Africans have more in common with themselves than with any other nationality. As Garvey stated, there is ‘‘absolutely no difference between the native African and the American and West Indian Negroes in that we are descendants from one family stock.’’40 Finally, while Morrison is quite clear on the vicious nature of capitalism as demonstrated in Tar Baby, Beloved, and Paradise, and while she shows her reader the positive rewards of collective work and responsibility in all of her works, especially Beloved, she never explicitly states that planned development of the economy is a prerequisite for the survival and advancement of African people. Just as Africans have a common heritage and culture, so do they have a common struggle against capitalism/imperialism and a common struggle for socialism: ‘‘Until there is an All-African Union Government pursuing socialist policies, and planning the economic development of Africa as a whole, the standard of living of the African masses will remain low, and they will continue to suffer.’’41

180


In its denunciation of the patriarchal, capitalist structure of Ruby, Paradise is the novel in which Morrison comes closest to demonstrating an awareness of the principles of scientific socialism: production for use, not profit; planned methods of production; political power in the hands of the people; and the application of scientific methods in all spheres of thought and production. Without a free and united homeland, without a unification of African people throughout the world, without scientific socialism, African people will continue to wage a constant but ineffective struggle against their nation-class oppression. Hopefully, Toni Morrison will come to understand, embrace, and advocate Pan-Africanism: the total liberation and unification of Africa under scientific socialism.

Conclusion: A Praisesong for Toni Morrison, A Call to Action for Her Readers SINCE THE FIRST EDITION OF TONI MORRISON’S DEVELOPING CLASS Consciousness, Morrison has authored two additional novels: Jazz and Paradise. Each one adds to and/or crystallizes an earlier theme in her canon. Most importantly, however, with the publication of each, she proves that she is still, and perhaps even more so, a vigilant advocate for the liberation of oppressed people in general and African people in particular. In Jazz her artistic mastery of the jazz form applied to the written text is more than matched by the crucial nature of her subject matter: conditions make people wild, bring out the Wild in them. Conditions are life-threatening for women in particular, especially the young Dorcases of the world. They are without the aid of the extended family or the unified community. Alone and confused and made women before their time, they swallow the flames of oppression. Once again, this text reveals that Morrison’s first priority as an artist is in arriving at solutions for the dilemma of African people. Sisterhoods are needed in the African community, and through them, communication—not silence—will cushion the blows of capitalism by alleviating some of the pain and suffering of women. (Textnote: Sisterhoods will not liberate us, however. True liberation for the Dorcases of the world can only come about with the realization of a united, socialist Africa and subsequent African World Movement. Sisterhoods will truly be effective only if they are linked to the African Revolution.) Paradise reflects Morrison’s recognition of the African’s mistaken, persistent belief that the enemy is the ‘‘white man.’’ The novel is her attempt to teach us that one is not born innately evil. It is the ‘‘plan’’ (the capitalist plan), not the ‘‘man’’ (the white man) that is the culprit. Complex situations always contain several contradictions. While African people suffer from race and gender oppression, class exploitation is the principal contradiction. It is in 181

182

10: CONCLUSION

this novel then that Morrison demonstrates an acute awareness of the necessity of production for use, for the betterment of the people, not for profit; of the importance of power in the hands of the people—true democracy, not bourgeois democracy; of the fact that a society must exist for the sole purpose of liberating and developing humankind. After winning the highest prize for literature, Morrison returns to her calling—wrestling with the nature of the oppression that is killing her people. She writes Paradise. After experiencing the deaths of her father and mother, she returns to her calling. After her house burns down, with her valuable manuscripts burnt to a crisp, she returns to her search for solutions. In case you missed the title of this chapter, this is a praisesong for Toni Morrison. Like Ida B. WellsBarnett, whose life story Morrison narrates for the PBS program Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice, Morrison refuses to limit her struggle to accomplishing the well-being of her family. Race and people problems demand her attention too. This of course is the mark of an African heroine or hero, not the amount of money or the kind of status one has personally achieved, nor the care and concern for one’s own loved ones. With the world in disarray, with war drums beating, most loudly in the U.S., with far too many poor and working-class people struggling to survive, it is also time for Morrison’s readers to set down their voices beside hers and be heard. In case you missed the title of this chapter, this is a call to action for Morrison’s readers. In the last year, the church and state in the U.S. have been unmasked and found wanting. The church as sanctuary has been called into question. The state as an entity ‘‘for and by the people’’ has been called into question. The homeless population has increased at such an alarming rate that it has broken all records: 2002 marks the highest one-year increase since the Great Depression. (Desperate for ways to combat a surge in homelessness, New York City is looking into whether retired cruise ships could be converted into shelters!) Forty-one million Americans do not have health insurance, about 1.4 million of whom lost their health insurance in 2001. Nuns have stepped in where the government fears to tread: they deliver hope to destitute towns in the Mississippi Delta by reinforcing crowded and under-financed public schools and by serving as nurses, doctors, counselors, and construction workers. Workers’ pension money may be used to rescue state deficits. Students throughout the country are finding that one major is insuffi-

10: CONCLUSION

183

cient. They are pursuing double, triple, and even quadruple majors! The record of the 107th Congress reveals that most all of the new laws enacted are ones that favor the rich: a $1.35 trillion, 10-year tax cut; an economic stimulus package of business tax cuts; a stronger hand for the president to negotiate trade treaties, grants and loans to help airlines after terror attacks; a record $355 billion defense bill and $10.5 billion military construction bill; the Yucca Mountain in Nevada to be the nation’s nuclear waste repository. Is it not time for us to do as Morrison does—struggle to find solutions to the problems of the people? Is it not time for us to design a world that places human need before corporate greed? If we do, who knows? Someone may write a praisesong for us one day.


Part II


A Sampling of the ‘‘Bits and Pieces’’ of Toni Morrison’s Life Experiences in Her Works: In Her Own Words Introduction

IN THE 1991 EDITION OF THIS WORK, I ATTEMPTED TO EXPLAIN THE writing process in connection with Toni Morrison. The last chapter of that edition traces some of the author’s life experiences to her novels: Morrison’s early years in the steel mill town of Lorain, Ohio during the Depression; her family’s beliefs and behavior patterns; the influences of the events of the Civil Rights Era; Morrison’s editing years at Random House, particularly the impact of the works of literary writers such as Henry Dumas and political writers such as Chinweizu on her own creative writing; the lesson taught her by Alex Haley’s Roots: the dialectical relationship between discovering one’s ancestral roots and discovering one’s self; the news clipping on Margaret Garner; and the author’s habit of picking up kernels of ideas from her early works and expanding them in later works, perhaps one of the best examples of which is her female trio: thin, dark-skinned outcast women that haunt the pages of Morrison’s fiction. This part of the book continues to trace the author’s life experiences to her novels by gathering together Morrison’s own statements concerning the creative writing process in general and the creative process involved in writing each of her own novels. There’s nothing like the author’s own words. At one point, for instance, Morrison denies the use of autobiographical information in her works. At another point, she admits that she includes them. What is clear, however, is that the autobiographical elements are more strongly represented in the early, first three novels. The later ones, beginning with Beloved, rely more on kernels of ideas plucked from news sources from the past or from current events. This later, greater reliance on and belief in her own creative ability 187

188

IN HER OWN WORDS

to make fiction out of facts do not mean that autobiographical elements are non-existent in the later works. In Jazz, for example, there are the stories of her family that give her the flavor of the 1920s. It’s just that the later works do not rely as heavily on autobiography as do the early novels. Well, you can judge for yourself by reading the following Morrison passages—in her own words. The Writing Process in General This section is most interesting in its documentation of Toni Morrison’s use of autobiography, but also for the glimpses into what makes a writer, what makes her a writer, the habits of the writer, and the state of mind of the writer during, or just prior to, and after the writing process.

I want to learn more and more about how to write better. That means to get closer to that compulsion out of which I write. I want to break away from certain assumptions that are inherent in the conception of the novel form to make a truly aural novel, in which there are so many places and spaces for the reader to work and participate. Also, I want to make a novel in which one of the principles of the discipline is to enlighten without pontificating. It accounts for the wide-open nature of the ending of my books, where I don’t want to close it, to stop the imagination of the reader, but to engage it in such a way that he fulfills the book in a way that I don’t. I try to provide every opportunity for that kind of stimulation, so that the narrative is only one part of what happens, in the same way as what happens when you’re listening to music, what happens when you look at a painting. I would like to do better at this one thing and to try to put the reader into the position of being naked and quite vulnerable, nevertheless trusting, to rid him of all of his literary experience and all of his social experiences in order to engage him in the novel. Let him make up his mind about what he likes and what he thinks and what happened based on the very intimate acquaintance with the people in the book, without any prejudices, without any prefixed notions, but to have an intimacy that’s so complete, it humanizes him in the same way that the characters are humanized from within by certain activity, and in the way in which I am humanized by the act of writing. Ruas, ‘‘Toni Morrison,’’ 108–9

IN HER OWN WORDS

189

Writing is discovery; it’s talking deep within myself, ‘‘deep talking’’ as you say. The publishing is rather anticlimactic. Tate, ‘‘Toni Morrison,’’ 130 I do know that I don’t like it here if I don’t have something to write. . . . [Here] meaning out in the world. It is not possible for me to be unaware of the incredible violence, the willful ignorance, the hunger for other people’s pain. I’m always conscious of that though I am less aware of it under certain circumstances—good friends at dinner, other books. Teaching makes a big difference, but that is not enough. Teaching could make me into someone who is complacent, unaware, rather than part of the solution. So what makes me feel as though I belong here, out in this world, is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover but what goes on in my mind when I am writing. Schappell and Lacour, ‘‘Art of Fiction,’’ 95 I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was 12 or 13. He said, ‘‘You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it.’’ And I said, ‘‘But, Daddy, no one’s going to see it!’’ And he said, ‘‘Yeah, but I know it’s there.’’ So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work. Dreifus, ‘‘Chloe Wofford,’’ 73 I try to write when I’m not teaching, which means fall and most of the summer. I do get up very early, embarrassingly early, before there is light, and I write with pencil, yellow pads, words, scratchings out, but, you know, long before that, I’ve spent a couple of years, probably eighteen months, just thinking about these people, the circumstances, the whole architecture of the book, and I sort of feel so intimately connected with the place and the people and the events that when language does arrive, I’m pretty much ready, I don’t have to discard so much. ‘‘Conversation: Toni Morrison,’’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, transcript, 9 March 1998. Everything I write starts there [Lorain] . . . Whether I end up there is another question, but that’s the place where I start. Always. And, of course, it isn’t the place that I imagine it to be, no place is. But that doesn’t matter, it’s my beginning, my thing, and I have distorted it, piled things on, I have done whatever it is that writers do to places, and made it my own. So it is mine now. And more and

190

IN HER OWN WORDS

more I see it that way, and hear it that way, and feel about it that way. Dowling, ‘‘Song of Toni Morrison,’’ 59 Sometimes when I’m in mourning, for example, after my father died, there’s a period when I’m not fighting day-to-day battles, a period when I can’t fight or don’t fight, and I am very passive, like a vessel. When I’m in this state, I can hear things. As long as I’m busy doing what I should be doing, what I must do, I don’t hear anything; there isn’t anything there. This sensibility occurred when I was lonely or depressed or melancholy or idle or emotionally exhausted. I would think I was at my nadir, but it was then that I was in a position to hear something. Ideas can’t come to me while I’m preoccupied. This is what I meant when I said I was in a state that was not busy, not productive or engaged. It happened after my father died, thus the association with depression. It happened after my divorce. It has happened other times, but not so much because I was unhappy or happy. It was that I was unengaged, and in that situation of disengagement with the day-to-day rush, something positive happened. I’ve never had sense enough to deliberately put myself in a situation like that before. At that time I had to be put into it. Now I know how to bring it about without going through the actual event. It’s exactly what Guitar said: when you release all the shit, then you can fly. Tate, ‘‘Toni Morrison,’’ 128–29 (This passage shows that something Morrison believes is put into the mouth of a character.) While I’m writing, all of my experience is vital and useful and possibly important. It may not appear in the work, but it is valuable. LeClair, ‘‘Language Must Not Sweat,’’ 120 It is difficult always for me and probably any writer to select those qualities that are genuinely autobiographical because part of what you are doing is re-doing the past as well as throwing it into relief, and what makes one write anyway is something in the past that is haunting, that is not explained or wasn’t clear so that you are almost constantly rediscovering the past. Jones and Vinson, ‘‘Interview with Toni Morrison,’’ 171 I think most first novels are pretty autobiographical in some way because you are frightened to pull from too many places. Later on I was able to use only the odors or the sounds or the smells of the

IN HER OWN WORDS

191

things I needed. But they are curious places. . . . But I seem to remember that when other people said her [Hannah Peace’s] name they were saying something else, and I don’t know what that was, but I don’t really want to know. I just want the taste of it. So that’s the kind of thing that’s, you know, sort of genuinely autobiographical. Jones and Vinson, ‘‘Interview with Toni Morrison,’’ 173 (Not only are ‘‘beginning’’ writers ‘‘frightened to pull from too many places,’’ but also self-examination is a natural starting point for a writer.) I never use anyone I know [for characters]. In The Bluest Eye I think I used some gestures and dialogue of my mother in certain places, and a little geography. I’ve never done that since. I really am very conscientious about that. It’s never based on anyone. I don’t do what many writers do. Schappell and Lacour, ‘‘Art of Fiction,’’ 105 You see, I don’t write autobiographically. First of all, I’m not interested in real-life people as subjects for fiction—including myself. Schappell and Lacour, ‘‘Art of Fiction,’’ 123 I wanted to find out who those [Lorain] people are and why they live the way they do. I wanted to see the stuff out of which they’re made. Dowling, ‘‘Song of Toni Morrison,’’ 58 I am from the Midwest so I have a special affection for it. My beginnings are always there. No matter what I write, I begin there. I may abandon this focus at some point, but for now it’s the matrix for me. Tate, ‘‘Toni Morrison,’’ 119

The Bluest Eye In this section, you can almost envision Toni Morrison as a little girl, as Claudia in fact, who is noisier than Frieda, her sister. You see Lorain, Ohio in the Autumn section and even the Greek hotel with Rosemary Villanucci at the window. You hear Morrison’s mother in Mrs. MacTeer, stuck like a record on the three quarts of milk that were in the icebox yesterday, but gone today. You mourn for Chloe Wofford’s friend who prayed for blue eyes every night for two years as you think of Pecola Breedlove. You see Morrison’s doing ‘‘good work’’ in

192

IN HER OWN WORDS

the kitchens of European families and think of Pauline, happier in the home of her employers, the Fishers, than in her own storefront home where the Breedloves ‘‘festered together in the debris of a realtor’s whim.’’

