1 Toni Morrison's Representation of Native

TONI MORRISON’S REPRESENTATION OF NATIVE AMERICANS IN A MERCY, BELOVED, AND PARADISE

ALYSSA HUNZIKER

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2014

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Debra King Walker for her extensive guidance and encouragement, as well as Dr. Malini Johar Schueller for her mentorship and support throughout this process. I would like to thank my professors and colleagues, each of whom has contributed greatly to my growth as a scholar. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their continued encouragement and support.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………………….3

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………..5

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….7

2 DEPICTING THE SURVIVING INDIAN: REPRESENTATIONS OF SETTLER

COLONIALISM IN A MERCY, BELOVED, AND PARADISE………………………13

3 TONI MORRISON’S BLACK PARADISE: BUILDING A BLACK HOMELAND IN

INDIAN TERRITORY…………………………………………………………………..32

4 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………..46

REFERENCE LIST……………………………………………………………………………...49

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………………………………………………….52

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

TONI MORRISON’S REPRESENTATION OF NATIVE AMERICANS IN A MERCY, BELOVED, AND PARADISE

Alyssa Hunziker

May 2014

Chair: Debra Walker King Major: English

Until the release of Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel, A Mercy, which features a Native

American slave as one of its most prominent characters, there had been little scholarship on the ways in which Native American presence is signified in Morrison’s collective body of work. For the most part, critiques of the novels from an American Indian Studies standpoint surround the lamentable lack of Native characters or Native voice in narrative settings that, outside of

Morrison’s fictitious universes, would be heavily populated by Native Americans. And while this quantitative lack of Native or African-Native American characters in Morrison’s oeuvre is troubling, one cannot discount the way that Morrison weaves Native presence through her texts through her references to Native lands and to Native crops, such as corn.

In my first chapter, I discuss the ways in which the publication of A Mercy addresses the settler colonial history of the United States and allies the struggles faced by both Native

American slaves (through the character, Lina) and imported African slaves in order to trace the intersection of these two communities at the nation’s inception. I suggest that Lina’s role as a protagonist in A Mercy subverts what the commonly cited trope of the vanishing Indian, as 5

Morrison depicts the inception of settler colonialism in the United States in order to suggest that

Native American survival in the colonial system serves as a powerful act of resistance. In doing so, I highlight the way Morrison’s subsequent use of Native American cultural signifiers, such as corn, acts as evidence of continued Native survival into the twentieth century.

My second chapter explores the way Morrison continues to represent Native presence in

Paradise. I suggest that as a historical novel reflecting on all-black Oklahoma towns built post- reconstruction, which were admittedly built in Indian Territory, the text relies on a contemporary

Native American presence. Because many late-nineteenth century advertisements for all-black towns advertised Indian Territory as an edenic, black paradise the title of the novel reveals the complicated racial make-up of Ruby and suggests the possible presence of Black Indians (which explains the reversed one-drop rule Ruby upholds), as well as Native residents of the Convent.

More importantly, the novel’s publication date occurs in a tumultuous time for the two communities as Black Indians were often thought of as evidence of a lost Indian bloodline. As such, Ruby’s reverse one-drop rule also serves as a critique of the conflict occurring between

Native Americans and Black Indians in the mid to late 1990s.

Ultimately, my project identifies Native presence, not just through the lens of actual characters, but through Morrison’s employment of corn and Native land as a signifier of the parts of Native American culture that are often overshadowed by the looming divide between blacks and whites. The project attempts to uncover the historical intersections of the African American and Native American communities that exist throughout Morrison’s work in order to demonstrate the ways in which she addresses trans-communal issues.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Native American characters appear in Toni Morrison’s novels throughout her oeuvre. In

Song of Solomon, the protagonist, Milkman, learns that his grandmother is Native American while he travels across the American south in order to learn his family’s history. In Beloved,

Sixo and the Thirty Mile Woman frequent a cave that previously served as a hideout for

Cherokees avoiding relocation, and in Paradise the text engages with an all-black town that is constructed in Indian Territory. With the release of the novelist’s 2008 novel, A Mercy, Morrison creates a Native American protagonist named Lina who serves as the author’s most prominent

Native American character thus far. In each of these depictions, we find representations of

Native Americans from a wide variety of tribes who come into contact with Morrison’s African

American characters for varying reasons. In each of these episodes, the relationships between

African Americans and their Native American counterparts are varied and diversified. Because

Morrison is a novelist who writes primarily historical fiction, looking at the ways in which she represents Native Americans, even while she writes from a uniquely African American perspective, can yield a rich understanding of her conceptions of their overlapping histories.

In her discussion of early Afro-Cherokee interactions, Tiya Miles states that “Cherokees had been aware of Africans at least since the sixteenth century when Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto beached in the Americas, carrying in tow West Indian and African slaves…[these slaves] were likely the first Africans that Cherokees encountered” (Miles, Ties That Bind 28).

This explanation of early Afro-Native interaction illustrates what Miles describes as the triangular relationship between Euro-American colonizers, African slaves, and Native

Americans, in which African-Native American interactions exist as a result of Euro-American

colonialism and slavery. African American and Native American slaves worked side by side during plantation slavery, and, as a result, their complicated intergroup history comes about as a result of settler colonialism and the trauma of the Middle Passage. In the introduction to When

Brer Rabbit Meet Coyote, a text that discusses the influence of Native American characters in the works of writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Sherman Alexie, Jonathan Brennan argues that as a result of European-won battles with Native American nations, those indigenous peoples who remained were often sold into slavery (Brennan 5). And although Native slavery proved to be far less popular than the enslavement of Africans, due to the popular assumption that “The Indian slave was inefficient” as “one Negro was worth four Indians,” and that

“attempting to get Native Americans to carry out the work largely failed,” these two groups, along with white indentured servants, were used as colonial sources of labor nonetheless

(Northrup 4-5, Morgan 7). Brennan’s introduction provides substantial evidence of African-

Native American interaction through slavery as he states:

There is substantial documentation showing that large numbers of Native Americans were not exempted nor released from slavery but instead were merged into a mixed African-Native American slave community…The conditions for the creation of African- Native American communities also existed outside the parameters of plantation slavery. African-Native American communities resulted from runaway African American or African-Native slaves. Many slaves bolted from the plantations to create separate maroon communities and nations that were often African-Native American (Brennan 8).

Thus, the creation of African-Native American communities serves as another reminder of the ways in which these two groups have come into contact through Euro-American slavery.

Despite the two groups’ shared experience within the construct of plantation slavery, interactions between Native Americans and Africans in the early colonial system was varied and complicated. Miles suggests that because many enslaved Native Americans were women, and many enslaved Africans were men, the joining of these two groups through marriage and familial

structures was common within plantation slavery. However, just as African-Native American slave communities built inter-group familial alliances and many escaped African slaves found refuge in Native American communities, a history of Native American enslavement of Africans complicates the way scholars view Native African interactions. Miles explains that “When colonists abandoned the Indian slave trade and demanded black slaves instead…Cherokees and other tribes, whose appetites for European goods was swelling, became hunters and traders of

Africans” (Ties That Bind, Miles 31). As a result, early and foundational Afro-Native interactions were predicated on a complex relationship in which Native Americans could either be allies or enemies to escaped African slaves.

Early Cherokee adoption of, and participation in, the Euro-American slave trade signifies the ways in which Native Americans began to adopt Euro-American practices and perspectives, even as they simultaneously began sharing cultural practices with their African counterparts. On the one hand:

African folktales featuring a trickster rabbit combined with southeastern Native tales about the same hero; African medicinal practices became enmeshed with Native knowledge about the uses of indigenous plants; African women’s basketry patterns were woven into Native women’s crafts; and corn, the staple of the southeastern Indian diet, became a signature of what we now call ‘soul food’ (Ties that Bind, Miles 29).

However, as a result of their interactions with Euro-American settlers, Native Americans simultaneously began to participate in the slave trade, adopted European conceptions of race and racial hierarchy, and, in some cases, viewed African slaves as intruders as colonizers and their slaved continued to take over Native lands. Even significant moments of cultural trauma, such as the Trail of Tears, became a shared experience among relocated Native nations and their

African and African American slaves which is then complicated by the fact that this shared experience exists only as a result of Cherokee slavery. Similarly, the relocation of blacks from

the southeast and into Indian Territory post-reconstruction, which is commonly referred to as the

Black Trail of Tears, serves as both a cultural parallel to Indian Removal, and an instance in which African American communities sought to take over native lands. Miles and Sharon P.

Holland suggest that blacks relocating to Indian Territory in the late nineteenth century imagined

Indian Territory as a “paradisical home…[in which] Indians were necessary but peripheral”

(Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds, Miles, Holland 7). As such, intergroup association is characterized by contradictions.

