WATER, PERFECT MEMORY: GENDER, CULTURE AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE NOVELS OF TONI MORRISON
By
TIFFANY NOELLE HINTON
A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
2005
Copyright 2005
by
Tiffany Noelle Hinton
This document is dedicated to my mothers and fathers. I am because we are. Ase.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank my sweeter girl, Raiyah Parker-Rhodes Chew Shaw, for having shared mommy with this most needy sibling. I could not have made it without the girlfriends who got me ‘ovah’: especially Natalie King-Pedroso and Annette Singleton, my fellow single parents who provided family-away-from-home for my daughter and I; Kim
Dismont Robinson, who will always have first dibs on my private island; and Natalie
Marshall, for a lifetime of friendship. Finally, I am eternally grateful to the Florida
Education Fund for funding my doctoral studies and more than a few would-be crises.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv
ABSTRACT vi
CHAPTER
1 ON WATER AND BLACK METACULTURAL EXPRESSION 1
2 “SHALL WE GATHER AT THE RIVER?”: AWAKENING (IN) SULA 42
3 REBIRTH OF THE COOL IN THE BLUEST EYE AND SONG OF SOLOMON 102
4 BETWEEN CULTURAL CONSERVATION AND HISTORICAL INNOVATION: THE RITUAL PROCESS OF OSUN IN TAR BABY 124
5 “THE UNDERWATER FACE SHE NEEDED”: ‘CLEARING RITES IN BELOVED 156
6 “THE SECRET OF BEING ALIVE [THAT] SETTLES AT THE BOTTOM [OF THE WATER]” IN JAZZ 246
7 WATER, GARDENS, AND ‘ENDLESS WORK’ IN PARADISE 285
8 TO THE “GETTING PLACE” 335
LIST OF REFERENCES 342
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 349
v
Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
WATER, PERFECT MEMORY: GENDER, CULTURE AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE NOVELS OF TONI MORRISON
By
Tiffany Noelle Hinton
December 2005
Chair: Debra Walker King Major Department: English
This study takes a comparative cultural studies approach to the curious amalgamation of water figurations in Toni Morrison’s fictions. It combines a Black metacultural framework, in which Black cultural modes and practices are examined with the context of traditional African systemics, with recent discourses on the African diaspora. Water is primary among the discrete structures of signification and modes of figuration by which, I argue, a complex of such culturally- and gender-specific concepts are carried into symbolic action in the novels. The central claim of this study is that
Morrison’s water figurations serve as the central metaphor and organizing principle for the social bonds and rituals, ways of knowing and philosophical underpinnings that distinguish what I describe as a Black metacultural systemic that distinguishes the ancestral presence of the water goddess, Osun, at its center. The author’s graphic water figurations are replete with the iconography by which the Yoruba-derived riverain deity is known throughout the African Diaspora. Osun serves as figure for the self-formative
vi capacities of consciousness as well as the communicable, potentially communal, process of revitalizing such internal resources. This, I argue, is precisely the role the enigmatic water goddess assumes in Morrison’s novels. Through the water figurations that announce and accompany her introspective presence in the novels, Osun functions as mediating agent for those gendered metacultural strategies by which early generations of
African Americans not only survived slavery and an enduring legacy of racial tyranny but also instituted and maintained crucial measures of insight, order, and agency. My purpose in bringing the oral literature, iconography, and ritual dramaturgy of Osun to bear on the discrete structures of each Morrison novel is to demonstrate the novels’ productive relationship to a discourse of knowledge that is paramount in the cultural praxes of women and men throughout the African Diaspora.
vii CHAPTER 1 ON WATER AND BLACK METACULTURAL EXPRESSION
[T]he act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. 'Floods' is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.…
[L]ike water, I remember where I was before I was ‘straightened out.
─Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory”
The novels of Toni Morrison are rife with a telling aggregation of water figurations, the measured repetition of which constitutes one long and loaded question.
What does it mean, for example, that The Bluest Eye’s most devastated character, Pecola, is said to be completely surrounded by “inanimate things” which she “saw,”
“experienced,” and “knew” as “real,” as “the touchstones of the world, capable of translation and possession” (41)? Meanwhile, Claudia, the narrator who revels in all things liquid, not only overcomes the destitution by which Pecola is driven mad but, as
Morrison has said, she will grow to become Sula (Stepto 20).
Why does Morrison, writing in the essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The
Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” describe the enigmatic character of
Sula in terms similar to those with which she explains the “cultural distinction” of
African American literature? Whereas she attributes a literature’s ‘Blackness’ to “its language─its unpoliced, seditious, confrontational, manipulative, inventive, disruptive, masked and unmasking language,” Sula is said to be both “quintessentially black, metaphysically black” and “new world black and new world woman…. Improvisational.
1 2
Daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out of the house, outlawed, unpolicing, uncontained and uncontainable. And dangerously female” (11; 25). Do these designations suggest how it is that the title character of Morrison’s second novel
peacefully surrenders to “a sleep of water always” only to persist long after her death as a
vital, efficacious presence in the narrative action (149)?
Perhaps this aggregation of trait and symbol makes Sula an auto-referential
precedent for both the “water-lady” who steers Son toward the island where he reclaims
his legacy in Tar Baby and the “fully dressed woman [who] walked out of the water” in
Beloved (50)? This ‘water character’ and concomitant water figurations are repeated in
each Morrison novel. What do they mean?
I contend that these provocative structures function in Morrison’s novels as a
profound “site of memory,” as metaphorical markers of distinct cultural memories, which
are further informed by gender, which extend to the African cultural origins of Black
America (Morrison “The Site of Memory”). My aim is to examine Morrison’s curious
amalgamation of water figurations as primary among the discrete structures of
signification and modes of figuration by which, I argue, a complex of such culturally- and
gender-specific concepts are carried into symbolic action in the novels.
As Morrison paves her narratives with temporal markers of the economic, political
and social realities of the American experience, the ground of each tale is the lived-
context of Black culture, as nuanced by the particular experiences of African American
women. These texts do not merely reference elements of a Black, female tradition; rather
it is through this distinctive frame that they pose questions of existence. In approaching
the world from the particular cultural situation of Black American women, Morrison’s 3 novels implicitly recognize Black women as fundamental sources of cultural knowledge, values, and agency. As the institutionalization of African American literature in traditional English departments has been concomitant with the growth of Black women’s literature, this literature presents an implicit challenge to its critical audience.
That is, literature such as Morrison’s implicitly begs “the deadly political questions” of the ways in which “cultural politics and questions of culture, of discourse, and of metaphor” inform both the creation and the critical reception of such literature
(Hall 290). Morrison novels call attention to “information discredited by the
West─discredited not because it is not true or useful or even of some racial value, but because it is information held by discredited people, information dismissed as ‘lore’ or
‘gossip’ or ‘magic’ or ‘sentiment’ (Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing” 388).
Writing in “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American
Literature,” Morrison argues compellingly for a theory of literature that truly accommodates” the presence of African American literature in the American canon; “one that is based on its culture, its history, and the artistic strategies the works employ to negotiate the world it inhabits” (11). Registering her distrust of the “sudden (for our purposes...)” scientific agreement that race, as a biological category, does not exist,
Morrison says “But there is culture and both gender and ‘race’ inform and are informed by it” (3). I suggest that looking beyond national boundaries to bring a broad African- centered cultural context to bear on Morrison’s novels allows for a refined analysis of the provocative techniques by which the author represents African American cultural dynamics, as nuanced by the particular experiences of African American women. To do so is not to deny Morrison’s place within the American literary canon; rather, it is to 4 enrich our understanding of the ways in which the author’s gendered Black cultural heritage serves to inform the peculiar rhetorical, thematic, and structural characteristics of her narratives, and thus, the American literary canon. Karla F. C. Holloway, Carole
Boyce Davies and Patricia Hill Collins are critical trailblazers in this regard.
Holloway’s Moorings and Metaphors (1993) is a cross-cultural study of the linguistic structures by which analogous figures of Black culture and gender are inscribed in the literature of African and African American women. Moorings illustrates the rich possibilities of Holloway’s argument that close attention to the linguistic structures of this literature “can lead to a critical recovery of cultural organization and patterns of memory and telling (30). In Black Women, Writing, and Identity (1994), Davies explores the construction of female subjectivity in a variety of cross-cultural texts by Black women.
Such writers, she argues, resist the terms of dominant discourses and renegotiate issues of identity in ways that point to a transformational female aesthetic. In Black Feminist
Thought (1990), a sociological tract that relies heavily upon literary sources, Collins’ postulates a Black women’s intellectual tradition, which is grounded in “the subjugated knowledge of a Black women’s culture of resistance” and is characterized by “self- conscious struggle against” all ideologies of domination (10; 38). Collins cites in this tradition ways of knowing that are informed both by culture and gender, by personal and collective histories, as well as by the social and political factors that condition its development and articulation.
Each of these three formulations contains important elements of the methodology I would like to use in examining Morrison’s water figurations. These seminal texts call attention to the ways in which discrete patterns of linguistic structures, aesthetic 5 principles, ways of knowing and of framing knowledge into language provide the basis for theorizing about Black women’s cultural ways of constructing narratives that are equally attentive to dynamics of gender. As such, this work demonstrates that when we turn our attention to the discernible cultural linkages between Black women writers in various sites of the African Diaspora, we may begin to delineate discrete structures of signification and modes of figuration which are reflective of a woman-centered diasporan consciousness. Collins reminds us that the implicit function of African American women’s literature, to “empower… African-American women and stimulate … resistance,” is only realized through a theoretical perspective “that affirms and rearticulates a consciousness that already exists” (32). As Morrison’s novels reconstitute the Black cultural past as lived, rather than as merely recorded, they provide a unique opportunity for the close examination of the ways in which she deploys structures of signification and modes of figurations that reflect and reauthorize such a consciousness.
For a growing number of scholars who specialize in Black Women’s Literatures, critical tendencies to obscure this authorial perspectivity inspires a new urgency toward exploring the cultural- and gender-specificity in which Morrison’s novels are grounded for counter-hegemonic modes of narrative construction, reading and interpretation.
Michelle Bonnet attributes recent shifts toward a more African-centered criticism of
Morrison’s novels to Beloved (1987), insisting that “the print of Africa is to be felt everywhere in the novel, much more so than in Morrison's previous fiction. It manifests itself ... in the religious, moral, or philosophical values conveyed by the text” (“To Take the Sin Out” 1). While Beloved is clearly among the author’s most accomplished novels in this regard, I contend that each Morrison novel is loaded with structures of 6 signification and modes of figuration that specify the ‘religious, moral, and philosophical values’ of traditional African systemics. What is more, I argue that Morrison configures water to function as central metaphor and organizing principle for these cultural views.
While these water figurations are frequently mentioned in critical studies of Morrison’s texts, it seems that an imperfect understanding of water’s significance and functions in
Black cultures have served to forestall convincing critical investigation into this striking feature of the novels.
Aoi Mori, writing in Toni Morrison and Womanist Discourse (1999), recognizes water as a recurring symbol in Beloved. Water, she notes, “represents a dynamic force for rebuffing oppressions,” as suggested by its role in Paul D’s escape from the prison camp, Beloved’s return to her mother, and the neighborhood women’s final exorcism of
Beloved (136). While the functions Mori attributes to these specific water figurations are correct, alone, they fail to offer much insight into the workings of the text. Indeed, specific grounding and analysis of these and others of Morrison’s water figurations from the critical perspective of womanist discourse, which Mori claims, might have served to reveal the ways in which such figurations are part of what Mori understands to be the author’s aim of “subverting a racial hierarchy and validating African American culture”
(21).
Anissa J. Wardi, in “Inscriptions in the Dust: A Gathering of Old Men and Beloved as Ancestral Requiems,” sees water as “a crucial geographical marker” for Morrison, which “suggests a shared historic origin, beginning with Middle Passage” (2). Morrison is said to evoke “the presence of that terrifying journey” through “sacred fluids” such as
“amniotic fluids, blue water, spring water, milk, blood, hot rain, sea, oceans, rivers, and 7 streams” (9). Wardi does not explain how she comes to define as “sacred” this variety of fluids nor how, exactly, they function to evoke the Middle Passage. While she suggests that “the Middle Passage connects Africa to America” and cites the predominance of water imagery in African American cemeteries as “a particular African resonance,” for
Wardi, Beloved’s copious water references function merely “to literalize”... the
“‘slipperiness’ of language” (3; 10). Morrison, she argues, “returns to the Middle
Passage as the watery site in which the signification process becomes fluid, where ‘signs float free of what they designate,’ meanings are fluid, and subject to constant ‘slippage’ and ‘spillage’” (10). Whereas Wardi attributes Morrison’s water figurations to mere language play which serves to evoke the Middle Passage as a “trope of historical meaning,” I see the Middle Passage as the liminal birthplace of New World Black cultures in which fundamental principles of traditional African cultures were recombined and regenerated in ways that served to accommodate the radical transformation of
Africans into Americans.
That is, the trans-Atlantic slave ships were filled with people hailing from various sites in West and Central Africa who nevertheless shared certain fundamental precepts about: the interrelatedness of all life; the participation of the dead and those yet to be born in the lives of the living; the fact of all manner of unseen forces, which respond to human actions; the causal relationship between social discord and misfortune; the essence of causality and the utility of divination to unveil precise solutions, and; ritual means of fellowship in which existential “beliefs are carried into action.”1
1 Raboteau 15. See also King and Mintz and Price for detailed reflections on these concepts. 8
From their journey through the Middle Passage to their appointment as slaves in the
Americas, Africans forged collective identities which depended as much on their shared inheritance of fundamental spiritual perspectives as on their shared predicament. Thus, social exchanges among those who shared “certain widely shared basic principles” would concede the formation and ongoing development of integrated cultural subsystems throughout the African Diaspora (Mintz and Price 45-46). This dynamic process of cultural transformation served to provide nascent African Americans myriad prescriptions for acting in and on their ‘new world,’ including the power with which water and watery fluids are invested in the cultural traditions of West and Central Africa.
The ongoing development of just such an integrated cultural subsystem is delineated in
Beloved.
In the novel, Sixo, a direct descendent of Africa, shares his cultural knowledges and rituals with others on the Garner farm. Thus, the men befriend the trees, under which
Sixo dances at night; and the two women, Baby Suggs and Sethe, her replacement on the plantation, both look to Sixo’s example for the fundamental cultural understandings and practices upon which to build her own ritual. For example, Sethe recalls how, after initiating a plan for escaping Sweet Home, Sixo “watched the sky. Not the high part, the low part where it touched the trees. You could tell his mind was gone from Sweet
Home” (197). In its later re-enactment of the infanticide, the narrative attributes this same gesture, with a twist, to Sethe. Perhaps Morrison invests such cultural memories with a visceral power when Sethe is said to “feel... her eyes burn and it may have been to keep them clear that she looks up. The sky was blue and clear. Not one touch of death in the definite green of the leaves” (261). 9
What is more, the very first occurrence of this gesture to appear in the narrative is in association to Baby Suggs, who was both the only woman enslaved at Sweet Home before being replaced by Sethe. Sensing impending trouble just prior to Sethe’s infanticide, Baby Suggs not only probes “the low part of the sky where it touched the trees” but she also tunes in to the natural elements which serve as empowered symbols throughout the novel: “Baby Suggs, holy, looked up. The sky was blue and clear. Not one touch of death in the definite green of the leaves. She could hear birds and, faintly, the stream way down in the meadow.…” (138). In these representative passages,
Morrison indicates that not only did private social exchanges among Sweet Home’s
Blacks lead to the formation of an integrated cultural system, but also that the women elaborated upon this system in deference to their particular needs. My aim is to show that watery figurations are primary among the structures of signification, such as the repeated reference to trees in Beloved and each of Morrison’s narratives, by which the author portrays an African American culture that partakes of the dynamic processes by which
African cultural systemics have been built upon and transformed in ways that reflect the particular needs and experiences of women throughout the African Diaspora.
Vashti Crutcher Lewis’ early study, “African Tradition in Toni Morrison’s Sula”
(1987), established an important blueprint in this regard. The critic calls attention to the polyvalent value placed on water in traditional West African cultural traditions as well as to “the extraordinary subtlety “ with which Morrison weaves such cultural references into her representation of Black American culture as lived in the Bottom community of Sula.
Through the many water references with which Shadrack and Sula are linked in “spiritual kinship,” Lewis sees them as “representatives of traditional West African culture,” who 10
are designated as “water spirit, priest, oracle of the river god” and as “water priestess,” respectively (92-93). Lewis’ ideas, along with Karla F. C. Holloway’s recognition of figural representations of both “the goddess” in African women’s novels and “the ancestral figure in African American women’s writings,” has prompted my own research into women’s roles in traditional African cultures and, thus, my ultimate contention that
Morrison’s water figurations constitute elaborate metaphorical markers of the ancestral presence of the Yoruba water goddess, Osun (Moorings 22).
As Joseph Murphy and Mei-Mei Sanford report in Osun across the Waters: a
Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas, “under conditions of enslavement and
cultural marginalization, Osun traditions became a key feature of African-Atlantic
strategies of adaptation and resistance to European values and spirituality” (5). Such
traditions include Gelede, a Yoruba society that annually holds elaborate ritual
celebrations in honor of aje, elder women who are regarded as possessing spiritual force.
Osun is principle and leader of aje, who are also referred to as “the Mothers” (Badejo
77). In her ambitious study, Africanism and Authenticity in African-American Women’s
Novels, Amy Levin explores the legacy of Gelede and the Sande society of Mende
women in the contemporary literature of such writers as Morrison, Gloria Naylor and
Alice Walker.
Levin glosses over the integrative development of various Western and Central
African cultural traditions into an African American culture which was both new and
somehow the same. Nevertheless, she makes a compelling case for understanding “what
has variously been interpreted as the mystery and magic” of these novels in terms of
“gendered Africanisms,” which she traces to the women-centered society rituals that 11
“permeated almost every level of existence in parts of [pre-colonial] West Africa and, in some cases, still do so” (3). Levin argues that the “power and secrecy” attributed to women in such societies “is a trope for relationships and discourse” in African American- woman-authored novels; the black mask of the Sande’s female leader, she suggests,
“indicates the way in which late-twentieth century novels assume a mask or cover of references to European texts” (4). Levin suggests that such secret societies and their female leaders provide important contexts for demystifying aspects of contemporary novels by African American women such as the ways in which the texts “repeatedly link initiation, rebirth, flight and water, so often that the similarities appear more than coincidental” (8). To illustrate her contention that such textual representation reference
African rather than Christian and other Western rituals, she provides brief descriptions of
“two crucial immersions” in Beloved and “three drownings” in Naylor’s Mama Day, and
she notes the repeated “images of women beckoning out of the water” in Jamaica
Kincaid’s fictions (8-9). Thereafter, Levin cites these “uses of water” as “only a few
examples of connections between African practices and events in contemporary novels”
(9). However, Levin does not move from such descriptive reports to perform close
textual analysis of such water figurations.
I set my work apart from these studies by my methodology of comparative cultural
studies which allows the delineation of a more triangular, woman-centered diasporic
context─one that incorporates much of the outstanding research that now exists on
multiple aspects of both African cultural systemics and those of its diaspora and which
accounts for the ways in which gender impacts and is impacted by culture. I combine
this cultural studies approach with close readings in which I explicate Morrison’s 12
linguistic construction of water figurations within the context of both antecedent traditions and New World revisions of African cultural systemics. This eclectic methodology is meant not only to uncover levels of reference and representation, of denotation and meaning, that lay beneath the novels’ surface but also to contribute to our growing understanding of the ways in which the African Diaspora is socially and historically constituted, reconstituted and reproduced. Attending to Morrison’s
construction of a gendered diasporic consciousness, including the social, historical, and
economic factors that condition its development, serves to shed substantial light on the
socially-inflected meanings that attend the author’s water figurations─which are arguably
among the most unwieldy aspects of the novels. Such attention is meant also to further
our growing understanding of the ways in which similarities in cultural forms continue to
appear throughout the African Diaspora.
I argue that water is primary among the structures of signification and modes of figuration by which Morrison represents an African American culture that not only encompasses perspectives deriving from traditional African cultural systemics but partakes, moreover, of what I designate as a Black metacultural systemic that distinguishes women at its center. A metaculture, as Edward Tiryakian explains, is “a set of beliefs and symbols, generated in the distant past and renewed by succeeding generations of actors; … promoted and promulgated by human agency,” metaculture “is for the most part invisible, unobtrusive, but provides the basic and ultimate frames and symbolism for action” (102). I have adopted this sociological term because I believe it provides a useful ways of conceiving just how it is possible that the cultural traditions of 13
Blacks in the African Diaspora continue to reflect origins from which historical time and circumstance have so long separated them.
In this study, I presuppose the kind of “perspectival shift” that the anthropologists
Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price recommend with regard to explorations of
Africanisms in the Americas: turning away from an inordinate focus on formal cultural
continuities, I am most concerned with exploring the underlying perspectives, or
“implicit ‘grammatical’ principles that generate” similar cultural forms throughout the
Black diaspora (52). Thinking in terms of a Black metacultural grammar, I believe, offers a useful way of conceptualizing the complex processes by which the common principles, orientations and broad aesthetic ideas of West and Central African systems are regenerated and reconfigured, again and again, by successive generations of New World
Africans. Moreover, in using this term, I am emphasizing both a semiotic concept of culture, which anthropologist Clifford Geertz explains as “interworked systems of construable signs” or “webs of significance” humans spin in concert with others in their social milieu, and a process view of culture, in which culture is understood not as a set of static products but as dynamic, socially established processes for conceiving, approaching, and interacting in and upon the world (14; 5).
The gendered Black metacultural interpretive model I am proposing also relies
heavily upon Morrison’s own commentary about her works, including her understanding
that the novel functions as a vehicle for cultural transmission which “is needed by
African Americans now” (“Rootedness” 340). This function is important because
metacultural frameworks are not biologically based but, rather, a product of social forces
and voluntary choices. As such, they compete for “space, for adherents and for 14
institutions (Tiryakian 102). Thus, as the post-civil rights generation of Black Americans have come to take advantage of de-segregated neighborhoods, schools and other institutional options that were largely unavailable to their predecessors, many of the more substantial Black metacultural modes and praxes have come to be commonly regarded as quaint throwbacks to a notable but obsolescent African American past─or worse, as backward, superstitious misinformation. This is what most concerns Morrison.
She says, the “civilization of black people, which was underneath the white
civilization, was there with its own everything. Everything was not worth hanging on to,
but some of it was, and nothing has taken its place while it is being dismantled” (“Toni
Morrison,” with Ruas 105). The author explains that her novels are meant to fill that
void: “they should clarify the roles that have been obscured; they ought to identify those
things in the past that are useful and those things that are not; and they ought to give
nourishment”; thus, the novels are intended to recover “what we used to do in private in
that civilization that existed underneath the white civilization.… All that is in the fabric
of the story” (“A Conversation” with Le Clair 26). My contention is that Morrison’s
novels engage the work of recovering, for contemporary African Americans, those
gendered Black metacultural knowledges and strategies by which earlier generations not
only survived slavery and an enduring legacy of racial tyranny but also instituted and
maintained crucial measures of insight, order, autonomy and agency the ‘New World.’
The results of a 1996 archeological excavation reveal ways in which the earliest generations of African Americans drew upon such knowledges and strategies. According to “Slave Artifacts under the Hearth,” a New York Times article by John Wilford Noble,
unearthed in the Annapolis, Maryland homes of slave-holders were rock crystal, glass, 15
bone and other artifacts hidden there by 18th century African Americans. According to
Noble, “[s]cholars studying the artifacts are reminded of rituals in African cultures, past
and present, to honor and call up the spirits of ancestors, cast healing spells, protect
against harm and divine the future” (B5). These artifacts and others like them─which,
Noble writes, have been found in another Annapolis home as well as in Virginia and
Maryland slave quarters─provide evidence that enslaved Africans, though often baptized, maintained the rituals of their traditional African cultural systems.
Of particular import to this study is the fact that the excavation’s booty includes
white objects which, in many traditional African systems, are associated with water and
ultimate reality as well as the relationship between this reality, individual character and
wellness. The ethnographer Alisha Renne reports that among the Bunu, Yoruba of
Northwestern Nigeria, “water is perceived as white, and whiteness implies waterliness,”
which, in turn, is associated with “the spirit world … [which is] conceptualized as ‘under
water’” (24-25). Robert Farris Thompson, historian of African and African American art,
reminds us that the Bakongo, too, understand water to lead to this permanent dimension
of reality, which is conceptualized as “the white realm” or “the land of things all white.”2
As anthropologist Victor Turner has noted of traditions ranging from the Ashanti of
Ghana to the Ndembu, a Ki-Kongo people living in Zambia, water and whiteness are correlative references to a range of “desirable qualities,” such as goodness, health, strength, purity, fertility as well as to “divinity and the ‘spiritual’ and fertilizing fluids.”3
2 Thompson, Flash 134; Cornet and Thompson 43.
3 The Ritual Process 40; 46. See also, Turner’s “Symbols in African Ritual.” 16
Because of water’s central value in the traditional cultural systems of the Yoruba and
Bakongo, rites of passage are often focused around this polysemic symbol. It is likely, then, that the enslaved African Americans whose artifacts were uncovered in those
Maryland homes were confident that “the gap between … the spirit world … and earth may be bridged by the use of white things” (Renne 29). Just such an understanding is implied in Morrison’s frequent associations of water and whiteness. One of many ready examples is the “white dress” in which Beloved’s baby ghost appears, long before she walks out of water as “a fully-dressed woman” (29; 50).