I began to write that book [The Bluest Eye] as a short story based on a conversation I had with a friend when I was a little girl. The conversation was about whether God existed; she said no and I said yes. She explained her reason for knowing that He did not: she had prayed every night for two years for blue eyes and didn’t get them, and therefore He did not exist. What I later recollected was that I looked at her and imagined her having them and thought how awful that would be if she had gotten her prayer answered. I always thought she was beautiful. Ruas, ‘‘Toni Morrison,’’ 95. (This passage shows how Morrison takes a shred, a slice, a piece of her life and creates a work of art.) I was very, very conscious of that mood and atmosphere of my hometown in the first book, The Bluest Eye, and used literal descriptions of neighborhoods and changed the obvious things, the names of people, and mixed things all up, but the description of the house where we lived, the description of the streets, the lake, and all of that, is very much the way I remember Lorain, Ohio. Jones and Vinson, ‘‘Interview with Toni Morrison,’’ 127. I became sensitive to languages very early, not just in school, but because I grew up in a steel town where there were so many immigrants, East European and Irish, European, Italian, all sorts. It was very much a mixed bag because it was in the thirties and because there was a steel mill there. It attracted all sorts of people. Hackney, ‘‘I Come from People Who Sang All the Time,’’ 4 I did use my sister. I have an older sister, but our relationship was not at all like the girls in The Bluest Eye. But there are scenes in The Bluest Eye that are bits and pieces—my father, he could be very aggressive about people who troubled us—throwing people out and so on, my mother’s habit of getting stuck like a record on some problem, going on for days and days and days and then singing in between, you know, just like a saga. Jones and Vinson, ‘‘Interview with Toni Morrison,’’ 129

IN HER OWN WORDS

193

(Doesn’t Morrison remind you of her mother? The novelist hangs onto an interesting tidbit, turns it over and over in her mind [‘‘getting stuck like a record on some problem’’] and she makes it into a saga. The difference is that she writes her saga instead of singing it.) You know, my mother would walk down to a theater in that little town that had just opened, to make sure that they were not segregating the population—black on this side, white on that. And as soon as it opened up, she would go in there first, and see where the usher put her, and look around and complain to someone. That was just daily activity for her, and the men as well. Jaffery, ‘‘Salon Interview,’’ 6 I was the one with the anonymous birth order. There was my older sister, firstborn; me, void; my younger brother, first son; and another son, the family baby. Feeling left out, and trying to attract attention, I became the noisiest of them all. Gray, ‘‘Paradise Found,’’ 6 So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work. . . . I started around 13. That was the work that was available: to go to a woman’s house after school and clean for three or four hours. The normal teen-age jobs were not available. Housework always was. It wasn’t uninteresting. You got to work these gadgets that I never had at home: vacuum cleaners. Some of the people were nice. Some were terrible. Years later, I used some of what I observed in my fiction. In The Bluest Eye, Pauline lived in this dump and hated everything in it. And then she worked for the Fishers, who had this beautiful house, and she loved it. She got a lot of respect as their maid that she didn’t get anywhere else. If she went to the grocery store as a black woman from that little house and said, ‘‘I don’t want this meat,’’ she would not be heard. But if she went in as a representative of these white people and said, ‘‘This is not good enough,’’ they’d pay attention. Dreifus, ‘‘Chloe Wofford,’’ 73 (Interestingly, there is a washerwoman named ‘‘Breedlove’’ mentioned in Bill Moyers’ ‘‘Ida B. Wells: Crusade for Justice.’’ Toni Morrison narrates this Public Broadcasting System television segment.) The only unfortunate relationship I ever had with a black man was their [her sons’] father. But I can’t blame him for not liking me. I

194

IN HER OWN WORDS

don’t like it, but what can I tell you [laughter]. But he ain’t the devil. He wasn’t even from this country. There was some other kind of woman he wanted to be bothered with, it wasn’t me [laughter]. He didn’t want nobody like me running around with a big mouth. He wanted a little quiet girl, who will just shut up and do what he say. Brown, ‘‘Interview with Toni Morrison,’’ 10 (The kind of ‘‘quiet girl’’ that Morrison describes is one who appears in The Bluest Eye [and is Nel the wife in Sula?]. The ones who come from Mobile. The Geraldines of the world. The Sulas of the world are their opposites. Remember the ‘‘everybody loves a black man’’ speech that Sula makes in front of Nel and Jude? When she finishes her speech, Jude thinks: ‘‘A funny woman . . . not that bad-looking. But he could see why she wasn’t married; she stirred a man’s mind maybe, but not his body’’ (Sula, 104). Well, we all know that was a lie. But clearly Jude did not want a wife like Sula; he wanted someone who would complete him.)

Sula Morrison takes the ‘‘shreds’’ of information about Hannah Peace, a woman who lived in her hometown, and weaves them into the quilted Sula story. Using these shreds, together with the history of Africans who lived in Pittsburgh, the African’s disdain of agencies or nursing home care for loved ones, the concept of the chorus as well as the African’s response to evil and Morrison has the seeds with which to flower her second novel. Shreds are ‘‘all you need to build,’’ according to Morrison. Just think. The Pittsburgh kernel metabolized into ‘‘the nigger got the hilly land, where planting was backbreaking, where the soil slid down and washed away the seeds, and where the wind lingered all through the winter. . . . still, it was lovely up in the Bottom.’’ Interesting too is Morrison’s reaction to domesticity. In a few interviews, she mentions her inability to be the nice little quiet wife that her husband desired. In a 1977 interview, Mel Watkins writes that Morrison ‘‘had to move beyond domestic trappings that females involve themselves in and expand into the realm of things that men participate and concern themselves with.’’ This description fits Sula as well. Had Sula the artist’s (man’s?) tools of pencil and yellow pad (‘‘paints and clays’’), she too may have become a novelist. Or, if you prefer the reverse, had Morrison been denied her pencil and yellow pad (‘‘paints and clays’’), she too may have become Sulalike.

IN HER OWN WORDS

195

Medallion was more difficult because it was wholly fabricated; but it was based on something my mother had said some time ago. When she first got married, she and my father went to live in Pittsburgh. And I remember her telling me that in those days all the black people lived in the hills of Pittsburgh, but now they lived amid the smoke and dirt in the heart of that city. It’s clear up in those hills, and so I used that idea, but in a small river town in Ohio. Stepto, ‘‘Intimate Things in Place,’’ 12 My grandmother would ask me about my dreams and, depending on the content of them, she would go to the dream book, which would translate dreams into a three-digit number. That was the number you played in the numbers game. You dream about a rabbit, or death, or weddings, and then color made a difference—if you dreamed about dying in a white dress or a red dress—and weddings always meant death and death always meant weddings. I was very interested because she used to hit a lot on my dreams for about a year or two. Ruas, ‘‘Toni Morrison, 100 I remember my great-grandmother, too. Her husband died before I was born, but I remember that when my great-grandmother walked into a room her grandsons and her nephews stood up. The women in my family were very articulate. Of course my great-grandmother could not read, but she was a midwife, and people from all over the state came to her for advice and for her to deliver babies. They came for other kinds of medical care too. Yes, I feel the authority of those women more than I do my own. McKay, ‘‘Interview with Toni Morrison,’’ 141 (Perhaps Morrison’s great grandmother is the model for M’Dear, for Ajax’s mother, for Pilate, for the women who haunt Jadine in Eloe, for Baby Suggs, and for Lone.) I knew all this about her [Morrison’s great-grandmother], that people came from all over the state to ask her advice in matters, and her sister was like her, too. So I kept the image, it stayed with me. I guess I’m finished with it now. It seems so complete. Koenen, ‘‘One Out of Sequence,’’ 79 (This passage reflects Morrison’s habit of using an idea until it reflects a whole, complete image.)

196

IN HER OWN WORDS

There’s another thing I wanted to tell you, some autobiographical fact that I thought might interest you. My mother’s friends and my mother knew a woman called Hannah Peace, who—I don’t know much about her, except I remember how she looked, not a lot, just the color of her skin, so dark, rose in it, and the lids of her eyes were very deep. Now I was little, so she seemed tall to me. And my mother and her friends, whenever they mentioned her name, and called her Hannah Peace, it seemed to me in the way they called her name there was some mixture of awe and approbation, some quality of both in it. Now I’ve never asked my mother about that lady, and I don’t remember seeing her more than two or four times, but it made an impression on me. There was a quality about that, I thought they sort of liked her and—not disliked her—they liked and admired her and disapproved of her. Admiration and disapproval, at the same time. Whenever something was up, they didn’t say her name like you say other people’s names. So when I was writing Sula, I used the name because I couldn’t not use it. It was all caught up with the sound of ‘‘Hannah Peace.’’ Then I gave her the personality of somebody else, but it was almost like the way people might say ‘‘Sula.’’ Koenen, ‘‘One Out of Sequence,’’ 79–80 There’s a woman in our town now who is an absolute riot. She can do anything she wants to. And it occurred to me about twenty years ago how depleted that town would be if she ever left. Everybody wanted her out, and she was a crook and she was mean and she had about twenty husbands—and she was just, you know, a huge embarrassment. Nevertheless, she really and truly was one of the reasons that they called each other on the telephone. They sort of used her excitement, her flavor, her carelessness, her restlessness, and so on. And that quality is what I used in Sula. Stepto, ‘‘Intimate Things in Place,’’ 15 I don’t know a thing about that lady [Hannah Peace in Morrison’s hometown], and I haven’t asked anybody about her, but I remember her face, and mostly this part around the eyes. So those are shreds, but that’s all you need to build somebody like Sula or Hannah. Neustadt, ‘‘Visits of the Writers,’’ 90–91 But I am not my characters, I just try to make sense from their point of view. Without a character, I do what an actress does: I get inside, I try to see what it looks like and how they feel and let them do what I think they’d do. . . . But I like lust lust, you know (that’s why I like Hannah). Koenen, ‘‘One Out of Sequence,’’ 70–71

IN HER OWN WORDS

197

(This statement is contradictory since Morrison both denies her use of her life in creating fiction and admits that she does so by connecting herself with Hannah via lust.) My grandfather used to walk away and we had to go out and find him. ‘‘Go find Papa,’’ they’d say to my sister and me. It was often true of little towns with three or four generations of people that the children would be sent out to find the older ones, who were wandering. But there aren’t any people to do that anymore, no children, no neighbors. Agencies do it. Well, the town I grew up in used to respond to an event like that almost like a chorus. Those people have a quality, a way of dealing with life that I value, and I write about it. Dowling, ‘‘Song of Toni Morrison,’’ 58–59 (This passage reminds us of the incident in which Sula puts Eva in a nursing home. The chorus, the Bottom community, is enraged as we learn from its spokesperson, the adult Nel.) It’s an animated world [the world of Morrison’s novels] in which trees can be outraged and hurt, and in which the presence or absence of birds is meaningful. You have to be very still to understand these so-called signs, in addition to which they inform you about your own behavior. It always interested me, the way in which black people responded to evil. They would protect themselves from it, they would avoid it, they might even be terrified of it, but it wasn’t as though it were abnormal. I used the line ‘‘as though God had four faces instead of three. . . .’’ Evil was a natural presence in the world. What that meant in terms of human behavior was that when they saw someone disgraceful, they would not expel them in the sense of tarring and killing. I think that’s a distinct cultural difference, because the Western notion of evil is to annihilate it. That may be very cleansing, but it’s also highly intolerant. Ruas, ‘‘Toni Morrison,’’ 100–101

Song of Solomon In tracing the roots of the Dead, Morrison’s own family lineage plays a paramount role in Song of Solomon: the clerical error on her aunt’s birth certificate; the song of Solomon that her mother and aunts know; ‘‘white boys’’ who threaten her grandmother’s family in Greenville, Alabama; Morrison’s ‘‘Indian’’ great-grandmother; and

198

IN HER OWN WORDS

the female trio of great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother (Pilate-Reba-Hagar). In fact, Song of Solomon may be the work which most closely parallels her family’s life.

[Morrison chose not to go back to Lorain when Song of Solomon was published.] I didn’t want those people to look at me funny. I didn’t want to experience myself as separate from them. I couldn’t bear the fact that old ladies who used to tell me, ‘‘Chloe, cross your legs’’ would look at me in any other way than that they had the right to tell me that still. Dowling, ‘‘Song of Toni Morrison,’’ 58 (This passage suggests that people in Lorain would see some similarities between them, their town, and their experiences, and the novel Song of Solomon. It’s useful in showing how writers, because they use their lives in their stories, become outsiders, isolated from the very community that nourished them and their writings. Of course, the passage could simply mean that Morrison didn’t want to be idolized or seen differently from the way she’d been seen by the people in her town. Na-a-ah!) [The interviewer makes the comment: ‘‘Consider Macon Dead. The book turns on his name, which is ‘Dead.’ It shows . . .’’ Morrison interrupts him and makes the following comment.] It shows a mistake . . . a clerical error . . . the carelessness of white people . . . and the indifference when they . . . they don’t pay much attention to what the records are. My mother doesn’t even have a birth certificate. My aunt has a birth certificate and her name is not even on it. It says, Negro Child, that’s all. Brown, ‘‘Interview with Toni Morrison,’’ 4 There is a huge wing of our family who lived in Greenville [Alabama] and then in Birmingham, and that portion of them that didn’t come to Ohio went out to California, and I only recently met some of them whom I had only heard stories about. The song in Song of Solomon is a song from that wing of the family in Alabama. The song that my mother and aunts know starts out, ‘‘Green, the only son of Solomon.’’ And then there are some funny words that I don’t understand. It’s a long sort of a children’s song that I don’t remember. But Green was the name of my grandfather’s first son and it was a kind of genealogy that they were singing about. So I altered

IN HER OWN WORDS

199

the words for Song of Solomon. Those people were born in Greenville. Jones and Vinson, ‘‘Interview with Toni Morrison,’’ 173 I never use characters from my life. I may have matched pieces, but it’s usually something vague. The song of Solomon: there’s a song like that in my family. I don’t know all the lyrics but it starts with a line like ‘‘Green, the only son of Solomon,’’ and then some words I don’t understand, but it is a genealogy. I made up the lyrics in the Song of Solomon to go with the story. And my mother was named out of the Bible, the way they were in the book. So stuff like that. Neustadt, ‘‘Visits of the Writers,’’ 90 [According to interviewer Micucci, Toni Morrison recalled hearing stories about ‘‘white boys’’ threatening her grandmother’s family on her farm in Greenville, Alabama.] Micucci, ‘‘Inspired Life,’’ 276 [According to interviewer Dowling, Toni Morrison’s great-grandmother was an Indian who’d been given eighty-eight acres of land by the government during Reconstruction. It was the inspiration for Lincoln’s Heaven, that ‘‘little bit a place’’ she wrote about in Song of Solomon.] The land got legally entangled . . . because of some debts my grandfather, who inherited it, owed—or, rather, didn’t know he owed. It was like the old man in Song of Solomon. Those people didn’t really understand what was happening. All they knew is that at one point they didn’t own the land anymore and had to work for the person who did. Dowling, ‘‘Song of Toni Morrison,’’ 54 I think what really happened was that I got interested in a woman producing a woman producing a woman in a kind of non-male environment, and each generation has a different problem. I duplicated it almost entirely in Song of Solomon; I think I was finished with the idea. Also I needed a reason for them to be self-invented. With Eva her genuine matriarchy, with Pilate I needed something to make her be outside the pale, so to speak, and that idea sort of appeared and I followed it along, perfectly ready to abandon it at any moment, but it worked. It worked for her, it established the presence of the surreal. I think, now that I’m reminded of it, that I was very impressed with a very lyrical scene. My mother and my grandmother lived in the same town, and I thought that my mother was a powerful person, and the person more powerful than she was

200

IN HER OWN WORDS

her mother who was really powerful. And I had the grand experience of having my great-grandmother come to town. And who can be more powerful than your great-grandmother? She was an incredible woman, and I saw my grandmother sitting on the edge of the table swinging her feet like a little girl in her mother’s presence. I remember all of them in the room, and there was my grandmother being very girlish when she’s with her mother. And I was the fourth—great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and me, and the scene, the event, must have made an enormous impression. Now the men in my family were very huge presences, and the women were very accommodating but very independent. But there must have been something about my seeing that, I guess, if one is interested in the autobiographical. Recently somebody reminded me of it and said, ‘‘Did that have anything to do with the fact that you produce those women?’’ I thought that might be the case, but just the sequence. There was a moment in which I was aware of all those women and all those generations and having my grandmother talk about her mother—I think I wasn’t in school yet or had just started—it must have made an enormous impression on me. Koenen, ‘‘One Out of Sequence,’’ 78–79 I remember one day when I was confused about what I had to do next—write a review, pick up groceries, what? I took out a yellow pad and made a list of all the things I had to do. It included large things, like ‘‘be a good daughter and a good mother,’’ and small things, like ‘‘call the phone company.’’ I made another list of the things I wanted to do. There were only two things without which I couldn’t live: mother my children and write books. Then I cut out everything that didn’t have to do with those two things. There was an urgency—that’s all I remember. Not having the leisure to whine. Not paying close attention to what others thought my life should be like. Not organizing my exterior and interior self for the approval of men—which I had done a lot of before. It’s not a bad thing to please a husband or a lover, but I couldn’t do that. It took up time and thought. Dreifus, ‘‘Chloe Wofford,’’ 75 (Do you remember Pilate’s determining what mattered to her, just after Reba’s birth? ‘‘When she realized what her situation in the world was and would probably always be she threw away every assumption she had learned and began at zero. First off, she cut her hair. That was one thing she didn’t want to have to think about any-

IN HER OWN WORDS

201

more. Then she tackled the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world?’’ Song of Solomon, 149. Also, remember Sula’s rearrangement of herself for Ajax?) But the consciousness of being Black I think happened when I left Cornell and went to teach at Texas Southern University. You see, I had never been in a Black school like that. I don’t mean my awareness was all that intense, but even at Howard University where I went to school, I remember I asked once to do a paper in the English Department on Black Characters in Shakespeare, and they were very much alarmed by that—horrified by it, thought it was a sort of lesser topic, because Howard wasn’t really like that. It was very sort of middle class, sort of upwardly mobile and so on. But when I left Cornell and went to Houston, even though I was only there a year and a half, in the South they always had Negro History Week; I’d never heard of it. We didn’t have it in the North. (Laughter) But then I began to think about all those books my mother always had in the house—J. A. Rodgers and all those people—and all those incredible conversations my grandfather had and all those arguments that would just hurt my head when I listened to them at the time suddenly had a different meaning. There was a difference between reading the Call and Post when it came or the Pittsburgh Courier and all the Black papers and then going someplace where there was something called the Black press. So I think it was as a novice teacher, and that was in 1957 or 1958, that I began to think about Black culture as a subject, as an idea, as a discipline. Before it had only been on a very personal level—my family. And I thought they were the way they were because they were my family. Jones and Vinson, ‘‘Interview with Toni Morrison,’’ 174 (This passage reminds us of Milkman. Outside corroboration of Macon Dead’s stories makes them more believable, more valuable: ‘‘Milkman felt a glow listening to a story come from this man that he’d heard many times before but only half listened to.’’ Song of Solomon, 231)

Tar Baby Tar Baby is the transition novel, the one that reflects Morrison’s weaning away from her reliance on shreds of information from her

202

IN HER OWN WORDS

life to kernels of facts that are meaningful to African people as a whole. In several interviews, she admits that she ‘‘felt like a writer’’ after Song of Solomon: ‘‘It was by the time I was writing Song of Solomon, the third book, that I began to think that this was the central part of my life. Not to say that other women haven’t said it all along, but for a woman to say, ‘I am a writer’ is difficult’’ (Schappell and Brodsky, ‘‘Art of Fiction,’’ 96). Beginning with Tar Baby, everything is ‘‘great for the writer’s mill’’ (Micucci, ‘‘Inspired Life,’’ 275).