Although Morrison’s novels focus primarily on the experiences of her African American characters, her incorporation of Native characters, cultural tropes, and spaces serves as a reminder of the two groups’ entwined historical past. As a writer of historical fiction, Morrison frequently exposes her readers to a part of American history that has been largely unrecognized or unexplored. Like real-life Afro-Indian relationships, Morrison’s depiction of Native

Americans is varied and complex. She references the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Creek,

Seminole, and Choctaw), northeastern Native tribes, such as the Iroquois, and Plains Indians, such as the Sac and Fox men. More importantly, these marginal characters are still given a certain level of individuality. In Paradise, for example, the founders of Haven and Ruby encounter some tribes who send them away, and some who offer them work in order to earn land. By discussing these moments of comparative history, Morrison implies that the African

American historical past in also tangentially related to the Native American historical past, and suggests that we must acknowledge these two groups’ interactions in order to better conceptualize African American history and identity.

In my first chapter, I discuss the ways in which Morrison’s A Mercy is primarily focused in its representation of the American settler colonial project. Further, by reading several

moments in which the Native American slave, Lina, survives the colonial system I suggest that

Morrison’s novel subverts the trope of the Vanishing Indian, and instead suggests a possible future for Native Americans into the twentieth century. In my analysis, I read the novels A

Mercy, Beloved, and Paradise according to their literary timelines rather than according to the chronology in which they were written. In doing so, I suggest that Morrison’s repeated references to Native American cultural symbols and motifs throughout these texts implies Native survival from the settling of the first novel, in 1690, up until Paradise, which is set in the 1970s.

Morrison’s novel, Paradise, focuses on another moment of shared African American and

Native American history through her representation of an all-black town which is modeled after twenty six all-black towns that were established in Indian Territory, which would later be

Oklahoma. In the late nineteenth century, Indian Territory was advertised as being a black paradise in order to encourage black homesteaders to settle in Indian Territory in the aftermath of the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run. My second chapter discusses this event and suggests that

Morrison uses Paradise to critique the idea that a black homeland or a black Eden can be built on

Indian soil. She does not negate the potential for a black homeland, but instead denies that a black homeland would be created at the expense of marginalizing another group. My second chapter discusses the ways in which the all-black town’s blood rule, which prohibits townspeople from engaging in interracial relationships, serves as commentary on several points of controversy surrounding Black Indians at the time of the novel’s publication, including the dismissal of

Radmilla Cody, a Black Indian, as Miss Navajo Nation in 1997 and the expulsion of Black

Indians from tribes attempting to achieve federal Tribal Recognition in the late twentieth century.

Ultimately, I suggest that the all-black town’s blood rule is not merely an inversion of the one-

drop rule, but also a response to the ways in which the Native American community disowned phenotypically black members.

CHAPTER 2 DEPICTING THE SURVIVING INDIAN: REPRESENTATIONS OF SETTLER COLONIALISM IN A MERCY, BELOVED, AND PARADISE

Toni Morrison has traditionally been seen as a novelist who writes about the African

American experience and, in texts such as Beloved, about the history of American slavery.

However, with the 2008 publication of A Mercy, after which we can re-read central texts such as

Beloved and Paradise, we might see the ways in which Morrison engages with themes central to settler colonialism. She does so by highlighting a Native American character, Lina, whose enslavement is paralleled with other enslaved characters in A Mercy, including Florens, an

American born slave of African descent. Through Lina’s narrative, Morrison traces the movement of settler colonists as Lina’s tribe is eliminated via smallpox, and she is subsequently forced to endure missionary influence and plantation slavery. Her status as a slave serves to not only unite the histories of both Native Americans and African Americans, who were both enslaved and treated as racially inferior to European settlers, but also to highlight the ways in which American slavery works in tandem with the nation’s settler colonial history.

Although Morrison does not explicitly write about the effects of settler colonialism on the indigenous population, A Mercy resonates with several issues surrounding settler colonialism nonetheless. In discussing the novel’s engagement with a historical past that is important to both slavery and settler colonialism, I will engage with scholars such as Huanani Kay-Trask, George

Lamming, and Lorenzo Veracini in order to contextualize Morrison’s depiction of an overtly settler colonial world in which Native American characters are enslaved, resist that enslavement through survival, and finally work against the settler colonizer’s attempts to erase indigenous history. When discussing the differences between colonialism and settler colonialism Lorenzo

Veracini states that “colonialism is not settler colonialism: both colonisers and settler colonisers

move across space, and both establish their ascendancy in specific locales…[but] the similarities end there” (Veracini 1). Instead, he suggests that “Colonisers and settler colonisers want essentially different things” as the colonizer tells the indigenous population “’you, work for me’” and the settler colonizer says “’you, go away’” (2, 1). Veracini states that “the colonial

‘encounter’ is mirrored by what I have theorised as a settler colonial ‘non-encounter,’ a circumstance fundamentally shaped by a recurring need to disavow the presence of indigenous

‘others’” (2). In other words, he suggests that the settler colonial ‘non-encounter’ is underscored by the settler colonizer’s attempt to erase indigenous history, and thereby erase the possibility for there to have ever been a colonial encounter between settlers and Natives. Morrison’s text writes against the settler colonial project by refusing to participate in the “need to disavow the presence of indigenous ‘others,’” and to, instead, prominently feature an indigenous character (2).

Further, by investigating eighteenth century settler colonialism and plantation slavery, Morrison uses the genre of historical fiction in order to assert the United States’ status as a settler colony and to assess the ways in which the settler colonial project in the U.S. is further complicated by its reliance on slave labor. By reading her texts according to their narrative chronology, we can see the ways in which Morrison implies that the settler colonial project has continued well into the twentieth century.

Before the publication of Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel, A Mercy, there had been little scholarship discussing the novelist’s representations of Native Americans throughout her oeuvre.

While A Mercy features a Native American slave as one of its protagonists, scholarship that preceded this book largely focused on the lack of named Native American characters in traditionally Native spaces. For example, in Craig S. Womack suggests that because Morrison’s

1997 novel, Paradise, is set in Oklahoma which, prior to statehood, was acknowledged as Indian

Territory, the lack of identifiably Native characters in the text is problematic and historically inaccurate. He states that “Beyond the demands of realism when one’s choice of artistic expression is historical fiction, the lack of attention to Native presence creates symbolic problems in relation to the novel’s exploration of the notion of African American autonomy”

(Womack 25). However, Womack’s definition of Native presence is limited to the existence of named, speaking characters, and he neglects to acknowledge the ways Morrison weaves Native presence into her narratives through various cultural signifiers and motifs.

Although Womack acknowledges two Native American characters, Penny and Clarissa, in Morrison’s novel, he is decidedly focused on the prominence of their individual roles in the text. He goes on to quantify the total dialogue given to Native characters throughout Morrison’s literary history and suggests that “in the entire corpus of Morrison’s work, tallying all her novels,

Native people have a total of eighty five spoken words,” and that “in Morrison’s writings when

Indians are alluded to, they are neither quoted nor given names, Indians seldom get to speak on their own behalf” (Womack 34, 41). Although Womack commends this essay for its useful insights into the combined histories of African Americans and Native Americans, his quantitative method of calculating which Native characters have spoken dialogue in Morrison’s novels does not take into account Song of Solomon’s protagonist, Milkman, in his tally. The new novel addresses many of the criticisms Womack levels at Morrison through the text’s protagonist, Lina, a Native American slave. Additionally, this book furthers Morrison’s representation of Natives through her employment of Native crops and material culture, such as the repeated references to Iroquoian corn husk dolls and Native presence in a manner that goes beyond named characters. Here, Morrison’s depiction of Native presence, though often inanimate, suggests a positive future for Native Americans in contemporary American culture, a

subject to which I will return later. Ultimately, this paper argues that Lina’s role as a protagonist in A Mercy subverts what Womack refers to as the trope of the vanishing Indian, as Morrison depicts the inception of settler colonialism in the United States in order to suggest that Native

American survival in the colonial system serves as a powerful act of resistance. In doing so, I intend to highlight the way Morrison’s subsequent use of Native American cultural signifiers, such as corn, acts as evidence of continued Native survival into the twentieth century.

While Morrison’s 1987 Nobel Prize winning novel, Beloved, examines plantation slavery in the late nineteenth century, A Mercy goes back further in time--to the late eighteenth century-- in order to trace the origins of settler colonialism in the United States. Rather than privileging the traditional narrative of the US as a strictly English colony, Morrison points to America’s rich colonial past by introducing Portuguese, Dutch, and English landowners alongside white indentured servants, Native American slaves, and Barbadian and Angolan slaves.