The existential thought behind the use of such water symbolism cannot be overstated, for, as Mircea Eliade notes, “a symbol always aims at a reality or a situation in which human existence is engaged.… [T]hey express, one might say, the ‘spiritual as lived’…” (102). Indeed, in his classic 1948 text, The Myth of the Negro Past, Melville
Herskovits suggests that North American Blacks’ attraction to Baptist denominations was owed to the fact that the practice of baptism by total immersion is consistent with the practices of traditional West African “river cults” [sic] (232-235). Forty five years later, religion scholar Walter Pitts would agree that, with its similarity to “initiation rite[s],” total immersion inspired Blacks’ Baptist conversions (45-46). Pitts’ contemporary,
Dwight Hopkins, goes even further to specify that African Americans, in fact, instituted the very practice of baptism by total immersion (4). Together, these divergent viewpoints suggest water’s place as one of the “implicit ‘grammatical’ principles” that serve as viable, generative sources of Western Black cultural forms (Mintz and Price 52).
Since culture, as Geertz notes, “consists of socially established structures of meaning,” my analysis proceeds from “sorting out the structures of signification” that 17
obtain in Morrison’s figurations of water “and determining their social ground and import” (Geertz 9). Indeed, Morrison’s fictions proffer masterful demonstrations, with a gendered twist, of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s definitive assertion that the Black literary tradition “has inscribed within it the very principles by which it can be read” (Signifying
xiii-xiv).4
Morrison’s distinct and prolific use of water figurations prompts my overall
contention that such structures constitute elaborate metaphorical markers of the ancestral
presence of the water goddess, Osun. The author’s graphic water figurations are replete
with the iconography by which the Yoruba-derived riverain deity is known throughout
the African Diaspora. A water figure in whose myths are registered paradigmatic
principles of consciousness, Osun is both ewuji, “a pleasing emanation, an awakening”
and oloro, “a confidante, the owner of words” (Badejo 27 n 2; 29 n 18). As such, Osun
serves as figure for the self-formative capacities of consciousness as well as the
communicable, potentially communal, process of revitalizing such internal resources.
This, I argue, is precisely the role the enigmatic water goddess assumes in
Morrison’s novels. Osun, along with water figurations that announce and accompany her
introspective presence in the novels, functions as mediating agent for those gendered
metacultural strategies by which early generations of African Americans not only
survived slavery and an enduring legacy of racial tyranny but also instituted and
maintained crucial measures of insight, order, agency. My concern is two-fold: to
4 Curiously, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is the only woman-authored texts included in Gates’ The Signifying Monkey (1988). As well, Gates’ seminal theory of the Black literary tradition does not include a detailed examination of the ways in which gender impacts the Black literary tradition. See Levin’s discussion of the ways in which Gate’s theories are not necessarily applicable to women (16-17). 18
demonstrate that water is key to the novels’ particular patterns of figural, thematic and
structural emphasis, and; to show this crucial role is directly attributable to its function as
sign for the mediative functions of Osun. I attempt to explicate the ways in which water thereby serves as the central metaphor and organizing principle for the social bonds and rituals, ways of knowing and philosophical underpinnings that distinguish what I describe as a Black woman-centered metaculture that specifies Osun as its center.
In arguing that Morrison’s curious water figurations function in the novels as
markers of Osun and her mediative role with regard to these knowledges and strategies, I
am not at all suggesting that the author has specifically authorized this interpretative course. Still, Morrison’s own commentary about the implicit correspondences between
African and African American cultures does happen to affirm my arguments. She says:
When I first began to write, I would do no research in that area [connections between African and African American cultures] because I distrusted the sources of research, that is, the books that were available, whether they were religion or philosophy and so on. I would rely heavily and almost totally on my own recollections and, more important, on my own insight about those recollections, and in doing so was able to imagine and to recreate cultural linkages that were identified for me by Africans who had a more familiar, an overt recognition (of them). (“An Interview,” with Davis 225)
Morrison’s report─that relying solely on her experiential knowledge of African American
culture led to her imaginative reconstruction of structures of signification and modes of
figuration which are intricately connected to the fundamental underlying perspectives, the
“implicit ‘grammatical’ principles” or “deep-level cultural rules” of West and Central
African systemics─is not at all surprising (Mintz and Price (52; 53). For that is precisely
how metacultural frameworks operate.
Again, metacultures are “for the most part invisible, unobtrusive, but provide... the
basic and ultimate frames and symbolism for action” (Tiryakian 102). Because 19
Morrison’s novels reconstitute the Black cultural past as lived, rather than as merely
recorded, they provide a unique opportunity for “delving below the surface of social forms to get at the value systems and cognitive orientations that underlie and accompany them” (Mintz and Price 55). Before turning to close readings of the ways in which
Morrison’s water figurations denote a gendered Black metacultural grammar, I would first like to discuss in detail the linguistic features by which Morrison inscribes,
reconstitutes and transforms this grammar as well as the important sociocultural functions
that this inscription serves.
Claudia Mitchell-Kernan’s provocative discussion of signifying helps to explain how Morrison constructs water figurations to reflect structures of meaning that are implicit to her source community. I see no reason, however, to further signify upon
signifiying, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. does in The Signifying Monkey. While Gates’
application of this rhetorical mode to African American Literature is masterful, needless
are the revisions he deploys in order to distinguish the term from its Standard English
equivalent. For Gates’ theory of “Signifyin(g)” draws heavily on the ethnography,
“Language Behavior in a Black Urban Community” (1972), in which Mitchell-Kernan
clearly distinguishes “signifying” as a speech act that is unique to speakers of Black
English, “a non-standard variety of English differing from the non-standard English of
some Whites as well as from Standard English” (18). In fact, when Mitchell-Kernan
“characterize[s] the speech community with respect to linguistic features which appear to
be highly correlated to ethnic membership and which conform to patterns which are
common in black speech in other regions,” she is, in fact, pointing to the underlying and 20
dynamic presence of implicit metacultural grammars, which serve to generate such
similarities in form (19).
For it is internal:
control of the many facets of Black speech [that] serves to create a consciousness of kind and rapport with other Blacks. Adeptness in the matter seems to be predicated on background knowledge and skills derivable from participation in Black culture. In this respect, the language of the community serves to promote unity among Blacks and to underline their community of interests and a point of cleavage with the relevant other who are, for many purposes, foreigners in this regard. (63)5
In other words, Black speech is both constitutive and reflective of implicit metacultural grammatical principles. Hence, Morrison’s own report that.” there are certain things I cannot say without recourse to my language” (“A Conversation,” with Le Clair 27).
The high value placed on the creative use of language skills seems to be another
‘deep-level rule’ of Black metacultural systems. In “A Resistance Too Civilized to
Notice,” William Piersen traces African American displays of verbal wit and other skilled
usages of language to a variety of African communities, where such oratory styles are
used to “defuse hostility and check antisocial behavior” (348). His documentation of
patterned yet improvisational uses of allusion, metaphoric reference, subtlety, and “wry
indirection” corresponds with the speech acts Mitchell-Kernan describes (352). It stands
5 Mitchell-Kernan contends that Blacks are overly familiar with whites; that this derives from their historical roles as “servants in White homes” and continues through exposure to the mass media, which reflects the perspectives of owners who are overwhelmingly white. Whites, however, tend to have limited access to Blacks’ “intra-cultural world” (65). Today, more than thirty years after the publication of Mitchell-Kernan’s study, this argument is relevant still. In recent years there has been the advent of national Black media outlets, such as Black Entertainment Television and radio’s “The Tom Joyner Morning Show.” As well, hip-hop and other Black popular music circulates globally. While these commoditized forms enjoy mass popularity, middle to upper-class Americans have little contact with the Black masses, many of whom live in areas which are segregated in terms of race and class. Indeed, Morrison’s literature demonstrates her concerns that, for Black Americans, social advancement is often achieved at the expense of metacultural integrity. 21 to reason, then, that such speech acts as signifying are moreover reflective of a Black metacultural aesthete (Mitchell-Kernan 8).
Signifying is of particular import to my argument that discrete structures deliver a complex of metaculturally-specific codes into the narrative action of Morrison’s novels.
For “indirect intent or metaphorical reference” is one of its “defining characteristics”
(120). As Mitchell-Kernan explains,
Indirection means here that the … signification of the utterance cannot be arrived at by a consideration of the dictionary meaning of the lexical items involved and the syntactic rules for the combination alone. The apparent significance of the message differs from it real significance. The apparent meaning of the sentence signifies its actual meaning.
Meaning conveyed is not apparent meaning. Apparent meaning serves as a key which directs hearers to some shared knowledge, attitudes, and values or signals that reference must be processed metaphorically. (121)
Interpretation is thus complicated by the fact that “the significance or meaning of words must be derived from known symbolic values” (96).
Moreover, the strategic indirection by which signifying acts are characterized
“depends for its decoding” upon dialogic exchange and reciprocal applications of shared knowledge:
It must be employed, first of all, by the participants in a speech act in the recognition that signifying is occurring and that the dictionary-syntactical meaning of the utterance is to be ignored. Secondly, this shared knowledge must be employed in the reinterpretation of the utterance. It is the cleverness used in directing the attention of the hearer and audience to this shared knowledge upon which the speaker’s artistic talent is judged. (Mitchell-Kernan 121)
Such “messages are indirect not because they are cryptic (i.e., difficult to decode), but because they somehow force the hearer to take additional steps” (Mitchell-Kernan 101).
Morrison excels at this directive aspect of signifying. Mitchell-Kernan’s explanation helps to elucidate the author’s methods: 22
The kind of signifying … involving metaphoric reference and metaphorical significance may be directive as measured against the speaker’s intent or the effect it causes. The most obvious cases are those in which metaphoric reference is used to insult or provoke a confrontation with the hearer and such intent is realized by the hearer’s taking umbrage. This sort of signifying might also be considered directive when the hearer recognizes such intent, but the goal is not realized because the hearer chooses for some reason not to be engaged. (111)
Again, for the speaker’s/author’s intent to be effected, the addressee/reader must
participate in the speech/narrative act: first, by recognizing the many cues that Morrison
provides when signifying is occurring, then, by ignoring the apparent meaning of the
utterance/narrative structure, and, finally, by deferring to Black cultural knowledges and
skills in order to reinterpret the utterance/narrative structure. Moreover, Morrison directs
savvy readers to structures of meaning that reflect and elaborate a nexus of metacultural
knowledges that constitute discourse on the Goddess Osun.
To do so, Morrison draws upon a central feature of signifying, which Mitchell-
Kernan describes as the “consciously and purposely formulated … encoding” of an
“implicit content or function, which is potentially obscured by the surface content or
function” (95). This is because the intertextual relationship that obtains between the
novels makes for what Holloway characterizes as the “paired elements of text and
philosophy” (“Beloved” 518). Examining that which she recognizes as reflections of
Black woman-centered cultural traditions in the language and figures of Beloved,
Holloway goes on to distinguish in Morrison’s novels “a constant exchange between an implicit mythic voice, one that struggles against the wall of history to assert itself and an explicit narrator, one that is inextricably bound to its spoken counterpoint” (521). I would like to extend Holloway’s brilliant analysis to suggest that the “introspective,” which functions in Morrison’s literature to “consistently defy the collected eventualities of time ‘past, present, and future,’” is Osun (“Beloved” 518; 521). That is, the 23
introspective presence of Osun functions to provide a crucial counterpoint to each novel’s
narrator and to individual characters, all of whom are bound to historical time and
circumstance. As Morrison’s water figurations call our attention to this contrapuntal discourse, what unfolds over the course of Morrison’s novels is a metadiscourse about the communal possibilities of consciousness as supplemented by Osun.
Indeed, Morrison overwhelmingly casts this figure as central to her literary
representations of that which Victor Turner calls the ritual process. In his classic volume,
The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969), the anthropologist analyzes the
rites of passage or transition of the Ndembu people of Central Africa. It is my contention
that the healing rites that appear in each Morrison novel, including Baby Suggs’ oft-cited
Clearing rite in Beloved, resonate strongly with Turner’s explication of the “plot
structure” of the Ndembu’s ritual process. The healing rituals which appear in each
Morrison novel follow a processual pattern, like the Ndembu’s; that is, they unfold in
discrete, patterned stages. Secondly, and more compellingly, Morrison’s healing rituals
seem to bear out many of the goals that Turner attributes to the Ndembu ritual process.
Turner tells us that the ritual process functions to mitigate the “differentiated,
segmented, often hierarchical system of institutionalized positions,” which he refers to as
“structure” (172). Likewise, Morrison’s narratives invoke the ritual process as but one of
the broad metacultural strategies that have long-enabled Black Americans to resist their
appointed positions at the margins of U.S. economic, political and social structures. This
point leads to a secondary but important attribute which Morrison’s healing rituals share
with Turner’s ritual process. That is, the ritual process cannot be considered apart from
the cultural system that gives rise to it. Turner is careful to analyze the ritual process 24 within the full context of Ndembu cultural system. Morrison, too, depicts the ritual process in ways that serve to underscore the implicit grammatical principles that underlie and accompany its depiction.
For example, a close look at Morrison’s characterization of Baby Suggs, holy, which is strategically positioned in the narrative before the Clearing ritual, reveals her metonymic association with a host of fundamental principles of a gendered Black metaculture. In Baby Suggs’ home, “talk was low and to the point─for Baby Suggs, holy didn’t approve of extra. ‘Everything depends on knowing how much,’ she said, and
‘Good is knowing when to stop’” (87). Signified here is the absolute power of the word and the cardinal goal of balance or harmony. Each of these principles is fundamental to a number of Western and Central African cultural traditions; in Baby Suggs’ characterization, they emerge as gendered Black metacultural grammars. Thus, Morrison firmly locates Baby Suggs’ spiritual power within this context before announcing, in the very next paragraph, that she serves as an “unchurched preacher to Beloved’s community of formerly enslaved persons.
That Morrison’s depictions of the ritual process are indissociable from the distinct knowledges and social bonds that, too, are attributed to her characters is, moreover, consistent with Turner’s explanation of the goal of the ritual process. While the ritual process functions to mitigate relationships between individuals and society, it is principally concerned with resolving existential, or life and death issues. Thus, its overall aim is to bring about group conversion to the perspective of communitas. Communitas constitutes the “sacred ideal of human community,” precisely because it is comprised of concrete individuals, who, though differing in physical and mental endowment, are 25
nevertheless regarded as equal in terms of shared humanity” (Turner, Ritual 177).
Likewise, Morrison generally attributes to the Black community of her novels comparable core beliefs about “the essential unity of personal, social, and natural domains of Being” (Renne 23). Generally, the narratives invoke the ritual process whenever the vicissitudes of structure begin to take precedence over these core beliefs in the communal mind. Moreover, communitas is typically symbolized “by matrilateral ancestors, especially by mother images” (Turner 116). Indeed, Morrison’s novels frequently feature female pariahs who serve to bring about the community’s conversion to communitas. Such is the case with the Convent women of Paradise, for example.
Turner tells us, finally, that ritual thought and activity depends heavily upon the use
of symbols. Such symbols and their referents are “cognitive classifications for ordering
the ... universe. They are also, and perhaps as importantly, a set of evocative devices for
rousing, channeling and domesticating powerful emotions…. They are also informed
with purpose and have a ‘conative’ aspect.… [T]he whole person, not just the … ‘mind’
is existentially involved with the life or death issues with which [such ritual processes]
are concerned” (43). Arguably, Morrison’s novels, which turn on elaborately-phrased
symbols, especially those that point to water, Osun and the host of referents with which
she is associated, are invested with just this kind of power. As I discuss in detail in my
close readings of the novels, such watery figurations contribute to Morrison’s
constructions of the ritual process in ways that make them instrumental to the narrative
action. For both her characters and readers, Morrison’s ritual process fulfills the crucial
function of demonstrating the functional value of age-old Black metacultural modes and
practices for contemporary audiences. This is precisely the type of “poetic synthesis” 26
that Wilson Harris discusses in History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas
(1995).
The eminent Guyanese writer discusses a cultural “renascence” that historicists
have overlooked: “an activation of subconscious and sleeping resources in the phantom
limb of disremembered slaves and gods. An activation which possesses a nucleus of
great promise─of a far-reaching new poetic synthesis” (20). Harris’ “phantom limb” is a
pun on limbo, the popular West Indian dance that “was born, it is said, on the slave ships
of the Middle Passage. There was so little space that the slaves contorted themselves into
human spiders” (18). But limbo also reflects a “certain kind of gateway to or threshold of
a new world and the dislocation of a chain of miles” (19). Here, Harris is referring to limbo’s historical, geographic and cultural trajectories─from its emergence as “a novel
re-assembly out of the stigmata of the Middle Passage” to its relationship to Haitian
Vodun, which is directly linked to the goddesses/gods of African Vodun and accommodative of Catholicism’s many saints and rituals (20). Rather than an effort to restore a lost past, limbo constitutes “a new corpus of sensibility that could translate and accommodate African and other legacies within a new architecture of cultures” (20).
For Harris, limbo partakes of an ‘introspective,’ like that which Karla F. C.
Holloway identifies in Morrison’s novels, which is distinct from the passage of historical
time and circumstance. As Paget Henry explains in “African and Afro-Caribbean
Existential Philosophies,” Harris cites “a poetics of consciousness that resists
historicization. Its symbolic and naming capabilities provide history with original
meanings, without becoming subject to history” (32). This “poetics of consciousness”
involves interpreting historical experiences in terms of a Black metacultural grammar of 27
existence, which imbues physical life with spiritual meaning. Hence, Harris’ description
of limbo:
[it] seeks to re-play a dismemberment of tribes … and to invoke at the same time a curious psychic re-assembly of the parts of the dead god or gods. And that reassembly which issued from a state of cramp to articulate a new growth─and to point to the necessity for a new kind of drama, novel, and poem─is a creative phenomenon of the first importance in the imagination of a people violated by economic fates. (21)
Limbo constitutes the merging of socialized historical memories with the critical force of
its creators’ imaginations. Rather, than mere reaction to Anglo-American domination,
“[t]his ground of accommodation, this art of creative co-existence,” serves moreover to
reconcile the “horizontal drama” of history with the “vertical drama” of “a crucial inner re-creative response to the violations of slavery and indenture and conquest” (20).
Morrison’s historical focus, and the narrative strategies that accompany it, is very
much like Harris’ in that she, too, invokes ancestral memories as subconscious resources
and produces ‘a new kind of novel’ in which she “redefines [Black] identity by
establishing new relationships between consciousness and unconsciousness” (Henry 32).
As Paul Gilroy notes of Beloved, Morrison “restage[s] confrontations” between “rational,
scientific, and enlightened Euro-American thought and the supposedly primitive outlook
of prehistorical, cultureless, and bestial African slaves” (Black 220). Indeed, Morrison
deploys the introspective presence of Osun not only to counter such Anglocentic
perspectives but , perhaps more importantly, to posit the ways in which the historical
violations which followed from such perspectives gave rise to a gendered Black
metacultural systemic. The author tells Gilroy:
modern life begins with slavery…. From a woman’s point of view, in terms of confronting the problems of where the world is now, black women had to deal with post-modern problems in the nineteenth century and earlier. These things had to be addressed by black people a long time ago: certain kinds of dissolution, the loss of 28
and the need to reconstruct certain kinds of stability. Certain kinds of madness, deliberately going mad in order, as one of the characters says in the book, ‘in order not to lose your mind.’ These strategies for survival made the truly modern person. They’re a response to predatory western phenomena. (Black 221)
With Osun configured as mediating agent for the social bonds and rituals, the ways of
knowing and patterns of recollection that distinguish the gendered metacultural strategies
by which African Americans maintained crucial measures of insight, order and self-
determination, Morrison’s novels demonstrate a creative synthesis which, as Gilroy
suggests of Beloved, is as much a “dilute product of Africa” as it is the “antinomian expression of western modernity” (Gilroy Black 219).
Whereas Harris maps this phenomenon through a popular Caribbean dance,
Morrison invokes a water figure in whose myths are registered paradigmatic principles of
consciousness. Because Osun serves as figure for the self-formative capacities of
consciousness as well as for the communicable, potentially communal, process of
revitalizing such internal resources, she functions to fulfill the author’s primary concern
to reactivate such “subconscious and sleeping resources” in contemporary African
Americans (Harris 20). That is, Osun functions as something of a mnemonic device in the
author’s oeuvre. As such, the novels constitute Morrison’s own ritual process of re-
membering─of literally piecing back together─the figurative body of Osun.
Discussing the genesis of her first book, The Bluest Eye, with author Gloria Naylor,
Morrison summons her experience of being an isolated, single, working parent. The
author’s provocative description of the way in which she was compelled to pursue to her
narrative project alludes to the subjective force with which Osun is known to manifest:
I was thrown back on, luckily, the only thing I could depend on, my own resources. And I felt the world was going by in some direction that I didn’t understand and I was not in it. Whatever was going on was not about me and there were lots of noises being made about how wonderful I was ‘black woman you are my queen.’ I 29
didn’t believe it.… It was too loud. It was too grand. It was almost like a wish rather than a fact, that the men … didn’t believe it either.… And so it looked as though the world was going by and I was not in that world.… I was somebody’s parent, somebody’s this, somebody’s that, but there was no me in this world. And I was looking for that dead girl and I thought that I might talk about that dead girl, if for no other reason than to have it, somewhere in the world…. I had written this little story earlier … so I took it out and began to work it up. And all those people were me. I was Pecola, Claudia…. I was everybody. And as I began to do it, I began to pick up scraps of things that I had seen or felt, or didn’t see or didn’t feel but imagined. And speculated about and wondered about. And I fell in love with myself. I reclaimed myself and the world a real revelation. I named it. I described it. I listed it. I identified it. I recreated it. (“A Conversation,” 576)
The Bluest Eye was born of an existential crisis, which was initiated by her personal
isolation and exacerbated by her social alienation in the mid-1960s.
Mobilized by the self-recovery that her writing served to impart, Morrison directed her pen at an emerging master narrative in which her own experiences were glossed over:
the dead girl... not only was that girl dead in my mind, I thought she was dead in everybody’s mind, aside from my family and my father and my mother─that person didn’t exist anywhere. That person. Not the name, but the person.… People ask me ‘is your book autobiographical?’ It is not, but it is, because of that process of reclamation. And I was driven there, literally driven. I felt penned in a basement…. I had been living some other person’s life.… I was interested primarily in the civil rights movement. It was in that flux that I thought…. I thought there would be no me. Not us or them or we, but no me. If the best thing happened in the world and it all came out perfectly in terms of what the gains and goals of the Movement were, nevertheless nobody was going to get away with that; nobody was going to tell me that it had been that easy. That all I needed was a slogan: ‘Black is Beautiful.’ It wasn’t that easy being a little black girl in this country─it was rough. The psychological tricks you have to play in order to get through─and nobody said how it felt to be that. (“A Conversation” 577)
Thus struggling against a masculinist bias in Black social and political thought, Morrison
formulated a novel that would begin to correct the record.
In the process of writing and refining The Bluest Eye, Morrison suggests that she,
too, was refined: “once having done that, having gone to those places, I knew I’d go there
again. So when I said every now and then, ‘Well, I don’t care if they publish it or not,’ I
cared, but I didn’t care enough not to do it again” (“A Conversation” 577). That 30
Morrison became clear about her purpose in writing, and less concerned with publishers’
likely reaction to her subject matter and approach, is not surprising considering Osun’s
reputation as a catalytic force, as “an awakening” (Badejo 26 n 2).
Thus, what began as Morrison’s effort to inscribe Black women’s lived experiences
on the tableau of contemporary African American culture and politics soon spiraled into
an entire narrative project that articulates a strategic existential philosophy. By
existential philosophy, I mean “the systematic formulation by an individual or group of
an ongoing consciousness of its existence that is first concretely realized in everyday
interactions and practices” (Henry 15). The underpinnings of this existential thought were instilled by Morrison’s family of origin, particularly its women.