I never read the [Uncle Remus] story, but it was one of the stories we were told, and one of the stories my mother was told, part of a whole canon of stories. It’s supposed to be a funny little child’s story. But something in it terrified me. What frightened me was the notion of the Tar Baby. It’s a lump of tar shaped like a baby, with a dress on and a bonnet. It’s a sunny day and the tar is melting, and the rabbit is getting stuck and more stuck. It’s really quite monstrous. The rabbit approaches it and says good morning and expects it to say good morning back. He anticipated a certain civilized response—he was a little thief—and when it didn’t happen he was outraged and therefore got stuck and went to his death. Of course, as in most peasant literature, that sort of weak but cunning animal gets out of it by his cleverness. So I just gave these characters parts, Tar Baby being a black woman and the rabbit a black man. I introduced a white man and remembered the tar. The fact that it was made out of tar and was a black woman, if it was made to trap a black man—the white man made her for that purpose. That was the beginning of the story. Suppose somebody simply has all the benefits of what the white Western world has to offer; what would the relationship be with the rabbit who really comes out of the briar patch? And what does the briar patch mean to that rabbit? Wherever there was tar it seemed to me was a holy place. ‘‘Tar Baby’’ is also a racial slur, like ‘‘nigger,’’ and a weapon hostile to the black man. The tragedy of the situation was not that she was a Tar Baby, but that she wasn’t. She could not know, she could not hold anything to herself. Ruas, ‘‘Toni Morrison,’’ 102 In the book I’ve just completed, Tar Baby, I use that old story because, despite its funny, happy ending, it used to frighten me. The story has a tar baby in it which is used by a white man to catch a rabbit. ‘‘Tar baby’’ is also a name, like nigger, that white people

IN HER OWN WORDS

203

call black children, black girls, as I recall. Tar seemed to me to be an odd thing to be in a Western story, and I found that there is a tar lady in African mythology. I started thinking about tar. At one time, a tar pit was a holy place, at least an important place, because tar was used to build things. It came naturally out of the earth; it held together things like Moses’s little boat and the pyramids. For me, the tar baby came to mean the black woman who can hold things together. The story was a point of departure to history and prophecy. That’s what I mean by dusting off the myth, looking closely at it to see what it might conceal. LeClair, ‘‘Language Must Not Sweat,’’ 122 [The interviewer, Jones, asks Morrison the question: ‘‘How important are outrage and anarchy in the attempts of your characters to gain or regain their natural heritage?’’] For some of them, very important. That’s the way they do it—like Son. For others it’s anathema like Macon Dead, and Jadine, and Sydney and Ondine. They don’t like that. They are proud people and they take pride in their labor. They like to do things well. They have that sort of elegant way of handling things and they’ve made peace with that and they know how to get on in the world step by step, by step, by step, by step. They play with the house cards, and they are not like those people who are not playing with the house deck. They are out to change it, fix it, ignore it, cut off their noses, in many instances to spite their own faces. They’re just not going to do it. Many men who are outlaws, not so much contemporary type outlaws but the outlaws that I knew in my youth (laughter), were just those kinds of people. They were, oh, I don’t know, episodic; they were adventurers. They felt that they had been dealt a bad hand, and they just made up other rules. They couldn’t win with the house deck and that was a part of their daring. So they looked at and that was solution to them [sic], whereas other Black people—they were horrified by all that ‘‘bad’’ behavior. Jones and Vinson, ‘‘Interview with Toni Morrison,’’ 181–82 (Morrison’s description of outlaws fits many of her characters, both male and female: e.g., Sula, Ajax, Guitar.)

Beloved The Margaret Garner story is the main kernel in Beloved. This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel shows the author’s creative processes work-

204

IN HER OWN WORDS

ing at full steam. If there were those who doubted her artistic prowess, this work removes all doubt. Taking a small newspaper clipping from Middleton’s The Black Book, she creates the world of U.S. slavery. Still, even in this masterfully creative work, there are autobiographical tidbits. For example, one is reminded of Baby Suggs’s way station house and her preaching in the Clearing when Morrison states that her family ‘‘talked a great deal about Jesus—they selected out of Christianity all the things they felt applicable to their situations—but they also kept this other body of knowledge that we call superstitions. They were way stations in their thinking about how to get on with it . . .’’ Ruas, ‘‘Toni Morrison,’’ 115.

[The following passage from an interview dated 1981 is perhaps evidence of Morrison’s getting the seed for her Beloved story, six years before its publication. The Amy Denver section of the novel? What do you think?] I write about what it must have been like when we just got here. There couldn’t have been another slave society in the world with a Fugitive Slave Law. It could not work with the Greeks and Romans, because they all looked pretty much alike. But with the black people, skin give them away. You could keep up the remnants and the vestiges of slavery far longer than it ever would have lasted if they had enslaved . . . suppose they had decided to buy Irish people and just spread them all about, as they did of course. Then when they stopped doing it you could sort of tell by the name or tell by the religion, but you couldn’t have laws—Jim Crow laws. With black people, because of the physical difference, they could be seen as slaves, and subsequently are now viewed as the visible poor. We are perceived as the lowest of the classes because we can be identified that way. It wouldn’t make any difference what we wore, or what neighborhood we lived in, we’re still visible as that. The visibility has made the prejudices last longer. It’s not because one is black that the prejudice exists. The prejudice exists because one can identify the person who was once a slave or in the lower class, and the caste system can survive longer. Ruas, ‘‘Toni Morrison,’’ 117 That was Margaret Garner’s story. She was a slave woman who escaped from Kentucky and arrived in Cincinnati to live with her mother-in-law. Right after she got there the man who owned her

IN HER OWN WORDS

205

found her. She ran out into the shed and tried to kill all her children. Just like that. She was about to bang the head of one up against the wall when they stopped her. She became a cause ce´ le`bre for the abolitionists because they were attempting to get her tried for murder. That would have been a big coup because it would have assumed she had some responsibility over those children. But the abolitionists were unsuccessful. She was tried for the ‘‘real’’ crime, which was stolen property, and convicted and returned to that same man. I didn’t want to know a great deal about her story because there would be no space for me to invent, but what struck me was that when they interviewed her she was not a mad-dog killer. She was very calm. All she said was, ‘‘They will not live like that. They will not live like that.’’ Her mother-in-law, who was a preacher, said, ‘‘I watched her do it. And I neither encouraged her nor discouraged her.’’ So for them, it was a dilemma. Shall I permit my children, who are my best thing, to live like I have lived, when I know that’s terrible? So she decided to kill them and kill herself. That was noble. She was saying, ‘‘I’m a human being. These are my children. This script I am writing.’’ Moyers, ‘‘Conversation with Toni Morrison,’’ 271–72 (In Beloved, Sethe tells Paul D that Beloved ‘‘was my best thing.’’ Beloved, 272) I did research about a lot of things in this book [Beloved] in order to narrow it, to make it narrow and deep, but I did not do much research on Margaret Garner other than the obvious stuff, because I wanted to invent her life, which is a way of saying I wanted to be accessible to anything the characters had to say about it. Recording her life as lived would not interest me, and would not make me available to anything that might be pertinent. I got to a point where in asking myself who could judge Sethe adequately, since I couldn’t, and nobody else that knew her could, really, I felt the only person who could judge her would be the daughter she killed. And from there Beloved inserted herself into the text. Darling, ‘‘In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,’’ 248 [In the following passage, Morrison thinks/writes about the interview/conversation she has had with Gloria Naylor.] It was a conversation. I can tell, because I said something I didn’t know I knew. About the ‘‘dead girl.’’ That bit by bit I had been res-

206

IN HER OWN WORDS

cuing her from the grave of time and inattention. Her fingernails maybe in the first book, face and legs, perhaps, the second time. Little by little bringing her back into living life. So that now she comes running when called—walks freely around the house, sits down in a chair; looks at me, listens to Gloria Naylor and anybody else she wants to. She cannot lie. Doesn’t know greed or vengeance. Will not fawn or pontificate. There is no room for pupils in her eyes. She is here now, alive. I have seen, named and claimed her—and oh what company she keeps. Naylor, ‘‘A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison,’’ 217 There are so many little feathers of stories about [the days of emancipation that her grandfather remembered]. I never looked at it very closely, because there was so much misery way back then, but I remember he [Morrison’s grandfather] was a little boy under five, and all he heard was that emancipation was coming, and there was a great deal of agitation about that. Because he could feel the excitement, the fear, the apprehension as well as the glee, he knew something important was happening. Emancipation is coming! Nobody explained it to him—and he thought it was some terrible monster. And on the day when he knew it was coming he just went and hid under the bed . . . Oh, poor baby. And then there were these other people I heard them discuss—their charm and traditions— they were Indians who were married to some slave people in my family. Some of them never made the transition from slavery. They were given land that was then taken away from them by the rapacious part of the culture that they could neither stand up to nor live with. Then there were the survivors, who got away with it, and made out in a flexible way. These things were talked about—the family, the neighbors, the community. They talked a great deal about Jesus—they selected out of Christianity all the things they felt applicable to their situation—but they also kept this other body of knowledge that we call superstitions. They were way stations in their thinking about how to get on with it and a reason to get up the next morning. Ruas, ‘‘Toni Morrison,’’ 114–15

Beloved/Jazz The seeds of both Beloved and Jazz are reflected here in Morrison’s conceptualization of the novels.

IN HER OWN WORDS

207

And that brings me to the book that I’m writing now called Beloved. I had an idea that I didn’t know was a book idea, but I do remember being obsessed by two or three little fragments of stories that I heard from different places. One was a newspaper clipping about a woman named Margaret Garner in 1851. . . . They put her in jail for a little while and I’m not even sure what the denouement is of her story. But that moment, that decision was a piece, a tail of something that was always around, and it didn’t get clear for me until I was thinking of another story that I had read in a book that Camille Billops published, a collection of pictures by Van der Zee, called The Harlem Book of the Dead. Van der Zee was very lucid. He remembered everybody he had photographed. There was this fashion of photographing beloved, departed people in full dress in coffins or in your arms. You know, many parents were holding their children beautifully dressed in their arms and they were affectionate photographs taken for affectionate reasons. In one picture, there was a young girl lying in a coffin and he says that she was eighteen years old and she had gone to a party and that she was dancing and suddenly she slumped and they noticed there was blood on her and they said, ‘‘What happened to you?’’ And she said, ‘‘I’ll tell you tomorrow.’’ That’s all she would say. And apparently her ex-boyfriend or somebody who was jealous had come into the party with a gun and a silencer and shot her. And she kept saying, ‘‘I’ll tell you tomorrow’’ because she wanted him to get away. And he did, I guess; anyway, she died. Now what made those stories connect, I can’t explain, but I do know that, in both instances, something seemed clear to me. A woman loved something other than herself so much. She had placed all of the value of her life in something outside herself. That the woman who killed her children loved her children so much; they were the best part of her and she would not see them sullied. She would not see them hurt. She would rather kill them, have them die. You know what that means?. . . . And that this woman had loved a man or had such affection for a man that she would postpone her own medical cure or go ahead and die to give him time to get away so that, more valuable than her life, was not just his life but something else connected with his life. Now both of those incidents seem to me, at least on the surface, very noble, you know, in that old-fashioned sense, noble things, generous, wide-spirited, love beyond the call of . . . And I call her Beloved so that I can filter all these confrontations and questions that she has in that situation, which is 1851, and then to extend her

208

IN HER OWN WORDS

life, you know, her search, her quest, all the way through as long as I care to go, into the twenties where it switches to this other girl. Therefore, I have a New York uptown-Harlem milieu in which to put this love story, but Beloved will be there also. Naylor, ‘‘A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison,’’ 206–208

Jazz There are just a few traces—extenuated traces—of Morrison’s life experiences reflected in this novel. She remembers the stories her family members told of the 1920s and she remembers the ‘‘A train’’ rides she takes. She is also able to use her New York living experiences and revert back to the familial roots of Kentucky and Virginia. Then too she parallels the year 1906, the year her great-grandmother flees west to Birmingham, Alabama, with the year Joe and Violet leave Vesper County, Virginia to go north to Harlem. These are some of her life’s tidbits. Mostly, however, she relies on the current reality of young African females living in urban areas throughout the U.S., newspaper articles chronicling the 1920s, and Stevie Wonder’s song ‘‘Living Just for the City’’ as inspirations: ‘‘When they fall in love with a city, it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves. And in the beginning when they first arrive, and twenty years later when they and the City have grown up, they love that part of themselves so much they forget what loving other people was like’’ (Jazz, 33).

[The stories that her parents told about the 1920s of their youth partly inspired Jazz, according to Morrison who recalls the ‘‘gleaming terms of excitement and attraction’’ they used to describe that era.] Everything is great for the writer’s mill. Micucci, ‘‘Inspired Life,’’ 275 [In writing Jazz, Morrison drew on childhood memories of listening to her mother and her relatives recall their youth in the Roaring Twenties:]

IN HER OWN WORDS

209

The powerful, radical alteration in fashions. The enormous, cataclysmic response to a certain kind of music . . . They were feeling licensed and empowered, and a little naughty. Donahue, ‘‘Jazz Symbol,’’ 2D I read magazines and newspapers of a particular place and period in order to soak up the atmosphere and the relevant discourse, the relevant headlines and matters that seem to be important to people. For example, in ‘‘Jazz,’’ I read both mainstream newspapers for 1926 and newspapers published by black publishers in New York and elsewhere. ‘‘Toni Morrison,’’ Time.com, 21 January 1998, p. 2 It’s like you used to be born Black, and that meant something. It meant when you saw another Black person you knew all sorts of things right away. And no matter what kind of financial situation they were in, you know, you all went to the same hairdresser and all went to the same beauty parlor. There were some things you could count on, some language, some shared assumptions. That doesn’t seem to be true now. Being Black now is something you have to choose to be. Choose it, no matter what your skin color. I used to always feel safe among Black people. I did. I don’t anymore, just because they are Black. And that for me is a huge jump. I’m in betwixt this generation of people who could go into any Black neighborhood and be safe . . . Somebody told me that their grandmother said that she had come to Philadelphia sixty years ago. And she said, ‘‘When I saw a Black man, I thought, ‘I am safe. Thank God.’ But now when I see a Black man, I think I ought to run.’’ Something has happened. You see we are very close now to the society that is around us. I don’t mean that the structures that held us together are gone, but there are new things pressing in our lives—new modes, new music, new menus, television, you know, and it’s like going to the city. Stevie Wonder has a little song . . . ‘‘Living Just for the City.’’ It’s not enough. So I am a bit alarmed by the changes. Maybe I shouldn’t be. Maybe I should move. . . . You know there are still lovely places. But I even see it in Lorain, Ohio. Just—I keeping [sic] thinking—the children are really in danger—our children. Jones and Vinson, ‘‘Interview with Toni Morrison,’’ 186 People set our house on fire to evict us when I was about two years old . . . while we were in it. 60 Minutes, Sunday, March 8, 1998

210

IN HER OWN WORDS

(Dorcas’s house is ‘‘torched’’ and her mother ‘‘burned crispy in its flame’’ when Dorcas is a little girl. Jazz, 57.)