A frequent and oft critiqued trope in fiction featuring Native American characters centers on the characters’ portrayal as perpetually in the past with no real ties to the present, or perpetually in the past while vanishing from the present. Womack, in his reading of Paradise, states that the reader “[does] not learn much about Native people, and we constantly circle back to the same question: why are Indians both named in the past and erased in the present?...[the novel] simply duplicates images of vanishing Indians represented in countless works written by non-Native, and sometimes, Indian authors” (Womack 42). Similarly, Virginia Kennedy suggests a Native presence through absence in the Oklahoma-set novel; however, even in this reading of Morrison’s text, Kennedy can only refer to Native characters as “The Native ghosts of

Euro-American imagination that haunt the landscape to suggest that an actual Indian presence has vanished…these ghosts haunt the edges of Euro-American consciousness but are essentially

powerless in the shaping of the nation” (Kennedy 201). Ultimately, Lina’s presence in A Mercy deviates from this paradigm, and rather than vanishing, Lina repeatedly demonstrates her ability to survive European diseases, religious missionaries, and finally, enslavement. By the end of the novel, one of its other protagonists, Florens, comments that “Only Lina was steady, unmoved by any catastrophe as though she had seen and survived everything” (A Mercy 1136-1138). Lina effectively avoids becoming the vanishing Indian and suggests that there may be an alternative to this trope. Even at the close of the text, though Lina seems to be in a dangerous social position as a slave with no master, Morrison hints at a chance for further Native survival by equating the character with corn, and ultimately, with a corn husk doll. Corn is particularly important in this context as an identifiably Native American crop that, in many tribes, holds larger spiritual significance. In addition, according to Bruch D. Smith “the first Europeans to venture into the interior Southeast, although they were intent on conquest rather than natural history, were immediately impressed by the central economic importance of maize” (Smith 387).

While A Mercy ends with the three enslaved women, Lina, Florens, and Sorrow, alone and without a male master to care for them, as “[they] had no standing in law, no surname and no one would take [their] word over a Europe,” Lina’s repeated survival throughout the text indicates that there may be hope for the women (A Mercy 585). One scholar we can look to in order to better contextualize Lina’s survival is Haunani Kay-Trask. Although Kay-Trask focuses specifically on issues prevalent to native Hawaiians in the twentieth century, her arguments can nonetheless also be applied to the experience of continental indigenous groups, and indeed, Kay-

Trask alludes to the continued survival of Native Americans within the continent. For example, both Kay-Trask and Taiaiake Alfred assert that for native peoples, “daily existence in the modern world is thus best described as...a struggle against [their] planned disappearance” (Kay-Trask

26). While this refers to modern Natives, she continues by citing “the ‘vanishing’ Indian [who] has steadfastly refused to vanish, resisting all manner of genocide,” and in doing so, suggests that

Native survival alone can be seen as an act of anti-colonial resistance (26). Lina’s ability to survive multiple forms of European settler colonialism indicates that, despite the novel’s bleak ending, she will continue to survive beyond the scope of the novel.

Kay-Trask and Alfred’s concept of Native survival as an act of anti-colonial resistance is especially important in reading Lina from Toni Morrison’s A Mercy as she survives and resists several forms of European domination in the course of the narrative. Veracini’s catalog of the differing definitions of what indigenous disappearance “should actually mean” according to the settler includes “being physically eliminated or displaced, having one’s cultural practices erased, being ‘absorbed,’ ‘assimilated,’ or ‘amalgamated’ in the wider population” all while the indigenous population is told “‘you, work for me while we wait for you to disappear’” (Veracini

2). While this list merely attempts to encapsulate the varying forms of indigenous disenfranchisement throughout settler colonies, these tactics are all used against Lina in

Morrison’s novel, and thus, her ability to survive multiple forms of European domination in turn suggests that Lina serves as an alternative to the trope of the vanishing Indian and that her survival may exist beyond the narrative’s timeline.

Lina escapes what Veracini calls “[physical elimination]” when small pox laden blankets, gifted by European settlers, result in mass fatalities in her village. Early in the text, Lina describes the mass death of her village, saying:

[They tore] at blankets they could neither abide nor abandon. Infants fell silent first, and even as their mothers heaped earth over their bones, they too were pouring sweat and limp as maize hair. At first they fought off the crows, she and two young boys, but they were no match for the birds…and when the wolves arrived, all three scrambled as high

into a beech tree as they could. They stayed there all night listening to gnawing, baying, growling, fighting and worst of all the quiet of animals sated at last (A Mercy 507-518).

Thus, Lina not only escapes European disease introduced by smallpox ridden blankets, she also bears witness to the grotesque annihilation of her village as animals “[gnawed]”on her neighbors’ remains (509). Furthermore, despite the mass genocide of Lina’s village, and the subsequent dismemberment of these corpses, the indigenous people are eliminated by uniformed

French men who “[rescue]” Lina while killing the scavenging wolves and setting fire to the villagers’ remains. Even in this scene, the rescue party poses a great threat to Lina as exposing herself could cause her to “risk being shot” (518). As a result, Lina’s very presence in the text serves as an act of subversive anti-colonial resistance and raises the potential for a continued

Native survival.

After surviving elimination, Lina experiences “having [her] cultural practices erased,

[and] being ‘absorbed’ [and] ‘assimilated’” (Veracini 2). First, she is taken to live with “kindly

Presbyterians” who teach her that she is

a heathen [to] be purified…[and] that bathing naked in the river was a sin; that plucking cherries from a tree burdened with them was theft; that to eat corn much with one’s fingers was perverse…Covering oneself in the skin of beasts offended God, so they burned her deerskin dress and gave her a good duffel cloth one (A Mercy 520, 526-533).

As such, the Presbyterians are portrayed as an archetype of colonial missionaries whose aim is to convert Natives to Christianity, and demonstrate Lina’s first experience resisting assimilation.

Although she “[acknowledges] her status as a heathen,” and attempts to conform to the

Presbyterians’ religious education, she is eventually abandoned due to her promiscuity and is sold to Jacob Vaark, a Dutch landowner, as a slave (A Mercy 526). In spite of the fact that Lina is ejected from the missionaries’ protection, her subsequent release from the Presbyterians reveals Lina’s ability to resist religious assimilation.

While Lina’s transition from heathen to slave allows her to escape the religious missionaries, she also experiences what Veracini classifies as being “‘assimilated’ or

‘amalgamated’” (Veracini 2). Immediately after the dissolution of her arrangement with the

Presbyterians, and her transfer to Jacob’s farm, Lina is said to be “Relying on her memory and her own resources [as] she cobbled together neglected rights, merged European medicine with native, scripture with lore, and recalled or invented the hidden meaning of things. Found, in other words, a way to be in the world” (A Mercy 536). In spite of the fact that the novel initially suggests that the only way for a Native American to exist in the New World is through assimilation, Lina’s eventual escape from slavery, accidental though it may be, indicates that there may be an alternative “way [for Native Americans] to be in the world,” through assimilation an the amalgamation of Native and Euro-American cultures and practices (536).

After Lina’s tenure as a slave, she witnesses her owners die of the same disease that originally killed her village. Though Lina’s status as a slave with no master at the end of the novel places her in a vulnerable position, she nonetheless, escapes death and slavery while her owners do not.

Lina’s survival is given even more power as, according to David Northrup and Kenneth Morgan,

“During the first centuries of colonization whites, blacks, and Amerindians all suffered extraordinary mortality rates” and “Attempting to get Native Americans to carry out the work largely failed: the Indians proved poor workers and…[many] died out before 1650” (Northrup

32, Morgan 7). In this way, the novel subverts the trope of the vanishing Indian and, instead, erases the slave-owner from the plantation, as well as from the textual present. Consequently, despite the fact that “The Indians 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,” Lina nonetheless becomes a survivor who lives through three forms of European

domination—disease, religion, and slavery (Northrup 3-4). Lina’s survival, despite the colonial paradigm, suggests that she may have a more hopeful future at the novel’s end if she continues to survive. It is through A Mercy that Morrison not only establishes an American colonial past which accounts for Native American slavery, but also allows Lina to have substantial power, despite her enslavement, through her ability to survive.