In an interview, Morrison tells Nellie McKay: “my life seems to be dominated by
information about black women. They were the culture bearers.… I feel the authority of those women [her mother, grandmother and great grandmother] more than I do my own”
(415-416). In another interview, Morrison explains the source of their knowledge and
authority:
I have a family of people who were highly religious…. Their sources were biblical…. But they combined it with another kind of relationship…. They did not limit themselves to understanding the world only through Christian theology. I mean they were quite willing to remember visions, and signs, and premonitions and all of that. … [T]hat there was something larger and coherent, and benevolent was always a part of what I was taught and certainly a part of what I believe. (“An Interview” with Jones and Vinson 178)
In a mid-1970s interview, Morrison expands her account of this belief system to include
her “relationship to things other than human beings” (Parker 253).
By the time of her 1985 “Conversation” with Naylor, when Beloved was being
written, Morrison talks very specifically about her “enormous responsibility” for: 31
the woman I’m calling Sethe, and for all these people; these unburied, or at least unceremoniously buried, people made literate in art. … [T]he inner tension … those people create in me; the fear of not properly, artistically, burying them, is extraordinary.… I have to now have very overt conversations with these people. Before I could sort of let it disguise itself as the artist’s monologue with herself but there’s no time for that foolishness now. Now I have to call them by their names and ask them to reappear and tell me something or leave me alone even.… They are such special company that it is very difficult to focus on other people.… But these are demands that I can meet, and I know I can because they would not have spoken to me had I not been the one. (585-586)
This is the ontological position and attendant concerns that drive Morrison’s writing process as well as her narratives. From the very beginning. then, it would seem that Osun was embedded in each, as “a confidante, the owner of words” (Badejo 29 n 18).
Indeed, the author has commented widely on the convictions she brings to the task of writing. I would like to summarize six such premises, which serve not only as markers of Morrison’s existential thought but also as reminders of the primary functions I have attributed to Osun’s role in the novels. First is Morrison’s insistence that the novel be both “beautiful” and functional: “it should also work. It should have something in it that enlightens something in it that opens the door and points the way” (“Rootedness” 341).
Secondly, there is the author’s emphasis on the novel as a mode of cultural transmission in which to reconstruct “those classical, mythological, archetypal stories” of the Black past (“Rootedness” 340). Moreover, she has specified that each of her novels invoke ancestral presences, “timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom”
(“Rootedness” 343).
Fourth among these implicit philosophical underpinnings is Morrison’s suggestion that, as Black cultural productions, the novels necessarily approximate the implicit grammatical principles that underlie and accompany them: the self-reflexive qualities and 32 refigurative capacities of Black English as spoken and “the affective and participatory relationship between the artist or the speaker and the audience that is of primary importance” in Black creative expression (“Rootedness” 341). There is “rememory,” the concept Morrison instituted in Beloved to indicate that subconscious memories exert a physical presence beyond the minds of the individuals who experience them. This concept is crucial to the novels’ concerns with mediating the existential angst which arises from African Americans’ lived-experiences of historical displacement, enslavement, racialization, and other forms of determination by the other.
Finally, in her postscript to “A Conversation” with Gloria Naylor, there is the author’s pointed characterization of her entire narrative project as that of reviving “the dead girl”:
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 rescuing 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… (593)
Whereas “the dead girl” functions as sign of an existential impasse, Osun serves as figure for the self-formative capacities of consciousness and as mediator of the ritual process for revitalizing such internal resources. Thus, I am not suggesting that Morrison’s “dead girl” is a mere concept-metaphor for the reclamation of a distinct body of Black, female myths. Rather, my contention is that her revival constitutes a reassembly of Osun, which functions moreover, to mobilize the entire metacultural field in which the timeless figure thrives.
Not only Morrison’s existential crisis but also her resolution of ‘reclaiming herself and the world’ is presaged in Ifa, an ancient corpus of Yoruba oral literature: 33
the ese Ifa (Ifa divination poems) tells us that Osun is the only female among the first seventeen orisa (divinities) to descend from orun (heaven) to aye (earth)…. The odu Ifa (Ifa chapter), Ose Tura, tells us that Olodumare, the Supreme Creator, assigned these seventeen orisa … the task of establishing an orderly world for human habitation. The other sixteen orisa ignore Osun during their deliberations, it states, because she is a woman. However, they are unaware at that time that she is aje [spiritually powerful women], and leader of aje, thus she embodies her own special powers given to her and sanctioned by Olodumare. Because they shun her, she arrests their progress, and their plans fail.… Olodumare advises them to counsel with Osun. Having done so, they offer ibo (sacrifice or restitution) to Osun. The Great Mother Osun demands initiation, and advises them to initiate all ‘women like her’ as compensation for their actions.6
The ethnographer, Diedre Badejo, tells us that the Ifa corpus is hailed by the Yoruba as
“the most comprehensive and authoritative body of knowledge about their people,
genealogy, history, belief systems, and philosophy” (2). Such primordial narratives
“concern repeated, or archetypal, themes that humans face over and over again, rather
than problems that are relevant only to one person or one group or at one particular
period of life (Doty 15). They are “experienced … as both true and crucial to those who
perceive through them [their] experienced world” (Doty 14). Thus, ‘women like Osun’
are very much like Morrison’s description of herself: they are pathfinders, innovators, coolly confident women who actively summon their innate power in order to correct imbalances and restore order to their worlds.
Like many of Africa’s ‘old gods/goddesses,’ Osun manifests with remarkable
frequency in a multitude of Black cultural systems. In Africa, the Yoruba water goddess
has several counterparts: among the Igbo of southeast Nigeria, imo miri animates large
6 Badejo 2. In Osun Seegesi: The Elegant Deity of Wealth, Power and Femininity, Badejo includes a useful pronunciation key for the tonal marks that distinguish among Yoruba words which share identical spelling (187-189). She explains that because Yoruba is a tonal language, its meanings shift according to intonation, elision, form and dialect and are, therefore, best understood in context. Unfortunately, I do not have access to the language fonts necessary for the inclusion of such tonal markings. For the sake of emphasis, I italicize Yoruba, non-English, and non-standard English terms throughout this study. 34
rivers and is thought to bring children and wealth, and protection to her supporters;7 female water deities who are associated with wealth and fecundity, such as Mamywateh and Mbumba, find followers all over West Africa.8 Just as these local communities
assimilated such figures with those brought by colonizers,9 New World Africans created
cultural systems in which various traditional African elements are synthesized with those
of Roman Catholicism and Judeo-Christianity. For example, both Vodoun, as practiced in Haiti and New Orleans, and Macamba, in Brazil, fuse Roman Catholic Saints with
Yoruba deities (orisons), spirits/deities (Vodoun) of the Fon, Mahi and Ewe of present- day Benin, and “‘local,’ ‘water’ or ‘nature’ spirits variously known in Ki-Kongo as simbi, nkita, n’kisi nsi and by other terms as well.”10 As Thompson stresses, “The fusions were
different, for Macamba and Vodoun are independent and distinguishable expressions of
New World black religiosity” (“Kongo” 155).
In this way, watery figures whose associative relations are consistent with those of
Osun have been recreated and revised─as variations in place, circumstance, and
imagination apparently dictated─throughout the African Diaspora. Thus, this matrix is as
new as it is old. Its tenacity is testament not to uncritical and unconscious imitations of
the past but to perspicacious and inventive approaches to the present. Osun is first and
foremost a perpetually transforming signifier, as indicated both by her cognomen, “the
7 Uchendu, 97.
8 Fernandez, 231..
9 Fernandez, 231..
10 Wyatt MacGaffey, Modern 26. See also Thompson’s “Kongo.” 35
everflowing,” and by the remarkable similarities that obtain between her and other ritual
media, both in Africa and its diaspora.
To the chain of metacultural signifiers that serve to distinguish reciprocal
relationships between water, individual character and wellness, and the spirit
world─which I explored in an earlier section of this chapter─we can add yet more links.
For Turner’s observations about the ritual processes of the Ndembu, a Ki-Kongo people
of Northwest Zambia, offer more pointers for reading the signs that cluster around Osun.
He notes that whiteness correlates with water as “state” and “process,” respectively
(Ritual 40). Turner also tells us that “coolness,” a “synonym for freedom from attack…
and hence for health,” is itself a process of water (Ritual 40). Whereas waterliness
implies whiteness which, in turn, denotes the spirit world, water is a process of this
permanent dimension of reality and coolness is its intrinsic technique.
These structures of signification, and the distinct orders of meaning they
encompass, converge in the figure of Osun. For, not only is she a “white,” or “cool” and
“covert,” goddess but Osun serves also as idiomatic symbol of the “secret, enigmatic”
powers thought to be possessed innately by women (Drewal and Drewal 102; 42). She is
ewuji, “a pleasing emanation, an awakening” and oloro, “a confidante, the owner of
words” (Badejo 29 n 18). As such, Osun functions as an intersubjective mediator. Thus,
not only does she emanate from bodies of waters but, when invoked in ritual processes,
Osun is also known to emanate from human bodies. In this way, she might not only cool an individual psyche but also flood entire communities with her enigmatic effect.
There are, for example, the annual Osun festivals held in Nigeria, and throughout
West Africa, where 16 days are devoted to honoring the riverain goddess and sacrifices 36
are offered to the Osun River (Badejo 103-123). Bahia, Brazil is the site of annual rites
in which Osun devotees honor the goddess by depositing sacrificial flowers into the sea
(Jahn 67). As well, Osun’s popularity in the U.S. has been spurred by the increasing
presence of Caribbean immigrants in major U.S. cities, since the 1960's (Murphy and
Sanford 5). A 1994 Essence Magazine article directs its audience of Black North
American women: “[i]n times of trouble, go to water─whether it is to the river, ocean or
bathtub” (Villarosa 68). While Osun’s name goes unspoken here, this example does signify her capacity to direct her restorative powers toward mediating human affairs.
As Gates suggests of her counterpart, Esu, the Yoruba God of mediation between
the material and spirit worlds, Osun might be thought of as a holistic signifier “of an
unbroken arc of metaphysical presupposition and a pattern of figuration shared through
time and space among certain black cultures of West Africa, South America, the
Caribbean, and the United States” (Signifying 6). I would suggest, moreover, that as a
figure of perpetual transformation whose mediative properties are distinguished in the
cultural traditions of peoples situated throughout Africa and its diaspora, Osun is a fluid
signifier in which is mirrored fundamental assumptions about feminine power, about the self-constituting capabilities of consciousness, about acting in and on the worlds inherited from ancestors on both sides of the Atlantic.
In Osun Seegesi: The Elegant Deity of Wealth, Power and Femininity, Diedre
Badejo examines several genres of Yoruba oral literature for insight into this remarkable
figure. The Ifa corpus, Osun festival dramaturgy, and oriki, or praise poetry, all serve to
document Osun’s historical, political and sociocultural prowess in Yorubaland. Consider
this excerpt from an Osun Oriki Badejo heard in Osogbo, Nigeria: 37
The Secret Child is created, Osun Osogbo! 11
The one who in flowing majestically along hits her body against grass.
The one who in flowing majestically along hits her body against rocks.
Onikii [the owner of the praise] Awoyegunle [the secret of being alive (that) settles at the bottom (of the water)]!12
Solagbade [the wealthy one captures or receives the crown]13
Ewuji [a pleasing emanation; an awakening]14
I again salute the Great Mother Osun, Osun Osogbo! (Badejo 19)
While its formulaic verse makes rich use of metaphorical reference, this praise poem is
not merely lyrical. When performed in accordance with its function as a ritual
invocation, Oriki Osun are said to activate, or bring into existence, the transformational
capacities of this formidable character.
The dense, figurative wording of this oriki delineates Osun as a powerful historical
figure, as an archetypal female who is rich in metacultural wisdom and fortitude, and as
guardian of the mysterious processes of procreation. She is further denoted as one who
flows through historical time and circumstance but remains uncontained by either; this is because she holds the unfailing “secret of being alive [that] settles at the bottom [of the water].” Finally, Osun is distinguished as intersubjective mediator of such consciousness, which functions to impart prosperity, or general well-being.
As this oriki clearly suggests, Osun alludes both to a specific deity, the owner of
healing waters, and to a mutational, diffusive fountain of power. Indeed, the word Osun
11 Osogbo was settled and ruled, in the early 1600's, by a prototypical Osun, p.106
12 Badejo 32 n 50.
13 Badejo 26 n 1.
14 Badejo 27 n 2. 38
means “a source that seeps out and establishes something, a beginning” (Badejo 176).
Thus, Osun has several cognomens, each of which attests to the various media through which she manifests. Yeye, the “Good Mother,” refers to her function as “the protector of birth, defender of mothers and adoptive mother of helpless children” (Santos 69). Hence,
Badejo’s report that “an image of an unborn human form floating in the watery womb is found in bold relief on the walls of the Osun grove,” which borders the Osun river in
Osogbo, Nigeria (80). Osun is also identified as Seegesi, “the preeminent hairplaiter with the coral beaded comb,” which alludes to her power to influence a person’s “inner head” or character (Abiodun 11). What is more, Osun is principle and leader of aje, elder women who are regarded as possessing spiritual force, including inherent capacities for transformation, and who are associated with birds (Badejo 77; Drewal and Drewal 11).
As well, Osun is a title for influential women, such as the founder and ruler of Osogbo,
Nigeria (Badejo 176).
While Osun is loaded with multiple meanings, relationships between her myriad
appellations, signs, and the themes that she typifies are highly intertextual and, therefore,
dependent upon rigorous contextualization. This is true of the iconography in the Osun
Oriki, cited above, which is distinct to a particular Osun shrine in a particular Nigerian
township. Still, this Osun Oriki highlights that which perhaps most informs this figure’s enduring appeal in Black metacultural systems: Osun is a perpetually regenerative signifier, an effusive body that pours through all manner of disruptive forces with her integrity intact.
While she is refigured to reflect local priorities wherever she flows, Osun recurs
always to her foundational role within the patriarchal system of traditional Yoruba 39
cosmology and social structure. That is, she signifies a holistic sociocultural vision of a
society founded upon and sustained by the age-old properties of reciprocity, balance, and order─between community and its individual members, humans and nature, women and men, and spiritual and physical existence.
My attempt to locate and explicate Morrison’s intricate structures of signification and modes of figuration within the context of both antecedent traditions and New World revisions of African cultural systemics is meant not only to uncover levels of reference and representation, of denotation and meaning, that lay beneath the novels’ surface but
also to contribute to a growing understanding of the implicit ‘grammar’ that continues to
generate similar cultural forms throughout the African Diaspora. My purpose in bringing
the oral literature, iconography, and ritual dramaturgy of Osun, in particular, to bear on
the discrete structures of each Morrison novel is to demonstrate the novels’ productive
relationship to a discourse of knowledge that is paramount in the cultural praxes of
women and men throughout the African Diaspora. In bringing such context to bear on
the discrete structures of each Morrison novel, I attempt to explicate the remarkable
narrative techniques by which the fluid potentiality of the Goddess Osun is mobilized.
The study’s remaining chapters include successive close readings, in which I bring
detailed descriptions of what I describe as a Black woman-centered metacultural context
to bear on each Morrison novel. Precisely because such context engenders Sula’s
improvisatory reach for a space outside the conventions of narrative representation and
interpretation, I have chosen it as the exclusive focus of Chapter Two. In my reading of
Morrison’s second novel, I attempt two movements: to establish water as endemic trope
from the outset, generally, of Morrison’s narrative project, and to locate the techniques of 40
symbol and metaphor by which the author will repeat and elaborate these figurations
throughout her oeuvre. To this end, I systematize the novel’s myriad water figurations in
accordance with the multiplicity of symbolic designations, sacred meanings, and ritual
thought and activity that various Black metacultural systems attribute to Osun.
Moreover, I explicate the novel’s particular patterns of figural, thematic and structural
emphasis in terms of the entire metacultural field in which this timeless figure thrives.
Chapter Three brings such detailed context to bear on Morrison’s other early
works, The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon. As it recurs to and expands upon my detailed reading of Sula, this chapter serves to trace Osun’s presence to the very beginning of Morrison’s narrative project. In Chapter Four and Five, respectively, I explore the ways in which Morrison’s fictions reach a developmental zenith in Tar Baby and Beloved, the crux of which is the overt demonstration of such metacultural grammars as the reciprocal relationship that obtains between the past and present, the dead and the living, consciousness and agency. With the explicit refinement of this focus comes
Morrison’s outright identification of the Goddess. In Tar Baby, she is “the water-lady.”
In Beloved, she is the re-embodiment of an “unspeakable” past; of black bodies and souls ravaged by the slave economy, then left unclaimed. These chapters focus, moreover, on ways in which both novels’ metaphorical references to Osun serve to demonstrate a ritual process for adapting to historical change while also maintaining crucial measures of cultural integrity. In Chapter Six, I discuss the ways Morrison configures water in her more recent novels to signify the untold potential inherent in Blacks’ lived experience of
American history. In Jazz and Paradise, the introspective presence of Osun functions to 41 resituate the improvisational against the inevitable, thus inspiring innovative metacultural strategies for approaching the historical present.
This study’s conclusion includes an open-ended summation of the copious nuances that obtain in the novels’ water figurations. Finally, I offer suggestions for further critical inquiry into the ways in which gendered metacultural grammars might serve to influence texts and other creative productions by Black women artists of the diaspora.
CHAPTER 2 “SHALL WE GATHER AT THE RIVER?”: AWAKENING (IN) SULA
“Until we understand in our own terms what our rites of passage are, what we need in order to nourish ourselves, what happens when we don’t get that nourishment, then what looks like erratic behavior but isn’t will frighten and confuse us. Life becomes comprehensible when we know what rules we are playing by.”
—Toni Morrison, with Bessie W. Jones and Audrey Vinson
Sula opens with the announcement of a community’s demise. Its first paragraph commences with allusive details: “In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood. It stood in the hills above the valley town of Medallion and spread all the way to the river” (3). That Blacks have been relegated to “The
Bottom,” the hills of the fictional Ohio town in which Sula is set, the unavailability of decent work for Blacks, and the general sense of futility the introduction evokes, all stand as signs of systematic discrimination and impoverishment. Yet, there is another sign operating in the introduction’s description of the Bottom: an abundance of water images signify “the force of meaning” of Black life in early 20th century America (Baker 28).
Morrison delineates the exclusively Black “Bottom” and Medallion, the surrounding valley area inhabited by whites, as not only separate spaces but discrete realities with the river marking the line between the two. Indeed, the difference between the communities’ ways of knowing informs the very origin of the Bottom:
A joke. A nigger joke. That was the way it got started. Not the town, of course, but that part of town where the Negroes lived, the part they called the Bottom in spite of the fact that it was up in the hill. Just a nigger joke. The kind white folks tell when the mill closes down and they’re looking for a little comfort somewhere.
42 43
The kind colored folks tell on themselves when the rain doesn’t come, or it comes for weeks, and they’re looking for a little comfort somehow. (4)
The Bottom was an interactive world—distinct from Medallion and its Western
conceptions of time, order, and progress. In the African-centered Bottom, time was a cyclically regenerative phenomenon for which the community bore responsibility, water
was a restorative agent of ordered existence, and progress was measured not in economic
units but in terms of maintaining balance between the twin worlds of the living and the dead.
In their singular quest for economic mobility, the introduction suggests, the
Bottomites lost sight of this Black metacultural universe and the attendant strategies by
which they had maintained insight, order and some measure of autonomy. Thus, the
introduction ends by drawing on negation to, first, identify the loss of these metacultural
strategies as the Bottom’s true threat and, second, to direct readers to the water figures
who will function to lead the community in a ritual process for recovering existential
certitude:
Maybe … [the Bottom] was the bottom of heaven.
The black people would have disagreed, but they had no time to think about it. They were mightily preoccupied with earthly things—and each other, wondering even as early as 1920 what Shadrack was all about, what that little girl Sula was all about, and what they themselves were all about, tucked up there in the Bottom. (6)
By opening the novel with the announcement of the community’s physical destruction,
Morrison negates her text’s overall concern with the renewal of the Bottom community,
only to devote the remainder of the text to realizing this very process. With the
introduction having thereby signified the necessity for, and the instigators of, the 44
Bottom’s ritual process of self-recovery, the text’s first chapter, “1919,” focuses on
Shadrack.
Shadrack serves as archetypal African American, a liminal figure who is forced to reconstruct himself within the antithetical culture of 20th century America. His early experiences prefigure his installation as water “priest and prophet” for the Bottom community (Montgomery 129). Deposited into the fracas of World War One, the naive young soldier discovers water as the demarcation between order and chaos: “For several days they had been marching, keeping close to a stream that was frozen at its edges. At one point they crossed it, and no sooner had he stepped foot on the other side than the day was adangle with shouts and explosions” (7). This scene marks the liminal or transitional phase of Shadrack’s own ritual process; it involves “pass[ing] through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state” (Turner, Ritual 94).
The frenzied battle casts Shadrack into a psychic void. In the hospital in which he has been comatose for over a year, Shadrack awakens to find that his hands have grown gargantuan1 and comfort is provided only by a forceful memory: “He saw a window that looked out on a river which he knew was full of fish. Someone was speaking softly just outside the door” (10). Unceremoniously released from the hospital, the liminal figure wanders aimlessly:
he didn’t even know who or what he was … with no past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book, no comb, no pencil, no clock, no pocket handkerchief, no rug, no bed, no can opener, no faded postcard, no soap, no key, no tobacco pouch, no soiled underwear, and nothing nothing nothing to do … he was sure of one thing only: the unchecked monstrosity of his hands. He cried soundlessly at the curbside of a small Midwestern town wondering where the window was, and the river, and the soft voices just outside the door…. (12)
1 Turner reports that liminal figures are sometimes “disguised as monsters” (Ritual 95). 45
Shadrack fits Victor Turner’s description of a “threshold person” or “neophyte in
liminality”: he has effectively “slipp[ed] through the network of classifications that
normally locate … positions in cultural space; he is “neither here nor there;” he possesses
“no status, property…, [and no] position in a kinship system” (Ritual 95). Thus,
Shadrack is “a blank slate, on which [will be] inscribed the knowledge and wisdom of the
group, in those respects that pertain to … [his] new status” (Turner, Ritual 103).
Shadrack’s ritual process continues to unfold in the jail cell where he is held for
vagrancy and (presumed) intoxication:
There in the toilet water he saw a grave black face. A black so definite, so unequivocal, it astonished him. He had been harboring a skittish apprehension that he was not real—that he didn’t exist at all. But when the blackness greeted him with its indisputable presence, he wanted nothing more. (13)
With this ‘definite, unequivocal, indisputable blackness,’ Morrison distinguishes between
Blackness as it is constructed in racialized discourse and Blackness as embodied experience. Thus it is with his experience of the Yoruba rite of water gazing, in which the ancestors cast his identity onto the only water available to him, that Shadrack progresses through liminality.2 Both his psyche and his hands return to their normative
states, as Shadrack is now prepared to “cope with” his “new responsibilities” (Turner,
Ritual 103).
As Victor Turner explains, this is because such symbols:
unite the organic with the sociomoral order, proclaiming their ultimate religious unity, over and above conflicts between and within these orders. Powerful drives and emotions associated with human physiology … are divested in the ritual process of their antisocial quality and attached to components of the normative order, energizing the latter with a borrowed vitality.... Symbols are both the
2 Raboteau discusses water gazing on p. 15; see also, Thompson p. 34. 46
resultants and the instigators of this process, and encapsulate its properties. (Ritual 52-53)
Thus, Shadrack is said to have enjoyed “the first sleep of his new life” before being
released from jail and “escorted … to the back of a wagon. Shadrack got in and in less
than three hours he was back in Medallion, for he had been only twenty-two miles from
his window, his river, and his soft voices just outside the door” (14). This metaphoric
structure is repeated and revised three times before it is used here to signify the
consummation of Shadrack’s ritual process. In recovering these evocative symbols,
Shadrack has gained unmediated access to “the knowledge and wisdom of the group”
(Turner, Ritual 103).
Thus, it is during the ride to Medallion that Shadrack commits himself to this
objective: “to order and focus experience,” to “mak[e] a place for fear as a way of
controlling it” with the annual rite of National Suicide Day (14). As Cornet and
Thompson remind us, maintaining balance between the twin worlds is a fundamental
issue in the Black metacultural universe (33). Shadrack’s ritualized observance of death
as an impartable aspect of life serves to remind the community that “life is a process
shared with the dead below the river or the sea—the real sources of earthly power and
prestige” (Cornet and Thompson 28). Thus, rather than being “the indicator of the
community’s shallowness,” as Karla F. C. Holloway has suggested, Shadrack does
indeed offer the Bottomites “hope of recovery” from the disorder that makes of their
existence a living death (Demetrakopoulos and Holloway 73-74). For Morrison is careful
to emphasize that the Bottomites recognized that “Shadrack was crazy but that did not mean that he didn’t have any sense or, even more important, that he had no power” (15). 47
In this way, Morrison illustrates how the very presence of this figure encourages
the community’s conversion to the perspective of communitas. Communitas constitutes
the sacred ideal of human community. It is comprised of “concrete idiosyncratic
individuals, who, though differing in physical and mental endowment, are nevertheless
regarded as equal in terms of shared humanity” (Turner, Ritual 177). This is the very community that Morrison portrays. Rather than neighborhoods that are merely marginal to the dominant society, she depicts relatively autonomous cabals whose social bonds and rituals reflect implicit metacultural principles or grammars.