Paradise Paradise reflects the weakest link between Toni Morrison’s life experiences and the creative process. In fact, the background information for the novel, including the kernel idea, is unrelated to her personal, familial life. Rather, it is research completely focused on the problem of how and under what conditions Africans can survive as a people. Although Morrison has always demonstrated a genuine concern for race, this complete movement away from self-examination to collective examination spotlights her Nobel laureate artistic skills as well as her deepening concern for her people. On March 8, 1998, Toni Morrison tells Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes that ‘‘the truth I’m most interested in is the nature of oppression . . . it’s amazing that we’re [Africans are] not all dead. It’s a shocker.’’

Part of the history of the race is dealing with personal transgression. You have to remember we were an owned people in the most finite sense of that word. The exodus from that is a very complicated journey. Where is the territory where you’re free? Where is the territory where you’re safe? Where is it that it’s okay to love somebody else and know that they’re not going to be taken from you for no reason? The idea of Home, or Paradise, or mine, or this domain, or language that’s ours—struggling to hang on to it, struggling to know what it is—is an important aspect, I think, of the life that African-Americans have led. And also the fear that somebody can just walk in your house in the middle of the night and say, ‘‘Give me your nephew.’’ And your house is . . . open. So, there is that constant sense of tension and how to defend it, how to protect it, how to transcend it, or travel away from it. That seems to me to be particularly acute among African-Americans. Morales, ‘‘Toni Morrison,’’ 98 I wanted to write books that ran the whole gamut of women’s sexual experiences. I didn’t like the imposition that had been placed on black women’s sexuality in literature. They were either mothers, mammies or whores. And they were not vulnerable people. They were not people who were supposed to enjoy sex, either. That was

IN HER OWN WORDS

211

forbidden in literature—to enjoy your body, be in your body, defend your body. But at the same time I wanted to say, ‘‘You still can be prey.’’ Right now, I’ve been writing a page or two in my new book, trying to evoke out-of-door safety for women. How it feels. How it is perceived when you feel perfectly safe a long way from home. This new book, ‘‘Paradise,’’ has taken over my imagination completely and I’m having the best time ever. I wrote thirteen pages in three days. I’ve never done that in my life. ‘‘Toni Morrison (Chloe Wofford),’’ Time Magazine, 11 September 1994, p. 275 The book coalesced around the idea of where paradise is, who belongs in it. All paradises are described as male enclaves, while the interloper is a woman, defenseless and threatening. When we get ourselves together and get powerful is when we are assaulted. [Ms. Morrison was also interested in the history of all-black towns founded by freedmen. . . . On a trip to Brazil in the 1980s, Ms. Morrison heard about a convent of black nuns who took in abandoned children and practiced candomble, an Afro-Brazilian religion; the local populace considered them an outrage, and they were murdered by a posse of men.] I’ve since learned it never happened. But for me it was irrelevant. And it said much about institutional religion and uninstitutional religion, how close they are. Dinitia Smith, ‘‘Mixing Tragedy and Folklore,’’ B2 I tried to make it possible to think that Paradise was within our imagination. Nothing like Dante’s Paradise, which is realistic and surrounded by horrors, and nothing like we imagine Paradise to be in the contemporary world—you know, something like a Disney theme park. . . . You know, the descriptions of Hell are the ones that attract the most attention. The poets really get on a roll when they think about that. And I wanted this book to move towards the possibility of reimagining Paradise. The thing is, if Paradise had everybody in it, there would be no Paradise at all—that’s because we think of it in terms of seclusion. But if we understood the planet to be that place, then this is all there is. So why not make it that way? Marcus, ‘‘This Side of Paradise,’’ 3–4

Afterword Toni Morrison’s Love

WOULDN’T YOU KNOW IT? JUST AS I WAS COMPLETING THE SECOND galley proofs of this second edition, Toni Morrison comes out with another novel: Love. How could I submit these proofs without availing myself of the opportunity to read, to study, to analyze another Morrison novel, however briefly? The novel centers around the Cosey family whose Cosey’s Hotel and Resort provides employment for many in the African community. Bill Cosey, a.k.a. Papa, is the daddy of the community, the paternal figure of the novel in more ways than one. It is he who owns the hotel and provides the jobs. He also likes little girls, marries one in fact. The other nine prominent characters are Heed Cosey, Papa’s child bride; Christine Cosey, once Heed’s best friend and now her granddaughter; May Cosey, Christine’s mother whose fear of the Civil Rights Movement drives her insane; Billy Boy Cosey, Bill Cosey’s deceased son and May’s deceased husband; L, the cook for the Cosey Hotel and Resort and the ‘‘savior’’ of the Cosey family; Vida Gibbons, once a worker at the Cosey Hotel and Resort; Sandler Gibbons, Vida’s husband; Romen, Vida and Sandler’s grandson whom they raise; and Junior, the ‘‘wild’’ girl who comes to work for the elderly Heed. [Textnote: Junior’s ‘‘milkshake brings all the boys to her yard’’.] As always, Morrison’s primary theme not only is relevant to the African community, but also is the critical issue that requires its attention: Since they suffer from a triple oppression, African females are the most exploited and oppressed, abused and used human beings on earth whose friendship is what saves them, cushions the blows of oppression. And of that sector, the African girl is the most vulnerable. Of course, this theme is not a new one in the Morrisonian canon. From the beginning of her writing career, Morrison has been interested in this vulnerable sector of the African population. Pecola and Claudia/Frieda in The Bluest Eye, Nel and 212

AFTERWORD

213

Sula in Sula, Hagar in Song of Solomon, Denver in Beloved, Dorcas and Felice in Jazz, Billie Delia and Pallas in Paradise—all exemplify the plight of the African female child. In fact, Love is a study on repeat; it repeats many of the critical themes of her earlier works. There is the girl who talks to her imaginary friend (The Bluest Eye); there is the breaking up of friendship caused by a man and the attempt to make amends when one friend is at the threshold of death (Sula); there is a family that is at the center of the African community (Song of Solomon); there is the lack of communication which causes years of misery (Beloved); there is the scarred-face woman—this time in red, not yellow (Tar Baby); there is the relationship between an old man and a young girl (Jazz); and there is the overall victimization of the female (Paradise, et al.). All of these riffs echo in Love. What is most striking, however, is that with the publication of Love, Toni Morrison’s last three novels may be seen as a trilogy. Primarily, each novel’s focus is on the plight of the African female. Each, moreover, targets a quintuplet of females. In Jazz, it is Wild, Violet, Dorcas, Alice Manfred, and Felice who are the focus. In Paradise, it is Connie, Mavis, Grace, Seneca, and Pallas. In Love, it is Heed, Christine, May, L, and Junior. Each novel in this trilogy reveals little, poor, or no parenting. Each unfolds a story of used or abused, haunted and hunted women. In Love, the idea of abused women appears as the first line of the novel: ‘‘The women’s legs are spread wide open, so I hum.’’ Television features ‘‘behinds and inner thighs as though that’s all there is to a woman’’ (3). Yet, despite this clear and present abuse of African women, the women of the novel—just as the women in real life—blame one another. Even L blames the women of the town for Bill Cosey’s problems: ‘‘brazen women can take a good man down’’ (10). It is the opposite, of course: whorish men take good women (girls) down. The women/girls of Love all love Cosey, or think they do. L says that young girls don’t know what love is, even though she herself falls for Cosey when she is only five years old, begins working for him at fourteen, and works for him for fifty years (64). And L’s word is law since L is Lord (63), at least lord of the Cosey manor. She ‘‘saves’’ all of the Coseys at one time or another. More importantly, she plays Lord when she takes it upon herself to kill Bill Cosey (201). This ‘‘love’’ for Cosey breaks up the true love girls have for one another, according to Morrison. In this novel, she fo-

214

AFTERWORD

cuses on the friendship of Heed and Christine to examine this idea of true love: [The parents’] place is secondary to a child’s first chosen love. If such children find each other before they know their own sex, or which one of them is starving, which well fed; before they know color from no color, kin from stranger, then they have found a mix of surrender and mutiny they can never live without. Heed and Christine found such a one. Most people have never felt a passion that strong, that early. (199)

This early, passionate child love quickly turns to impassioned hate when Bill Cosey decides to take Heed for his child bride. Like Nel and Sula, Claudia and Frieda, Christine and Heed were just at the brink of becoming ‘‘women’’ when Cosey ‘‘cozys’’ up to Heed. According to Christine, she herself was Twelve. My grandfather married her [Heed] when she was eleven. We were best friends. One day we built castles on the beach; next day he sat her in his lap. One day we were playing house under a quilt; next day she slept in his bed. One day we played jacks; the next day she was fucking my grandfather. (131–32)

Christine blames Heed. An old man in bed with a child means that he was fucking (raping is a more appropriate word) her. Unfortunately, it is not until the end of the novel that Christine comes to this realization. In fact, Christine and Heed are old women (and one of them has fallen and is close to death) when they realize that all of the time they’d been missing each other, not Bill Cosey: She does not watch or call out. Instead, she turns to smile at Christine, whose blood roar is louder than the cracking, so the falling is like a silent movie and the soft twisted hands with no hope of hanging on to rotted wood dissolve, fade to black as movies always do, and the feeling of abandonment loosens a loneliness so intolerable that Christine drops to her knees peering down at the body arching below. She races down the ladder, along the hall, and into the room. On her knees again, she turns, then gathers Heed in her arms. In light sifting from above each searches the face of the other. The holy feeling is still alive, as is its purity, but it is altered now, overwhelmed by desire. Old, decrepit, yet sharp. (177)

O, Lord, [Heed], girl, girl, girlgirlgirl. Structurally, the story is told by a third person narrator. There is no inscription; neither are there chapters. Instead, the novel is di-

AFTERWORD

215

vided into nine parts, each bearing the name of the chapter’s focus. [Textnote: Not only in theme—the focus on abused little girls, but also in structure—headings that reveal the focus of sections of the novel, this work reminds us of The Bluest Eye.] The first, ‘‘Portrait,’’ offers a view of the people of the novel. ‘‘Friend’’ concentrates on Romen who rescues a girl in the process of being gang raped. In ‘‘Stranger,’’ Junior’s coming to town is the focus. ‘‘Benefactor’’ focuses on Bill Cosey’s role in the community. ‘‘Lover’’ is Christine’s story. ‘‘Husband’’ examines the relationship between Heed and Cosey. In ‘‘Guardian,’’ Sandler’s relationship to his grandson, Romen, is explored. Even though Bill Cosey has long been dead, ‘‘Father’’ (‘‘Daddy’’ may be more to the point) examines his impact on the town. By lending money and providing jobs and molesting little girls, he has been the father to many of the Africans in town, especially the women. The last part, ‘‘Phantom,’’ explores the memories Christine and Heed have of their girlhood together. The title also refers to Celestial, perhaps the only female whom Bill Cosey truly loved. Like him, she was a whore. [Textnote: Birds of a feather . . .] Now, however, she is a ghost, a phantom, who visits the grave of Bill Cosey. L’s comments, in italics, frame the novel. Why? Because she is Lord, lord of Cosey’s Hotel and Resort, lord of the Cosey family. Her comments are in italics because she is both a part of the Cosey circle and apart from it. She is in the background, so she provides the background for the story. She is in between the sparring, trying to negotiate and arbitrate for the Coseys. She saves Christine and she kills Cosey. She is savior and executor. She is Lord. Repeated themes and repeated people—Love seems to have all the ingredients of Morrison’s previous novels, as if the author were flashing back over her writing career. As if she were paying tribute to her own contributions to literature. Is Love a lifetime award novel? Is it the author’s bidding farewell? We hope not, even though this work does not tug at the heart strings as do her earlier works. [Textnote: Only four out of the eight novels that Morrison has written thus far connect reader and characters together, present fully developed characters, tug at one’s heart strings: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved.] I wish I had more time. To think. To teach Love. To. But I don’t. Take what you have and be thankful. Okay. I’m thankful that Toni Morrison has once again written a novel to help her people. And, of course, I’m thankful for this opportunity to comment on Love. Thank you, ancestors.

Notes Chapter 1. Nkrumaism and the Novels of Toni Morrison 1. Emile Burns, An Introduction to Marxism (New York: International Publishers, 1966), 18. 2. Thiong’O Wa Ngugi, Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics (New York: Lawrence Hill and Company, 1972), xv. 3. Burns, An Introduction to Marxism, 21. 4. Ibid., 101. 5. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1972), 13. 6. Burns, An Introduction to Marxism, 54. 7. Samora Machel, ‘‘Establishing People’s Power to Serve the Masses,’’ in Samora Machel: An African Revolutionary, ed. Barry Munslow (London: Zed Books, Ltd., 1985), 4. 8. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 18. 9. Ibid., 99–100. 10. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1976). 11. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 99–100. 12. Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 29. 13. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1944), 18–19. 14. Ibid., 7–8. 15. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 100. 16. Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa, 27. 17. A condensed version of Roots was serialized in the Reader’s Digest in 1974; the entire work was first published in 1976. 18. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: New American Library, 1977), 336. 19. Judith Wilson, ‘‘A Conversation with Toni Morrison,’’ Essence 12 (July 1981): 86. 20. Susan Willis, ‘‘Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison,’’ in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Methuen, 1984), 270. 21. Ibid., 268. 22. Toni Morrison says that she writes for an African audience in particular. In an interview with Claudia Tate, she remarked: ‘‘When I view the world, perceive it and write about it, it’s the world of Black people.’’ Claudia Tate, ed., Black

216

NOTES

217

Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1985), 118. On another occasion, she stated: ‘‘I use myself as the Black audience.’’ Jane Bakerman, ‘‘‘The Seams Can’t Show’: An Interview with Toni Morrison,’’ Black American Literature Forum 12, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 59. 23. Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization (New York: Modern Reader, 1964), 69. 24. Barbara Christian, ‘‘Community and Nature: The Novels of Toni Morrison,’’ The Journal of Ethnic Studies 7 (1980): 4, 65. 25. Robert E. Stepto, ‘‘‘Intimate Things in Place’: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,’’ in Chant of Saints, ed. Michael S. Harper and Robert E. Stepto (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 214. For additional discussions on traditional African principles reflected in Morrison’s works, see Peter B. Erickson’s article, ‘‘Images of Nurturance in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby,’’ CLA Journal 28, no. 1 (September 1984): 20. See also Bettye J. Parker, ‘‘Complexity: Toni Morrison’s Women—An Interview Essay,’’ in Sturdy Black Bridges, ed. Roseann Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: Anchor Press, 1979). 26. Christian, ‘‘Community and Nature,’’ 78. 27. Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism (New York: Pergamon Press, 1985), 65. 28. Jacqueline DeWeever, ‘‘The Inverted World of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Sula,’’ CLA Journal 22, no. 4 (June 1979): 408. 29. Grace Ann Hovet and Barbara Lounsberry, ‘‘Flying as Symbol and Legend in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon, CLA Journal 27, no. 2 (December 1983): 121. 30. Julie J. Nichols, ‘‘Patterns in Toni Morrison’s Novels,’’ English Journal 72 (January 1983): 46. 31. Ibid., 47–48. 32. Wilson, ‘‘Conversations,’’ 134; Tate, ed., Black Women Writers at Work, 119. 33. S. G. Ikoku, ‘‘Aspects of Consciencism,’’ Pan-African Review 1, no. 2 (1964): 101.

Chapter 2. The Bluest Eye: The Need for Racial Approbation 1. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970), 24. 2. Toni Morrison’s decision to use an African female as protagonist reflects her interest in gender oppression as well as race and class oppression. In fact, all three forms of oppression are explored in each of Morrison’s works. However, their primacy varies depending on the author’s level of consciousness. In The Bluest Eye, sexism, like class exploitation, plays a secondary role to race oppression. Morrison does make clear, however, that the African female is the most vulnerable to capitalist propaganda in the United States, for it is the female in general who, in the United States, has often had her worth measured in terms of beauty rather than character or accomplishment. Also, Morrison’s concern with gender oppression is

218

NOTES

reflected in the rape of Pecola. Pecola’s rape and subsequent pregnancy further isolate her from society and, therefore, hasten her flight into insanity. 3. Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 34. 4. The Harlem Renaissance poet and novelist, Jean Toomer, made clear this association between the European female’s hair and lynching in his short poem, ‘‘Portrait in Georgia’’: Hair—braided chestnut, coiled like a lyncher’s rope, Eyes—fagots, Lips—old scars, or the first red blisters, Breath—the last sweet scent of cane, And her slim body, white as the ash of black flesh after flame.