Going beyond the scope of Native survival through a named character, A Mercy, Beloved, and Paradise often discuss Native Americans in conjunction with the untamed American landscape, as well as with the cultivation of Native crops, such as corn, in order to suggest that

American soil remains steadfastly Native soil. When discussing the Native’s relationship to the land, specifically, in the context of plantation slavery, George Lamming’s collection of essays,

The Pleasures of Exile, can prove a useful tool. Though Lamming’s book focuses on the colonization of the West Indies, it can nonetheless be used to draw a similar comparison to a

U.S. context, as well as give further insight to Morrison’s presentation of a Native slave. In

Lamming’s book, the theme of exile is explored through both personal anecdotes in relation to the author’s experiences outside of Barbados and through a discussion of Britain’s conception of the African slave early in the colonial process. Lamming points to direct comparisons between the African slave and the colonized land which suggests a mutual colonization of land, natives, and imported slaves.

In The Pleasures of Exile, Lamming utilizes William Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a model for, and example of, British conceptualization of the colonized subject. In this reading,

Shakespeare’s character, Caliban, serves as the colonized West Indian, and the character

Prospero as the colonizer. The African slave and the colonized West Indian native are often directly compared with the land, and Lamming continues this trope in his discussion of the slave-

owner’s views concerning the slaves as property. Lamming writes that “The whip was regular as wind, no less brutal on the bones than any hurricane which ripped open the land” (Lamming

120). Though this paradigmatic correlation between slave and land is an example of the author’s use of imagery, in a text that focuses on exile and the disconnect between subject and land, the implied connection between the imported slave and the landscape of the island seems particularly important as the imported slave is also exiled to this new land. Moreover, the relationship between the colonized subject and land is complicated by the slave’s inducement to cultivate that earth as “the land has no existence without the labor of these slaves” (Lamming

123). In the context of Morrison’s novel, A Mercy, we see that Lina is exiled from within her native country through the process of displacement and enslavement. Like the imported slaves who are responsible for the cultivation of the land itself, Lina must serve as an accomplice in

Jacob’s quest to fence off land and declare land ownership. While Florens, Sorrow, and the two indentured servants, Scully and Willard, are held accountable for the taming and re-education of the land through their role harvesting cash crops, Lina’s status as a slave taming the land reinforces the power of the settlers over Native land and Native people.

According to Veracini, “successful settler colonies ‘tame’ a variety of wildernesses, end up establishing independent nations, [and] effectively repress, co-opt, and extinguish indigenous alterities” (Veracini 3). In essence, Morrison begins her depiction of settler colonialism by directly equating the indigenous land with an indigenous people, and in so doing, suggests that conquering the land is an extension of dominating and eradicating that land’s people.

Throughout A Mercy, the domination of land is paralleled with the use of human labor through slavery and indentured servitude, and eventually, Jacob “co-opts” Native crops while distancing their cultivation from native food practices. Although at the start of the text, Jacob “winced”

when witnessing another man’s reliance on slave labor and states that “flesh was not his commodity,” as the novel progresses his eventual status as a slave-owner occurs in tandem with his need to own and fence off land. Upon Jacob’s arrival to the New World, the landscape is both oppressive and unfamiliar as “Unlike the English fog he [had] known since he could walk, or those way north where he lived now, this one was sun fired, turning the world into thick, hot gold. Penetrating it was like struggling through a dream” (A Mercy 93). His breath and tread seem to slice through the world’s silence in a way that is disruptive; however, Jacob is nonetheless aware of the need to travel through the land carefully, and to be mindful of entering

Native lands. His initial care for the land and acknowledgment of his own status as a settler in another peoples’ land is evident as he “negotiated native trails on horseback, mindful of their fields of maize, careful through their hunting grounds, politely asking permission to enter a small village here, a larger one there” and he states that “recognizing the slope of certain hills, a copse of oak, an abandoned den, the sudden odor of pine sap—all of that was more than valuable; it was essential” (A Mercy 133-135, 137). Here, Morrison suggests that Jacob’s care for the land is an extension of his own knowledge that he is a settler in a land that is not, in fact, unpeopled.

Despite Jacob’s initial proclamation that slave ownership and indentured servitude are “a calamity,” and his compulsion to “[sneer] at wealth dependent on a captured workforce that required more force to maintain,” he quickly begins collecting slaves in order to construct a fenced-in house, complete with a magnificent gate, and thereby, declares ownership over both human labor and property (254, 318). As such, Jacob quickly transitions from settler to colonizer and fulfills the prophecy Lina hears in her native village of men who

would come with languages that sound like a dog bark…They would forever fence in land, ship whole trees to faraway countries…ruin soil, befoul sacred places and worship a dull, unimaginative god…Cut loose from the earth’s soil, they insisted on purchase of its

soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out horribleness (605).

In effect, Morrison suggests that the settler colonial project is inherently destructive, not only to an indigenous population, but to the earth itself. Rather than continuing his earlier policy of

“politely asking permission” to use Native lands, Lina is horrified when Jacob “[decides] to kill the trees and replace them with a profane monument to himself…killing trees in that number without asking permission…He mystified Lina. All Europes [sic] did” (485). The very act of building a house is shown to be detrimental to the natural landscape as Jacob tames the once- wild environment, clears the land, builds his “profane monument,” and begins to plant his own garden. In this way, the land itself becomes another character woven into Morrison’s complex narrative, and this act of fencing off the property actually serves to contain the land in the same way that Jacob contains his other slaves. In the end, it is only with the help of Native American slave labor that Jacob effectively enslaves Native American soil.

Ultimately, Morrison’s novel goes even further than Lamming’s text suggests as the novelist eventually equates the slave, not just with the land, but with the crops they harvest from it. Throughout A Mercy, and indeed, Beloved and Paradise, Morrison employs corn as a symbol and signifier of Native American presence as well as Native agricultural and cultural practices.

She does this first, by describing Native characters, including Lina, in conjunction with corn, or as having the features of corn, thereby anthropomorphizing the crop itself. Morrison describes

“two women [who] face into the wind that whips their hair like corn tassel,” and characterizes a dying child and mother as “pouring sweat and limp as maize hair” (Morrison 435, 507).

Accordingly, corn and maize become signifiers for the disposable parts of Native American culture--the corn tassel, which is not edible but is necessary for reproduction, and the silky hairs

that are often discarded along with the corn’s husk. Because of Morrison’s association of a peoples’ identity with one of their primary food sources, the text itself broadens the scope of settler oppression against Native peoples by damaging, not only their persons, but also their land.

Hence, when Jacob disregards Lina’s suggestion to grow corn and squash together, he is both damaging his own crops, and attempting to distance native foods from native foods practices.

Eventually, A Mercy’s Native American characters are transfigured into a corn husk doll, which makes an appearance at the novel’s opening and again at the end, and as a result of the doll’s connection to both Native American heritage and to the human form, it can be said to function as an inanimate character. Although the anthropomorphized doll is originally “sitting on a shelf,” it “is soon playing in the corner of the room and the wicked of how it got there is plain” (30). While the doll’s positioning in the corner of the room seems to indicate that it has been malevolently cast aside, Morrison’s decision to ascribe the object with the ability to “play” seems to afford it some sort of agency and human capability. Ultimately, the corn husk doll appears again at the end of the text, and as such, serves to bookend the novel itself. Because of this, the corn husk doll becomes its own character and looms over the text as the reader contemplates “the wicked of how it got there” (30). Although Florens’s final pages trace how the doll came to be stored on the shelf, as a boy “[holds] tight to the corn husk doll” and Florens

“[takes] it away and [places] it high on a shelf too high for him to reach,” the doll’s subsequent positioning on the floor seems to make it accessible and no longer out of reach (1570, 1577).

Additionally, Florens asserts that she “[thinks the doll] must be where his power is” as the child’s “fingers cling to the doll” until it is ripped away from him and “he screams screams.

Tears falling” (1577). The doll’s status as a totem of power, coupled with its ability to once again be accessible to the child, indicates that Native American power and culture can continue

to exist beyond the confines of the text. Although A Mercy closes with Lina’s uncertain future as she is a slave with no master, the continued presence of corn in Morrison’s subsequent texts

(according to the narratives’ chronology) points to a sustained Native American lineage. As a result, while the named characters of Paradise are featured in the margins of the text and are figured in the novel’s historical past, corn’s persistence can potentially be an indicator of contemporary Native survival and resistance against the settler colonial project.

Morrison’s earlier novel, Beloved, centers on the lives of several slaves in the mid- nineteenth century and traces their experiences as plantation workers, as well as their post- abolition struggles. Though this novel was written almost thirty years before A Mercy, when read according to the chronology of the narratives, Beloved serves as a continuation of the ideas presented in A Mercy by exploring the end of slavery rather than the beginning, and therefore depicting the nation as a continuing settler colony. While there are no obviously identifiable

Native American characters in Beloved, Morrison nonetheless speaks to Native issues through the character of Sixo, whose exchange with the Redmen’s Presence, who haunts an old Cherokee mountain hideout, relationship with the Thirty Mile Woman, and frequent alignment with corn indicate that he may be of Native American lineage. Similarly, Sixo’s relationship with schoolteacher reinforces his analogous qualities to Native Americans historically by referencing

Native American re-education, a topic which is explored in Morrison’s later novel, Paradise.