In portraying the ease with which National Suicide Day comes to structure the
social life of the Bottom, Morrison illustrates the premium Black metacultures place on
individual creativity and improvisation:
As time went along, the people took less notice of these January thirds, or rather they thought they did, thought they had no attitudes or feelings one way or another about Shadrack’s annual solitary parade. In fact they had simply stopped remarking on the holiday because they had absorbed it into their thoughts, into their language, into their lives.
Someone said to a friend, ‘You sure was a long time delivering that baby. How long was you in labor?’
And the friend answered, ‘'bout three days. The pains started on Suicide Day and kept up till the following Sunday.…
Somebody’s grandmother said her hens always started a laying of double yolks right after Suicide Day. (15-16)
Even the local minister “took it up” (16). Indeed Reverend Deal’s satirical comments
about Shadrack’s redemptive powers become a prophetic endorsement of the pivotal role
the riverbank-dwelling fisherman will assume in the narrative.
In linking such characters as Shadrack with complex water configurations that
reflect the particular powers attributed to them through ritual action, Morrison renders 48
ritual processes that are, for example, directly in line with traditional BaKongo systems.
As Wyatt MacGaffey notes in Religion and Society in Central Africa: the BaKongo of
Lower Zaire, such ritual processes signify the values of a localized cosmos both metonynmically and metaphorically. For not only does Morrison craft metonymic representations, in which particular people are associated with a “succession” of power
between the invisible and visible realms, but she renders metaphors that indicate
“exchange” or “the uses to which power is to be put by analogies constructed in natural materials” (12).
Appropriately, then, Shadrack’s narrative actions, as well as those to which he will
lead the Bottomites, revolve around water symbols. Moreover, his characterization exemplifies the structure and scope ritual takes in traditional African systems. As Evan
Zuesse notes, in Ritual Cosmos: the Sanctification of Life in African Religions:
The personal egoistic sphere, the social sphere, and the transcendental cosmic one must all be brought together. [African traditional religions] generally do this through ritual, and through the ritual type of instruction which emphasizes the concrete and transforms it into a symbol. The entire purpose … [of ritual activity] is to anchor the [initiant] in this world of multiplicity transparent to meaning. A different mode of concentration is evoked by transcendental truths, one must learn to enact the world differently. One must see everything as a symbol. (8)
In addition to discrete concepts, such symbols reference an entire semantic field in which is contemplated such fundamental issues as the workings of the cosmos and humans’ place within it. Just as his monstrous hands, which operate as signs of a liminal psyche, are corrected in his rite of water gazing, Shadrack exemplifies for the Bottomites the existential issues with which ritual processes are concerned: directly engaging intense emotions in order to channel them creatively, unveiling the permanent dimensions of reality in order to bring meaning to human existence, and organizing experiences in accordance with this reality. In this way, representative ‘water characters,’ along with 49
Morrison’s discrete water configurations, signify Black metacultural strategies for
negotiating liminality, mitigating the debilitating effects of a rigid social structure and
renewing existential certitude.
Thus, it is no coincidence that warm water was Eva’s answer to her baby boy’s
pain from constipation (33). Some twenty years later, as depicted in the chapter entitled
“1921,” Eva realizes that not only does her drug-addicted son need water once again but,
this time, Plum wants to return to the semiotic water of her womb. The knowing mother
recognizes life as a cyclical and perpetual process of birth, life, death, and rebirth, which
the Bakongo refer to as “the four moments of the sun” (Cornet and Thompson 27). For
the Bakongo, Wyatt MacGaffey writes, “the path of the sun and of the soul are
analogous; both describe the periphery of a divided universe” (“Religion” 45). “The
relationship between the two worlds is described in terms of “time, space, and cause.” At
dawn and dusk the twinned worlds of the cosmos exchange day and night. Because dusk
signifies death, it marks the time when the ‘dead’ inhabit “‘this world’ (nza yayi),” as the
‘living’ sleep; likewise, dawn, which signifies rebirth, is the time when life begins anew in this world and in “‘the land of the dead’ (nsi a bafwa),” respectively. These worlds are separated by a body of water, which is “traditionally called Kalunga but most often referred to as nlangu, ‘water,’ m’bu, ‘ocean,’ or nzadi, ‘great river’ or by various ordinary words for water, pools, and rivers.” (MacGaffey, Religion 43). This is, of course, analogous to the Yoruba citation of an underwater Spiritworld.
Because “the two worlds are largely, though not entirely, symmetrical and
complementary,” the ‘living’ can perceive the ‘dead’ in dreams (MacGaffey 90). Thus,
one year after Shadrack had begun his annual rite to balance the worlds of the living and 50
‘dead’, dream visions propel Eva to carry out a ritual process for her beloved son, whose
own experiences in World War One had set him intractably adrift.
Descending her home’s stairway late one night, Eva enters Plum’s littered bedroom
and collects him in her arms: “Rocking, rocking, listening to Plum’s occasional chuckles,
Eva let her memory spin, loop, and fall. Plum in the tub that time as she leaned over him.
He reached up and dripped water into her bosom and laughed. She was angry, but not
too, and laughed with him” (46-47). Having recalled her son’s coolness, Eva pours
kerosene over him and lights his way toward being remembered thusly in the Spiritworld:
Plum on the rim of a warm light sleep was still chuckling. Mamma. She sure was something.’ He felt twilight. Now there seemed to be some kind of wet light traveling over his legs and stomach…. It wound itself—this wet light—-all about him, splashing and running into his skin. He opened his eyes and saw what he imagined was the great wing of an eagle pouring a wet lightness over him. Some kind of baptism, some kind of blessing, he thought. Everything is going to be all right, it said. Knowing it was so he closed his eyes and sank back into the bright hole of sleep. (47)
Rather than that of a brutal murder, this depiction is of a serene rebirth. That Plum “felt
twilight,” experienced light, then “the bright hole of sleep” suggests the fourth solar
moment, when the sun shines on the watery Spiritworld. Moreover, the anointing liquid,
infused with Eva’s loving intention, assumes the force of nommo, “the physical-spiritual life force which awakens all ‘sleeping’ forces and gives physical and spiritual life” (Jahn
105). This polyvalent Dogon concept indicates, as well, “the word and water and seed and blood in one” (Jahn 101). As unleashed by his mother, nommo is the catalyst that assures Plum that “[e]verything is going to be all right.”
The Yoruba have a similar concept: ase reflects the “absolute power and potential
in all things … and in utterances” (Drewal and Drewal 5). A fundamental concept in
Yoruba philosophy and social organization, ase is the creative force of the universe, the 51
morally neutral yet sacred power to bring things into actual existence.3 Ase emanates from the Supreme Being and flows through a complex network of deities, ancestors, and the ‘living.’ Through reciprocal relationships, the ‘living’ and the ‘dead’ can replenish their ase. Thus, ase unites all beings in an eternal state of interdependence.
Women, particularly elders like Eva, are believed to be especially powerful avatars
of ase and are thus honored as Aje, “The Mothers,” “owners of birds.”4 By virtue of their
age, such elder women are thought to have honed the wisdom, coolness of character and feminine potential which allows them to manifest vital force in extraordinary ways.
Indeed, the textual description of Eva’s journey, down the stairwell, to carry out Plum’s death alludes to the feathered creatures in which aje manifest as well as to the wide- ranging and enigmatic scope of their characteristic effect: “At the foot of the stairs she …
swooped on through the front room, to the dining room, to the kitchen, swinging and
swooping like a great heron, so graceful sailing about in its own habitat but awkward and
comical when it folded its wings” (46). As Eva escorts him to the Spiritworld, excerpted
above, Plum is therefore said to envisage “the great wing of an eagle pouring a wet
lightness over him.”
Indeed, Eva epitomizes this distinction:
Coolness … is a part of character, and character objectifies proper custom. To the degree that we live generously and discreetly, exhibiting grace under pressure, our appearance and our acts assume virtual royal power. As we become noble, fully realizing the spark of creative goodness God endowed us with … we find the
3 Drewal and Drewal 5-6; Murphy Santeria 130-135; Thompson Flash 5-9.
4 Drewal and Drewal 17. See this text for a detailed explication of Gelede, the annual Yoruba festivals in honor of elder women of spiritual force.
52
confidence to cope with all kinds of situations. This is ashe. This is character. This is mystic coolness. All one.5
Prior to the death scene, the text emphasizes the point that “Eva’s last child, Plum, to
whom she hoped to bequeath everything, floated in a constant swaddle of love and
affection, until 1917 when he went to war” (45). As one who has mastered coolness, Eva
assumes the power to kill—in order to revitalize—her only son.
That coolness cannot be considered in isolation from other grammatical principles
is essential to the model I am constructing. For, understanding the interrelatedness of
these concepts is imperative for understanding the unified metacultural universe that Sula
reflects. The narrative acknowledges both physical and spiritual reality, which occur
across the dual dimensions of land and water and include the ‘living,’ the ‘dead,’ and the
yet born in its enduring, reciprocal cycles. Thus, rather than “separate semantic
structures,” character and coolness are indissociable; they “shade into each other and
also blur into the existential definition of ashe” (Thompson, Flash 13).
The Bottomites confirm such a nuanced understanding:
in their secret awareness of Him, He was not the God of three faces they sang about. They knew quite well that he had four, and that the fourth explained Sula.
The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over. (118)
Since evil is as germane to existence as is ‘goodness,’ the morally neutral force of ase
can be directed in multivalent ways, ways which resist simplistic conceptions of ‘right’
and ‘wrong. Coolness of character is what enables the self-containment that allows one
5 Thompson Flash 16. Note that Thompson renders the Yoruba word, ase, as ashe. Such variation owes to the independent processes in which such distinguishable expressions of black religiosity are recreated by people of the African Diaspora. In this study, I have chosen to revert to the Yoruba spelling of ase and other terms originating from the Yoruba. 53
to directly acknowledge and counter such forces. “[F]or what has a face,” according to
the Yoruba, “is controllable.”6
Rather than evil, the narrative states, Sula is “distinctly different” (118). In the
process of designating Sula’s character, Morrison arranges good and evil, and other
qualities in the Bottomites’ local cosmos, in reciprocal union. In the novel, such dualities
as male and female, community and its individual members, body and soul, living and
dead, ‘hotness’ and ‘coolness,’ land and water—are structural; opposition is best
understood as complementarity. Dualities point to a ‘grammar’ of existence which
underscores the very objective undergirding traditional African systems: the enduring
quest for equilibrium. Ultimately, the ‘African universe’ is concerned with balancing all
forces in harmonious order, with stabilizing “the transitory nature of human life” by
correlating it with “the permanent features of experience” (MacGaffey, Modern 147). In
this sense, all persons bear responsibility for the cyclical regeneration of time and space,
and causation. That is, the harmonious maintenance of the cosmos depends upon
equilibrating the reciprocal universe of the living and the dead.
Morrison demonstrates the personal benefits of such cosmic maintenance when, long after his death, Plum continues to commune with his mother. When she is institutionalized by Sula, Eva is assumed senile, presumably because she speaks “both the language of the invisible world and the language of human beings” (Mbiti 63). On Eva’s behalf, Plum engages his own life force to impart information—he “tells [her] things”
(169). For instance, he warns her against the nursing home’s medication-spiked orange
6 Babatunde Lawal, qtd. in Thompson, Flash 12. 54
juice. Consequently, Plum manifests even more ase because his mother consciously reciprocates his ongoing existence.
Ancestral spirits are not the only forces who require reciprocal relationships with
the ‘living.’ Judith Gleason explains the compelling command orisas possess in Yoruba
cosmology:
Yoruba sages say that when a person is born he or she ‘chooses a head,’ thereby becoming endowed with a portion of cosmic essence, which is the soul’s matrix. Such primal substances of which our various heads are made can be experienced in their natural manifestations such as water, wind, fire, tree, and so on. These environing forces are not worshipped as such but rather as loci of beings the Yoruba call orisa…. They are numinous archetypal forces…. The word orisa literally means ‘head calabash’…. Our heads, like calabashes, contain a modicum of sacred substance, shared with orisa, whose portions are plenitude. The orisa with whom we have prenatally chosen to be consubstantial is called ‘the owner of the head.’ (7)
For the Yoruba, orisa are living guides for maintaining harmony between and within the spiritual and physical planes. These powerful personifications of ase are accessible to those who recognize them.
Perhaps it is the formidable character of the ‘Good Mother,’ Orisa Osun, that
Morrison had in mind when purposefully creating Sula as “a woman of force” (Parker
254). For soon after Plum’s cross-over, Sula seems to become Osun’s omo-orisha or
“child of the orisha.”7 Traditionally, such adoption (or possession)8 happens in
communal rituals, like the one Morrison envisages for Sula and Nel at the river’s edge.
7 Joseph Murphy, Santeria 14. Writing of Santeria, a Yoruba-derived religion that has traveled with Cuban immigrants to New York City, Murphy reports that, traditionally, orisas “engulf” only trained mediums. “But,” he says, “the orishas may reach out in ecstasy to anyone present in the spirit. In this way, the orisha puts out a call for new devotees” (14).
8 In Santeria, Murphy takes pains to rescue this term from the “Western” implication of “demonic influence”; “the basic problem,” he notes, “rests on the understanding of this consciousness as religious. Santeria presents an ontology of consciousness, the belief that certain states of awareness reveal the world as it truly is and that our ordinary awareness, while possessing its own validity, is dependent on this orisha consciousness” (137). 55
A rite of initiation is explicitly signified in Morrison’s metaphorical mode of negotiating the scene, which begins with Hannah’s proclaiming to love but dislike her daughter. This “pronouncement” is said to have “sent [Sula] flying up the stairs” in a state of “bewilderment” that registers as “a sting in her eye,” until:
Nel’s call floated up and into the window, pulling her away from dark thoughts back into the bright, hot daylight.
They ran most of the way. Heading toward the wide part of the river where trees grouped themselves in families darkening the earth below. They passed some boys swimming and clowning in the water, shrouding their words with laughter.
They ran in the sunlight, creating their own breeze, which pressed their dresses into their damp skin. Reaching a kind of square of four leaf-locked trees that promised cooling, they flung themselves into the four-cornered shade to taste their lip sweat and contemplate the wildness that had come upon them so suddenly. (57-58)
Morrison emphasizes Sula’s experience of being both nullified and quickened by her
mother’s words; Nel’s “call” redirects Sula’s awareness to the present moment’s
potential. Indeed, the narrative inscription of a pause after this line, as replicated above,
speaks volumes about the process of conversion that Sula is undergoing. “They ran most
of the way,” not only completes the original paragraph but it also signifies the supplemental power with which Sula has been invested.
The girls are indeed “Heading” toward a place loaded with metacultural
significance. By having them solicit connection with trees that have purposely “grouped
themselves in families” at the river’s most substantive site, the narrative denotes a
network of spiritual consciousness in which the girls, the river, and the trees will emerge 56
as equally deliberate agents.9 As Sula and Nel journey to this particular place, the
narrative coasts in allusive detail, fluently correlating the river, its “swimming and
clowning” boys, and the “laughter” by which the nuances of their colloquy is concealed.
This seeming shift in narrative focus is anything but; rather, it reveals another key aspect
of Morrison’s strategies of signification.
As Henry John Drewal and Margaret Thompson Drewal note, so fundamental to
Yoruba culture is the concept of ase that it generates a structure that is, itself, fundamental to Yoruba art and ritual performance. Following from the system’s implicit acknowledgement of “innate individual power and potential,” Yoruba art and ritual performance is organized to produce:
a structure in which the units of the whole are discrete and share equal value and importance with the other units and in which the autonomous segments evoke, and often invoke and activate, diverse forces.… This type of organization or compositional style is seriate.…
Attention to the discrete units of the whole in any medium produces an overall form that tends to be multifocal, often characterized by a shifting perspective. (7)
This seriate style of composition is evident throughout the novel. Hence, Sula’s first
chapter is devoted to Shadrack—his origins and the role he assumes in the community;
whereas “1920,” the novel’s second chapter, traces Nel’s origins, then mentions her
budding relationship with Sula at the very end, it is not until “1921” that Sula, and her
own narrative of origins, takes center stage in the novel. Together, these multifocal
chapters function to signify that the novel’s many characters, including the Bottom
9 Thompson reports that the traditional Bakongo correlation between trees and spiritual immortality continues to manifest in African American rituals, “Kongo” 172-173. 57 community itself, share equal value and importance with the title character; all have innate power and potential, distinct perspectives, and multiple relationships.
The concept of seriality helps to explain the incremental process by which Osun becomes increasingly evident in the articulation, advancement, and eventual synthesis of
Sula. For now, the boys playing in the river invoke ewuji, the pleasing emanation that is
Osun. The next paragraph reemphasizes the fact that the girls are literally hastening to their own meeting with ‘the Good Mother’: “They ran” is revised as “They ran in the sunlight…” to indicate noontime, the sun’s second moment, which “indicates the … point of most ascendant power” in the mundane world (Cornet and Thompson 28). In its entirety, this sentence acts to recollect and resignify the density of forces acting upon
Sula’s ‘inner head’: not only does it attribute coolness to the girls (they are said to create
“their own breeze, which pressed their dresses into their damp skin”) but it inscribes the sign of the four moments of the sun. “Coded as … a quartered circle or diamond …or a special cross with solar emblems at each ending,” the sign of the four moments of the sun is the “Kongo emblem of spiritual continuity and renaissance par excellence” (Cornet and
Thompson 28). Here, Morrison figures the cosmogram as “a kind of square of four leaf- locked trees which promised cooling … four-cornered shade.” Indeed, by the end of this passage, these associative references are thoroughly synthesized to signify the girls’ propulsion toward a process of renewal that will result from their willingness to savor their own “sweat” as much as from their “contemplation” of the mediative presence of
Osun.
But Morrison’s signification of Osun consciousness does not stop with the passage
I have quoted. Because this mode is indissociable from the process of its delivery, it’s 58
tempting to quote, and then elaborate upon, Sula’s every word. The efficiency with
which Morrison not only depicts “the performative power of ase,” but also renders the
ritual dramaturgy of Osun, makes this passage “not merely affecting but also efficacious,
not merely symbolic or metaphorical but instrumental” (Drewal and Drewal 5). Sula is a veritable study in “making,” or actively engaging the force of, Osun, the conventions of which I hope will become more and more evident as this discussion continues.10
Laying with their “bodies stretched away from each other at a 180-degree angle,”
Sula and Nel form the Kalunga line “of life and death,” which divides this world from the
next, on the Bakongo cosmogram; as Bakongo figure this liminal door as the river or sea,
it is not coincidental that Morrison invokes this threshold here (58; Cornet and Thompson
40). Intentional also is the transgressive language of etutu. Literally translating as
‘peace,’ this Yoruba word signifies the process of cooling, which marks the introductory
stages of the ritual process11 Thus, “[u]nderneath their dresses flesh tightened and
shivered in the high coolness” (58). The emblematic fan of Osun is also invoked here.
With it, she “begs” or “cools and purifies [the air], neutralizing its negative contents”
(Abiodun 10). As well, the passage marks the place of an emergent female fecundity:
“their small breasts just now beginning to create some pleasant discomfort when they
were lying on their stomachs” (58). Finally, the theme of renaissance suffuses this
passage, as Nel initiates an unspoken, unrehearsed, yet highly synchronized ceremony.
10 For Yoruba, to actively engage a deity and become possessed by her is to “make” the God/dess. See Murphy, Santeria p. 140, and Thompson, Flash p. 9.
11 For detailed discussions of this complex code, see Drewal and Drewal and Thompson, Flash. 59
“In concert, without ever meeting each other’s eyes” each girl strips bark from a
twig to reveal its “smooth, creamy innocence,” its ase-conducting whiteness (58).12
“When both twigs were undressed Nel moved easily to the next stage”: clearing the grass
from a spot of earth, she makes “a small neat hole that grew deeper and wider with the
least manipulation of her” ‘cooled twig.’ Sula follows suit until each girl’s hole becomes
“one and the same” (58). In this basin, which the narrator compares to a “dishpan,” the girls bury the twigs, along with an aluminum “bottle cap,” “paper, bits of glass, butts of
cigarettes … small defiling things” that, being white,13 nevertheless typify the reciprocal flow of ase between this world and the watery realm of the dead (58-59). As the girls
complete their cooling rite, the scene lurches to its symbolic climax:
Carefully they replaced the soil and covered the entire grave with uprooted grass.
Neither one had spoken a word.
They stood up, stretched, then gazed out over the swift dull water as an unspeakable restlessness and agitation held them.
At the same instant each girl heard footsteps in the grass. A little boy in too big knickers was coming up from the lower bank of the river. (59)
Tumultuous and impassive at once, the river draws Chicken Little near.
While Nel would send him away, Sula solicits Chicken Little to worldly symbols of
his “immortal spirit”14: helping the boy to the top of a riverside Beech, “Sula pointed to
the far side of the river.” From their perch, the river appears to go on forever; back on
the ground, however, Nel looks “small and foreshortened.” Glimpsing the two
12 Murphy Santeria 80.
13 Renne notes that white includes transparent shades as well as those of light gray (p. 24).
14 Thompson “Kongo” 173. 60
alternative worlds, Chicken readily chooses an infinite existence. “I ain’t never coming
down,” he says. The girls insist that he retreat from his newly found vision, but the boy
says plainly: “Lemme go.” After they are both replanted on the ground, Sula does just
that. She:
picked him up by his hands and swung him outward then around and around. His knickers ballooned and his shrieks of frightened joy startled the birds and the fat grasshoppers. When he slipped from her hands and sailed away out over the water they could still hear his bubbly laughter. (60-61)
“Swift” and “dull” before, the river “darkened and closed quickly over” the boy’s body
(61). As “the something newly missing” from the earth becomes “the peace of the river,” the transcendent event is realized (61) [my emphasis].
Indeed, from its inception as Sula’s response to Hannah’s “stinging” words to this
cooling of the river, the entire event imbues the Yoruba idea of etutu. I’ve already
discussed such cooling or sacrificial rites as opening markers of ritual performances, but
there is more. For etutu is executed as well at the close of “transitory, worldly
manifestation[s] of an otherworldly reality” (Drewal and Drewal 4). Such discrete
introductory and concluding formulas are said to both bridge the material world, bringing
participants into a state of ritual transcendence, and “restore normalcy” after the fact
(Drewal and Drewal 4). In this way, The Good Mother is assuaged, Sula’s life force is
strengthened, and Chicken Little comes to fill his ‘too big pants.’
Tellingly, the narrative’s extensive description of the recovery of Chicken’s body
offers a succinct forecast of what would otherwise have been a delimited future for him
on earth:
A bargeman … found Chicken later that afternoon stuck in some rocks and weeds, his knickers ballooning about his legs. He would have left him there but noticed that it was a child, not an old black man, as it first appeared, and he prodded the body loose, netted it, and hauled it aboard. He shook his head in disgust at the kind 61
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. He dumped Chicken Little into a burlap sack and tossed him next to some egg crates and boxes of wool cloth. Later, … still bemused by God’s curse and the terrible burden his own kind had of elevating Ham’s sons, he suddenly became alarmed by the thought that the corpse in this heat would have a terrible odor, which might get into the fabric of his woolen cloth. He dragged the sack away and hooked it over the side, so that the Chicken’s body was half in and half out of the water.
Wiping the sweat from his neck, he reported his find to the sheriff at Porter’s Landing, who said they didn’t have no niggers in their county, but that some lived in those hills ’cross the river, up above Medallion. The bargeman said he couldn’t go all the way back there, it was every bit of two miles. The sheriff said whyn’t he throw it on back into the water. The bargeman said he never shoulda taken it out in the first place. Finally they got the man who ran the ferry twice a day to agree to take it over in the morning.
That was why Chicken Little was missing for three days and didn’t get to the embalmer’s until the fourth day, by which time he was unrecognizable to almost everybody who once knew him, and even his mother wasn’t deep down sure, except that it had to be him since nobody could find him. When she saw his clothes lying on the table in the basement of the mortuary, her mouth snapped shut, and when she saw his body her mouth flew wide open again and it was seven hours before she was able to close it and make the first sound.
So the coffin was closed. (63-64)
By subtly contrasting organic and inorganic metaphors here, Morrison’s achieves a brilliant delineation of the conflicting worlds whites and Blacks occupy in the novel.