Toni Morrison, student of African literature and former English major and teacher, is certainly aware of Toomer’s poem. Her point that Maureen Peal’s hair resembles lynch ropes is intended to remind the reader of this poem and thus to elicit feelings of apprehension and ugliness rather than beauty. 5. Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 53. 6. Ibid., 57. 7. Ibid., 61. 8. Keith E. Byerman’s comment on the skin-color conflict in The Bluest Eye reflects the extent of Morrison’s emphasis on race: ‘‘Morrison describes a social situation so distorted by the myth of whiteness that it produces a child, Pecola, who is so obsessed by the blue-eyed beauty of Shirley Temple that she creates a self-contained reality that cannot be penetrated even by rape and incest.’’ ‘‘Intense Behaviors: The Use of the Grotesque in The Bluest Eye and Eva’s Man,’’ CLA Journal 25 (June 1982): 448. Also Chikwenye Ogunyemi’s insightful statement on the significance of the novel’s title emphasizes the issue of race as Morrison’s thematic concern: ‘‘The bluest eye can be a pun on ‘the bluest I,’ the gloomy ego, the black man feeling very blue from the psychological bombardment he is exposed to from early life to late. The novel is, then, a blues enunciating the pain of the black man in America and an attempt to grapple with the pain which is sometimes existential. The superlative ‘bluest’ implies that the other groups are ‘blue’ and ‘bluer’—and, of course, the black race is the ‘bluest.’’’ ‘‘Order and Disorder in Toni Morrison ’s The Bluest Eye,’’ Critique 19, no. 1 (1977): 114. 9. Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 71. 10. Ibid., 132. 11. Ibid., 133. 12. Ibid., 133. 13. According to Barbara Christian, ‘‘Morrison’s use of the inversion of the truth is sifted. So that the seasonal flow of birth, death and rebirth is inverted in the human society.’’ Christian, ‘‘Community and Nature,’’ 74. 14. The structural problems of the text have led some critics such as Jacqueline DeWeever to believe that there is only one narrator. According to DeWeever, ‘‘Claudia tells the story from her point of view, presenting the world of three little black girls.’’ DeWeever, ‘‘The Inverted World,’’ 404. 15. Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 62. 16. Phyllis R. Klotman, ‘‘Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in

NOTES

219

The Bluest Eye,’’ Black American Literature Forum 13, no. 4 (Winter 1979): 123–24. 17. Bakerman, ‘‘‘The Seams Can’t Show,’’’ 59. 18. Stepto, ‘‘‘Intimate Things in Place,’’’ 222. 19. Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 7.

Chapter 3. Sula: The Struggle for Individual Fulfillment 1. Karen F. Stein, ‘‘Toni Morrison’s Sula: A Black Woman’s Epic,’’ Black American Literature Forum (Winter 1984): 149. 2. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: New American Library, 1973), 52. 3. Ibid., 92. 4. See Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar for a more realistic presentation of the options available to women. According to Walker, women since the beginning of their existence have been creative—despite their oppressive conditions. In fact, Walker shows that women have been creative in creating these options, even in regard to art. 5. Bakerman, ‘‘‘The Seams Can’t Show,’’’ 60. 6. Morrison, Sula, 51. 7. Ibid., 52. 8. Parker, ‘‘Complexity,’’ 253. 9. Morrison, Sula, 53. 10. Ibid., 168. 11. Ibid., 95. 12. Ibid., 83. 13. Ibid., 149. 14. Ibid.,92. 15. While Barbara Christian restricts her analysis of the individual’s quest for self-fulfillment outside of the fulfillment of the community to women only, she nevertheless accurately characterizes the negative consequences of such a search: ‘‘[Sula] seeks her own individuality as a means to self-fulfillment. But as a woman, her desire to make herself rather than others goes against the most basic principle of the community’s struggle to survive.’’ Christian, ‘‘Community and Nature,’’ 70. 16. In his commitment to struggle for a wholesome life for himself and the rest of the Bottom community, and in his recognition of himself as an African (Shadrack looks into the blackness of the toilet and gains comfort), Shadrack is a forerunner of Son. See Byerman’s comment for a different view. ‘‘[Shadrack] is deprived of all the markers of an identity.’’ Keith E. Byerman, Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1985), 194. 17. Morrison, Sula, 119. 18. Ibid., 122. 19. Ibid., 145. Critics such as Cynthia Davis and Karen Stein, who celebrate in Morrison’s development of a protagonist who indulges in self, read her canon as a static rather than a dynamic body of literature. According to Davis, Morrison’s characters such as Sula ‘‘are clearly existential heroes, ‘free’ in the Sartrean sense of being their own creators.’’ Cynthia Davis, ‘‘Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Mor-

220

NOTES

rison’s Fiction,’’ Contemporary Literature 23, no. 3 (Summer 1982): 331. Stein writes that ‘‘the ability to survive in the face of a hostile world and to accept one’s fate in full self-knowledge constitutes the real nobility left to the heroes.’’ Stein, ‘‘Toni Morrison’s Sula,’’ 149. Moreover, both critics fail to see the contradictions that exist in the work itself: that Morrison, on the one hand, points to the societal limitations of the female as the culprit, and on the other hand, blames the individual’s severing of communal ties. Clearly, the events surrounding National Suicide Day (1941) negate the notion that either mere survival of a community or individual existence outside of the community is viable for African people. 20. Morrison, Sula, 117. 21. Ibid., 112. 22. Ibid., 96. 23. Ibid., 117–18. 24. Ibid., 114. 25. Ibid., 115. 26. It seems a reflection of Morrison’s immature consciousness that she has the Bottom community band together and act positively as a result of perceived evil in the community. Usually, positive action brings positive results; negative action creates negative results. Perhaps unconsciously Morrison understands this dialectic because the unity created in the Bottom as a result of Sula’s negative, self-centered behavior is short-lived, artificial unity. Morrison will come to fully understand that the positive actions of a Son and a Paul D will spark a higher level of consciousness among the people in the community. (However, this banding together against Sula could represent Morrison’s clear understanding that sometimes people mistake who their enemy is. It is not until Sula dies that the community ‘‘sees’’ its true enemy.) 27. Christian, ‘‘Community and Nature,’’ 67. 28. Morrison, Sula, 149. 29. Ibid., 5. 30. Ibid., 133. 31. Ibid., 160. 32. Ibid., 161–62. 33. Ibid., 90. 34. Christian, ‘‘Community and Nature,’’ 71. 35. Stein, ‘‘Toni Morrison’s Sula,’’ 149. 36. It is important to distinguish between Nel the twelve-year-old girl and Nel the woman. Unlike Sula’s, Nel’s consciousness of herself in relationship to the community grows. As a child, Nel is more of a free spirit like Sula. Her free-spiritedness is reflected in her complicity with Sula in the death of Chicken Little. As a woman, however, Nel recognizes the importance of the community in the development of the individual, a mature recognition that brings with it social responsibility (e.g., visiting the nursing home where Eva lives) and that moves her closer to the thinking and behavior of the adult community (and further from the thinking and behavior of Sula). See also Stepto’s interview with Morrison in which Morrison reveals that Nel is the community since ‘‘she believes in its values.’’ Stepto, ‘‘‘Intimate Things in Place,’’’ 216. 37. Morrison, Sula, 163. 38. Ibid., 165. 39. Ibid., 20–21.

NOTES

221

40. Ibid., 23. 41. Ibid., 24. 42. Ibid., 174. 43. Barbara Christian’s insightful comment on Morrison’s recognition of the fruitlessness of the individual pursuit for freedom is relevant in pointing up Morrison’s own ambivalence in regard to the idea that individual fulfillment outside the community is the answer for African women: ‘‘Morrison resists the idea that neither individual pursuit or community conservatism is enough for fulfillment. Left without a context, the self has ‘no speck from which to grow,’ and deprived of creative spirits the community succumbs to death and destruction.’’ ‘‘Community and Nature,’’ 71. Morrison’s failure to fully recognize this dialectic operating between the individual and the community is reflected in the solution she proposes in Sula. 44. Morrison, Sula, 121. 45. Sekou Toure, ‘‘Africa on Walk: Revolution and Religion,’’ International Ideological Symposium, Conakry, Guinea, November 13–16, 1978. 46. Morrison, Sula, 51. 47. Barbara Lounsberry and Grace Hovet, ‘‘Principles of Perception in Toni Morrison’s Sula, Black American Literature Forum 13, no. 4 (Winter 1979): 128. 48. Indirectly, however, the Chicken Little episode lends further credence to Morrison’s point that racism is alive and flourishing in the United States. The European who finds Chicken Little’s body ‘‘shook his head in disgust at the kind of parents who would drown their own children. When, he wondered, will those people ever be anything but animals, fit for nothing, but substitutes for mules, only mules didn’t kill each other the way niggers did.’’ Morrison, Sula, 63.

Chapter 4. Song of Solomon: The Struggle for Race and Class Consciousness 1. Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slaves and the African Elite (New York: Random House, 1975), 232. 2. In an interview with Robert Stepto, Morrison makes a statement that indicates that she, herself, sees her work as a developing canon: ‘‘And his [Macon Dead, Jr.’s] son is the main character who makes friends with people in the community that is described in Sula. Stepto, ‘‘‘Intimate Things in Place,’’’ 222. It is interesting to note in this connection that Sula dies at thirty and Milkman develops consciousness at thirty-one. 3. As editor for Random House, Morrison edited the works of conscious Africans like Chinweizu. He pays tribute to her in his acknowledgments page. Morrison seems to have been particularly influenced by this work because some of the ideas present in Song of Solomon are quite similar to ones advanced by Chinweizu, especially those on African identity. See Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us, 224–26. 4. In regard to theme, Richard K. Barksdale astutely writes that Morrison ‘‘turns upside down many of the established social, moral and cultural beliefs that the Western world has inherited from the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions.’’ Richard K. Barksdale, ‘‘Song of Solomon,’’ World Literature Today 52 (Summer 1978): 465. In regard to structure, see Barbara Harris’s comments in

222

NOTES

‘‘Myth as Structure in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Melus 7, no. 3 (Fall 1980): 71. Harris describes the sophisticated narrative form of Song of Solomon: The textual richness of the novel derives from a present which spans three generations, with each narrative tied back into the development of the novel’s hero. The digressions, explanations, and expansions which interrupt Milkman’s own story suggest not a serial or chronological unfolding but an interlace, in which dominant narrative is embellished and enhanced through meticulously articulated subplots and images threading their way through Milkman’s life (P. 71).

5. The terms used to describe each of Milkman’s developmental stages are adapted from those of the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, found in his chapter ‘‘The Territorial Passage’’ in the work Rites of Passage. I do not attempt to apply Gennep’s definitions of the territorial stages verbatim; nor do I, always, use the stages within the same context. Rather, I extract the terminology and tailor it to fit my analysis (for an alternative classification system, see Dorothy Lee’s ‘‘To Ride the Air,’’ in which she divides Milkman’s development into four stages: initiation, renunciation, atonement, and release [P. 64]). While each of the three developmental stages has its own distinguishable characteristics, there is overlapping present. As dialectics tell us, there is positive and negative (contradictions) in everything and everyone; however, one is always dominant. Thus, while Milkman exhibits characteristics that are predominantly negative in his preliminal stage, there are positive characteristics present as well. They are just overshadowed by the negative. 6. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: New American Library, 1977), 68. 7. Ibid., 75. 8. Ibid., 90–91. 9. According to Joyce M. Wegs, ‘‘Milkman’s repeated urination in inappropriate contexts symbolizes his self-concern, his indifference to others, and his childishness.’’ Joyce M. Wegs, ‘‘Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: A Blues Song,’’ Essays in Literature 9, no. 2 (Fall 1982): 218. 10. Morrison, Song of Solomon, 47. 11. Ibid., 37. 12. In fact, the women of the novel become the gauge by which to measure Milkman’s maturing race and class consciousness. For example, Pilate’s role in the novel is dialectically related to Milkman’s developing consciousness. When Milkman first sees her, she is sitting with one foot pointing east and one west. Because east points to Africa and its culture and, thus, to Milkman’s past, and west points to the Western world and its culture and, thus, to Milkman’s present and future, Pilate symbolizes the bridge that connects the two. She is the source, the base from which Milkman must build his race and class consciousness. 13. Morrison, Song of Solomon, 282. 14. Ibid., 81. 15. Ibid., 68. 16. Ibid., 70. 17. Ibid., 69–70. 18. Ibid., 62. 19. Ibid., 35.

NOTES

223

20. Ibid., 78. 21. Ibid., 88. 22. Barbara Christian writes that Macon Dead, Sr.’s philosophy is shared by the rising African middle class. ‘‘Community and Nature,’’ 71. 23. Morrison, Song of Solomon, 150. 24. Ibid., 106. 25. Ibid., 79. 26. Ibid., 120. 27. Ibid., 113. 28. Ibid., 126. 29. Ibid., 161. 30. Ibid., 122. 31. Ibid., 154. 32. Ibid., 156. 33. Ibid., 157. 34. Ibid., 161. 35. Ibid., 210–11. 36. Ibid., 211. 37. Ibid., 211. 38. Ibid., 179. It is interesting to note that Milkman drives into Shalimar in a Buick, connecting his low level of class consciousness here with that which he possesses in the peacock scene. 39. Morrison, Song of Solomon, 180. 40. Ibid., 281. 41. Ibid., 274. 42. Ibid., 280. 43. Ibid., 284. 44. Ibid., 278. In the Morrisonian canon, psychological growth is measured both by physiological changes and physical distance. Milkman’s journey first to Danville, then to Shalimar, portends his heightened consciousness. 45. Morrison, Song of Solomon, 234. 46. Ibid., 282. 47. Morrison’s class analysis was sharpened by editing The West. In that work, Chinweizu discusses class suicide: The African decolonization movement was organized, dominated and guided by, and for the benefit of, that 1 percent of Africans who sought to make gains within colonial society by mobilizing the people and agitating in the name of the whole nation. Their leaders, like leaders everywhere, had to serve the interest of their class if they were to remain leaders. Where their class interest coincided with the people’s interest they served both simultaneously; where these interests diverged they always served their class but systematically contrived to appear to be serving the nation as a whole. What was good for their class they saw as good for the whole nation. Their class was their true nation. Given their position and ambition, radical militancy on their part would have mounted to self-betrayal, and perhaps class suicide (P. 146).

After writing and digesting the contents of Song of Solomon, Morrison’s analysis will sharpen even more. In both Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, Morrison uses the color silver to symbolize the wealth and status of the ruling class as well as the

224

NOTES

petty bourgeois aspirations of Africans. See Bonnie S. Lange for an alternative point of view. According to her, ‘‘Milkman’s silver-backed brushes are a symbol of betrayal.’’ Bonnie S. Lange, ‘‘Toni Morrison’s Rainbow Code,’’ Critique 24 (Spring 1983): 179. 48. Morrison, Song of Solomon, 269. 49. Ibid., 268. 50. Ibid., 281–82. 51. Ibid., 339. 52. Ibid., 319. 53. Ibid., 186. 54. Ibid., 122. 55. Ibid., 123. 56. Ibid., 280. 57. Ibid., 288–89. 58. Barksdale, ‘‘Song of Solomon,’’ 465. 59. Morrison, Song of Solomon, 340. 60. Ibid., 288–89. 61. Ibid., 5. 62. Ibid., 152. 63. Ibid., 153. 64. Ibid., 130. 65. Cynthia Davis has a different interpretation of Morrison’s use of a male protagonist. According to this critic, Morrison ‘‘is quite able to show black women as victims, as understanding narrators, or even as ‘free’ in the sense of disconnection. But when the time comes to fulfill the myth, to show a hero who goes beyond the independence of engagement, she creates a male hero. Her own emphasis on the effect of particulars on meaning raises questions about that choice.’’ ‘‘Self, Society, and Myth,’’ 337. 66. Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa, 27. 67. Morrison, Song of Solomon, 341. 68. See Grace Ann Hovet’s comment on Milkman’s potential to engage in conscious action: ‘‘At the end of Song of Solomon, she [Morrison] describes her main character, Milkman Dead, as a fleet and bright ‘lodestar,’ indicating thereby his ability to lead.’’ Hovet and Lounsberry, ‘‘Flying,’’ 140. 69. Nkrumah, Consciencism, 78. 70. While Dorothy H. Lee astutely acknowledges the expansion of consciousness achieved by the union of Milkman and Guitar, she sees this union in, of, and by itself as liberating. Like other critics, she views the discovery of self as the end all. Dorothy H. Lee, ‘‘Song of Solomon: To Ride the Air,’’ Black American Literature Forum 16, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 64–70. For similar views, see also Leslie A. Harris, ‘‘Myth as Structure in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon,’’ Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 7, no. 3 (Fall 1980): 75 and Davis, ‘‘Self, Society, and Myth,’’ 336. Grace Ann Hovet and Barbara Lounsberry offer a refreshingly different and expanded view of Milkman’s goal: ‘‘Milkman gains his identity at the end of the novel when he understands his relationship to the past and develops imaginative and responsible love for those in his present. How he can transmit his insights and love, now gained, is only hinted at in the conclusion of Song of Solomon. Like Milkman, we are left in midair at the end of the novel. But also like him, we have

NOTES

225

learned ‘what it takes to fly.’’’ ‘‘Flying,’’ 140. Additionally, Virginia Hamilton’s version of the flying African myth serves as another important way of judging the ending of Song of Solomon and assessing Morrison’s level of consciousness at this point in her writing career. According to the myth, the African with the knowledge of flight used his awareness to help other Africans to fly: ‘‘[Toby] cried out to the fallen and reached his arms out to them. ‘Kum kunka yali, kum . . . tambe!’ Whispers and sighs. And they too rose on the air.’’ Virginia Hamilton, The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), p. 170.