In one scene, schoolteacher, whose name is arguably tied to the United States’ colonialist reeducation of Native American children, accuses Sixo of stealing from Sweet Home. Sixo states that, rather than stealing, he was “improving…[the] property” as “Sixo plant rye to give the high piece a better chance. Sixo take and feed the soil, give you more crop. Sixo take and feed Sixo give you more work” (199). Because of Sixo’s connection to Native American

culture, this scene reiterates the ways in which Native Americans initially helped white European settlers learn to plant New World crops, including corn. In this reading, Sixo’s supposed stealing is seen instead as means through which he continues to help the masters of Sweet Home grow crops. Rayana Green illustrates the shared history of using corn as a grain between white settlers and Native Americans in her essay, “Mother Corn and the Dixie Pig: Native Food in the Native

South,” and argues that:

Four hundred years ago, the settler-saving ‘gifts’ of Indian food and food production technologies, along with the salvation of the English adventurer by the Indian chief’s beautiful daughter, anchored colonial mythology; three hundred years ago Indian corn and tobacco centered the new growth economy; two hundred years ago Indian good resources still constituted, in essence, the base diet of the region. Yet this history seems nearly irrelevant today—as do Indians themselves—to popular conceptions of the South (Green 116).

Green’s argument that Native Americans have been forgotten to “popular conceptions of the

South” is reinforced by Sixo’s questionable lineage.

Ironically, it is Sixo’s eventual death that exemplifies Kay-Trask and Alfred’s concept of

Native survival, as his ability to resist death (for a time) occurs as an overt demonstration of resistance. In spite of his slave-owners’ attempts to conjure a fire and burn Sixo alive, their efforts result in a flame that is “only enough for cooking hominy” (Beloved 237). In essence, the slave-owners’ inability to kill Sixo through the appropriation of the native crop, hominy--a variety of corn that acts as “sustenance, ceremonial object, prayer offering, symbol,” and has been linked to several Native American societies--typifies Native survival as his attempted elimination is ultimately unsuccessful (436-437 Wall, Masayesva). After the initial failed assassination attempt, Morrison writes that “by the light of the hominy fire Sixo straightens…He laughs…His feet are cooking; the cloth of his trousers smokes. He laughs…[he calls] out

‘Seven-O! Seven-O!’ Smoky, stubborn fire. They shoot him to shut him up. Have to” (Beloved

237-238). Ultimately, Sixo’s murder can be seen as an allegory for the “forced land cessations accompanying Indian Removal” in the 1830s as the Sweet Home owners attempt to eradicate

Sixo from the land (Green 118). Despite the fact that this second attempt to kill Sixo is successful, Sixo’s triumphant shouts of “Seven-O!” suggest a continued Native line despite

Sixo’s death, and imply that the Thirty Mile Woman may be impregnated with Sixo’s child.

Additionally, Sweet Home’s cornfield acts as a site of resistance against plantation slavery as, after Sixo’s death, several slaves use the protection of the cornstalks to meet and attempt an escape from the plantation. In this way, Morrison’s novel, Beloved, can be read as a sequel to A

Mercy since both texts suggest a possible future for Native Americans in a settler colonial society. Arguably, we can see the continuation of this trope in Paradise as the novel is set in post-reconstruction Oklahoma.

Paradise, though written before A Mercy and Beloved, is set one hundred years after the latter text, and centers on several women who live in an abandoned mansion turned Indian re- education school turned Convent. Thus, the very architecture of Paradise recalls colonial oppression through religious missionaries and Native re-education just as it reintegrates these earlier scenes of re-education through the Presbyterians in A Mercy and schoolteacher in

Beloved. Despite the fact that the Convent is located in Oklahoma, a state rife with Native conflict that was once accepted as Indian Territory before its incorporation through statehood, the book contains no mention of Native characters who exist in the present. Like A Mercy,

Paradise opens and closes on the same scene, where the men of Ruby massacre the women living in the Convent. However, while the Convent is destroyed at the close of the novel, and its occupants killed and effectively erased from the narrative as their corpses vanish, it is tellingly only the cornstalks that remain unharmed. Because of this, I would argue that we can read these

cornstalks, which are referenced throughout Paradise, as evidence of further Native survival and the continuation of a Native bloodline or presence.

Like Jacob’s “profane monument to himself” in A Mercy, the Convent begins as a

“mansion where bisque and rose-tone marble floors segue into teak ones” and is described as being “an embezzler’s folly…[and] the embezzler’s joy” (A Mercy, Paradise 3). In other words,

Morrison implies that both mansions are erected as a result of insatiable greed as their owners rely either on an enslaved workforce, or on crime to support their wealth. Eventually, the mansion is converted into a Convent, re-converted into a Native boarding school, and, upon its subsequent abandonment, becomes a site that seems to hold mystical powers as each of its inhabitants are compulsively drawn to the mansion where they begin to feast with reckless abandon. Though the women are individually drawn to the Convent more than fifteen years after the last of its Native students have left, the cornstalks that originally surrounded the mansion continue to grow and serve as a gateway for newcomers and visitors to the Convent.

Consequently, unlike Jacob’s iron gate that fences the land in even as it keeps others out, the

Convent’s gate is a product of the land that, when harvested, can be sold to outsiders.

Like the corn present in A Mercy, the cornstalks surrounding the Convent, while inanimate, are nonetheless ascribed with human characteristics. One of the Convent women hears “the faraway cough of cornstalks,” which not only anthropomorphizes the crop, but necessarily suggests that the plants could be hiding people (A Mercy 685). Therefore, the cornstalks themselves could be the site of Virginia Kennedy’s Native ghosts, who hide just inside the cornfield. When Mavis arrives, “she [has] to negotiate acres of corn” to access the house, a scene that is reminiscent of Jacob’s first time navigating the landscape of the New

World in A Mercy, and while she simply negotiates her way through the cornstalks, one could

easily see this as “[negotiating with] acres of corn” in order to gain entrance to the property

(Paradise 595). In effect, the cornstalks act as gatekeepers to the Convent. Later, the cornfield is called “an empire of corn,” which indicates not only its expansiveness, but its ability to continue to expand the boundaries of the cornfield (652). As such, the cornfield not only demonstrates a native cultural afterlife through the crop’s continued growth, but also serves as a place of contemporary native food practices. While the Arapaho girls of the Convent’s recent past sold corn and other crops to passersby, the Convent women adopt this same practice, and in one morning, “sold forty-eight ears of corn and a whole pound of peppers” (648-651). In this way, the mansion’s new inhabitants continue the practices of the Convent’s former tenants.

Although Womack claims that “[the Cheyenne-Arapahoe] girls simply disappear from the landscape,” these characters leave the town in order to move somewhere else, while the Convent women’s bodies literally disappear from the landscape after the women are assassinated. While the existence of corn in Paradise does not overtly signify native presence, or the contemporary existence of Native Americans in the Oklahoma town, the crop’s survival nonetheless indicates a potential for Native existence.

Assessing Lina’s role in A Mercy can help to address claims that Morrison neglects to include Native Americans in her historical fiction, not just from a representational stand point, but also as a means of demonstrating the ways in which Morrison subverts the trope of the vanishing Indian by presenting contemporary Native practices in the context of her novels. By reading the novels in chronological order according to the decades in which they are set, one can effectively argue that Lina’s survival throughout A Mercy indicates her ability to continue to survive beyond the confines of the text. Because of this, we can read Sixo’s role in Beloved as a continuation of Lina’s survival in the earlier text. Although Sixo does not survive the narrative

itself, he nonetheless inspires dissent among the other slaves and uses his initial survival as a means of resisting the plantation slave-owner. By extension, Paradise, the novel on which

Womack centers his critique, provides a history of Native American education that could possibly be the result of Indian Removal from the Deep South (where Lina’s narrative takes place) to twentieth century Oklahoma. While this text admittedly places its Native characters in the narrative’s historical past, it simultaneously subverts the trope of the vanishing Indian by, instead, erasing the Convent women at the end of the book and allowing only the cornstalks to remain visible in the Oklahoma landscape. At the novel’s close, the cornfield, as a signifier of

Native American culture, is the sole survivor in the wars between blacks and whites and men and women. Ultimately, Morrison’s continued references to Native survival despite “being physically eliminated or displaced, having one’s cultural practices erased, being ‘absorbed,’

‘assimilated,’ or ‘amalgamated’ in the wider population” all while the indigenous population is told “‘you, work for me while we wait for you to disappear’” indicates a powerful act of anti- colonial dissent (Veracini 2). In this way, Morrison suggests a Native American presence that is decidedly both in the historical past and in the present.