First, the meaning of Chicken Little’s name is doubled, which is a conceptual allusion to the twin worlds of the living and the ‘dead.’ (Drewal and Drewal11). Thus, there is the conventional assumption that his name compares with that of the nursery tale character whose urgent warnings that the sky is falling goes unheeded by his neighbors.
On the other hand, it alludes to the BaKongo-derived idea that the sacrifice of a “white,” or cool, chicken releases the powers of “the white realm,” the Spiritworld (Thompson,
Flash 134). 62
The bargeman’s name is contracted to suggest that he is indissociable from the
vessel of freight transportation he propels through the waters. This signifies not only the
anomalous system of profit by might, with the barge as figure of terrorizing imposition, but also its anonymity. Until he realizes that it is that of a child, the bargeman’s initial
impulse is to disregard the Black male body. Then, assuming that Chicken Little is the
victim of delayed infanticide, he proceeds to describe Blacks as deviant, animal-like others.
Meanwhile, Morrison parallels the bargeman’s words with his own dehumanizing actions: he is said to “dump,” “sack,” and “toss” the child’s body among his cargo.
“Bemused,” by interrelated myths of white supremacy—God’s allegedly cursed regard for Black humanity is said to make for ‘the white man’s burden’—the bargeman is then
“alarmed” into recalling his priority: his material goods. Because the boy’s rotting corpse, now referred to as “the Chicken’s body,” threatens his prosperity, the bargeman suspends the boy between earth and water, “wipe[s]” away his own moisture, and lands his barge. Next, Morrison’s portrayal emphasizes the easy “he said …” then “he said …” way in which he and a sheriff discuss vanquishing the burden of Chicken Little’s body, now referred to as “it.”
Finally, Morrison uses the body’s misadventure with the bargeman to resituate
Black communal reverence for the boy’s worth against such disregard. “That was why”:
“Chicken Little was missing for three days”; he could not be located by the community’s
‘everybody’ (the implied inverse of “nobody”); Chicken Little’s body has so decomposed that his coffin has to be closed, and; Chicken Little’s mother is overcome with a grief so
striking that she loses control of her mouth for a full “seven hours” [my emphasis]. 63
While theirs is not a full comprehension of the actual significance of Chicken
Little’s passing, Nel and Sula do acknowledge the narrative suggestion that the boy’s
“immolat[ion] … works toward a regeneration of life” (De Hensch 124). The girls are
led by the examples of the women attending Chicken Little’s funeral, the hands of whom
“unfolded like pairs of raven’s wings and flew high above their hats in the air” (65).
From their exalted perch, ‘the Mothers’:
…saw the Lamb’s eye and the truly innocent victim: themselves. They acknowledged the innocent child hiding in the corner of their hearts, holding a sugar-and-butter sandwich. That one. The one who lodged deep in their fat, thin, old, young skin, and was the one the world had hurt.
And when they thought about all that life and death locked into that little closed coffin they danced and screamed, not to protest God’s will but to acknowledge it and confirm once more their conviction that the only way to avoid the hand of God was to get in it. (65-66)
At the burial, Sula and Nel affirm this communal “conviction,” noting that through their
interaction with him, Chicken Little is no longer stuck in the detritus of the world: “They
held hands and knew that only the coffin would lie in the earth; the bubbly laughter and
the press of fingers in the palm would stay aboveground forever” (66). Thus, the scene
that began with the burial of ase-bearing things at the Kalunga line ends with the burial
of the ‘white’ chicken whose immolation will effectively release the powers of “the white
realm” throughout the Bottom. However, as indicated in the nursery tale that Chicken
Little’s name serves also to invoke, this process may very well go unheeded by the
Bottomites.
For the neophyte water priestess, confirmation of her role in this process is
“something only” a fellow Omo-Osun (child of Osun) “could give” (156). In Sula’s
birthmark, Shadrack recognizes a tadpole—an amphibian whose sole purpose is to transform into a higher state of being—and therefore “knew she was a friend” (156). He 64
bears witness to his crony’s destiny, saying “‘always’ to convince her, assure her, of
permanency” (157). For Sula, “[h]e had answered a question she had not asked, and its
promise licked at her feet” (63).
Impatient and fickle, young Sula is unprepared for her supplemental power.
Consciously unaware of her obligation to assist in Chicken Little’s transition, Sula thinks her actions at the river’s edge prove her unreliability. While her perspective is shortsighted, her conclusions are correct. Indeed, in this African-centered universe, where life revolves around a communal network of the ‘living,’ orisas, ancestors and other spirit forces, there truly is “no other that you could count on … no self to count on either” (119). That is to say, there is no personal identity nor individual consideration that negates that of the collective good; no concept of enlightenment, no personal salvation that leaves behind the larger community of the ‘living,’ the ‘dead’ and the yet born. Having “no ego” to interfere with the fulfillment of coolness and being unsullied by the antithetical cosmology that eclipses her neighbors, Sula seems the perfect vessel for Osun’s redemptive powers (119).
It is loneliness, too, which avails Sula to The Good Mother’s embrace. Isolated
from her “distant mother,” Sula escapes her chaotic household through Spirit’s doorway
(52). She “spent hours in the attic … galloping through her own mind on a gray-and-
white horse tasting sugar and smelling roses in full view of someone who shared both the
taste and the speed” (52). Raboteau’s note that equestrian imagery signifies the god/dess’
descending on, or mounting, the head of a medium,15 Renne’s note that shades of “light
15 See p. 82. This understanding of orisa possession is widely held; see, for example, Badejo and Murphy (Both Santeria and Working). Indeed, Zora Neale Hurston’s 1938 account of Neo-African religious practices is aptly titled Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. 65
gray” are included in the delineation of watery whiteness and Jahn’s reminder that
“flowers are sacrificed to [Osun] and she drinks strained honey” combine to offer striking
support for the idea that it is indeed Osun who supplements Sula’s consciousness (24;
67). What is more, this ‘white,’ or cool and covert, water figure is associated with wealth and the color gold.16 Even before her initiation as an Omo-Osun, Sula is said to have a
birthmark, “shaped something like a stemmed rose,” over her “large, quiet eyes” (52).17
Morrison is careful to specify that the birthmark will “darken,” or intensify with the passage of time. That the birthmark of her youth is “the same shade as her gold-flecked eyes, which, to the end, were as steady and clean as rain,” signifies that Sula was born an
Osun (53).
Immediately after her initiation, however, Sula begins to display the particular powers attributed to her through such ritual action. Soon thereafter, Sula’s family becomes frustrated by the girl’s sudden “craziness” (75). In her study of Candomble, one of Brazil’s orisa-based religions, Mikelle Omari indicates that initiates come to take on their deity’s personality, behavior traits, and associative symbols (147). Thus,
“everybody” is right on target in assuming that Sula’s unprecedented irritability, her determination to bathe the water-shy deweys, and her general “acting up,” is natural (74).
Moreover, they are correct in correlating her emerging transformation with the ideograph of Osun that is inscribed on her eyelid: “The birthmark over her eye was getting darker and looked more like a stemmed rose” (74). Indeed, Sula’s “nature [is] coming down,”
16 Osun oral literature attributes to the riverain goddess a wealth of bracelets, and other jewelry—all in brass. This alloy of metallic elements, along with its attendant hues of gold and yellow, is one of the most empowered symbols of Orisa Osun; see Badejo 108-109, Jahn 67, and Thompson 79.
17 On p. 4 of Flash, Thompson reports that wide eyes reflect spiritual alertness. He quotes Arabo Eko: “under the influence of a spirit, eyes swell to accommodate … the eyes of the god” (9). 66
when the ‘hot’ aspect of the otherwise ‘cool’ Goddess Osun emerges as a harbinger of
Hannah’s impending death (74).
As Omari explains,
[t]he relationship between the initiate and the orixa [Portuguese rendering of orisa] … is intense, personal and reciprocal. The orixa is viewed as simultaneously possessing unlimited capabilities for coercive and punitive powers as well as supportive and beneficial powers. The concept that the orixa (and other supernatural forces) possess the power to intervene in a positive manner in all human affairs is counterbalanced by the idea that if they are offended, negative intervention is the unfailing result.… The orixa possess the power to punish not only initiates and affiliates … but anyone who offends them, the initiates they protect, or the values they represent. (147)
Recall, it is Hannah’s declaration of love but dislike for her daughter that instigates
Sula’s direct alliance with Yeye. When combined with this representative line of an Osun
Oriki—“Strong woman who burns a person”18—Omari’s observation of orisas’ far-
reaching powers helps explain why, after receiving a series of divine warnings, Hannah
ignites.
Hannah’s questioning of her own mother’s love, though listed as the second of five
“strange things” Eva later cites as omens of Hannah’s impending death, is first to appear in the text. Not only does this line open the chapter but, in emphasizing the fundamental
significance of parent-child relations, it operates as a directive for reading the events of
“1923.” Indeed, what Barbara Christian characterizes as “a question that must be answered before [Hannah] dies” is actually the statement that seals her death
(“Contemporary Fables” 80). For Hannah’s query, “Mamma, did you ever love us?”
18 On p. 4 of Flash, Thompson reports that wide eyes reflect spiritual alertness. He quotes Arabo Eko: “under the influence of a spirit, eyes swell to accommodate … the eyes of the god” (9). 67
indicates, as Eva states, “an evil wonderin” that is both challenged and resolved thorough
the chapter’s sequence of events (67).
Hannah, who lives under Eva’s now-prosperous roof, dares to question the love of
a mother who has sacrificed for her children’s lives and has a stump of a leg to prove it.
Despite her constant whirl of domestic activity, Hannah lacks the generosity, the
coolness, associated among the Yoruba with iwa, character and custom. As we have already seen in the case of Eva, coolness of character is crucial for the individual maintenance of ase. When Hannah slights Eva, who should command the highest respect
as her mother and as a powerfully mature woman, her own life force becomes
weakened.19
Morrison’s fastidious construction of their confrontation conveys the depths of
Hannah’s disharmonious character. Hannah presses her mother to defend her parenting
record but refuses to hear—“I know ‘bout them beets, Mamma. You told us that a million times”—the meaning of Eva’s words (69). Snapping Kentucky Wonder pole beans all the while, Hannah is only willing to endure her mother’s narrative, of her
round-the-clock struggle to keep her children alive and well in the “killer” year of 1895,
until the beans are ready to be washed (69). Now, Hannah fully intends disrespect:
She picked up the basket and stood with it and the bowl of beans over her mother.
Eva’s face was still asking her last question. Hannah looked into her mother’s eyes.
‘But what about Plum? What’d you kill Plum for, Mamma?’ (69-70)
19 See Thompson’s extended discussion of traditional Yoruba aspects of characteristic coolness and the consequences of neglecting such good character in Flash, pp. 9-16. 68
By literally looking down on her mother, ignoring her responses, and challenging her with direct eye contact, Hannah completely disavows iwa.
As Hannah waits for an answer, Eva surrenders to a memory of “that winter night
in the outhouse holding her baby in the dark, …the last bit of lard scooped from the sides
of the can, held deliberately on the tip of her middle finger…. The last food staple in the
house she had rammed up her baby’s behind to keep from hurting him too much when she opened up his bowels to pull the stools out” as she relieved him of constipation (70).
So vivid is her rememory of Plum’s very first revival at her hands, that, “[e]ven now on
the hottest day anyone in Medallion could remember … Eva shivered from the biting
cold and stench of that outhouse” (70-71). Eva’s willed interaction with this experience
thus regenerates the same introspective, mediating presence that twice empowered her to
save her son’s life: “When Eva spoke at last it was with two voices. Like two people
talking at the same time, saying the same thing, one a fraction of a second behind the
other” (71). By virtue of their capacity for transformation, because they can access “the
otherworld,” “the mothers” are “considered ‘owners of two bodies’” (Drewal and Drewal
10-11). As principle aje, Osun acts as oloro, “a confidante, the owner of words” for such
women (Badejo 29 n. 18).
Thus, Eva now speaks with startling clarity of what constituted a mandate for
Plum’s rebirth:
There wasn’t space for him in my womb. And he was crawlin’ back. Being helpless and thinking baby thoughts and dreaming baby dreams and messing up his pants again and smiling all the time. I had room enough in my heart, but not in my womb, not no more.… Godhavemercy, I couldn’t birth him twice.… I kept on dreaming it. Dreaming it and I knowed it was true. One night it wouldn’t be no dream. It’d be true and I would have done it, would have let him if I’d’ve had the room but a big man can’t be a baby all wrapped up inside his mamma no more; he suffocate. I done everything I could to make him leave me and go on and live and 69
be a man but he wouldn’t and I had to keep him out so I just thought of a way he could die like a man not all scrunched up in my womb, but like a man. (72)
Here, Morrison clarifies the complicated passion of Eva’s deed20 in order to contrast it
with the whimsy of Hannah’s own choices. An ineffectual mother and irreverent daughter, Hannah takes relationships for granted. Snatching what she wants from everyone, including the various, often married, men from whom she exacts “some touching every day,” Hannah believes she can escape the universal mandate for reciprocity (44). Viewed in this context, the novel’s very next scene is particularly striking:
Hannah went off to the kitchen…. She turned the spigot on, letting water break up the tight knots of Kentucky Wonders and float them to the top of the bowl. She swirled them about with her fingers, poured the water off and repeated the process. Each time the green tubes rose to the surface she felt elated and collected whole handfuls at a time to drop in twos and threes back into the water. (72)
The sight of matter escaping water’s pull accounts for Hannah’s delight as well as the
sudden sleepiness—the lessening of her own life force—that overtakes her. She dreams
“of a wedding in a red bridal gown until Sula came in and woke her” (73).
With the very next paragraph, the text signifies the anterior source and force of its
inherent order: “But before the second strange thing, there had been the wind, which was the first. The very night before the day Hannah had asked Eva if she ever loved them” a
violent windstorm rocks the Bottom. “Everything shook, and although the people were
frightened they thought it meant rain and welcomed it. Windows fell out and trees lost
arms.” However, the rain-promising wind “just swept through, took what dampness there
20 Plum’s puerile behavior is inversely correlated with characteristic coolness. Thompson helps explain why smiling is included as a marker of Plum’s lack of coolness. As an elder in a Yoruba village explained to Thompson, “[c]onstant smiling” is anomalous; sealed lips “are a sign of seriousness,” or internalized coolness (Flash 13). 70
was out of the air, messed up the yards, and went on.” Emphasizing both the
indissociability and the implicit hierarchy of the two events, the text hereby acts to
resituate the entire nexus of ‘strange things.’ As the first sign, after all, of Hannah’s
impending death, the parched atmosphere which thereafter suffuses the Bottom signifies a
narrative drive toward regeneration, as supplemented by the ‘hot’ side of Osun. Indeed,
at “four thirty in the morning…the sun was already rising like a hot white bitch” (73).
The phenomenal role Sula assumes in the event of Hannah’s death is hereby
resignified. For, she is the reason that Eva overlooks “the third strange thing,” Hannah’s
dream: “[Eva] had thought it odd even then, but the red in the dress confused her. But
she wasn’t certain that it was third or not because Sula was acting up (74). The ‘hot’
aspect of Osun emerges in Sula to disrupt Hannah from her prophetic dream, then to
distract Eva from seeing not only the successive significance of the signs leading to
Hannah’s death but the very unfolding of the event itself:
Before she trundled her wagon over to the dresser to get her comb, Eva looked out the window and saw Hannah bending to light the yard fire. And that was the fifth (or fourth, if you didn’t count Sula’s craziness) strange thing. She couldn’t find her comb. Nobody moved stuff in Eva’s room except to clean and then they put everything right back. But Eva couldn't find it anywhere. One hand pulling her braids loose, the other searching the dresser drawers, she had just begun to get irritated when she found it in her blouse drawer. Then she trundled back to the window to catch a breeze, if one took a mind to come by, while she combed her hair. She rolled up the window and it was then she saw Hannah burning. (75) [my emphasis]
With this, the third indirect invocation of Sula’s disruptive behavior, the narrative not only implies that she has displaced the comb but it redoubles its insinuation that Sula is, in fact, one in a series of agents by which the Peace’s lives are being reconstituted. Now the wind takes over. Vested with “a mind,” this sublime catalyst is implicated not only as the cause of Hannah’s fire but it defeats Eva’s strategy for rescuing her daughter: “she 71 threw herself out of the window. Cut and bleeding she clawed the air trying to aim her body toward the flaming, dancing figure. She missed…” (76).
The answer that Eva will nearly die to supply is, again, lost on Hannah. For, as
“Eva dragged herself toward her firstborn.… Hannah, her senses lost, went flying out of the yard gesturing and bobbing like a sprung jack-in-the box” (76). Consumed by fire,
Hannah does not, however, burn to death: it is water, thrown by neighbors onto her flaming body, which “seared to sealing all that was left of the beautiful Hannah Peace”
(76). All the deaths in Sula are associated with water, but Hannah’s departure is unique: it is singularly painful. This representation recalls Thompson’s words: “the Yoruba see the force of inner character operating as a smoky flame … easy to detect, for outward beauty can be burned through by inner ugliness or selfishness” (Flash 11).
By the completion of “1923,” all five ‘strange things’ are affectively reordered into a fluid compendium of the resounding logic by which Hannah’s death and Sula’s life are both extended. Rather than condemning Sula for “just looking” as her mother burns,
Eva, of all people, should have recognized the force operating on her granddaughter (78).
The intensity of Sula’s gaze signifies her “spiritual alertness” (Thompson Flash 4). Her coolness reflects an evolving sense of self-containment, or control of her inner head, which is associated with the feminine potential to manifest vital force in extraordinary ways (Drewal and Drewal 73-74).
In Part Two of the novel, a grown Sula returns to her hometown emitting such force. Indeed, by “1937,” Sula has matured into a powerfully cool woman, the fact of which is presaged by an influx of birds to the Bottom. Such thematic detail recalls this 72
translation of a traditional Yoruba incantation which, when voiced as part of a complex herbal healing system, invokes ase to “find favor with [aje]”:
The witches roar
They say malevolent birds have arrived in town
Akara oso will never allow the witch to kill the wizard
Aje kobale says the bird should not perch on me. (Verger 307)
Ethnographers Henry and Margaret Drewal inform us that aje is often mistranslated as
witchcraft when, in fact, it implicates the non-dualistic concept that all forces have both
constructive and destructive capacities (74). Given the stringency of the Bottom’s
gender-coded values, Sula’s ‘sorcery’ illuminates Judith Hoch-Smith’s conception of
“radical Yoruba sexuality” in which enigmatic feminine power—especially that
associated with riverain goddesses such as Osun, who is leader of Aje—militates against
male domination and ensures balance in the regulation of human affairs. She says, the
“concept of witchcraft permitted great quantities of power to become lodged in women,
who in turn were thought to use that power against the institutions of society” (qtd. in
Thompson, Flash 74).
Morrison acknowledges the polyvalent function of Sula’s characterization when
she says “Sometimes good looks like evil; sometimes evil looks like good—you never
really know what it is. It depends on what uses you put it to” (“Intimate Things” 14). In
the novel, Sula’s valuation is continuous with the predilections of those individual
community members who are determined to delimit and contain women. This communal
fear of women’s power is inscribed byway of the narrative’s repeated concern with Sula’s
birthmark, the meaning and image of which shifts according to its perceiver. Whereas
the narrator correlates the growing intensity of the birthmark—that it “was getting darker 73
and looked more and more like a stem and rose”—with the process of Sula’s maturation,
Nel’s husband, Jude, will encounter a “sting[ing] … rattlesnake over [Sula’s] eye” (74;
104). Nel has long-recognized it as a rose; the larger community will decide that Sula’s
birthmark “was not a stemmed rose, or a snake, it was Hannah’s ashes marking her from the very beginning” (114).
Long before any of these self-conscious projections are leveled at her, the narrator
informs us that Sula is marked from birth with a gold-colored flower of Osun (52-53).
Even before this announcement appears in the text, the novel’s epigraph serve to
presignify upon the birthmark; it reads: “‘Nobody knew my rose of the world but me.… I
had too much glory. They don’t want glory like that in nobody’s heart.’” With the strategic indirection by which signifying acts are characterized, Morrison suggests that somebody will recognize Sula’s quintessential coolness, somebody with “glory like that” in his/her own “heart.” Indeed, the narrative’s final comment on the birthmark is uttered by a fellow Omo-Osun. Shadrack recalls “[s]he had a tadpole over her eye (that was how he knew she was a friend…)” (156). Thus, a contrapuntal discourse is in play between those who do and those who do not “know” the actual significance of the symbols clustering around Sula.
While the larger community loathes Sula, Nel recognizes the positive signs
marking her friend’s return:
Nel alone noticed the peculiar quality of the May that followed the leaving of the birds. It had a sheen, a glimmering as of green, rain-soaked Saturday nights …; of lemon-yellow afternoons bright with iced drinks and splashes of daffodils. It showed in the damp faces of her children and the river-smoothness of their voices. Even her own body was not immune to the magic.
Although it was she alone who saw this magic, she did not wonder at it. She knew it was due to Sula’s return to the Bottom. (94) [emphasis mine] 74
The public evidence of “easy sun-washed days” takes on a personal significance for Nel,
because she shared in Sula’s discovery of feminine potentia during the noontime of their
youth (94). Thus, Nel immediately recognizes Sula as the very image of Osun,
“[w]alking along with her fluid stride, wearing a plain yellow dress” (95). In this Ewuji’s
presence, Nel sheds “tears of laughter,” which “pressed her bladder into action” and brought her children into the room to check the source of such “puzzl[ing] … wild free
sounds” (97). Returning from the restroom, the “damp-faced” Nel “felt new, soft and
new” (98).
The Bottomites will misread the signs of Sula’s return but, by “1939,” the
redemptive sway she wields over the neighborhood is unmistakable:
Their conviction of Sula’s evil changed them in accountable yet mysterious ways. Once the source of their personal misfortune was identified, they had leave to protect and love one another. They began to cherish their husbands and wives, protect their children, repair their homes and in general band together against the devil in their midst. (117-118)
In response to Sula’s mediative presence, the Bottom becomes a community again—a
reverent, enterprising and interdependent collective within the larger municipality of
Medallion. Her outsider status, like Shadrack’s, serves to compel the community’s
conversion to the perspective of communitas.
The community believes its new-found capacity derives from hating Sula when, in
actuality, it stems from the love to which she moves them to bear witness. The
Bottomites’ irreverent, albeit tolerant, treatment of Shadrack and Sula is consistent with
what amounts to their indifferent regard for the illimitable source of these water
characters’ power. Fully aware of the omnipotence of natural phenomena—that it “could
become sovereign in their lives and bend their minds to its will”—the community
nevertheless persists in defining such forces as “trivial” and “inconvenient” (89-90). 75
Devoting their own awesome wills to individual advancement, they ignore the call
continually being communicated by the forces of nature, their ancestral informants, and their personal mediums, Shadrack and Sula. It is a mandate for their return, not to a static and historically remote African past but, to a communitas in which angst is replaced by existential certitude that individual power and potential is unlimited, that life is an eternal dance of ever-mingling, ever-equilibrating ase.
Even the divinely, though unconsciously, inspired Sula must struggle with this call
to communal restoration. She shares the Bottomites’ conviction that she exists in
isolation, unaffected by and unaccountable to the environment in which she lives. What
Sula yearns for, “that version of herself which she sought to reach out and touch with an
ungloved hand,” is the self-containment which comes from ontological agency (121).
Searching for her self in another, and then settling for “only her own mood and whim,”
Sula forsakes the self-formation necessary for creative, capable, and intentional
consciousness. “In a way,” the narrator acknowledges,
her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the 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. (121)
Like the river that extends from larger waterways and simultaneously caresses its own
banks, Sula needs productive interaction with both her fundamental source and those who
surround her in ‘this world.’
Her affection for Ajax brings Sula to acknowledge the dual, interdependent nature
of the universe. Vivid images of water and earth dominate scenes of Sula’s and Ajax’s
interaction within the novel. Indeed, the narrative states that there had been a “universe
of time between them” when, during the summer of her initiation, Sula had been titillated 76
by the promise that lay within his “lemon-yellow” pants (124). Now, Ajax wins her over
with ase-conducting bottles of milk, which “looked, precious and clean and permanent,”
in his hands (124). This golden-eyed man and Sula are kindred spirits: he dreams of
flight and recognizes in Sula the self-contained ‘head’ of his mother, who “knew about
weather, omens, the living, the dead, dreams and all illnesses” and earned a living as “an
evil conjure woman”; she longs to plumb watery depths and admires Ajax for the “wide
generosity of spirit,” which demands a complete unveiling of her own (126; 128). Her
challenge in this relationship is the necessity of maintaining balance between the twin worlds.