Chapter 5. Tar Baby: A Reflection of Morrison’s Developed Class Consciousness 1. In discussing the ending of Tar Baby with Judith Wilson, Morrison states: ‘‘The problem has been put in the wrong place, as though it’s a sexual battle, not a cultural one. Racism hurts in a very personal way. Because of it, people do all sorts of things in their personal lives and love relationships based on differences in values and class and education and their conception of what it means to be Black in this society.’’ Wilson, ‘‘Conversation,’’ 133. This statement suggests that Morrison, after writing Tar Baby, understands the triple plight of African people. It also suggests that she is still unclear about the dominant role of class, although such a clarity is quite evident in the work itself. Perhaps the author had not yet fully digested the information presented in the novel. 2. Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa, 87. 3. Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (New York: New American Library, 1981), 132. 4. It is another example of Morrison’s heightened consciousness that she chooses two protagonists for this novel—one male and the other female. 5. For additional information on the terms people capitalism, enlightened capitalism, class peace, and class harmony, see Nkrumah’s Class Struggle in Africa, 87. 6. The terms humanism, collectivism, and egalitarianism are defined in chapter 1 of this book. 7. Eric Williams, in chapter 1 of Capitalism and Slavery, his economic study on the role of African slavery and the slave trade in providing the capital that financed the Industrial Revolution, writes: ‘‘Negro slavery, thus, had nothing to do with climate. Its origin can be expressed in three words: in the Caribbean, Sugar; on the mainland, Tobacco and Cotton’’ (p. 23). 8. Morrison, Tar Baby, 174. 9. On numerous occasions, Morrison has stated that she writes for an African audience. See note 4 in chap. 1 for citations. 10. Morrison, Tar Baby, 124. 11. Ibid., 178. 12. Ibid., 46. 13. Ibid., 51. 14. Ibid., 137, 82. 15. Ibid., 32, 87. 16. Ibid., 140. 17. According to Morrison, ‘‘In the original story, the tar baby is made by a

226

NOTES

white man—that has to be the case with Jadine. She has to have been almost ‘constructed’ by the Western thing, and grateful to it.’’ See Wilson, ‘‘Conversation,’’ 130. 18. Morrison, Tar Baby, 77. 19. Ibid., 77. 20. Ibid., 103. 21. Ibid., 101. 22. Ibid., 175. 23. Ibid., 57. 24. Ibid., 61–62. 25. Ibid., 38. 26. Keith E. Byerman perceptively writes that Jadine ‘‘chooses the fixed life of white values, which are repeatedly associated with death, to the uncertainties of her race, which Morrison consistently associates with life and nature. Moreover, she chooses in effect to be a creation rather than a creator, an art historian rather than artist.’’ Byerman, Fingering the Jagged Grain, 213. 27. Morrison, Tar Baby, 39. 28. Ibid., 133–34. 29. Ibid., 155. 30. Ibid., 154. 31. Ibid., 54. 32. Ibid., 156. 33. Ibid., 241, 242. 34. Ibid., 81. 35. Ibid., 1. 36. Ibid., 149. 37. Ibid., 97. 38. Ibid., 135. 39. Ibid., 124. 40. Ibid., 120. 41. Son’s dizzy, faint feeling after hearing the story of the race of African blind people may also result from the recognition of his relationship to it. Son’s association with this race on the Isle des Chevaliers is made from the beginning. Refer to pages 86, 90, 91, and 130 of Tar Baby for relevant passages. 42. Morrison, Tar Baby, 258. 43. Ibid., 196. It is interesting that Morrison names this African sister Nommo. Keith Byerman reveals that ‘‘in Africa, nommo (the word) creates reality.’’ Byerman, Fingering the Jagged Grain, 6. However, Jadine is not at all changed by her meeting of Nommo. Nommo’s experiences as both an African and a female do not bring home to Jadine the reality of the majority of African people in the United States. 44. Dreams have always played a significant role in Morrison’s canon, particularly in reflecting the protagonists’ level of consciousness in regard to African people. In Song of Solomon, Milkman—during his unconscious stage—dreams of his mother’s aphixiation by plants as he idly stands by and watches. In Tar Baby, Son dreams of ‘‘yellow houses with white doors which women opened and shouted Come on in, you honey you! and the fat black ladies in white dresses minding the pie table in the basement of the church and the white wet sheets flapping on a line,

NOTES

227

and the sound of a six-string guitar plucked after supper while children scooped walnuts up off the ground’’ (p. 102). That Son has these dreams reveals his sensitivity to and love for African people and the African way of life. However, that he tries to insert these dreams into Jadine as a way of politically educating her reveals his idealism, his fairy-tale belief that real conditions can change by simply wishing that they change. 45. Morrison, Tar Baby, 144. 46. Ibid., 186. 47. Ibid., 185–86. 48. Ibid., 174. 49. Ibid., 143. 50. Ibid., 175. 51. Ibid., 108. 52. Ibid., 136. 53. Ibid., 159. 54. Ibid., 182. 55. Ibid., 157. 56. Ibid., 191. 57. Ibid., 191. 58. Ibid., 217. 59. Ibid., 225. 60. Ibid., 226. 61. Ibid., 114. 62. Ibid., 257. 63. Virginia Hamilton records that ‘‘long ago in certain localities in Georgia, the tar baby was considered an actual living, monstrous creature. The monster was composed of tar and haunted isolated places on the plantation. It would insult people to the point at which they would strike out at it and thus become trapped by its sticky substance.’’ Hamilton, The People Could Fly, 19. Being the tar baby of the novel, Jadine insults African people in general and Son in particular by her blind acceptance of capitalist values. In striking out to persuade her of the negativisms of these values, Son becomes trapped. He is the rabbit. 64. See James Coleman’s ‘‘The Quest for Wholeness in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby,’’ Black American Literature Forum 20, nn. 1, 2 (Spring–Summer 1986): 71 for his comment on the idealism of Son’s solution: ‘‘Son does not seem able to adapt his folk ways to the modern world.’’ See also Peter B. Erickson’s perceptive remark that ‘‘Morrison juxtaposes Son’s romanticized, dream-like version of Eloe with the more close-up, qualified view we are given when Son brings Jadine home to visit.’’ Erickson, ‘‘Images of Nurturance,’’ 22. 65. Morrison, Tar Baby, 234–35. 66. Ce´ saire’s comment was quoted in Chinweizu’s The West and the Rest of Us. More than likely, as editor of The West, Morrison was aware of this quote. 67. Chinweizu makes this point throughout The West. See p. 303 on the arts as an example. This idea of using our African culture as the foundation and then extracting the positive from our traditional, Euro-Christian, and Islamic experiences was best voiced by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in 1964: ‘‘The philosophy that must stand behind this [African] social revolution is that which I have referred to as philosophical consciencism; consciencism is the map in intellectual terms of the disposition

228

NOTES

of forces which will enable African society to digest the Western and the Islamic and the Euro-Christian elements in Africa, and develop them in such a way that they fit into the African personality. The African personality is itself defined by the cluster of humanist principles which underlie the traditional African society.’’ Nkrumah, Consciencism, 79. 68. Discussing the significance of collectivism to the Eloe community, Morrison states: ‘‘I don’t think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village. And if you don’t have it, you’d better make it.’’ Wilson, ‘‘Conversation,’’ 86. This statement is testament to Morrison’s knowledge of and appreciation for the traditional African way of life. 69. Morrison, Tar Baby, 264. Various critics have offered their analysis of the ending of Tar Baby as well as previous Morrison endings. Most agree that they are unsatisfactory. Perhaps the most insightful of these theories is that of Lounsberry and Hovet and Keith Byerman. Referring to the ending of Sula, Lounsberry and Hovet point out that Morrison ‘‘carefully refrains from offering a synthesis of her dialectic between the new and the old. She settles for a clear presentation of the limitations of both.’’ Lounsberry and Hovet, ‘‘Principles of Perception,’’ 129. Referring to Tar Baby, Byerman writes that both Jadine and Son ‘‘in effect denies [sic] history: Son by believing in the possibility of returning to a prewhite black purity and Jadine by assuming that blackness was merely an aberration from the truth of Eurocentric Progress.’’ Byerman, Fingering the Jagged Grain, 215. 70. Morrison, Tar Baby, 90. 71. Ibid., 89. 72. Ibid., 69–70. 73. Morrison reveals another qualitative dimension in the structure of Tar Baby. In being a work that has the entire ‘‘village’’ participating in the telling of the story, it becomes a ‘‘sort of call-and-response thing that goes on—the narrator functions as chorus.’’ Wilson, ‘‘Conversations,’’ 86. 74. In highlighting Son’s role as a revolutionary or Christ figure, Morrison arranges his arrival around the Christmas holiday and names the Street house L’Arbe des la Croix (the tree of the cross).

Chapter 6. Beloved: Solidarity as Solution 1. Toni Morrison attributes another reason for her ambiguous endings. According to the author, ‘‘I could always write thirty more pages or fifty more pages, but I wanted to shift the ending away from the notion of a novel as tell me all I need to know and what is the solution to the problem. . . . I want the reader to think about it, I want him to take some responsibility for the ending.’’ Kay Bonetti, ‘‘An Interview with Toni Morrison,’’ (Columbia, Mo: American Audio Prose Library, May 1983). This reason, although perhaps partly accurate, does not address the author’s own need to think about the contents of the novel and her own inability to perceive her developing protagonist’s next step while writing about his or her present stage. An incubation period is needed. Also, her explanation contradicts her own admission—in the same interview—that when she knows a thing, she feels she should share it with her readers. 2. Self-isolation, not forced isolation, is the culprit. According to Morrison,

NOTES

229

forced isolation is uncontrollable. Pilate, born without a navel, and Shadrack, made mentally unstable by World War I, represent African people who are unwilling exiles. 3. Thomas LeClair, ‘‘The Language Must Not Sweat,’’ The New Republic (21 March 1981): 26. 4. Nkrumah, Consciencism, 72: Capitalism is a development by refinement from feudalism, just as feudalism is a development by refinement from slavery. The essence of reform is to combine a continuity of fundamental principle, with a tactical change in the manner of expression of the fundamental principle. Reform is not a change in the thought, but one in its manner of expression, not a change in what is said but one in idiom. In capitalism, feudalism suffers, or rather enjoys reform, and the fundamental principle of feudalism merely strikes new levels of subtlety. In slavery, it is thought that exploitation, the alienation of the fruits of the labour of others, requires a certain degree of political and forcible subjection. In feudalism, it is thought that a lesser degree of the same kind of subjection is adequate to the same purpose. In capitalism, it is thought that a still lesser degree is adequate. . . . Capitalism is but the gentleman’s method of slavery.

5. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 136–37. 6. Ibid., 147. 7. Ibid., 3. 8. Ibid., 49. 9. Unlike Milkman, who never struggles for his people, or Son, who gives up with his first failure, Paul D demonstrates the unwavering principles of the revolutionary cadre. Overcoming the dehumanization and emasculation suffered from wearing a horse’s bit, from squatting in muddy water that he slept and peed in, and from failing at his first attempt to struggle with Sethe, he comes back to struggle to build a life in the community with Sethe. 10. Morrison, Beloved, 39. 11. Ibid., 264. 12. Ibid., 274. 13. Ibid., 185. 14. Ibid., 88. 15. According to the Virginia Hamilton myth of the flying African, the African with the knowledge of flight used his awareness to help other Africans fly. See note 70 in chapter 4. 16. Morrison, Beloved, 110. 17. One method Morrison uses to juxtapose today’s dilemma with that of slavery is her creation of Sweet Home, a microcosmic analogy to the United States. According to Sethe, she and the Sweet Home men were treated like favored pets instead of beasts of burden. Moreover, in appearance, Sweet Home seemed like heaven instead of hell: ‘‘It rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy gloves’’ (p. 6). For the African in the United States, Sweet Home is a reminder of life in the United States in the 1980s. Today, Africans live ‘‘isolated in a wonderful lie,’’ thinking they are free and successful while having no real control of their destiny and while all around them other Africans are suffering and dying.

230

NOTES

18. Ella, enslaved by a European slavemaster and his son, is kept in a locked room for a year. She tells Sethe that what those two did to her that year was unimaginable. 19. Morrison, Beloved, 68, 131. 20. Ibid., 17. 21. Ibid., 17. 22. Ibid., 39. 23. There are minor male characters who have positive relationships with women. Wiley Wright in Sula and Henry Porter and Macon Dead, Sr. (Sing’s husband) in Song of Solomon are examples. 24. Morrison, Beloved, 273. 25. Ibid., 161. 26. Also, Morrison presents the struggle of another couple as an example for men and women today. Never believing like the others that freedom could exist for some Africans while others are enslaved, walking miles to be with each other, and finding completion only in the other’s presence, Sixo and the Seven-Mile Woman sacrifice themselves to create a ‘‘free’’ offspring: Seven-O. 27. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 7. 28. According to Eric Williams, ‘‘The immediate successor of the Indian . . . was not the Negro but the poor white. These white servants included a variety of types. Some were indentured servants, so called because, before departure from the homeland, they had signed a contract, indented by law, binding them to service for a stipulated time in return for their passage.’’ Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 9. 29. Morrison, Beloved, 34. 30. Ibid., 34. 31. Ibid., 34. 32. Ibid., 111. 33. Ibid., 112. 34. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 100. 35. Morrison, Beloved, 139. 36. Ibid., 146. 37. Ibid., 4. 38. Ibid., 180. 39. Morrison, Tar Baby, 186. 40. Morrison, Beloved, 235. 41. Ibid., 95. 42. Ibid., 254, 221. 43. Ibid., 118. 44. It is also interesting to note that Beloved is the first work in which Morrison omits even page numbers. Only the odd pages are numbered. Perhaps such a structural omission is intended to enhance the thematic emphasis on the plight of African people. Certainly, their continual cycle of oppression—including slavery, the slave trade, and colonialism, the underdevelopment of Africa, the distortion of African history, the present destruction of family life, the genocide of men, women, and children—reflects an odd, abnormal existence. 45. Morrison, Beloved, 8. 46. Morrison’s structural technique of unveiling pieces of information functions

NOTES

231

also as a shock absorber. So cruel and vicious was/is the plight of African people that pieces of it must be exposed bit by bit. Sethe and Paul D give each other pieces of their stories at a time so as not to overwhelm the other. 47. Morrison, Beloved, 115. 48. Ibid., 63, 60. 49. Ibid., 216. 50. Ibid., 274–75. At first, the epilogue seems a digression, an unnecessary appendage. However, in light of Morrison’s developing canon, it is just as significant to the theme and structure as any other section of the novel. The ending, through repetition, reaffirms to the reader that African people must build on their past, not be haunted by it, that the negativity must be dealt with and forgotten, that the positive, i.e., solidarity in the face of extreme oppression, must be remembered and accomplished again. It is a clear reflection of Morrison’s advanced consciousness. 51. Morrison, Beloved, 157. 52. Ibid., 205. 53. Ibid., 96. 54. Ibid., 177.