CHAPTER 3 TONI MORRISON’S BLACK PARADISE: BUILDING A BLACK HOMELAND IN INDIAN TERRITORY

In many of her novels, Toni Morrison frames her narratives around troubled communities. In Paradise, she expands this trope of intracommunity turmoil through the creation of two warring insular communities—the Convent, an all-female community housed in a former Convent-turned-Arapaho boarding school, and the town of Ruby, an all-black town modeled on the twenty-six all black towns established in Oklahoma post-reconstruction. To date, the text has largely been discussed in relation to the ways in which Ruby’s “blood rule…The one nobody admitted existed” acts as an inversion of the one-drop rule and serves to critique intraracial discrimination within the black community. However, few scholars have discussed the ways in which Morrison’s novel represents intercommunity relations between

Native Americans and the largely African American community of Ruby (Paradise 194).

Although the novel has been critiqued for its lack of Native American characters, looking at the momentary episodes where the Native Americans and African Americans come into contact in the text can reveal a richer understanding of the context in which Morrison writes the novel. In this chapter, I will suggest that Morrison acknowledges the idea of creating a black Eden, which was the goal of many all-black Oklahoma towns, is intrinsically tied to the idea of that paradise being located in Indian Territory, and thus, exists as a result of Native cooperation. More importantly, I suggest that the novel’s preoccupation with blood status and racial purity serves not only to critique intraracial discrimination, but also as a means though which Morrison can highlight late twentieth century race-based conflicts between African Americans and Native

Americans as a result of nations’ attempts to gain federal Tribal Recognition. Ultimately,

Paradise questions the idea of creating a black homeland in Indian Territory and suggests that,

while a black paradise is possible, a homeland cannot be built without first recognizing the history that came before its creation.

Indian Territory as Black Paradise

The events in Paradise span several decades and witness its characters travel across the

United States in order to ultimately settle in their respective destination—either Haven, Ruby, or the Convent. As such, the way in which Morrison builds both time and space function in interesting ways in the novel and serve as a means through which Morrison recounts several iterations of each dwelling’s origin story. It is in these origin stories where the characters most frequently come into contact with Native Americans hailing from several different tribes. By examining the ways in which each community is built, either in spite of Native claims to the land or with the help of Native Americans, we can see the complex ways Morrison depicts intercommunity friction.

Historically, the idea of an all-black paradise has been aligned with its location in Indian

Territory. Many of the advertisements for all-black towns during the Oklahoma Land Run of

1889 describe these settlements as being uniquely edenic. For example, Tiya Miles and Sharon

P. Holland quote from a brochure for Red Bird, Oklahoma, one of the original twenty six all- black towns established in the early twentieth century, and one of thirteen all-black towns still in existence in contemporary Oklahoma. In an advertisement from Red Bird Investment Company, residents of Indian Territory describe the land as “an idealized Promised Land,” and an “earthly

Paradise [where] everyman is recognized according to his merit” (Crossing Waters Crossing

World, Holland, Miles 7, 6). Similarly, Indian Territory was often called “the Eden of the West” as well as “a new Eden for blacks” (5, 10). While these all-black towns were advertised as being

uniquely edenic, the positive potential of these spaces was interestingly tied to their location in

Indian Territory. Miles and Holland explain that:

In imagining their paradisical home, black towns settlers envisioned a place where Indians were necessary but peripheral. They were necessary because it was Indian presence that differentiated Indian Territory from the states…they were peripheral because blacks located Native people at the margins of their new communities…a black Indian Territory transformed Indians into a vehicle for black identity formation and racial uplift (7).

Although Morrison’s text builds on this same trope of containing Native people in the text’s margins, Ruby’s dismissal of all non-blacks, or light-skinned blacks and Black Indians, is shown to be deeply problematic to the community as the town is forced to revise their origin story as black families marry white or Indian individuals from outside of the town.

According to the novel, Haven, Ruby’s predecessor, was founded in 1890, a year after the beginning of the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889. The original town’s origin story is disseminated over the course of the novel as townspeople reflect on the various stories they have been told about Ruby’s founding. As early settlers, the founders of Haven come into contact with Native peoples quite frequently as they are originally “turned away by rich Choctaw,” and thus forced to create a town in isolation (Morrison 13). Nevertheless, this early venture into Indian Territory demonstrates the ways in which the town acknowledges that despite the fact that “‘Oklahoma is

Indians, Negros and God mixed,’” the land is nonetheless Native (56). Despite being turned away by one tribe, the founders of Haven are shown to have positive interactions with Native peoples as they meet “Creek with whom they could barter their labor for wage” (14). As a further point of clarification, Morrison writes that the 1890s homesteaders worked for ownership of the land as one of the founders “[Pressed his hand into the flattened grass…‘Here,’ he said.

‘This is our place,’” though she quickly writes that “it wasn’t, of course. Not yet anyway. It

belonged to a family of State Indians, and it took a year and four months of negotiation, of labor for land, to finally have it free and clear” (98). As such, the founders of Haven benefit from their relationship with Creek Indians while earning land instead of taking land. Though Morrison questions the idea of a black homeland’s existence in Indian Territory, the Haven origin story ultimately seems to be a more positive model for Native American-African American interaction than that provided by Ruby’s origin story.

Interactions between Native American groups and the founders of Ruby are noticeably different than those of their forefathers. According to the novel, the new town is constructed in

1949 after Haven is abandoned in the face of the Second Great Migration1. When Haven community members begin moving to “a big city this time…anywhere that was already built” including “Saint Louis, Houston, Langston or Chicago,” the founders of Ruby respond by instead relocating “deeper into Oklahoma, as far as they could climb from the grovel contaminating the town their grandfathers had made” (5, 16). Unlike Haven, Ruby serves as a space in which residents can get away from other blacks and move deeper and deeper into Oklahoma with the hopes of finally finding black Paradise. While other all-black towns are disbanded in the face of the Great Migration, the Haven-to-Ruby settlers choose to go further into the state, rather than to flee to northern cities. Like its predecessor, the town of Ruby is built in Indian Territory. When discussing the relocation of the town, Morrison states that the settlers built the new town “forty miles west—far far from the old Creek Nation which once upon a time a witty government called

‘unassigned land’” (Morrison 5). Unlike Haven, which was founded before Oklahoma’s statehood, Ruby is constructed long after the 1889 Land Rush, once homesteaders and sooners

1 Although this essay does not focus on the ways in which Morrison represents the effects of the Great Migration on all-black towns, the novel is filled with references to this event. 35

flooded the state and displaced most of its Indians. As such, the new town’s proximity to the

Creek Nation is notable for two reasons—first, because it demonstrates the community’s recognition of land ownership, and because their aim to build “far far” from other groups serves as an early clue to the town’s restrictive racial membership. Although the younger generation attempts to construct Ruby in the same way that their forefathers founded Haven, their interactions with Native peoples is notably different. Rather than working for land as wage, the

Ruby men “fought White law, Colored Creek, bandits and bad weather” (54-55). As such, they work in opposition to the settled Creek Indians and attempt to distance themselves from any other Native settlements. Despite this fact, the Ruby founders settle down the road from the

Convent, a site of previous Native American trauma where “stilled Arapaho girls once sat and learned to forget” (3). Because “the mansion-turned-Convent was there long before the town, and the last boarding Arapaho girls had already gone when the fifteen families arrived,” the narrator suggest that the town itself is built on Native land, or at the very least, land on which

Native girls had been educated (9). The later disdain with which the townspeople view the

Convent and its inhabitants, then, seems unfounded as the dwelling was established long before the town itself.

Despite being seventeen miles down the road from Ruby, the Convent functions as the closest settlement to the all-black town, and while its residents are not identified as being Native

American, the building’s history and architecture nonetheless mark the building as a Native space. Because of this, the disdain with which the Ruby townspeople hold the Convent women becomes a means of hating the space rather than solely hating its residents. Although the

Convent that is introduced in the novel has already been uninhabited by its Native American schoolgirls, the building nonetheless reminds visitors of its previous occupants. When the men

of Ruby first invade the house, they come across “the dining room, which the nuns converted to a schoolroom where stilled Arapaho girls once sat and learned to forget” (4). The identifiable nature of the previous schoolroom demonstrates the ways in which this space of education has turned into a memorial of sorts. As such, the Convent becomes a site of preserved Native trauma. Immediately after leaving the former schoolroom, the men notice that “the chill intensifies as the men spread deeper into the mansion, taking their time, looking, listening, alert to the female malice that hides here and there” (3). In other words, Morrison suggests that the building is haunted by the dwelling’s previous occupants as the manifestation of “female malice” is introduced upon entering the schoolroom, and builds as the men continue to explore the house.