Mentally deconstructing Ajax’s face, Sula digs until she finds Osun’s gold, then the
(Spiritworld’s) translucent whiteness of alabaster. Finally she reaches earth, friable soil
that is “fertile, free of pebbles and twigs.” Now she alludes to balancing the universe: “I
will put my hand deep into your soil, lift it, sift it with my fingers, feel its warm surface
and dewy chill below. I will water your soil, keep it rich and moist.” Finally, Sula poses
the novel’s essential questions: But how much? How much water to keep the loam moist?
And how much loam will I need to keep my water still? And when do the two make mud?
(131)
These questions direct us to the exigency of balance and reciprocity between the
twin worlds. They are followed by a new paragraph, which suggests that Sula is so
consumed with him that she fails to answer the call to balance that Ajax embodies: “[h]e
swallowed her mouth just as her thighs had swallowed his genitals, and the house was very, very quiet” (131). The very next line, offset by a trio of textual bullets, is not 77 indented; thus, it constitutes the continuation of this paragraph, in which Sula’s responds, after all:
Sula began to discover what possession was. Not love, perhaps, but possession or at least the desire for it. She was astounded by so new and alien a feeling. First there was the morning of the night before when she actually wondered if Ajax would come by that day. Then there was an afternoon when she stood before the mirror finger-tracing the laugh lines around her mouth and trying to decide whether she was good-looking or not. She ended this deep perusal by tying a green ribbon in her hair. The green silk made a rippling whisper as she slid it in her hair—a whisper that could easily have been Hannah’s chuckle, a soft slow nasal hiss she used to emit when something amused her. Like women sitting for two hours under the marcelling irons only to wonder two days later how soon they would need another appointment. (131)
That the narrator invokes Hannah ridicule with these terms is significant. For Osun’s cognomen, Seegesi, alludes to her power to influence a person’s “inner head” with the art of hairplaiting (Abiodun 11). Thus, the character who so disregarded character—a concept so “heavily charged … with ideas of beauty and correctness”—seems, nevertheless, to have associated such beauty parlor rituals with the lack of a cool inner head (Thompson Flash 16). Likewise, Sula’s ego-driven response to the exigency of balance signifies a loss of self-containment, or control of her own inner head.
When Ajax arrives, he tells her of his most recent encounter with the police, whom he “regarded as the natural hazards of Negro life. But Sula, the green ribbon shining in her hair, was flooded with an awareness of the impact of the outside world on Ajax”
(133). He is arrested by Sula’s reply of “‘Come on. Lean on me.’”
Ajax blinked. Then he looked swiftly into her face. In her words, in her voice, was a sound he knew well. For the first time he saw the green ribbon. He looked around and saw the gleaming kitchen and the table set for two and detected the scent of the nest. Every hackle on his body rose, and he knew that very soon she would, like all of her sisters before her, put to him the death-knell question ‘Where you been?’ His eyes dimmed with a mild and momentary regret. (133) 78
After Ajax bolts, Sula discovers the fact that she had not even known his full name. The
problem, however, is that she has yet to realize her own.
“1939” ends with a defeated Sula reminiscing about others’ misappraisal of her.
Then, she falls into a sleep of dreams, just as Hannah does before her death. Fire is not,
however, a feature in Sula’s reverie; instead, her slumber is “full of dreams of cobalt
blue” (137). As blue is associated with etutu , aesthetic coolness, as well as the event of a
cooling rite like that of Sula’s initiation, it appears that the Spiritworld is calling upon
Sula to recover her inner head (Thompson Flash 12). Her self-containment is what first
attracted Ajax’s suspicion that she “was perhaps the only other woman he knew [beside
his mother] whose life was her own, who could deal with life efficiently, and who was
not interested in nailing him” (127).
This denotation of etutu as idealized action is stressed in the chapter’s final
paragraph:
When she awoke, there was a melody in her head she could not identify or recall ever hearing before. ‘Perhaps I made it up,’ she thought. Then it came to her—the name of the song and all its lyrics just as she had heard it many times before. She sat on the edge of the bed thinking, ‘There aren’t any more new songs and I have sung all the ones there are. I have sung them all. I have sung all the songs there are.’ (137)
To suggest that she is poised, once again, at Kalunga, Sula’s physical position is combined with the lyrics and grammatical structure of her song. Beginning with a present tense negation of “more new songs,” the first sentence’s originating clause denotes an agential relationship between speaker and object. “And,” unites both clauses, thereby eclipsing their independence as well as that of speaker and object. Finally, the auxiliary, “have,” expresses action Sula has already completed. The second sentence reiterates the fact that she has sung all existing songs. The final line repeats the subject’s 79
completed action and reasserts, with “there” used as an intensive to emphasize, the
present (tense) potential for supplementary action. But, instead of transposing her
dilemma by literally creating “more new songs,” what Sula does is withdraw ase and “lay
down again” (137).
Now, her revelation, itself, reverts into “a little wandering tune made up of …
words,” non-punctuated and repetitious, which express completed action only—until the
very end, when the intensive, “there,” and the present-tensical “are” become all but devoid of agential possibility. Indeed, the self-referentiality evinced in the sentence structure seamlessly extends to the narrative action: “I have sung all the songs all the songs I have sung all the songs there are until, touched by her own lullaby, she grew drowsy, and in the hollow of near-sleep she tasted the acridness of gold, left the chill of
alabaster and smelled the dark, sweet stench of loam” (137). This passage, which closes
“1939,” recalls the very metaphor references that were deployed when Sula deconstructed
Ajax’s face. Thus, the novel’s essential questions, about the critical exigency of balance
and reciprocity, are recovered in “1940.”
When the chapter opens with the ailing Sula being visited by Nel, Sula seems to
have come into self-containment; before she dies, her goal seems to be to set Nel on the
same path. Not only is she now sleeping in Eva’s brass (of Osun) bed, but she counters
Nel’s goal of “keeping a man” at any cost with the statement that “they ain’t worth more
than me” (143). Meanwhile, her birthmark is said to grow darker and darker as she
challenges Nel to face herself. Smarting from the fact that Sula slept with her husband,
Jude, Nel says: “having done all the dirt you did in this town and you still expect folks to 80 love you?” (145). In response, Sula harmonizes a host of incongruent figures and seamlessly connects this capacity to her initiation as Osun:
Her face glistened with the dew of fever.… ‘Oh. they’ll love me alright. It will take time, but they’ll love me.’ The sound of her voice was as soft and distant as the look in her eyes. ‘After all the old women have lain with the teenagers; … when all the white women kiss all the black ones; … when Lindbergh sleeps with Bessie Smith and Norma Shearer makes it with Steppin Fetchit … then there’ll be a little love left over for me. And I know just what it will feel like.’
She closed her eyes then and thought of the wind pressing her dress between her legs as she ran up the bank of the river to four leaf-locked trees and the digging of holes in the earth. (146)
Osun hovers, as well, in Sula’s final question about who between them was “good” and throughout Nel’s hurried departure, when the entire house “billowed around her light then dark, full of presences without sounds” (146).
The enduring state of interrelation that Morrison highlights here is compounded with a recursive reference to the various characters who had made a home of Eva’s house, including “[t]he beautiful Hannah Peace” (146). Like ‘the whisper of her chuckle at Sula’s green ribbon’ and Sula’s own question to Nel, this narrative recollection of
Hannah challenges readers to reconsider our prior judgments, to expand our own question of who is ‘good’ in order to admit the possibility of answers that are neither fixed nor dualistic but fluid and multi-focal. Clarified in this passage is the fact that, rather than a lone failure on Sula’s part, it is a general lack of balance and reciprocity which now haunts the “Peace” home: “Where were they? Eva out at the old folk’s home, the deweys living anywhere, Tar Baby steeped in wine, and Sula upstairs in Eva’s bed with a boarded-up window and an empty pocketbook on the dresser” (146). In this way,
Morrison encourages readers to correlate Sula’s own decline with that of the communitas that had once filled the house with both ‘presence and sound.’ 81
To signify the opening rite, or cooling formula, of Sula’s death, the text demarcates
a narrative pause—a triple space followed by three textual bullets. Now, Sula
experiences a rapid series of iron, the Yoruba term for a “spectacle,” “a fleeting,
transitory” glimpse into the “‘mysterious, permanent dimension of reality which, until
revealed, is shut off from human view.’” Iron refers, as well, to “mental images,”
“mystical vision[s] … or the power of visions,” “remembrance[s]” (Drewal and Drewal
1). Thus, “[p]ictures,” of extraordinarily cool power, such as the deliberate blue eagle on
Tar Baby’s wine bottle, and the memory of Hannah’s attempts to restore her own vision,
“drifted through her head as lightly as dandelion spores (147). It is only through
concerted effort of the will that such transient images admit revelation. But, just as she
had refused to create “new songs,” Sula declines this opportunity. Bored with a world
where “[n]othing was ever different” precisely because she has neglected to make a
difference, Sula withdraws from life (147).
Thus, Sula’s death rite commences with the final of her recurring dreams about
“The Clabber Girl Baking Powder lady … smiling and beckoning to her, one hand under
her apron. When Sula came near she disintegrated into white dust, which Sula was
hurriedly trying to stuff into the pockets of her blue-flannel housecoat” (147). In her
attempt to “pocket” the peace of the white realm, Sula becomes “covered” with the white
powder, instead. Thus, “she woke gagging and overwhelmed with the smell of smoke”
(148). This, of course, alludes to the fire that consumed Hannah (146).
Now, the latent fluidity that has been ascribed to Sula is transfigured: “Pain took
hold. First a fluttering as of doves in her stomach, then a kind of burning, followed by a spread of thin wires to other parts of her body. Once the wires of liquid pain were in 82
place, they jelled and began to throb” (148). The pain solidifies as Sula’s life force
weakens: the “throbs” literally progress from “waves … [to] hammer strokes, razor edges
or small explosions” (148). “[T]he only peace she had,” is said to come from looking at
“the boarded-up window Eva jumped out of”: “[t]he sealed window soothed her with its
sturdy termination, its unassailable finality. It was as though for the first time she was
completely alone—where she had always wanted to be—free of the possibility of
distraction” (148). Contrary to her exultations, Sula’s isolation serves as sign of her self-
appointed exile from the land of the living and the unique opportunities it offers for
mastering relationships.
For, not only is Sula the only character in the novel to die alone but the scene of her
death is the metaphoric inverse of Eva’s achievement in assisting her wounded son,
Plum, to “die like a man not all scrunched up in my womb, but like a man” (72). Indeed,
the dying Sula is envisaged not as an autonomous woman but as a newborn:
It would be here, only here, held by this blind window high above the elm tree, that she might draw her legs up to her chest, close her eyes, put her thumb in her mouth and float over and down the tunnels, just missing the dark walls, down, down until she met a rain scent and would know the water was near, and she would curl into its heavy softness and it would envelop her, carry her, and wash her tired flesh always. Always. Who said that? She tried hard to think. Who was it that had promised her a sleep of water always? (149)
Morrison does not envisage Sula’s death as an act of vengeance. Rather, it is figured as
an extension of latitude in which, finally, “there was not going to be any pain” (149).
Surrendering to the fluid permanence Shadrack promised her, Sula is indeed reborn in the
Spiritworld. Conscious, calm, and thoroughly in character, Sula exalts from the other
side: “‘Well, I’ll be damned, it didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel’” (149).
Thus, when “1941” commences, the “dead girl” continues to dominate the narrative action: 83
The death of Sula Peace was the best news folks up in the Bottom had had since the promise of work at the tunnel. Of the few who were not afraid to witness the burial of a witch and who had gone to the cemetery, some had come just to verify her being put away but stayed to sing ‘Shall We Gather at the River’ for politeness’ sake, quite unaware on the bleak promise of their song. Others came to see that nothing went awry, that the shallow-minded and small-hearted kept their meanness at bay, and the entire event be characterized by that abiding gentleness of spirit to which they themselves had arrived by the simple determination not to let anything—anything at all …—keep them from their God. (150)
In this chapter, Morrison not only specifies Sula as an mediative presence who serves to
disrupt the Bottomites’ suspended consciousness but, by empowering word of mouth and omens as repetitive structures, she also demonstrates ways in which communal perception affects their collective ase.
To do so, Morrison deploys an elaborate intratextual strategy of signification.
Once again, “signs,” like those presaging Hannah’s death and those of Sula’s alleged
‘evil,’ fuel the Bottomites’ conviction “that either because Sula was dead or just after she was dead a brighter day was dawning” (150-151). But, prior failures of vision and articulation betray the credibility of the signs’ messengers and meanings, both. Thus,
“The rumor that the tunnel spanning the river would use Negro workers became an announcement” is immediately countered with the note that the tunnel project has been underway for four years already (151). The signifying suggestion that “blacks were free, or so it was said, to occupy” the new nursing home is likewise clarified by its rejoinder that Eva is, in fact, the only Black to have been moved there (151). The ambiguity of the modifier “free” is a recursive reference to the “1937” passage when Sula tells Nel of her intent to assume Eva’s income. Now that Sula is dead, Eva can pay for the improved nursing home with what remains of Hannah’s insurance as well as “all that army insurance” held by Plum (102). 84
Just as Eva’s response to Hannah’s dream-revelation of her own death is to merely
play the ‘lottery’ number it simultaneously signifies, the Bottomites ignore the sum of the
signs, reading them only for the prospect of long-awaited material gain. Not only do these “signs” denote the futility of single-mindedly materialist outlooks but, like the novel’s previous omens, they signify the preeminence of the narrative’s internal drive to order. Hence, the passage’s final line—“So it was with a strong sense of hope that the people in the Bottom watched October close” (151)—acts to expound upon its first: in the wake of Sula’s death, the community will once again be led to the perspective of communitas. For, replete in the tripled space that separates the very next line is the narrative’s move to surmount the effect of their collective ase.
With no indentation to indicate a new paragraph, the text now reads: “Then
Medallion turned silver” (151). Resituating the Spiritworld’s watery whiteness as the
text’s most immanent sign, Morrison signifies upon the narrative’s urgent shift to coolness with “It seemed sudden, but actually there had been days and days of no snow—
just frost ...” (151). The Bottomites take notice as the force of Osun is unleashed:
old women sprinkled stove ashes, like ancient onyx, onto the new-minted silver. …[Children] hugged trees simply to hold for a moment all that life and largeness stilled in glass, and gazed at the sun pressed against the gray sky like a worn doubloon, wondering all the while if the world were coming to an end. Grass stood blade by blade, shocked into separateness by an ice that held for days. (152)
For weeks, the community is completely immobilized: “women” are made to miss work, and the children fall ill. The result of this cooling is communitas by default, for they are forced to depend upon one another for necessities normally purchased from Medallion’s stores.
As Badejo reminds us: 85
[O]ffenses by or against nature are part of the exacting ethos that alone can release profound human and spiritual rejuvenation.… Spiritual will and the will of nature are juxtaposed against human will which chooses to accept or reject the challenge and/or the remedy. Penance and retribution, therefore, are not always aspects of punishment … but can be the first acts of a resumed awareness, ji, and an appeal to the axiom of cosmic adjustment, or restoration. (69)
The Bottomites, however, refuse to meet this challenge. As soon as the ice begins to
melt, they revert to “small-spiritedness” (154).
Now the narrator elaborates upon this spiritual crisis, the true source the
community’s continuing misfortune:
Still it was not those illnesses or even the ice that marked the beginning of the trouble, that self-fulfilled prophecy that Shadrack carried on his tongue. As soon as the silvering began … there was something wrong. A falling away, a dislocation was taking place. Hard on the heels of the general relief that Sula’s death brought a restless irritability took hold. … [M]others who had defended their children from Sula’s malevolence (or who defended their positions as mothers from Sula’s scorn for the role) now had nothing to rub against. The tension was gone and so was the reason for the effort they had made. Without her mockery, affection for others sank into flaccid disrepair. Now that Sula was dead and done with, they returned to a steeping resentment of the burdens of old people. Wives uncoddled their husbands, there seemed no further need to reinforce their vanity. And even those Negroes who had moved down from Canada to Medallion, who remarked every chance they got that they had never been slaves…. They returned to their original claims of superiority. (153)
Like the “silvering,” Sula proved to be a mediative agent for the metacultural strategies
by which the community instituted crucial measures of insight, order and agency.
Abandoning the perspective and conduct that these seemingly disruptive forces had inspired, the Bottom collapses under the weight of its reactionary principles.
While systematic racial and economic oppression appears to render the Bottomites
powerless to change the conditions of their lives, Morrison seamlessly attributes these
conditions to the community’s consciousness. Their capacity for creative group agency
is evident in those instances when they are forced to actualize communitas. Yet, rather
than the sustained manifestation of internal character, their achievement looms as but a 86
temporary reaction to external threat. Left with no one against whom they could wield
their rectitude, they refrain from the mutual regard and resourcefulness that will bring
about lasting restoration for the community.
In order to recommence the patterned phases of the ritual process, the narrative
focus returns to Shadrack, Sula’s original Omo-Osun. Just as rising temperatures arrive
to melt the ice that has plagued the Bottom for two months, Shadrack’s annual Suicide
Day rite rolls around. In the wake of Sula’s death, however, Shadrack has declined also.
This spirited character seems bereft of all but symbolic capacity to lead the Bottom in the rite that will bring them once again to the sacred power and moral value of communitas.
Not since confirming her initiation with the word “always” had Shadrack engaged
Sula (157). Save for fish peddling and leading the annual observance of National Suicide
Day, Shadrack interacts with no one but “the river and the sky” (156). Meanwhile, he has kept as “memento” the belt Sula dropped in her hurry, that day, to leave his house
(157). This belt, then, operates as sign of the disaffiliatory use to which Shadrack has put
his own life force: “It hung on a nail near his bed—unfrayed, unsullied after all those
years, with only the permanent bend in the fabric made by its long life on a nail” (157).
Insisting that Sula was “carrying his knowledge” for him, Shadrack has retreated from
living life, fashioning his entire existence around the memory of their singular
engagement (157). In his mind, the belt becomes contiguous with “the face, tadpole-
over-the-eye-face” which further develops into: “His visitor, his company, his guest, his
social life, his woman, his daughter, his friend—they all hung there on a nail near his
bed” (157). 87
For Shadrack, then, Sula’s death represents a crisis of his own purpose. As in
Sula’s death-bed musings, his dilemma is said to proceed from an inherent disbelief in his
own significance. Shadrack thus projects passivity onto the elements: “He might as well sit forever on his riverbank and stare out of the window at the moon” (158). In the narrator’s contrapuntal vision, however, the elements cast ase of their own:
By his day-slashed calendar he knew that tomorrow was the day. And for the very first time he did not want to go. He wanted to stay with the purple-and-white-belt. Not go. Not go.
Still, when the day broke in an incredible splash of sun, he gathered his things. In the early part of the afternoon, drenched in sunlight and certain that this would be the last time he would invite them to end their lives neatly and sweetly, he walked over the rickety bridge and on into the Bottom. But it was not heartfelt this time, not loving this time, for he no longer cared whether he helped them or not. His rope was improperly tied; his bell had a tinny sound. His visitor was dead and would come no more. (158)
Gone is the solemnity with which Shadrack established his annual rite, but the sun
emerges as catalyst for the integrity with which the event is now reinscribed. Despite the
mediator’s indifference, the dejected community embraces, for the first time, the
opportunity to actively reconstruct their lives.
Ignoring word that Black men would finally be hired to work the tunnel spanning the river—at last releasing any hope of finding salvation within the confines of their material environment—many now submit, for the very first time, to the true significance of Shadrack’s archetypal “struggle to order and focus experience,” to “mak[e] a place for fear as a way of controlling it” (14). In the imaginative reaches of their consciousness, where memory and imagination merge, they experience “just a brief moment, for once, of not feeling fear, of looking at death in the sunshine and being unafraid” (159).
In a jubilant parade filled with light and laughter, these Bottomites advance toward
the river calling to others, along the way: “to help them further this slit in the veil, this 88
respite from anxiety, from dignity, from gravity, from the weight of the very adult pain
that had undergirded them all those years before. Called them to come out and play in
the sunshine” (160). Attached to the ways of the world to which they’ve limited
themselves, they are unable to honor the palimpsest on which the fullness of their
awesome reality is cast for eternity. Those like the middle-class Helene Wright, who has
joined the “most conservative”—hence least African21—church in Medallion, hold back
from this reawakening (18). Even for the many Bottomites “who understood the Spirit’s
touch which made them dance, who understood whole families bending their backs in a
field while singing as from one throat, who understood the ecstasy of river baptisms under suns just like this one,” this ritual activity appears—as their laughter had to the white businessman collecting payments in the Bottom—as a “curious disorder and headless display” (160).
But those who concede to the subtle pull of Osun are drawn to the water’s edge.
Once there, however, they are again “dazzled” by the symbols of materialist progress
“that glittered under ice struck to diamond in the sun” (161). Thus, instead of performing the cooling rite of empowerment for which they’ve been led, the group focuses impotent rage onto the tunnel:
They didn’t mean to go in, to actually go down in the lip of the tunnel, but in their need to kill it all, all of it, to wipe from the face of the earth the work of the thin- armed Virginia boys, the bull-necked Greeks and the knife-faced men who waved the leaf-dead promise, they went too deep, too far… (162)
21 In “African Religious Retentions in Florida,” Robert L. Hall says that “possessionlike” behavior, the “degree or type of demonstrativeness” and “the amount of heat and emotional ecstasy generated [during religious ceremonies] seems to be closely related to social position” (109). Hall continues: “The association of the black masses with denominations having the more exciting brand of services led the Reverend Thomas Lomax, a black Georgia Baptist firebrand of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries … to crack: ‘If you see a Negro who is not a Baptist or a Methodist, some white man has been tampering with his religion’” (110). 89
Resubmitting to the concepts, and the conceivers, by which Anglo-American
supremacism is both propelled and sustained, the Bottomites substantiate and reinforce
the supposition that African Americans are mere adjuncts of cultural imperialism.
The text signifies that this is why droves die here. With “blazing sunlit ice rapidly
becoming water” (161):
The earth, now warm, shifted; the first forepole slipped; loose rock fell from the face of the tunnel and caused a shield to give way. They found themselves in a chamber of water deprived of the sun that brought them there. With the first crack and whoosh of water, the clamber to get out was so fierce that others who were trying to help were pulled to their deaths. Pressed up against steel ribs and timber blocks young boys strangled when the oxygen left them to join the water. Outside, others watched in terror as ice split and earth shook beneath their feet. Mrs. Jackson, weighing less than 100 pounds, slid down the bank and met with an open mouth the ice she had craved all her life. Tar Baby, Dessie, and the deweys (at least it was supposed; their bodies were never found)—all died there. Mr. Buckland Reed escaped, so did Patsy and her two boys, as well as some fifteen or twenty who had not gotten close enough to fall, or whose timidity would not let them enter an unfinished tunnel. (162)
Here, Morrison juxtaposes the characters’ capacity for agency with their entrenchment in
a pervasive power system—coded as “steel ribs and timber blocks.” But it is the force which has drawn them to the river’s edge in the first place that ultimately proves most powerful.
Thus, this passage resignifies the community’s incorporation within an order both
omnipotent and inescapable. As they strike out at, rather than cool, the loaded symbol
that is the tunnel and as they forsake one another in a fruitlessly internecine struggle for
life, the very elements of life abandon them “to join the water.” The effect of this is to
resituate character as that which determines destiny. This is suggested, already, in
Hannah’s depiction and explicated in Sula’s. It is reiterated here, when the passage
emphasizes that Mrs. Jackson, who has already been identified as manipulatively 90
unwilling to pay for what she wants and greedy,22 “met with an open mouth the ice she
had craved all her life” (162).
Grounded in the existential paradox of the twinned realms, Morrison’s point here is
a delicate one, ripe for misinterpretation. She is not blaming ‘the victim.’ Quite to the
contrary, what she hereby denounces is capitulation to the very notion of victimhood.
There is always choice, Morrison insists, between losing one’s inner head to the collected
eventualities of time and circumstance and conjuring the self-containment, or control of the inner head, which compels the potential to manifest vital force in extraordinary ways.
With this passage, the author furthers her demonstration that so potentially
detrimental is the cultivation of such willed stasis that the “earth will shake” from under
those who are too afraid of “getting close enough” to fully “enter” alternative pathways,
remarkable for their inchoate potential, to life. Indeed, the chapter closes with this
reminder of Shadrack’s originating role of bringing the community to the river’s edge,
that liminal door between the living and the dead where they could complete the ritual
process that would have secured communitas, once again. In the midst of each ensuing
level of chaos, “he just stood there. Having forgotten his song and his rope, he just stood
there high up on the bank ringing, ringing his bell.”23
The narrative’s drive toward its goal of communitas quickens in its final chapter.