Chapter 7. Women Who Run with Wild: The Need for Sisterhoods in Jazz 1. ‘‘women who run with wild: the need for sisterhoods in jazz’’ first appeared in Modern Fiction Studies 39, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall/Winter 1993): 623–46. 2. The term ‘‘African’’ is used to refer to all people African descent, regardless of birthplace. The term‘‘ European’’ is used to refer to all people of European descent. Malcolm X, in referring to the question of identity, once asked a poignant question: ‘‘If a cat has babies in the oven, are they biscuits?’’ Place of birth does not determine identity. Place of birth determines citizenship. 3. All quotations are taken from Toni Morrison’s Jazz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 1992. 4. Wild is also a female character in Alice Walker’s Meridian. Morrison’s Wild and Walker’s Wild have characteristics in common. 5. See Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women Work and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1985). In Chapter 5, ‘‘‘To Get Out of This Land of Sufring’: Black Women Migrants to the North, 1900–1930,’’ Jones discusses the various reasons for the African woman’s migration north: ‘‘Significantly, black men mentioned the degraded status of their womenfolk as one of the prime incentives to migrate, along with low wages and poor educational opportunities for their children. Husbands told of sexual harassment of wives and daughters by white men and of other forms of indignities woven into the fabric of southern society’’ (157). 6. The lack of communication is always depicted as negative in the Morrisonian canon. Perhaps the best example is in Beloved. The community’s refusal to communicate the approach of the slave catchers to Baby Suggs comes back to haunt the community. 7. Violet’s childhood is reminiscent of Malcolm X’s. Her father’s political convictions force him to leave the family and set in motion the circumstances for

232

NOTES

Rose Dear’s nervous breakdown and True Belle’s coming to instill in the children her own identity crisis. On pages 99 to 100, Morrison writes: ‘‘His trips back were both bold and secret for he had been mixed up in and up with the Readjuster Party, and when a verbal urging from landowners had not worked, a physical one did the trick and he was persuaded to transfer hisself someplace, anyplace, else.’’ Because he was an organizer for Marcus Garvey’s U.N.I.A., Malcolm’s father was cut in half by a train after being tied to a railroad track by racist Europeans. His mother suffered a mental breakdown which set into motion years of confusion for Malcolm. See ‘‘Chapter One: Nightmare’’ in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. 8. It is quite significant that Violet is a hairdresser. Golden Gray’s hair was adored by True Belle, and she passes on this adoration for Golden and his hair to Violet. Also, the hair symbolizes the head, the mind. Violet’s daily job of ‘‘straightening’’ African women’s hair is a reflection of her own lack of consciousness. Hair, to look nice, to be acceptable, must be straightened (i.e., must resemble the European’s hair). To be straight, correct, and acceptable is to resemble the European. In other words, her occupation reflects her self-hatred. 9. Once again, Morrison gives us the image of the horse in connection to the women characters. Golden Gray’s horse startles Wild; Dorcas has hoof marks on her face; Alice Manfred envisions herself going wild and galloping over the ‘‘pulpy body of a woman who wore white shoes in winter’’ (87). 10. Unity is a major theme in Morrison’s canon. In The Bluest Eye, Claudia recognizes that Maureen Peal is not her enemy. Both she and Maureen are products of the society in that they are taught that beauty has to be measured by the standards of the ruling class: ‘‘And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.‘‘ In Sula, Nel must come to realize the truth of Eva’s words: ‘‘You. Sula. What’s the difference?’’ There is Sula in Nel. Remember, it is Nel who takes control of the Chicken Little incident by covering up the accident. This bold, wild act is one the reader would associate with Sula, not Nel. In Song of Solomon, Milkman must see himself as a part of the community—in Michigan and in Shalimar—as a prerequisite to becoming a part of the living. In Tar Baby, Jadine’s isolation from her people—including Sydney and Ondine—make her more a tanned European (‘‘Copper Venus’’) than an African. In Beloved, Sethe must rely on the African community in order to purge the ghost from 124: ‘‘Unloaded, 124 is just another weathered house needing repair.’’ 11. In the Morrison canon, laughing at oneself is healing. It reflects one’s ability to see herself as the world sees her. Milkman’s ability to laugh at his lack of hunting skills helps to integrate him within the Shalimar community. 12. Morrison investigates this idea of two halves of one whole in Sula. Nel and Sula make one good whole. In this instance, however, the author investigates two halves within one body (i.e., the schizophrenic). Violet experiences a ‘‘double consciousness’’ based on her triple oppression: class, race and gender. 13. Someone once said that African women are their own mamas. Who said that? Someone help me, please. 14. It appears as if the ‘‘new’’ bird Violet brings home is not new at all. Since its beak is worn down, there is the strong suggestion that this bird is ‘‘my parrot’’ who pecked at Violet’s window pane after she ‘‘frees’’ it. Just as she gets another chance with Joe, so Violet gets another chance with ‘‘my parrot.’’

NOTES

233

One other interesting point to note is that this novel is one of few in the Morrison canon that depicts a struggle between an African man and woman in which the struggle is positively resolved: Violet and Joe experience a more wholesome relationship as a result of their struggle. 15. Morrison is all the jazz greats rolled into one: She is Art Tatum, the great master of the embellishment approach to jazz improvisation ‘‘whose additions and fills were often dazzling, and whose sense of rich, improvised harmony was probably the most developed that our popular music has ever seen.’’ She is Thelonious Monk, the great master reductionist who subtracted from a melody, reducing it to a kind of outline. She is the great Charlie ‘‘Bird’’ Parker who takes off ‘‘on the songs of other birds, inflating, inverting and turning them wrong side out, and . . . capable of driving a prowling (‘square’) cat wild.’’ (Ralph Ellison, ‘‘On Bird, Bird Watching, and Jazz,’’ in Shadow and Act [New York: Random House, 1953], 223). For additional information on Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk, see Martin Williams’ Where is the Melody? A Listener’s Introduction to Jazz (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963). Morrison fits Ellison’s description of the true jazz artist, one whose ‘‘solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition’’ (Shadow and Act, 234). 16. If one sign of oppression is the African’s need to look and act like a European, then African females are oppressed in all of Morrison’s novels. Pecola Breedlove, the youngest, poorest, and most African-looking, is probably the most oppressed female in Morrison’s canon. 17. Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s description of the hybrid character in the ‘‘speakerly text’’ is a most fitting characterization of Morrison’s narrator: ‘‘Free indirect discourse is represented in this canonical text as if it were a dynamic character, with shifts in its level of diction drawn upon to reflect a certain development of selfconsciousness in a hybrid character, a character who is neither the novel’s protagonist nor the text’s disembodied narrator, but a blend of both, an emergent and merging moment of consciousness.’’ (See Gates’s The Signifying Monkey [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], xxv-xxvi). 18. It is interesting to note that just as the narrator resembles the female characters in the novel, so Malvonne resembles the narrator, meddling in other people’s lives. Instead of returning the bag of letters her nephew Sweetness steals from a mailbox and letting the postal authorities handle the problem, she assumes this responsibility. Malvonne reads all the letters and responds to the ones she feels are most critical, the letters of oppressed/Wild females. Responding to a letter in which a young girl applies to correspondence law school, Malvonne adds a note of her own—‘‘I do not have the dollar right this minute . . .’’ (42)—and mails the letter to the addressee. Responding to a letter to Daddy Sage from Steam, Malvonne adds a note of caution (44). The letters that she feels compelled to ‘‘act on’’ are ones which prefigure events in the novel. For example, Daddy Sage is surely Joe Trace and Steam, Dorcas. It is, in fact, while Malvonne is ‘‘preparing [her] anonymous advice [to Daddy] that Joe Trace knocked on her door’’ (44). Interesting too is the fact that although Malvonne meddles in the lives of people she doesn’t know, attempting to prevent Daddy from licentious behavior, for example, she does not do the same for Joe. For money, she facilitates the Joe-Dorcas affair. 19. This idea—that the reader must learn the truth for herself—is the main idea

234

NOTES

of Morrison’s critical work playing in the dark. In the U.S., European critics and writers have assimilated stereotypes of Africa and Africans in their consciousness, and this assimilation is reflected in the way some of these critics do not read African texts and in the way the color black or a ‘‘black’’ person is characterized in a work of art by a European writer. Morrison uses the term ‘‘American Africanism’’ as a way of describing the ‘‘denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people’’ (pp. 6–7). Thus, there has to be a new way of approaching literature, a new scholarship that does not measure the worth of literature according to a hierarchy based on European standards. Europeans in general and critics in particular have to look at African people, their culture, and their literature outside the mold of a Great Chain of Being. And, as always, Morrison enlists narrative structure (even in a critical work!) to enhance this idea. For example, titles are in lower case letters and chapter titles are at the bottom of pages. By structuring her text in this manner, Morrison teaches us to read differently, to see differently, beyond our ‘‘traditional’’ way of seeing and reading. See Toni Morrison, playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 20. The reader is an active participant in any Morrison novel. As Morrison states: ‘‘Writing and reading are not all that distinct for a writer. Both exercises require being alert and ready for unaccountable beauty, for the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer’s imagination, for the world that imagination evokes. Both require being mindful of the places where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision. Writing and reading mean being aware of the writer’s notions of risk and safety, the serene achievement of, or sweaty fight for, meaning and response-ability’’ (playing, xi). 21. The narrator states that Golden Gray assumes his father ‘‘is named Henry LesTroy, although from the way True Belle pronounced it, it could be something else’’ (148). That something else could be ‘‘LeStory,’’ meaning ‘‘the story’’: LesTory or LesTroy is the one person who knows ‘‘the story’’ which ties together the lives of Joe, Wild, Golden Gray, and Violet (since LesTory knows True Belle’s story). 22. Remember the wonderful balanced sentence in Song of Solomon that makes the connection between Pilate Dead and Ruth Foster: ‘‘The singer, standing at the back of the crowd, was as poorly dressed as the doctor’s daughter was well dressed.’’ 23. For additional information on the current oppression of African women, see the following works: The World’s Women—1970–1990: Trends and Statistics (New York: United Nations, 1991) and Gerald David Jaynes and Robin M. Williams Jr., A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989).

Chapter 9. A Rationalization for and an Assessment of Toni Morrison’s Developing Class Consciousness 1. Kay Bonetti, ‘‘An Interview with Toni Morrison’’ (Columbia, MO.: American Audio Prose Library, 1983). Henceforth, the name ‘‘American Audio’’ will be used to refer to this interview.

NOTES

235

2. Morrison, Tar Baby, 181. 3. American Audio. 4. American Audio. 5. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, in Essential Works of Marxism, ed. Arthur P. Mendel (New York: Bantam Book, 1961), 31. 6. Clenora Hudson. ‘‘The Unearthing of Emmett Till: A Compelling Process,’’ The Iowa Alumni Review 41, no. 5 (October 1988): 19. 7. Cleveland Sellars, The River of No Return (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1973), 60. 8. Ibid., 59. 9. Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us, 403. 10. Morrison, Tar Baby, 174. 11. Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us, 407. 12. Ibid., 408–9. 13. Ibid., 408. 14. Anie Dillard, ‘‘Write Till You Drop,’’ New York Times Book Review, 28 May 1989, 23. 15. Eleanor Traylor, ‘‘Henry Dumas and the Discourse of Memory,’’ Black American Literature Forum 22, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 372. 16. Ellison, Haley, Bambara, Dumas, and Harris are only five writers whose ideas more than likely impacted Morrison. African writers born on the continent had a tremendous impact upon her as well. From them she learned the art of telling a circular, oral story to her people. To her, it seemed that the African novelists in the United States were talking to a European audience rather than an African audience because their novels explained a lot. From African writers on the continent she learned ‘‘technique and style; the formation of sentences and the choice of words . . . the kinds of metaphors they chose.’’ Amreican Audio. 17. Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1976), 10. 18. Morrison, Song of Solomon, 341. 19. Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (New York: Random House, 1980), 255. 20. Morrison, Tar Baby, 222. 21. Ibid., 223. 22. Henry Dumas, Goodbye, Sweetwater (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1988), xiv. 23. Toni Morrison, ‘‘On Behalf of Henry Dumas,’’ Black American Literature Forum 22, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 310. 24. Henry Dumas, ‘‘Ark of Bones,’’ in Goodbye, Sweetwater, 18. 25. Morrison, Beloved, 51. 26. Eleanor Traylor first mentions this connection between the name of Dumas’s hometown and Morrison’s name for the plantation in Beloved in ‘‘Henry Dumas.’’ There is also the likelihood that the impact of this name was greatly enhanced by Morrison’s awareness of the old classic blues song, ‘‘Sweet Home.’’ 27. Morrison, Beloved, 6. 28. Already at the back of Morrison’s mind was the Plum story in Sula. Eva kills her ‘‘beloved baby boy’’ to save him from the living death of heroin just as Sethe kills her baby girl Beloved to save her from the living death of slavery. See p. 34 of Sula and p. 163 of Beloved.

236

NOTES

29. Morrison, Beloved, 110. 30. Tate, ‘‘Toni Morrison,’’ 130. 31. Bakerman, ‘‘‘The Seams Can’t Show,’’’ 56. 32. LeClair, ‘‘The Language Must Not Sweat,’’ 25. 33. American Audio. 34. LeClair, ‘‘The Language Must Not Sweat,’’ 29. 35. W. E. B. DuBois, quote in Howard Fuller’s Journey to Africa (Chicago: Third World Press, 1971), 70. 36. Marcus Garvey, ‘‘The African Republic and White Politics,’’ in Voices of a Black Nation: Political Journalism in the Harlem Renaissance, ed. T. Vincent (San Francisco: Ramparts, 1973), 272–73. 37. Malcolm X, ‘‘Malcolm X: Struggle for Freedom,’’ Filmed Interview of Malcolm X in Paris (New York: Grove Press, 1964). 38. Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa, 87. 39. Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks (New York: Random House, 1971), 223. 40. Marcus Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey or Africa for the Africans (London: Frank Cass, 1967), 52. 41. Kwame Nkrumah, Revolutionary Path (New York: International Publishers, 1973), 183.

Bibliography Akpata, Bantole, ‘‘Philosophical Consciencism: Its Egalitarian and Humanist Aspects Analysed.’’ Pan-African Review 1, no. 2 (1964): 41–42. Bakerman, Jane. ‘‘‘The Seams Can’t Show’: An Interview with Toni Morrison.’’ Black American Literature Forum 12, no. 2 (summer 1978): 56–66. Bambara, Toni Cade. The Salt Eaters. New York: Random House, 1980. Barksdale, Richard K. ‘‘Song of Solomon.’’ World Literature Today 52 (summer 1978): 465. Benston, Kimberly W. ‘‘I Yam What I Am: the Topos of Un (Naming) in AfroAmerican Literature.‘‘ In Black Literature and Theory, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Methuen, 1984. Bonetti, Kay. ‘‘An Interview with Toni Morrison.’’ Columbia, Mo.: American Audio Prose Library, May 1983. Audiocassette. Brown, Cecil. ‘‘Interview with Toni Morrison.’’ Massachusetts Review (autumn/ winter 1995). Burns, Emile. An Introduction to Marxism. New York: International Publishers, 1966. Byerman, Keith E. Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. ———.‘‘Intense Behaviors: The Use of the Grotesque in The Bluest Eye and Eva’s Man.’’ CLA Journal 25 (June 1982): 447–57. Carmichael, Stokely. Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism. New York: Random House, 1971. Chinweizu. The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slaves and the African Elite. New York: Random House, 1975. Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism. New York: Pergamon Press, 1985. ———. ‘‘Community and Nature: The Novels of Toni Morrison.’’ The Journal of Ethnic Studies 7 (1980): 4, 65–78. Collier, James Lincoln. Inside Jazz. New York: Four Winds Press, 1973. Coleman, James. ‘‘The Quest for Wholeness in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby.’’ Black American Literature Forum 20, nos. 1–2 (spring–summer 1986): 62–73. ‘‘Conversation: Toni Morrison.’’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript. 9 March 1998. Darling, Marsha. ‘‘In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison.’’ In Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Davis, Angela. Women, Race & Class. New York: Vintage, 1983.