This point is further proven when Morrison notes that “One of [the men], the youngest, looks back, forcing himself to see how the dream he is in might go…He has never before dreamed in colors such as these: imperial black sporting a wild swipe of red” (4). Although this is

Morrison’s first time introducing these two colors in the novel, they appear in combination throughout the text, most notably when a “fist, jet black with red fingernails” is painted on the side of the Oven in Ruby’s town square (101). The mixing of “imperial black,” which is so dark it might be compared to the “blue black” skin color of Ruby’s populace, and red seems to be an obvious nod to the mixing of Native American and African American cultural symbols. The fact that the man’s vision is brought about only when he is deep in the Convent speaks to the building’s powerful link to its Native American past, and suggests that perhaps the vision is brought about by some sort of supernatural power.

Native presence in the Convent is apparent, not only through the building’s architectural haunting, but also through the roles of its new occupants in the text. The Convent’s racial makeup is unclear throughout the text, as Morrison’s only hint comes with the novel’s opening

line, “the shoot the white one first”; however, the women who come to inhabit the mansion mimic the social structures of the original school. The Convent is a solely female space in the same way that it was as a boarding school, and although the women do not attend classes, they each learn from Consolata, and eventually from one another. Although the Arapaho boarding school students were gone well before the founding of Ruby, the presence of both Consolata and the Superior Mother in the text serves as another reminder of the building’s past. Because both women witnessed and assisted in the founding of the Arapaho school, they each stand in as the area’s original settlers. While Consolata’s background is left unclear, she is frequently described in ways that identify her as Native. For example, when Mavis first meets Connie, she is described as having “two Hiawatha braids [that] trailed down her shoulders,” and throughout the remainder of the text, her braids become the focus of her description as “her braids [fall] forward,” she “[lifts] her braids from her chest and [drops] them behind her shoulders,” and “one braid from under her straw hat fell down her back” (38-39, 69). This reference to Hiawatha is important, not only because the original Hiawatha was a co-founder of the Five Nations (each of whom were relocated to Oklahoma from the Southeast), but because she served as a guiding figure for many of those tribes, including the Seneca tribe for whom one of the Convent women is named. Similarly, the Superior Mother’s death at the beginning of the text leaves Connie in charge of the house and the women who appear at its door. Connie’s role as mother and educator, especially to Seneca can be seen to be modeled after that of Hiawatha, which, at least symbolically, locates a contemporary native presence in the text. Because of Ruby’s proximity to the Convent, the townspeople’s ultimate extinction of the Convent women, serves as an extermination of the town’s Native neighbors as a means of claiming that homeland.

Ultimately, the origin stories of Haven, Ruby, and the Convent provide a rich understanding of the ways in which Morrison conceptualizes Native American and African

American interactions. While Haven acknowledges that its town is built from Creek land, and the founders work alongside Creeks to earn ownership of the land, Ruby’s founders attempt to distance themselves from their Native neighbors, and by the novel’s close, demolish the only standing symbol of Native history in their area. This narrative is strikingly similar to that of Red

Bird, Oklahoma, whose name and ties to the Creek Nation imply that Morrison’s fictitious town may be modeled on Red Bird. When discussing Red Bird, Holland and Miles state that:

Several letters in the Red Bird brochure suggested that Native people were or should be marginal in the black Indian Territory and repeated the value of having a town ‘for colored people alone’ (Red Bird Investment Company, 1905)…Not until the last two pages of the Red Bird brochure is the Creek Nation, the site for Red Bird, acknowledged in any detail…the brochure explains how black towns were founded on Indian land. But then in a rhetorical erasure of Native presence, the brochure expresses the hope that Indian Territory will soon be dissolved into the new state of Oklahoma (Holland, Miles 7-8).

Though a contemporary website for Red Bird, Oklahoma acknowledges its Native history by stating that “the little community of Red Bird was laid on the allotment of a Creek Indian,”

Morrison is critical of the earlier narrative of Native marginalization (Red Bird). In the text, the town makes its best effort to not only marginalize Native presence by building far away from a historical landmark, but also to attempt to physically erase the reminder of an existing Native presence through their murders of the Convent women. As such, we can view the combined origin stories of Haven and Ruby as a means through which to identify shifting conceptions of black paradise and the potential for Indian Territory to serve as “a refuge in America, and more, as a potential black space that would function metaphorically and emotionally as a substitute for the longed-for African homeland” (Holland, Miles 4).

Racial Purity and Fears of Miscegenation in Paradise

As several scholars have noted, one of the central themes in Morrison’s novel is the fear of “racial tampering” as a result of miscegenation. Candice M. Jenkins suggests that “Haven and

Ruby residents’ adherence to the ‘blood rule,’ the demand that 8-rock blood be kept ‘pure’ and unadulterated by whiteness in any form, is a disciplinary condition of the bond they share”

(Jenkins 276). Jenkins’s article provides a nice foundation for looking at the ways in which

Morrison depicts intraracial conflict through a noticeable black/white binary; however, examining Morrison’s simultaneous examples of black/Native conflict helps to complicate the more nuanced issue of intraracial and inter/intracommunity turmoil communicated in the novel.

Aside from the novel’s opening line, “they shoot the white one first,” the race of the

Convent women is left largely ambiguous throughout the novel. By contrast, the neighboring town of Ruby is often described not only by race, but by the unique darkness of their skin as all of the residents “except for three or four…were coal black, athletic, with noncommittal eyes”

(160). Later in the text, Morrison repeats this refrain and describes the townspeople as “Blue- black people, tall and graceful, whose clear, wide eyes gave no sign of what they really felt about those who weren’t 8-rock like them” and whose skin was as dark as “a deep deep level in the coal mines” (193). As a result of their dark skin and classification as 8-rock, or 8-R, the Ruby townspeople are described as though they are a uniquely different race altogether as they are not identified as black, but as 8-rock. The original families’ coal black skin works descriptively and as a means of unifying the people with the land itself. In other words, the association with the coal mine, located deep below the town’s soil, simultaneously suggests that the 8-rocks are connected to Ruby’s soil. Additionally, by associating the description of 8-rock skin color with the non-communicative nature of their eyes, Morrison amplifies the ways in which the blood rule

serves as an overt prerequisite for town citizenship. Their aversion to non-8-R visitors is shown to worsen as:

For ten generations they had believed the division they fought to close was free against slave and rich against poor. Usually, but not always, white against black. Now they saw a new separation: light-skinned against black. Oh, they knew there was a difference in the minds of whites, but it had not struck them before that it was of consequence, serious consequence, to Negroes themselves (194).

Although the passage highlights the original tensions of “white against black,” thereby adding credence to Jenkins’s assertion that the town looks to remain “unadulterated by whiteness” in particular, the “new separation” in Ruby seems to complicate the original black/white binary set up in the novel (Morrison 194, Jenkins 276, Morrison 194). The new tension existent between light-skinned and dark-skinned residents may certainly reference multiethnic citizens of both black and white ancestry; however, by broadly invoking the term “light-skinned” Morrison allows for a wide range of multiethnic community members. In light of both Haven and Ruby’s location in Indian Territory, and association with Native Americans, the possibility for this new separation to exist between the 8-rocks and Black Indians seems particularly plausible.

While Morrison’s novel does not explicitly discuss Black Indians, the Ruby blood rule is nevertheless particularly striking when considering the time in which the author wrote Paradise.

In the late twentieth century, blood authenticity became a source of tension for members of mixed race heritage. In 1997, the same year as the novel’s publication, a major source of controversy erupted over the declaration of Radmilla Cody, a woman of mixed African

American and Native American descent, as Miss Navajo Nation. Celia E. Naylor quotes a letter printed in the Navajo Times, and written by Orlando Tom who states that:

When the Navajo people select a person to represent their nation as ‘Miss Navajo,’ that person must possess the appearance and physical characteristics of the Navajo people. Miss Cody’s appearance and physical characteristics are clearly black, and are thus

representative of another race…There is a duty and responsibility to procreate with our own kind, so we can perpetuate our existence in the years to come…inter-racial unions and the children it brings forth, is nothing other than ethnic genocide, and is the true enemy of Indian sovereignty (Naylor 150-151).