In “1965,” Sula’s thematic vision, seriate structure, and metaphoric references, attain a
stunning level of unity. First, Morrison immediately deploys the introspective whose
recurring contrapuntal interplay has consistently functioned to surmount the series of
22 Mrs. Jackson’s character is described on pp. 70 and 75.
23 This quote appears on p. 162. For bells as emblem of Osun, see Thompson, “Orchestrating.” 91 communal acts that serve to elicit the Bottom’s collapse, as presignified in the novel’s introduction. Hence, the chapter’s opening lines, “Things were so much better in 1965,” is immediately countered by a signifying rejoinder: “Or so it seemed” (163). Secondly, in this chapter Morrison restricts her omniscient narrator to the perspective of Nel, thereby explicitly linking the narrative introspective with this character. Not only does “1965” serve to reinscribe the triangular relationship which was first denoted in the girls’ rite at the river, but it also recollects Shadrack into this alliance of water characters, as first specified in the novel’s early chapters. Thus, the novel’s seriate mode of narrating the distinct elements of the plot comes full circle in this chapter.
I have already conducted a brief discussion of the way this organizing principle operates in the novel. Now, I would like to review the novel’s seriate structure in detail.
First, the introduction’s announcement that the community has come to an end is nevertheless followed by a narrative recovery of the community’s origins, social bonds and rituals. The introduction ends by drawing on negation to identify the loss of such metacultural strategies as the Bottom’s true threat. As well, its final reference to the community’s wondering what Shadrack and Sula are “all about” functions to direct readers to the water figures who will lead the community in a ritual process for recovering existential certitude (6).
Thus, “1919,” the novel’s first chapter, depicts the ritual process of self-recovery that explains exactly what Shadrack is “all about” (6). This autonomous segment evokes
“his window, his river, and his soft voices just outside the door” (14). This structure is repeated and revised several times before it is finally redeployed to correlate the consummation of Shadrack’s rite of self-recovery with his relocation to a river-side home 92 in Medallion. There, with the supplemental force of “his window, his river, and his soft voices just outside the door,” he commences his objective to lead the entire Bottom community in the ritual process.
Although the introduction has led us to expect it, the novel’s second chapter is not, after all, devoted to Sula. Instead “1920” is a sprawling narrative about Nel’s origins.
Here, Morrison draws upon negation, first, to reveal Nel’s grandmother as an Osun figure24 against whose “wild blood” Nel’s own mother has been “constantly on guard;” second, to denote the inverse self-image that Nel’s mother attempts to impose upon her, and; third, to specify the way that Nel’s own attraction to her grandmother, “the woman in the yellow dress,” precipitates the mirror-scene in which Nel, like Shadrack before her, discovers an empowering image of herself as wholly self-contained (7; 25).
This chapter is meant to contribute to our understanding of what Sula is “all about,” after all, because it is only after these encounters that Nel gains “the strength to cultivate
… in spite of her mother” her friendship with Sula (6; 29). “1920” thus ends with the blossoming of their symbiotic relationship. The text’s seriate mode of plot development continues to unfold with “1921’s” depiction of Sula’s own origins, which includes the legacy of aje, as specified in Eva’s delivering Plum to rebirth in the Spiritworld. “1922,” depicts not only Sula’s and Nel’s cooling rite at the river’s edge but also Shadrack’s
24 The allusive terms by which Rochelle is signified as Osun are elaborated almost as soon as they are deployed. The effect of this is to solidify not only Osun’s identity but also her allure. First denoted as the “sweet odor of gardenia” that lingers in the house, Rochelle is next described as “a woman in a yellow dress [who] came out of the garden” (25). Next comes a series of markers of Osun and Aje: “The woman in the canary-yellow dress;” “she who carried the gardenia smell;” “This tiny woman with the softness and glare of a canary;” “the gardenia smell and canary-yellow dress;” “The woman in the yellow dress” (25- 26). 93
hearing the girls’ voices outside his door and confirming their initiation as Osun with the
words “always.”
As these early chapters distinguish the particular origins and perspectives of each
Osun figure, each shares equal value and importance with the others. That each of these
autonomous segments serves to invoke the various ritual media, functions and forms of
Osun combines with the fact that the novel’s title character is not introduced until the
final page of “1920,” to signify that Sula is but one of three horses the “Good Mother”
rides through the text. Shadrack, Sula and Nel are agents of the ritual process that, from
the novel’s very beginning, is strategically anticipated—for the Bottom community and
for the narrative itself. Thus, the critical process of Nel’s “rememory” and the
concomitant rebirth of yet another Osun figure fills Sula’s most definitive chapter. It
constitutes the narrative’s final bid in its drive to convert the community to the
perspective of communitas.
That the former Bottomites have, in fact, regressed is signified in the narrative
report that the young Blacks crowding Medallion’s valley area “had a look about them
that everybody said was new but which reminded Nel of the deweys” (163). Recall that
the deweys are those dubious characters who complied, in countenance and function,
with the generic label assigned to them by another; who exhibited an extreme aversion to
water, and; whose bodies, as the narrator reminds us here, were never found after the
tunnel’s deconstruction. Nel’s suspicion—that they “had gone off and seeded the land
and growed up in these young people in the dime store with the cash-register keys around
their necks”—confirms the narrative’s denotation that the community has again arrived at
the liminal phase of the ritual process (163). These youngsters, who are “so different 94
from the way she remembered them forty years ago” function to signify that the
community is “pass[ing] through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of
the past or coming state” and true progress will only come with their conversion to the
sacred values of communitas (163; Turner Ritual 94).
In “1965,” it is Eva, as informed by her ancestral guide, Plum, who mobilizes Nel
to recommence the ritual process. To do so, she by summons the generative power of
“rememory”—the same power that first allowed Shadrack to glimpse “his window, his
river, and his soft voices just outside the door.” Indeed, Eva commands Nel to remember
that one of those voices belongs to her; that, together, she and Sula have long comprised
complementary faces of Osun.
Nel believes that a sense of propriety moves her to patronize Sula’s seemingly
senile grandmother and the other “old birds” at the nursing home (167). But Eva quickly admonishes her to recognize the significance of communing with aje: “I can’t make visits
too often. You should have some respect for old people” (167; 168). Saying “I got oranges. How did you get him to go in the water?” is Eva’s cool and covert way of intimating the protection and wisdom she obtains in her ongoing affiliation with Plum.
For Plum has both warned her against the nursing home’s drugged orange juice and informed her of the details surrounding Chicken Little’s death.
Eva discloses their shared status as liberators of callow boys: “‘You. Sula. What’s
the difference? You was there. You watched, didn’t you? Me, I never would’ve
watched.… It’s awful cold in the water. Fire is warm. How did you get him in?’” (168).
Now, aje attempts to jar Nel’s own “rememory”:
‘Why are you trying to make out like I did it? 95
Eva stopped ironing [sans iron or clothes] and looked at Nel. For the first time her eyes looked sane.
‘You think I’m guilty?’ Nel was whispering.
Eva whispered back, ‘Who would know that better than you?’
‘I want to know who you been talking to.’ Nel forced herself to speak normally.
‘Plum. Sweet Plum. He tells me things.’ Eva laughed a light, tinkly giggle—girlish.…
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Just alike. Both of you. Never was no difference between you. Want some oranges?… Sula? I got oranges.’ (169)
Rather than accept aje’s offering of the means to such respite, Nel bolts from the nursing
home.
This does not, however, halt the process of her self-recovery, for Osun’s coolness
awaits her: “[o]utside she fastened her coat against the rising wind. The top button was
missing so she covered her throat with her hand. A bright space opened in her head and
memory seeped into it” (169). Here again, the wind acts as instigative agent, which
compels Nel’s instantaneous “tracing [of] God.”25 What follows, then, is Nel’s surrender
to “rememory”:
What did Eva mean by you watched? How could she help seeing it? She was right there. But Eva didn’t say see, she said watched. ‘I did not watch it. I just saw it.’ But it was there anyway, as it had always been, the old feeling and the old question.
25 In “Kongo Influences,” Thompson explains that this gesture indicates the Kongo sign of the cosmos. It is called zenga Nzambi, “tracing God” or leva Nzambi , “swearing on God” (153). He writes, “Bakongo trace this basic symbol today with their right hands, the index fingers indicating God above, the ancestors below, the Kalunga line, and then, in a reverse direction, their throats. In other words, they implicate their very lives in the truthfulness of what they gave just sworn, by the sign of the cosmos” (152-153). Traditionally, Bakongo invoked this sign to “demonstrate that they understood the meaning of life and death. With this sign Bakongo miniaturized not only the structure of the universe but also the eternal sources of moral sanction, God above and the dead below. This sign was thus a seal and witness of sacred equity, justice and truth” (153). 96
The good feeling she had had when Chicken’s hands slipped. She hadn’t wondered about that in years. ‘Why didn’t I feel bad when it happened? How come it felt so good to see him fall?’
All these years she had been secretly proud of her calm, controlled behavior when Sula was uncontrollable, her compassion for Sula’s frightened and shamed eyes. Now it seemed that what she had thought was maturity, serenity and compassion was only the tranquility that follows a joyful stimulation. Just as the water closed peacefully over the turbulence of Chicken Little’s body, so had contentment washed over her enjoyment. (170)
With this revelation that she had, in fact, delighted in what amounted to their mutual
initiation as Omode Osun (Children of Osun), the narrative proceeds to recommence the
opening formula of that very induction.
Like the girls’ original approach to that particular place where tree families band
together with the expanse of the river, Nel’s gait is now so “fast” that she’s “running
almost” to a site that is loaded with identical significance (170). Talking to herself, invoking “the performative power of ase,” Nel heads to another Kalunga, the threshold between the twinned worlds, like the one she and Sula had marked years before at the river’s edge.26 Thus, she ventures into the “colored part of the cemetery,” where Sula and
kin were buried.
Once there, Nel reflects upon what she believes to be the dormant ase of the Peace
legacy:
each flat slab had one word carved on it. Together they read like a chant: Peace 1895-1921, Peace 1890-1923, Peace 1910-1940, Peace 1892-1959.
They were not dead people. They were words. Not even words. Wishes, longings. (171)
26 The quotation appears in Drewal and Drewal 5. MacGaffey notes that, in addition to bodies of water, “Kalunga is also localized at crossroads on the way to the cemetery or the forest” (Religion 90). 97
This legacy of “Peace” has remained dormant until now, when Nel calls it forth through
her rhythmic utterances.
What follows is Nel’s recollection of the community’s response to Sula’s death,
which illustrates the overall crisis of iwa, custom and good character, that makes for the
community’s liminal status. Thus, she recognizes that, rather than a ‘horse’ directed by
Osun, it is:
spite that galloped all over the Bottom. That made every gesture an offense, every off-center smile a threat, so that even the bubbles of relief that broke in the chest of practically everybody when Sula died did not soften their spite and allow them to go to Mr. Hodges’ funeral parlor or send flowers from the church or bake a yellow cake. (171-172)
Because the community members refused either to respond as Sula’s body lay dead for
two days or to coordinate the funeral, Nel “finally called the hospital, then the mortuary,
then the police, who were the ones to come. So the white people took over” (172). The
funeral was thereby carried out with a “closed coffin,” a practice that “shocked” Nel’s cultural sensibilities (173). This, the author’s third textual reference to closed coffins is
significant: whereas the bodies of Hannah and Chicken Little are too disfigured for
display, Sula’s closed casket operates as sign of a communal failure of iwa.
Likewise, the narrative next focuses on Sula’s burial in the “colored section” of the
cemetery, where Nel nevertheless “found herself the only black person there” (173).
Indeed, the “cluster of black folks at the lip of the cemetery” serves to recall the group
whose members “didn’t mean to go in … the lip of the tunnel, but in their need to kill it
all” die of their own rage (161). In each case, the Bottomites’ collective ase brings into
existence a free-flowing malevolence, which consumes the entire community.
Nel’s recollection continues: “not until the white folks left—the gravediggers …—
did those black people from up in the Bottom enter with hooded hearts and filed eyes to 98
sing ‘Shall We Gather at the River’ over the curved earth that cut them off from the most
magnificent hatred they had ever known” (173). This reference, as Maxine Montgomery
notes, “is not to the river in Revelation’s vivid description of an otherworldly heaven”
(136). Indeed, the narrative signifies upon this structure. Having twice cited the song
title without its question mark, the author now revises it into a call to which “the dead
girl” actively responds:
Their question clotted the October air, Shall We Gather at the River? The beautiful, the beautiful river? Perhaps Sula answered them even then, for it began to rain, and the women ran in tiny leaps through the grass for fear their straightened hair would beat them home. (173)27
Thus completing its reconstruction of the series of acts that constitute communal refusal
of the power, creativity and self-determining capacity of a consciousness supplemented
by Osun, the narrative now casts Nel as “hurrying down the road with the sunset in her
face” (173).
Whereas its other configurations of the four solar moments (the initiation scene, the
final Suicide Day Ceremony) indicate a full noon sun or “the point of most ascendant
power,” this final invocation is of the sun’s fourth moment—the moment of rebirth in the
Spiritworld (Thompson and Cornet 28). We know that prior to entering the cemetery Nel
traced the sign of the four moments, thus avowing “not only the structure of the universe
but also the eternal sources of moral sanction, God above and the dead below”
27 This passage alludes to Osun’s identity as “the preeminent hairplaiter” (Roland Abiodun 10). Throughout the novel, plaited hair serves to signify Osun’s influence on the inner head of specific characters. For example, Morrison is careful to specify that Eva, the character who epitomizes characteristic coolness, braids rather than straightens her hair (75). Equally telling is this early narrative reference to Sula’s influence upon Nel: “After she met Sula, Nel slid the clothespin [that her mother insists she wear in order to narrow her nose] under the blanket as soon as she got in the bed. And although there was still the hateful hot comb to suffer through each Saturday evening, its consequences—smooth hair—no longer interested her” (55). 99
(Thompson, “Kongo” 153). Now, upon leaving this threshold between the two worlds,
Nel is cast into the renascence which sunset evokes. The final strategic revision of this metaphorical reference marks the commencement of the closing formula for Nel’s protracted ritual process. This rite was prefigured in “1920,” in the narrative note that
Nel’s grandmother, the Osun figure, lived in the “Sundown House” (17). Thus, this scene serves to signify Nel’s recovery of her ancestral legacy of living, as “a woman in yellow,” in the rays of the sun’s fourth moment.
Shadrack is invoked in this closing formula. Indeed, as Nel leaves the cemetery, it is from Shadrack’s perspective that she is identified as “the woman hurrying along the road with the sunset in her face” (171). Now, the implicit connection between Shadrack,
Sula and Nel is made explicit. Shadrack’s attempt to “remember where he had seen [Nel] before” serves to recover Sula’s own death-bed “effort to recall” “who was it that had promised her a sleep of water always?” (173; 149). That Shadrack’s life force has been waning steadily since Sula’s death is resignified in the narrator’s report that the “effort of recollection was too much” for him, just as it had been for the dying Sula (173).
Shadrack’s inability to place Nel is followed by his perspective that the “river had killed” all the fish (174). The former fisherman’s invocation of the dead fish appears in the text like literal instructions for the communal role of “priest and prophet,” which he is now passing onto his cohort: “No more silver-gray flashes, no more flat, wide, unhurried look.
No more slowing down of gills. No more tremor on the line” (Montgomery 129; 174).
Precisely because each is moving through the crossroads of the novel’s drive to halt the
Bottom’s cycle of despair, “Shadrack and Nel moved in opposite directions, each 100 thinking separate thoughts about the past. The distance between them increased as they both remembered gone things” (174).
Now, Morrison recollects the discrete narrative structure by which she has signified
Osun’s mediative presence with regard to both Shadrack and Sula and extends it to Nel.
Just before she and Nel head to their initiation at the river’s edge, Sula becomes “aware of a sting in her eye”; likewise, Shadrack’s memory of having seen Sula lying on a table in the funeral home is activated by “a feeling that touched his eyes and made him blink”
(57; 157). Thus, after she passes Shadrack,
Suddenly Nel stopped. Her eye twitched and burned a little. ‘Sula?’ she whispered, gazing at the tops of trees. ‘Sula?’
Leaves stirred; mud shifted; there was the smell of over-ripe green things. A soft ball of fur broke and scattered like dandelion spores in the breeze.
‘All that time. All that time, I thought I was missing Jude.’ And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. ‘We was girls together,’ she said as though explaining something. ‘O Lord, Sula,’ she cried, ‘girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.’
It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow. (174)
Nel is indeed “explaining something.” When she responds to this mediative presence, the metaphoric structures by which her own liminal status has been designated—the same mud that Sula warns against in her essential questions about the necessity of balance between the twinned worlds—are repeated and resolved. This marks the consummation of Nel’s ritual process. But there is still more to Nel’s explanation.
With Nel’s reclamation of the seminal bond she shares with Sula, the reciprocal relationship between Sula’s thematic vision, seriate structure, and metaphoric references is fully realized. For Nel’s rebirth functions to presage for the Bottomites a recommencement of yet another patterned phase of the ritual process. Indeed, the 101 narrative’s final signifying structure, “circles and circles,” serves to reiterate the likelihood that Nel will lead the community in the ritual processes of Osun. Thus, the story, which ‘began’ with the Bottom’s demise, which then centers itself in the cyclic process of life and death with which the ritual process is concerned, ‘ends’ with the prospect of a new beginning for the Bottom community.
CHAPTER 3 REBIRTH OF THE COOL IN THE BLUEST EYE AND SONG OF SOLOMON
[Y]ou made your point very subtly [in Sula]. The same way you did in The Bluest Eye; it wasn’t a fist stuck up into heaven—‘Black Power’.… You know how you can be in a room and the person that talks in a whisper is the one you always lean toward. Your books just whisper at the reader and you move in, and then you finally hear what’s being said, and you say to yourself, ‘Oh, my God.’
—Gloria Naylor, “A Conversation” with Toni Morrison
As Susan Willis reminds us in her historical study of the author’s early texts,
“[n]either Morrison’s use of metaphor, nor her general drive to return to origins is rooted
in a nostalgia for the past. Rather, the metaphoric rendition of past experience represents
a process for coming to grips with historical transition” (309). Indeed, Morrison’s
concern is to demonstrate a ritual process not only for adapting to historical change but for doing so with integrity.
For the Black communities of Morrison’s novels, this means building upon the
metacultural strategies by which generations before them have maintained insight, order
and some measure of autonomy. Thus, the author’s early novels feature a strategic
abundance of metaphorical references to the multiple identities and various ritual media
and functions that are constitutive of Osun. Such iconography serves to evoke the
creative power of a supplemented consciousness to “resolve its existential crises and
resist determination by the other”—a position which is generally occluded in
conventional accounts of Black history (Henry 32).
This is true of The Bluest Eye in which nine year old Claudia narrates the tragic
story of a Black girl who yearns for blue eyes. As her narration emphasizes, Pecola’s
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story is that of all Black American girls, subjected as they are to the white-is-right
standards of western culture. What shields Claudia from the overdeterminancy of this cultural mythos, the influence of which is intensified by 1940’s-era Black migration to
the urban areas of the American North, is a metacultural recognition of the organic world
and her enduring position within it. Indeed, the novel’s chapters are named and patterned after the four seasons, which is to say the narrative is structured in accordance with what we might call the ritual process of the world, itself; as such, it, follows the planet’s patterned cycles of birth, life, death, and rebirth. Thus, whereas Pecola is metonymically associated with the marigolds, which the “land kills of its own volition,” Claudia is associated with ‘the everflowing’ (167). Indeed it is Claudia who commences the ritual process of planting the marigold seeds, with the expectation that the flowers’ spring time debut will trigger a similar rebirth for Pecola.
In Song of Solomon, the ritual process is figured through the rejuvenating mission
of Milkman Dead. Milkman, whose indulgent middle-class upbringing leaves him
unmoved by the atmosphere of Black political activism that surrounds him in the novel’s
urban 1960’s-era setting, is literally full of ase-bearing mother’s milk. Throughout much
of the novel, pursues a narrow view of progress, while drawing vital force from the
women in his life. Self-centered and materialistic, Milkman treks to the rural site of his
father’s origins in search of a rumored family fortune. What begins as a quest for gold,
however, becomes a journey into the organic world of his familial past, where Milkman
will eventually discover the true “gold” of Osun.
It is a “dead girl,” Circe, who directs Milkman to the cave in which he believes his
would-be treasure awaits. To reach the cave, however, Milkman must first cross a creek.
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His descent into the water becomes the initiatory moment of a ritual process wherein
Milkman is progressively stripped of his material coverings and possessions, tested by
“some of the meanest unhung niggers in the world” during a hunting expedition and, ultimately, compelled to realize a full range of sensory, organic and social perceptions
(273).
Only after these pivotal experiences is Milkman finally prepared to comprehend his familial legacy: his mother’s self-sacrifice merges with Pilate’s all-encompassing love, and Hagar’s death is confluent with that of her ancestor, Ryna. This legacy is revealed in
“the lore sung by children, lived by the folk and whispered by the wind” in the family’s ancestral home of Shalimar (Nwankwo 179). Sweet’s reminder that, with his solitary flight, Solomon had left others behind combines with Pilate’s oft-repeated warning from her father, “you just can’t fly off and leave a body,” to rouse Milkman into a communal concern so genuine that by the novel’s conclusion he is finally ready to give his own life, rather than continue milking others of theirs (336). It is at this point that his earlier dream, where everyone was “going in the direction he was coming from,” becomes a prophetic endorsement of a Black metacultural view of progress (106).
As I have suggested, a similar dilemma of metacultural integrity lies at the center of
Sula, which covers the years between 1919 and 1965. In this novel, the joke that prompted the Bottom’s name suggests a disjunction between white and Black cultural notions of progress. This “nigger joke” is “The kind white folks tell when the mill closes down and they’re looking for a little comfort somewhere,” but Blacks use it to “tell on themselves when the rain doesn’t come, or comes for weeks, and they’re looking for a little comfort somehow” (4-5) [my emphasis]. Here whites’ alienation, which is
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produced by the lack of wage labor, is contrasted with the Black experience of alienation,
which results not from glitches in the capitalist machine but from neglecting their role of maintaining balance between the twin worlds of the living and the dead. In Africa’s traditional religions, “the power of the god[/desse]s and spirits was effectively present … on every level, environmental, individual, social, national, and cosmic. Aspects of reality seen as impersonal from a modern scientific viewpoint were not only personified but personalized, i.e., placed within the context of social relationships” (Raboteau 11). Thus, as we have seen in Sula, water’s excesses and other such shifts in the cyclic processes of the organic world, signal a crisis of communal culture, which arises from their methods of adapting to historical change.
After attending college and living for ten years in urban landscapes, Sula returns to
the Bottom and disregards their communal values. On the surface, she appears to
embody the Western image of progress. However, Sula shares with Song of Solomon’s
Pilate a profound “disrespect for progress [which] can also be viewed as [a] hold onto
sanity in a world content to drive itself mad” (Harris 95). Sula is archetypal pariah, one
of the “dangerously free” characters, who are overwhelmingly associated with water in
Morrison’s novels (The Bluest Eye 125). As such, and along with Sula’s other Osun figures, she serves to interrogate the erosion of traditional metacultural values in the
Bottom, thus inspiring her neighbors to recover and elaborate upon the most salient of their cultural traditions.
Of the Bluest Eye, Morrison has said that Claudia and her sister Frieda later grow
up to be Sula (“Intimate” 20). Apparent in the girls is Sula’s authenticity, dynamism and
her initial sense of self-containment. Claudia reports, “[w]e felt comfortable in our skins,
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enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend … unworthiness” (62). Claudia’s confidence in the rightness of her own being is continuous with her fascination with all things liquid. She revels in bath water, rain, puddles, mud, even vomit, about which she wonders, “how anything could be so neat and nasty at the same time” (13). Like Sula, Claudia grapples with paradox and seeks to unify opposing forces. She rejects out of hand White dolls and the Shirley
Temple, if only to counter the admiration that such symbols automatically elicit. What
Claudia prizes, instead, is sensory experience:
‘I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama’s kitchen with my lap full of lilacs, and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.’ The lowness of the stool made for my body, the security and warmth of Big Mama’s kitchen, the smell of the lilacs, the sound of the music, and, since it would be good to have all my senses engaged, the taste of a peach, perhaps, afterward. (21)
From its setting in the kitchen where Claudia’s grandmother prepares nourishment for her
family to the flowers and violin music, Claudia’s ideal scenario invokes the “Good
Mother.”1
It is her characteristic coolness that draws Claudia to Marie, one of a trio of
prostitutes who befriend Pecola. Like Sula’s, Marie’s eyes are “as clean as rain” (82).
Claudia wonders aloud if “it may have been my own image I saw in … her eyes that
reminded me of waterfalls in movies about Hawaii” (64). Like Sula, Marie is a pariah—
“the one church women never allowed their eyes to rest on”—and, like Sula, she invokes
the figure of a water goddess (64).
1 As I discuss in chapter two, flowers are associated with Osun. So, too, is violin music. Thompson tells us that Cuban devotees often offer violin music to Osun (“Orchestrating” 261).