237

238

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Davis, Cynthia. ‘‘Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison’s Fiction.’’ Contemporary Literature 23, no. 3 (summer 1982): 323–42. De Weever, Jacqueline. ‘‘The Inverted World of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Sula.’’ CLA Journal 22, no. 4 (June 1979): 402–14. Dillard, Annie. ‘‘Write Till You Drop.’’ The New York Times Book Review, 28 May 1989, 23. Donahue, Deirdre. ‘‘Jazz Symbol of Liberated Black Souls.’’ USA Today, 30 April 1992. Dowling, Collette. ‘‘The Song of Toni Morrison.’’ New York Times Magazine, 20 May 1979. Dreifus, Claudia. ‘‘Chloe Wofford Talks About Toni Morrison.’’ New York Times Magazine, 11 September 1994, 72–75. DuBois, W. E. B. Quoted in Journey to Africa by Howard Fuller. Chicago: Third World Press, 1971. Dumas, Henry. Goodbye, Sweetwater. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1988. Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper and Row, 1960. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1972. ———. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1953. Erickson, Peter B. ‘‘Images of Nurturance in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby.’’ CLA Journal 28, no. 1 (September 1984): 11–32. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Fuller, Howard. Journey to Africa. Chicago: Third World Press, 1971. Garvey, Marcus. ‘‘The African Republic and White Politics.’’ Negro World, 12 February 1921. Reprinted in Voices of a Black Nation: Political Journalism in the Harlem Renaissance, edited by T. Vincent. San Francisco: Ramparts, 1973. ———. The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. London: Frank Cass, 1967. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gray, Paul. ‘‘Paradise Found.’’ Time, 19 January 1998. Hackney, Sheldon. ‘‘I Come from People Who Sang All the Time.’’ Humanities 17, no. 1 (March–April 1996): 4. Haley, Alex. Roots: The Saga of an American Family. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1976. Hamilton, Virginia. The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1985. Harris, Barbara. ‘‘Myth as Structure in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.’’ Melus 7, no. 3 (fall 1980): 71. Harris, Leslie A. ‘‘Myth as Structure in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.’’ MultiEthnic Literature of the U.S. 7, no. 3 (fall 1980): 69–76. Hovet, Grace Ann and Barbara Lounsberry. ‘‘Flying as Symbol and Legend in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon.’’ CLA Journal 27, no. 2 (December 1983): 119–40.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

239

Hudson, Clenora. ‘‘Emmett Till: The Impetus for the Modern Civil Rights Movement.’’ Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1988. ———. ‘‘The Unearthing of Emmett Till: A Compelling Process.’’ The Iowa Alumni Review 41, no. 5 (October 1988): 18–23. Ikoku, S. G. ‘‘Aspects of Consciencism.‘‘ Pan-African Review 1, no. 2 (1964): 94– 102. Jaffery, Zia. ‘‘The Salon Interview of Toni Morrison.’’ Salon, February 1998, 6. Jaynes, Gerald D. and Robin M. Williams Jr. A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989. Jones, Bessie W. and Audrey Vinson. ‘‘An Interview with Toni Morrison.’’ In Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Klotman, Phyllis R. ‘‘Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in The Bluest Eye.’’ Black American Literature Forum 13, no. 4 (winter 1979): 123–25. Koenen, Anne. ‘‘The One Out of Sequence.’’ In Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Lange, Bonnie Shipman. ‘‘Toni Morrison’s Rainbow Code.’’ Critique 24 (spring 1983): 173–81. LeClair, Thomas. ‘‘The Language Must Not Sweat.’’ The New Republic, 21 March 1981, 25–29. Also in Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Lee, Dorothy H. ‘‘Song of Solomon: To Ride the Air.’’ Black American Literature Forum 16, no. 2 (summer 1982): 64–70. Lester, Julius. Black Folktales. New York: Grove Press, 1969. Lounsberry, Barbara and Grace Ann Hovet. ‘‘Principles of Perception in Toni Morrison’s Sula.’’ Black American Literature Forum 13, no. 4 (winter 1979): 126–29. Machel, Samora. ‘‘Establishing People’s Power to Serve the Masses.’’ In Samora Machel: An African Revolutionary, edited by Barry Munslow. London: Zed Books, Ltd., 1985. ‘‘Malcolm X: Struggle for Freedom.’’ Filmed Interview of Malcolm in Paris. New York: Grove Press, 1964. Marcus, James. ‘‘This Side of Paradise.’’ Interview with Toni Morrison. [email protected]. 21 May 1998. Internet: http://www.amazon.com/ exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/7651/002-4385040-4461601. Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto. In Essential Works of Marxism, edited by Arthur P. Mendel. New York: Bantam Books, 1961. McClain, Ruth Rambo. ‘‘Sula.’’ Black World, June 1974. McDowell, Edwin. ‘‘Behind the Best Sellers-Toni Morrison.’’ New York Times Book Review, 5 July 1981, 18. McKay, Nellie. ‘‘An Interview with Toni Morrison.’’ In Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Micucci, Dana. ‘‘An Inspired Life: Toni Morrison Writes and a Generation Lis-

240

BIBLIOGRAPHY

tens.’’ In Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Middleton, Harris, et al. The Black Book. New York: Random House, 1974. Morales, Robert. ‘‘Toni Morrison.’’ Vibe, May 1998, 98. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. ———. The Bluest Eye. New York: Washington Square Press, 1970. ———. ‘‘On Behalf of Henry Dumas.’’ Black American Literature Forum 22, no. 2 (summer 1988): 310–12. ———. Jazz. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. ———. Love. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. ———. Paradise. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. ———. playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. ———. Sula. New York: New American Library, 1973. ———. Song of Solomon. New York: New American Library, 1977. ———. Tar Baby. New York: New American Library, 1981. Moyers, Bill. ‘‘A Conversation with Toni Morrison.’’ In Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Naylor, Gloria. ‘‘A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison.’’ In Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Neustadt, Kathy. ‘‘The Visits of the Writers Toni Morrison and Eudora Welty.’’ In Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Ngugi, Thiong’O Wa. Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics. New York: Lawrence Hill and Company, 1972. Nichols, Julie J. ‘‘Patterns in Toni Morrison’s Novels.’’ English Journal 72 (January 1983): 46–48. Nkrumah, Kwame. Class Struggle in Africa. New York: International Publishers, 1970. ———. Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization. New York: Modern Reader, 1964. ———. Revolutionary Path. New York: International Publishers, 1973. Ogunyemi, Chikwenye O. ‘‘Order and Disorder in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.’’ Critique 19, no. 1 (1977): 112–20. Parker, Bettye J. ‘‘Complexity: Toni Morrison’s Women—An Interview Essay.’’ In Sturdy Black Bridges, edited by Roseann Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. New York: Anchor Press, 1979. Rodman, Selden. ‘‘Whites and Blacks.’’ National Review, 26 June 1981, 730–32. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1972. Ruas, Charles. ‘‘Toni Morrison.’’ In Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

241

Schappell, Elissa and Claudia Brodsky Lacour. ‘‘The Art of Fiction CXXXIV.’’ Paris Review 56 (fall 1993): 95. Sellars, Cleveland. The River of No Return. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1973. Smith, Barbara. ‘‘Beautiful, Needed, Mysterious.’’ Freedomways 14 (first quarter 1974): 69–72. Smith, Dinitia. ‘‘Mixing Tragedy and Folklore.’’ The New York Times, 8 January 1998. Stein, Karen F. ‘‘I Didn’t Even Know His Name: Names and Naming in Toni Morrison’s Sula.’’ Names (September 1980): 226–29. ———. ‘‘Toni Morrison’s Sula: A Black Woman’s Epic.’’ Black American Literature Forum (winter 1984): 146–50. Stepto, Robert E. ‘‘‘Intimate Things in Place’: A Conversation with Toni Morrison.’’ In Chant of Saints, edited by Michael S. Harper and Robert E. Stepto. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Also in Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Tate, Claudia. ‘‘Toni Morrison.’’ In Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate. New York: Continuum, 1985. ‘‘Toni Morrison.’’ Time.com, 21 January 1998. ‘‘Toni Morrison (Chloe Wofford).’’ Time Magazine, 11 September 1994, 275. Toure, Sekou. ‘‘Africa on Walk: Revolution and Religion.’’ International Ideological Symposium. Conakry, Guinea, November 13–16, 1978. Traylor, Eleanor. ‘‘Henry Dumas and the Discourse of Memory.’’ Black American Literature Forum 22, no. 2 (summer 1988): 365–78. van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Watkins, Mel. ‘‘Talk with Toni Morrison.’’ In Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Wegs, Joyce M. ‘‘Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: A Blues Song.’’ Essays in Literature 9, no. 2 (fall 1982): 211–23. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1944. Williams, Martin. Where is the Melody? A Listener’s Introduction to Jazz. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963. Williams, Michael W. ‘‘Nkrumahism as an Ideological Embodiment of Leftist Thought within the African World.’’ Journal of Black Studies 15, no. 1 (September 1984): 117–34. Willis, Susan. ‘‘Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison.’’ In Black Literature and Literary Theory, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Methuen, 1984. Wilson, Judith. ‘‘A Conversation with Toni Morrison.’’ Essence, July 1981. The World’s Women—1970–1990: Trends and Statistics. New York: United Nations, 1991.

Index African petty bourgeois, 72 African socialism, 71 ‘‘Ark of Bones,’’ 173 Audience, 216–217n. 22 Bakerman, Jane, 40, 43, 176 Bambara, Toni Cade, 170–71 Barksdale, Richard K., 65, 221n. 4 Beloved, 25, 30, 41, 87, 88–103, 168– 69, 173–76, 203–8, 228–29 n. 2, 229 nn. 9 and 17, 230 nn. 18, 26, 28, and 44, 230–31 n. 46, 231 n. 50, 227 n. 50, 235n. 28 Black Book, The, 174–75 Bluest Eye, The, 24, 28, 32–42, 49, 51– 53, 69, 73, 88–89, 178, 191–94, 218 nn. 13 and 14 Brown, Cecil, 194, 198 Burns, Emile, 19 Byerman, Keith E., 218n. 8, 219n. 16, 226 n. 26, 228n. 69 Capitalism, 21 Capitalism and Slavery, 95, 225n. 7, 230 n. 28 Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture), 83, 179 Cesaire, Aime, 84 Chinweizu, 24, 54, 167–69, 221 n. 3, 223 n. 47, 227–28 n. 67 Christian, Barbara, 27, 46, 48, 218n. 13, 219n. 15, 221 n. 43, 223 n. 22 Civil Rights Struggle, 24, 48 Class struggle, 69 Coleman, James, 227 n. 64 Collectivism, 26 Cummunist Manifesto, The, 166 Conrad, Joseph, 69

Darling, Marsha, 205 Davis, Cynthia, 219–20 n. 19, 224n. 65 DeGobineau, 36 DeWeever, Jacqueline, 27, 218 n.14 Dialectical materialism, 20 Dillard, Annie, 170 Donahue, Deirdre, 209 Dowling, Collette, 190–91, 197–99 Dreifus, Claudia, 189, 193, 200 DuBois, Shirley Graham, 178 DuBois, W. E. B., 179 Dumas, Henry, 170, 172 Egalitarianism, 26, 62 Ellison, Ralph, 170 Erickson, Peter B., 227 n. 64 Europhiliacs, 74 Garvey, Marcus, 79, 178–79 Gray, Paul, 193 Hackney, Sheldon, 192 Haley, Alex, 171 Hamilton, Virginia, 93, 225 n. 70, 227n. 63, 229n. 15 Harris, Barbara, 221–22 n. 4 Harris, Middleton, 170 Heart of Darkness, 69 Historical materialism, 21 Howard University, 167 Hovet, Grace Ann, 27, 224n. 68, 224– 25 n. 70 Hudson, Clenora, 166 Humanism, 26, 62 Hunters Cave, 62 Idealist world view, 19 Imperialism, 69 Invisible Man, 170

242

INDEX

Jadism, 79, 169 Jaffery, Zia, 193 Jazz, 11, 30–31, 104–124, 178, 181, 206–10, 231–32 n.7, 232 nn. 8, 9, and 12, 232–33 n. 14, 233 nn. 15 and 18, 234n. 21 Jones, Bessie and Vinson, Audrey, 190–92, 199, 201, 203, 209 Kaunda, Kenneth, 70–71 Klotman, Phyllis, 39 Koenen, Anne, 195–96, 200 Lange, Bonnie S., 223–24 n. 47 LeClair, Thomas, 90, 190, 203 Lee, Dorothy H., 222 n. 5, 224 n. 70 Liminal stage, 55, 58–59 Lorain, Ohio, 38, 165 Love, 212–215 Lounsberry, Barbara, 51 Malcolm X, 79, 178–79 Marcus, James, 211 Marx, Karl, 166 Materialist world view, 19 McKay, Nellie, 195 Micucci, Dana, 199, 202, 208 Morales, Robert, 210 Moyers, Bill, 205 National Suicide Day, 45, 47 Native American Indian, 96, 178 Naylor, Gloria, 206–8 Neustadt, Kathy, 196, 199 NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 189 Ngugi, Thiong’O Wa, 19 Nichols, Julie, 27 Nkrumaism, 20, 30 Nkrumah, Kwame, 222–3, 36, 68, 178– 79, 227–28 n. 67, 229n. 4 Non-Violent Action Group (NAG), 167 Ogunyemi, Chikwenye, 218n. 8 Pan-Africanism, 180 Paradise, 11, 31, 125–64, 177–82, 210–11 People class, 20, 71 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 45

243

playing in the dark, 235–36 Postliminal stage, 55, 60 Preliminal stage, 55, 60 Racism, 22 Random House, 167 Reader’s Digest, 171 River of No Return, The, 167 Rodney, Walter, 22, 97 Roots, 171, 216 n. 17 Rose Tattoo, The, 42 Ruas, Charles, 188, 192, 195, 197, 202, 204, 206 Ruling class, 19, 21 Schappell, Elissa and Lacour, Claudia, 189, 191 Sellars, Cleveland, 167 Sexism, 217–18 n. 2 60 Minutes, 209 Smith, Dinitia, 211 Song of Solomon, 24–25, 29, 50–51, 53–68, 69, 77, 88–90, 93, 95, 166– 67, 171, 178, 197–201, 221–22 n. 4, 222 nn. 5 and 12, 223 nn.38 and 44, 223–24 n. 47, 226–27 n. 44, 230 n. 23 Sonism, 169 Stein, Karen, 43, 48, 221 n. 19 Stepto, Robert E., 26, 40, 195, 196, 220 n. 36 Sula, 24, 28–29, 42–53, 69, 88–89, 178, 194–97, 219nn. 15 and 16, 219–20 n. 19, 220 nn. 26 and 36, 221 nn. 43 and 48, 228n. 69, 230 n. 23, 235 n. 28 Tar Baby, 23–25, 29–30, 41–42, 50, 68–88, 90, 93, 95, 100, 168–69, 172, 175–79, 201–3, 223–24 n. 47, 225n. 4, 225–26 n. 17, 226 n. 41 and 43, 226–27 n. 44, 228 nn. 68, 69, 73 and 74 Tate, Claudia, 176, 189–91 Temple of My Familiar, The, 219 n. 4 Till, Emmett, 57, 166–67 Time.com, 209 Time Magazine, 211 Toomer, Jean, 218n. 4 Traylor, Eleanor W., 170, 235 n. 26

244 Van Gennep, Arnold, 62, 222n. 5 Walker, Alice, 219 n. 4 Wegs, Joyce M., 222n. 9 West and the Rest of Us, The, 24, 167–68

INDEX

Williams, Eric, 22, 95–96, 225n. 7, 230n. 28 Willis, Susan, 25 Wilson, Judith, 26

Toni Morrison's Developing Class Consciousness

Aspects of History and Class Consciousness

Toni Morrison's Beloved

Morrison, Toni - Beloved

Consciousness

Consciousness

Consciousness

Auftrag an Toni 15

The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia

Consciousness

Consciousness

Consciousness

Consciousness

Consciousness

Consciousness and Action Among the Western Working Class

New Trade Union Activism: Class Consciousness or Social Identity?

Class

Developing Thinking; Developing Learning

Developing Thinking; Developing Learning

Toni Morrison (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (Bloom's Guides)

Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained

Self-Consciousness

Self-Consciousness

Self-Consciousness

Understanding consciousness

Understanding Consciousness

Consciousness Evolving (Advances in Consciousness Research)

Understanding Consciousness

Consciousness Explained

Toni Morrison's Developing Class Consciousness

Aspects of History and Class Consciousness

Toni Morrison's Beloved

Morrison, Toni - Beloved

Consciousness

Consciousness

Consciousness

Auftrag an Toni 15

The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia

Consciousness

Consciousness

Consciousness

Consciousness

Consciousness

Consciousness and Action Among the Western Working Class

New Trade Union Activism: Class Consciousness or Social Identity?

Class

Developing Thinking; Developing Learning

Developing Thinking; Developing Learning

Toni Morrison (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (Bloom's Guides)

Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained

Self-Consciousness

Self-Consciousness

Self-Consciousness

Understanding consciousness

Understanding Consciousness

Consciousness Evolving (Advances in Consciousness Research)

Understanding Consciousness

Consciousness Explained

Recommend Documents