While this event may not have affected Morrison’s publication, it nonetheless speaks to the intercommunity tensions that existed at the time of the novel’s release, and adds an interesting context with which to analyze Ruby’s focus on skin color. Tom’s insistence that Cody is

“clearly black” negates her role as a member of the Navajo Nation in a way that seems to parallel

Ruby’s insistence on racial purity. Likewise, Tom’s fears that the Navajo people “will all be part of the melting pot, part this and part that, yet never anything specific” speaks to the townspeoples’ fears of miscegenation, and possibly to the extinction of 8-rocks. As such,

Morrison’s creation of the Ruby blood rule can be seen not only as an inversion of the one-drop rule, but as an inversion of critiques of Black Indians’ membership in Native American tribes.

Because tribal membership post-1970 was largely based on phenotype rather than on a family’s historical connections to the tribe, the blood rule can be read as a reaction to this type of discrimination.

Tiffany M. McKinney suggests that in the decades leading up to the novel’s publication,

“Indian communities…[began] to stringently review their membership rosters, with the hopes of increasing their chances for [federal tribal recognition]…The result of this, at times, has been for

Indian communities to cast phenotypically black Indians as non-Indians for purposes of tribal membership” (McKinney 57). Because of this, Ruby’s reverse one-drop rule can also be seen as a reaction to tribal redefinition of membership post-1970 which maintained that “Tribal- recognition authority under 25CFR83 is limited to Indian tribes indigenous to the Continental

United States. Moreover, the provisions of the section are intended to apply to those Indian

groups that can demonstrate a ‘substantially continuous tribal existence’ and that have

‘functioned as autonomous entities through history until the present’” (65). In other words, nations who allowed for tribal members of mixed heritage could arguably be denied federal tribal recognition by stating that a number of members originate from the African continent rather than the United States. In her discussion of the Paucatuck Pequots’ quest for tribal recognition in

1993, McKinney describes the tribe as being split into two distinct groups and cites “an article in the Hartford Court [that] summarized the familial faction among to Pequots by saying the divide

‘results from an 150-year old struggle in which two factions of the tribe have been at odds over whether one side which has habitually married blacks and Portuguese is as equally Eastern

Pequot as one [that] habitually married whites’” (McKinney 69). While this anecdotes speaks to the racially segregated membership rosters of the Massachusetts-based tribe, its similarity to the revision of Ruby’s origin story is striking and suggests that the text speaks to larger Black Indian issues. While the original play mentions the first nine families to settle Ruby, successive versions only mention eight families, and eventually only seven. When Pat Best begins noticing the revision of the town’s origin story, she deduces that some of the original families were removed from the play as a result of “skin color” (215). Thus, Ruby’s blood-rule and subsequent refusal of families who violate that rule acts as an inversion of the tribal expulsion of Black

Indians. As such, the narrative speaks to larger cultural fears of miscegenation that could potentially render either community phenotypically extinct.

Although Ruby’s fears of miscegenation are arguably centered on its dark skinned inhabitants mixing with whites, the text nonetheless indicates that any racial mixing would be prohibited by “the blood rule. The one nobody admitted existed” (Morrison 194). This fear is echoed when Pat Best suggests that “[the townspeople] hate [the Best family] because [Pat’s

mother] looked like a cracker and was bound to have cracker-looking children like [her], and although [Pat] married Billy Cato, who was an 8-rock…[she] passed the skin on to [her] daughter” (195). In other words, the fears of interracial coupling derives from the loss of the 8- rocks’ dark skin in future generations. Like Tom in his letter to the Navajo nation, “the blood rule” in Ruby seems to result from fears of extinction that is tied to phenotype. While Pat’s mother of “sunlight skin” could be white, she can also just as easily be Native American as she merely “looked like a cracker” (194, 195). The objection to her relationship with Richard Best is derived from the fact that she has “no last name” and is “a wife of sunlight skin, a wife of racial tampering” (197).

Ultimately, Morrison’s marginal Native American characters in her novel seem to be tied directly to the idea of Indian Territory as “a refuge in America, and…a potential black space that would function metaphorically and emotionally as a substitute for the longed-for African homeland” (Holland, Miles 4). Though the novel’s discussion of homeland is often tied to

Ruby’s younger generation preferring to identify as African while the older generation calls themselves decidedly African American, the idea of creating a homeland in Indian Territory is openly critiqued in the novel. For example, Richard Best, the first violator of the blood rule, deviates from his community by asking:

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…back when God said Good! Good!—there, right there where you know your own people were born and lived and died (Morrison 213).

What Best’s argument suggests is not that an African American homeland cannot exist, but that it should not exist as a result of marginalizing other groups. His implication that the all-black town has been built “some place [they] went to and invaded and slaughtered people to get” and

“someplace [they] stole from people living there” allies the black homesteaders with early

American colonizers. In other words, Morrison implies that in an effort to create a black homeland, the homesteaders of the 1889 Land Run expel local Native Americans who have already been displaced from the Southeast by the 1830 Indian Removal Act.

CHAPTER 4 CONCLUSION

Toni Morrison’s fiction engages with primarily African American community issues and tropes. However, as a novelist whose work is significantly focused on the past, her literature understandably represents the intersection of African American and Native American communities throughout the seventeenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Though texts like

Beloved and Paradise mainly focus on African American communities, reading A Mercy,

Beloved, and Paradise according to their textual chronology, and in association with Native

American history, can yield a rich understanding of the ways in which the author weaves together intercommunity histories.

As I posit in my first chapter, A Mercy, Beloved, and Paradise, when read in succession, offer readers a chance to trace Morrison’s representations of Native Americans from the beginning of American settler colonialism through American slavery, and ultimately into the late twentieth century. Reading the novels according to this model can also add import to the ways the texts move geographically. In my first chapter, I discuss the ways in which the land in these texts is represented as native, and, in my second chapter suggest that Morrison characterizes the land on which Ruby and Haven are built as Indian Territory. This focus on the land becomes significant when noting the geographical location of each book, as the movement from the

Southeastern United States in A Mercy to Oklahoma in Paradise invokes the same migratory patterns as the Trail of Tears in which several Native Nations were forcibly moved from the

Southeast and into Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. By replicating the movement of

Native tribes in the Trail of Tears, Morrison touches upon what is arguably one of the most traumatic events in nineteenth century Native American history.

In the same way that Lina’s survival at the end of A Mercy seems to indicate the potential for a continued Native presence well into the twentieth century, tracing the lineage of the novels against the background of Indian Removal suggests a similar theme of Native survival. The

Indian Removal Act of 1830 served as the beginning of Native relocation; however, the law was enforced on a voluntary basis and was targeted at what is often called the Five Civilized Tribes— the Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw. Despite the supposedly voluntary nature of the Indian Removal Act, each of these nations was eventually forcibly removed during the Trail of Tears over the course of the next decade. The fact that Paradise references the communities’ interactions with Choctaw and Creek tribes, and that Beloved makes reference to an old Cherokee hideout in Kentucky reinforces Morrison’s engagement with the migratory patterns of the Trail of Tears. Although the novelist also depicts local Oklahoma tribes such as the Seneca-Cayuga and Sac and Fox nations, the repeated relationship of Haven and Ruby with the Creek and Choctaw signifies Morrison’s focus on relocated Southeastern tribes.

The geographical movement from the south in A Mercy to the west in Paradise, when reading the text’s according to their intrinsic timelines, is also particularly significant for the

African American community. The migration of black Oklahoma homesteaders in the late nineteenth century has often been referenced as a kind of Black Trail of Tears where African

American groups follow the same path as that of the Five Civilized Tribes. Additionally, many

African American slaves completed the original Trail of Tears alongside Native Americans as slaves. In an article for CNN, Tiya Miles states that:

African American history, as it is often told, includes two monumental migration stories: the forced exodus of Africans to the Americas during the brutal Middle Passage of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the voluntary migration of Black residents who moved from southern farms and towns to northern cities in the early 1900s in search of ‘the warmth of other suns.’ A third African-American migration story—just as epic, just as

grave—hovers outside the familiar frame of our historic consciousness. The iconic tragedy of Indian Removal: the Cherokee Trail of Tears that relocated thousands of Cherokees to Indian Territory…was also a Black migration. Slaves of Cherokees walked this trail along with their Indian owners (Miles).

Miles’s assertion that the Trail of Tears acts as a third migration for the African American community is compelling, and demonstrates the ways in which the Trail of Tears is an intercommunity conflict. Ultimately, Morrison’s textual construction demonstrates the ways in which the Trail of Tears and migration to Oklahoma speak to larger issues in both the Native

American and African American communities.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Alyssa Hunziker received her bachelor’s degrees in English and in World Arts and

Cultures from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2011. She holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of Florida, where she is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in

English.