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Thompson tells us that riverain goddesses are associated with roundness, wealth, and a “problematic coolness” which often yields to vengeance (73). Hence, Marie is decidedly overweight, tells Pecola that men pursue her for her money and shows a burning temper when Frieda insults her.
When the sisters arrive at the two-story building the prostitutes share with the
Breedloves, Marie invites them to wait in her apartment for Pecola. Noting the way
“[t]hose rain-soaked eyes lit up, and her smile was full, not like the pinched and holding back smile of other grown-ups,” Claudia attempts to comply (83). But Frieda’s candor incites the ‘hot’ face of Osun:
‘No, ma’am, we ain’t allowed.’
…The smile of the Maginot Line slipped. ‘Ain’t ‘llowed?’
‘No’m’
‘Ain’t ‘llowed to what?’
‘Go in your house.’
‘Is that right?’ The waterfalls were still. ‘How come?’
‘My mama said so. My mama said you ruined.’
The waterfalls began to run again. She put the root-beer bottle to her lips and drank it empty. With a graceful movement of the wrist, a gesture so quick and small we never really saw it, only remembered it afterward, she tossed the bottle over the rail at us. (83) [my emphasis]
Like all Morrison pariahs, the prostitutes serve as the marker by which others in the community judge themselves as righteous. Whereas a communal sense of propriety is constructed in opposition to the behaviors of Morrison’s water characters, an introspective presence of Osun always emerges to dispute these perspectives. Just as Nel,
Shadrack and the narrator in Sula provide a consistent counterpoint to various communal perceptions of Sula, Claudia recognizes Marie’s fecund qualities. Indeed, she says “I
108 thought I saw a mild lonesomeness cross the face of the Maginot Line. But it may have been my own image that I saw in the slow flaring of her nostrils, in her eyes that reminded me of waterfalls in movies about Hawaii” (64). Despite her consistent perceptions of Marie as uniquely humane, Claudia “had heard too many black and red words about her, seen too many mouths go triangle at the mention of her name, to dwell on any redeeming features she might have” (64). Together, these much-maligned water characters beg Sula’s question: “[h]ow you know … [a]bout who was good … how you know it was you?” (146)
Throughout Morrison’s narrative project, the introspective presence of Osun functions to signify the answer to this question. Thus, we learn that The Bluest Eye’s prostitutes provide Pecola with a uniquely loving alternative to the animosity that is heaped on her both at home and in the community. They are said to be “whores in whores’ clothing,” who, like Sula, had decoded the limited options available to them and chose the closest thing to freedom that they could imagine (48). In many ways, their lifestyle represents a blow against male domination and the stifling gender roles to which the community’s women are limited. Their hatred of men, save for Marie’s “fabled love for Dewey Prince” [my emphasis], is superseded only by their disdain for the community’s women—the “[s]ugar-coated whores”—who are, according to the prostitutes, complicit in their own oppression (47; 48). Collecting Pecola into their outsider community, they counteract the derision with which their neighbors, the women in particular, pelt her.
The prostitutes therefore function to distinguish traditional Black communal values from those that leave people like Pecola “outdoors” (18). Thus, Morrison’s
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preoccupation with the overwhelming influence of bourgeois society on young Black
women newly arrived from the Southern belt is rendered with descriptions in which the
repudiation of “funk”—a spirit of self-containment, spontaneity, and sensuality—is
clearly correlated with the loss of all propensity toward water. Consider, for example,
this description of Marie: “From deep inside, her laughter came like the sound of many
rivers, freely, deeply, muddily, heading for the room of an open sea” (45). Now consider
this metaphoric representation of the community’s everywoman:
She hopes he will not sweat—the damp may get into her hair; and that she will remain dry between her legs. She hates the glucking sound they make when she is moist. When she senses some spasm about to grip him, she will make rapid movements with her hips, press her fingernails into his back, suck in her breath, and pretend she is having an orgasm. She might wonder again, for the six hundredth time, what it would be like to have that feeling while her husband’s penis is inside her. The closest thing to it was the time she was walking down the street and her napkin slipped free of her sanitary belt. It moved gently between her legs as she walked.… And then a slight and distinctly delicious sensation collected in her crotch. As the delight grew, she had to stop in the street, hold her legs together to contain it. That must be what it is like, she thinks. (69)
Indeed, the community is filled with such repressed women.
There is Della, “a good Christian woman” whose obsession with cleaning herself of the “dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions” leads her to overuse “violet water” (68; 14). Her husband leaves her for a “slack” girl, saying “he wanted a woman to smell like a woman. Said
Della was just too clean for him” (14-15). There is Geraldine, whose repression is so successfully accomplished that she has managed to circumvent her bodily production of water: she “did not sweat in her armpits nor between her thighs” (67-76). Not surprisingly, Geraldine is the same woman who hurls epithets at Pecola after her son has both tortured Pecola and killed her cat.
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Finally, there is Pecola’s mother, Pauline, whose conviction that her injured foot
renders her unworthy causes her to lift it “as though she were extracting it from little
whirlpools that threatened to pull it under” (88). This is particularly interesting, because
the river is so revered in Pauline’s memories of her youth in Kentucky. Pauline handles
her conviction that she and her children are ugly by retreating to the refuge of work and
the movie theater; otherwise, she fights with her husband and abuses her children. With
their determination to trade their cultural moorings for the trappings of progress, such
women succeed in vanquishing not only their own but also their children’s sense of self-
containment. This is especially clear when “contempt for their own blackness” is said to
lead a group of Black boys to spew onto Pecola the flames of a blistering self-hatred (55).
Ruth Dead, of Song of Solomon produces not only an antisocial son but also two
pitiful daughters, who are described as “dry” and “boiled dry” (9; 28). Admittedly
“pressed small” by her father and stifled in a loveless marriage to the rigid Macon Dead,
Ruth lacks self-containment and, therefore, insists on a kind of power that registers outside herself (124). Thus, her son and father are the focus of her “two secret indulgences” (13).
In the first of these, Ruth forces mother’s milk on her son until he is well beyond
school-age. Milk, that precious ase-conducting liquid with which mothers nurture their
progeny, is synonymous with the water that nourishes all life. It is this quintessential life
force that Ruth intends to pass to her son:
She had the distinct impression that his lips were pulling from her a thread of light. It was as though she were a cauldron issuing spinning gold. Like the miller’s daughter—the one who sat at night in a straw-filled room, thrilled with the secret power Rumpelstiltskin had given her: to see golden thread stream from her very own shuttle. (13)
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As it privileges signs of the “Good Mother,” Ruth’s indulgence appears to be a ritual
process of Osun. However, because it involves misusing another to fulfill her own needs,
Ruth’s rite does not serve to actuate the integrity of a consciousness as supplemented by
Osun. To convince herself that she is benefiting rather than abusing her son, Ruth must invoke a fairy tale; she identifies not only with the protagonist’s imprisonment but also with her dependence upon her jailer for “secret power.”
Thus, what she succeeds in passing on to her son is a dual disposition in which
victimization and beneficence are indissociably united. This is precisely what Freddie
signifies when he walks in on this rite and christens the boy: “A Milkman. That’s what
you got here, Ms. Rufie. A natural milkman if I ever seen one. Look out, womens. Here
he come” (14). Milkman’s ultimate recovery from this disorder will ensue in a ritual
process of his own, the opening and closing formulas of which involve immersion in, and
reemergence from, water.
Ruth’s ritual abuse of the young Milkman is also linked to water: “part of the pleasure it gave her came from the room in which she did it. A damp greenness lived there” (13). She is inspired, moreover, by the presence that lives in her dining room
table. For years, a daily bowl of fresh flowers had been placed there. Now, a watermark
persists in their place. Whereas Deborah Guth describes it as a “depleted signifier,” the
narrative description serves to invoke Osun, who is “able to make her self anew
whenever she comes to consciousness.”2 The text reads: “the watermark, hidden by the bowl all these years, was exposed. And once exposed, it behaved as though it were itself
2 584; the second quotation comes from Murphy and Sanford 6.
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a plant and flourished into a huge suede-gray flower that throbbed like fever, and sighed like the shift of sand dunes. But it could also be still. Patient, restful and still” (12).
Indeed, the watermark is specified with terms that are synonymous with Osun’s
signification as a “source that seeps out and establishes something, a beginning” (Badejo
176). Thus, Ruth looks to it continuously:
She knew it was there, would always be there, but she needed to confirm its presence. …[S]he regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was life and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside herself.
Even in the cave of sleep, without dreaming of it or thinking about it at all, she felt its presence. (11)
As her surname implies, Ruth is literally “Dead” to her power to manifest vital force in
ways that would regenerate her own life. Thus, the watermark, along with her ritual
abuse of both her son and father, serves for Ruth to verify her very existence.
Such existential crises serves to solicit the introspective presence of the “Good
Mother” for a number of individual Morrison characters, including Pauline, of The Bluest
Eye:
Pauline was fifteen…. Fantasies about men and love and touching were drawing her mind and hands away from her work. Changes in weather began to affect her, as did certain sights and sounds. These feelings translated themselves to her in extreme melancholy. She thought of the death of newborn things, lonely roads, and strangers who appear out of nowhere simply to hold one’s hand, woods in which the sun was always setting. In church especially did these dreams grow. The songs caressed her, and while she tried to keep her mind on the wages of sin, her body trembled for redemption, salvation, a mysterious rebirth that would simply happen, with no effort on her part. In none of her fantasies was she ever aggressive; she was usually idling by the river bank or gathering berries in a field when someone appeared, with gentle and penetrating eyes who—with no exchange of words— understood; and before whose glance her foot straightened, and her eyes dropped. The someone had no face, no form, no voice, no odor. He was a simple Presence, an all-embracing tenderness with strength and a promise of rest. It did not matter that she had no idea of what to do or say to the Presence—after the wordless knowing and the soundless touching, her dreams disintegrated. But the Presence
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would know what to do. She had only to lay her head on his chest and he would lead her away to the sea, to the city, to the woods … forever. (90)
Young Pauline seems to invoke Yeye, in whose ritual processes the nascent woman’s
“wordless knowing”—about the otherwise ineffable processes of “the river bank,” of
“woods in which the sun was always setting,” and of “rebirth”—could be transformed
into existential certitude. Pauline’s desire, however, is for a revolution of self in which
she is freed from responsibility for herself.
As with her portrayal of Sula, Morrison also correlates Pauline’s lethargy to her
need for a creative outlet. She is said to have “missed—without knowing what she
missed—paints and crayons” (89). Without such recourse, Pauline lacks self-
containment, which would enable her inability to manifest vital force in extraordinary
ways. Thus, it is a singer in the church choir “who seemed to hold in her mouth all the
sounds of Pauline’s soul. Ivy sang the dark sweetness that Pauline could not name; she
sang the death-defying death that Pauline yearned for” (90).
Rather than engaging the ritual process, Pauline marries the “yellow eye[d]” Cholly
(91). “And he did touch her,” the text signifies, “firmly and gently, just as she had dreamed. But minus the gloom of setting suns and lonely river banks” (92). While a
“mysterious rebirth” never “simply happen[s]” for Pauline, Cholly does “lead her away to the city” of Lorain, Ohio, where he will support his family with steel-mill work. There,
Pauline is soon overcome by the same loneliness that prompted her earlier dreams of revitalization. Disappointed that her husband is but a man, after all, shunned by the community’s “dicty-like” women, and unaccustomed to living in such close proximity to newly-arrived immigrants and other poor whites, Pauline hopes that children will offer the renewal for which she longs (93). After motherhood buckles under the weight of her
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lofty expectations and Cholly loses both his job and his motivation, Pauline escapes from
her family life, entirely.
She takes refuge in her job as a maid in a prosperous Lakeshore house. There,
surrounded by gleaming new appliances and blond children, Pauline indulges her
obsession for order. When she is not working, Pauline keeps company with the starlets
of Hollywood movies, fights Cholly, and savors the promise of redemption in Heaven.
While Pauline is determined to muddle through her limited existence, others, like Cholly
and Song of Solomon’s Hagar, represent the ‘dangerous freedom’ one acquires when the
delicate balancing act, which is required between the twin realms, goes unheeded and
water therefore becomes not “a passage” but “a great barrier” to redemption (MacGaffey
and Janzen 106).
Rain ruins Hagar’s desperate plan to captivate Milkman. He has lost interest in her
because she has no interest in anything but him—and neither does he. In a frenzied effort
to regain his affections, Hagar runs to the beauty parlor and goes on a shopping spree, only to see her shopping bag and its name-brand promises drowned in a sudden rainstorm. Here, she must face the hollow image that she casts:
At last she opened the door and presented herself to Pilate and Reba. And it was in their eyes that she saw what she had not seen before in the mirror: the wet ripped hose, the soiled white dress, the sticky, lumpy face powder, the streaked rouge, and the wild wet shoals of hair. All this she saw in their eyes, and the sight filled her own with water warmer and much older than the rain. (318)
Just as it activates figures like Sula and Marie, water strips from others the veneer of self- effacement.
Water also functions to hamper Cholly Breedlove. Contextualizing his complicated
story without condoning his actions, Morrison carefully excavates the process of Cholly’s
becoming “dangerously free” (125). His mother abandoned him shortly after his birth,
115 leaving Cholly’s Great-Aunt Jimmy to care for him. Two weeks after she sat on a rain- soaked bench during a camp meeting, Aunt Jimmy dies a classically-Morrison-death by
“peach cobbler” on a “wet Saturday night” (110). Her funeral banquet prompts the scene in which the teenaged Cholly has escaped to the woods with Darlene. In an oft-cited passage, two white hunters with “long guns” interrupt the youngsters’ sexual interlude at
“a dry riverbed” (118). They command the lovers to continue, while shouting insults and shining a flashlight on Cholly’s buttocks. Like Sula’s bargeman, the hunters are referenced by the instruments they carry, only. This serves to signify the peremptory force of a pervasive power system, as well as its anonymity.
Cholly’s humiliation is total and solitary. Darlene, the other victim of this assault, is further brutalized by his reaction to her: “he hated the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence. The one he had not been able to protect, to spare, to cover” (119).
Darlene’s hands are said to look “like baby claws” as Cholly punishes her with the same
“violence born of total helplessness” that he will later wield against Pecola (117).
Before the rape of his daughter can become a plausible course of action for him,
Cholly undergoes a processual pattern of disintegration in which he directs his own sense of self-contempt at those who observe his impotence. Because this “loathing … galloped through him” rather than the Good Mother, water serves to frame the process of his disintegration (119). Thus, rain, which promised to break from the sky throughout
Cholly’s and Darlene’s interlude, does not appear until just after they are violated by the hunters. Afterwards, Cholly fears that Darlene might be pregnant. He decides to leave town in search of his father who, Cholly “recalled, with sympathy,” had also “run out on a pregnant girl”—Cholly’s mother (120). When his father dismisses him, Cholly strains
116 to thwart the “fall of water from his eyes,” which causes his bowels to release “liquid stools” (124). Now, Cholly is said to feel like a helpless baby. Thus, the passage that follows is replete with metaphorical references to his rebirth, during the sun’s fourth moment, at the Kalunga line of life and death.
Cholly runs until he comes to a river, on the bank of which he crouches in “fetal position, paralyzed, his fists covering his eyes, for a long time” (125). The metaphorical significance of Cholly’s embryonic posture is furthered in the narrative’s note that it admits “no sound, no sight,” no perceptions at all. When evening comes, “the dark, the warmth, the quiet, enclosed Cholly like the skin and flesh of an elderberry protecting its own seed” (124). Cholly is then overcome by ‘rememories’ of his afternoon, the full recall of which triggers the return of his sensory perceptions. Thus smelling himself,
Cholly moves toward the river to rinse his soiled clothes. That he cannot see the river clearly, that he is therefore forced to “find the water’s beginning with his hands” signifies
Cholly’s inability to distinguish the “Good Mother” (125). This meaning is emphasized when Cholly reemerges from the river and, for the very first time, sheds tears of longing for Aunt Jimmy.
Specifically, he longs to gaze upon the elder woman’s quirky characteristics, such as her four gold teeth—the same characteristics which, when she was alive, had made him wish that he, himself, was dead. Afterwards, three women solicit him to their home, offering lemonade and confirmation of his myopic rite of passage: “[a]s he drinks, their eyes float up to him through the bottom of the jar, through the slick sweet water. They give him back his manhood, which he takes aimlessly” (125). Thus, Cholly’s “dangerous
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freedom” is achieved, as Barbara Christian notes, through “rituals of potency and
impotency, and the woman is testament to both” (125; Christian, “Contemporary” 69).
The only man with whom Cholly has enjoyed relationship is an elder figure named
“Blue.” His function in the novel is consistent with the etutu his name invokes. Blue
serves as ancestral figure for Cholly. Thus, he reconstructs for Cholly classical narratives
from the Black past, “old-timey stories about how it was when the Emancipation
Proclamation came,” and “ghost stories.” Because Blue also functions as archetypal
Black male for the young Cholly, “[t]hey talked about the women Blue had had, and the
fights he’d been in when he was younger, about how he talked his way out of getting
lynched once, and how others hadn’t.” Cholly is said to have simply “loved Blue.”
Throughout his life, he relishes the peace he found in Blue, “the good times they had
had.”3 For Cholly, his emasculation by the hunters and his father’s rejection both function as signs of a failure to live up to Blue’s coolness of character. Moreover, it is the self-loathing that Cholly projects onto female figures, which makes of water a blockade, rather than a conduit, to redemption.
Thus, Pauline can only goad Cholly into fights, which add color to her otherwise
bleak days, by throwing water onto him and Pecola is washing dishes when he rapes her
(38; 127). “Her hands were going around and around a frying pan, scraping flecks of
black into cold, greasy dishwater” when Cholly contemplates the range of his feelings for
Pecola—“revulsion, guilt, pity, love” (128). Here, a resounding image of Black fragmentation and displacement into insolvent, polluted water serves to signify the paradoxical logic that underlies and accompanies the rape of Pecola. Water energizes
3 These quotations are found on p. 106.
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Cholly but it does not grant him solution. This is because he bends it into an open signifier into which he pours each of his conflicting desires. Not only is Cholly incapable of reconciling his own feelings but he is also unequipped to “read” the sensibilities of others. Thus, after he has emptied his “soul” into Pecola, Cholly cannot determine whether her clinging, wet hands indicate “a hopeless but stubborn struggle to be free, or
… some other emotion” (128).
Long before this scene unfolds, we learn that Pecola’s ultimate desire is to break through the cultural mythos that serves to convince her that she is inherently and irrevocably “ugly.” “All things inside her are flux and anticipation. But,” she concurs with the message which is communicated to her in the eyes of whites and reinforced in those of her neighbors: “her blackness is static and dread” (42). The actual significance of Pecola’s dilemma is metaphorically referenced in her description of the yellow flowers of Osun:
Why, she wonders, do people call them weeds? She thought they were pretty. But grown-ups say ‘Miss Dunion keeps her yard so nice. Not a dandelion anywhere.’ Hunkie women in black babushkas go into the fields with baskets to pull them up. But they do not want the yellow heads—only the jagged leaves. They make dandelion soup. Dandelion wine. Nobody loves the head of a dandelion. Maybe because they are so many, so strong, so soon. (41)
How is it that Pecola’s inner head collapses under the weight of outside assessments?
She lacks coolness of character, the self-containment that allows Claudia to resist determination by others.
The loss of Pecola’s instinctive self-valuation is also perpetuated by her abusive family as well as her physical environment. Whereas Claudia seeks out and celebrates all forms of water, Pecola “saw” “experienced,” and “knew” only “inanimate things” as
“real”: “They were the codes and touchstones of the world, capable of translation and
119
possession” (41). Because Pecola’s psychic void is an outgrowth of her physical
dislocation from the organic world, her sole reference to peace—to etutu—are the blue eyes of Shirley Temple and the children featured in nursery school primers: “Alice has
blue eyes. Jerry has blue eyes.… They run with their blue eyes.… Four pretty blue eyes.
Blue-sky eyes.… Morning-glory-blue-eyes. Alice-and-Jerry-blue-storybook-eyes” (40).
Because Pecola’s own eyes “held the pictures, and knew the sights” of both a static
environment and the gross distortions reflected in the eyes of others, she engages a daily
rite of prayer for blue eyes (40). Pecola finally obtains blue eyes at the same time that
she gives birth to her father’s dead baby. That is to say, she joins the ranks of the
“dangerously free” (125).
Whereas Morrison uses inanimate metaphors to convey the debilitating effects of a
rigid social structure, she renders freedom in liquid terms. For example, The Bluest Eye
is set in an Ohio town which is replete with historical referents to Black freedom: it “sat
on edge of a calm, blue lake, which boasted an affinity with Oberlin, the underground
railroad station, just thirteen miles away” (93). However, “this melting pot on the lip of
America facing the cold but receptive Canada” is no panacea from the oppressive
conditions that legions of Blacks have migrated from the South to escape (93).
Moreover, Lorain becomes the site of communal alienation from the organic world,
particularly the restorative medium of water.
Claudia reports that Lorain’s white-owned lakefront houses are “the loveliest” yet
least lively residences in the entire city. Here, “the sky was always blue,” as opposed to
the “orange-patched sky of the steel-mill section” in which Claudia, other Blacks, and
poor whites live. For those who cannot afford the prime lakefront property, there is Lake
120
Shore Park, “a city park laid out with rosebuds, fountains, bowling greens, picnic tables.”
Blacks, however, are banned from this public space and, thus, from its lake. As Claudia narrates, “[i]t was empty now, but sweetly expectant of clean, white, well-behaved children and parents who would play there above the lake in summer before half-running, half-stumbling down the slope to the welcoming water. Black people were not allowed in the park, and so it filled our dreams.”4 While the lake is the stuff of the youngsters’ dreams, such waterways are at the forefront of the reminiscences of Aunt Jimmy’s elder women friends—the only people in the novel who are said to be “in fact and at last, free”
(110). In this way, historical transition precipitates a severing of the metacultural practices which had provided crucial measures of order, insight and agency for generations of Blacks.
We see a similar displacement from water in both Sula and Song of Solomon. In the former, the Bottomites live far up on a hill, in full view of the surrounding river; their
‘end’ is marked by their voluntary displacement to the central valley. Meanwhile, “the white people were buying down river, cross river, stretching Medallion like two strings on the banks” (166). In Song of Solomon, the Black community is distant from the lake; land is available at its edge but few can afford it. Besides, Corinthians tells us that, by the late 1960’s, “Negroes don’t like water” (35).
In contrast to the diminished capacities she ascribes to those who are displaced from water, Morrison offers compelling portrayals of water as a medium of joy, creative capacity and wisdom. In The Bluest Eye, modern accouterments serve to obstruct
Claudia’s sole opportunity to submerge herself in water. Bathing in a galvanized zinc tub
4 This quotation, and each quotation that precedes it in this paragraph, is found on p.84.
121 involves “[s]lipping around on the zinc, no time to play or soak, for the water chilled too fast, no time to enjoy one’s nakedness, only time to make curtains of soapy water careen down between the legs” (21). For Claudia, the worst part of this destabilizing rite is the
“irritable, unimaginative cleanliness” that results (21). What she longs for is that which
Ajax claims, in Sula. “His idea of bliss (on earth as opposed to bliss in the sky) was a long hot bath in piping-hot water—his head on the cool white rim, his eyes closed in reverie” (128) [my emphasis]. No soap, zinc, or other containers on the imagination hinders Ajax; thus, he soaks up the regenerative properties of water.
When Pecola begins menstruating, Claudia distinguishes in water attributes that are particularly feminine. “The mothers” are said to control both menstruation and fertility, each of which is part and parcel of women’s “secret, enigmatic” power (Drewal and
Drewal 49; 42). Thus, upon discovering the advent of Pecola’s menstrual cycle,
Claudia’s mother leads the young girl to a bathroom. From her post outside the bathroom door, Claudia listens as the older woman initiates Pecola, or leads her through a rite of passage to womanhood: “The water gushed, and over its gushing we could hear the music of my mother’s laughter” (28). Recall the novel’s other association of menstruation with covert feminine power and ecstasy: even when the communal everywoman has eradicated all signs of “funk,” she is nevertheless overwhelmed by the free-flow of her menses, which elicits an uncommon experience of the erotic.
Sula is replete with such metaphorical references to water’s capacity to imbue an enigmatic, covert, female power. For example, Sula’s return to the Bottom is marked by ominous signs. However, her girlhood friend, Nel, is said to recognize Sula as ewuji, as a pleasing emanation that serves to enliven the entire environment. Thus, elaborate
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configurations of water function to signify the “magic” that drenches not only the Bottom
but also Nel’s “own body,” upon Sula’s return (94).
This is also true of Song of Solomon. That Milkman has successfully completed the
initial phase of his rites of passage is confirmed by Sweet. Their scenes together are rife
with water imagery, which signifies Milkman’s new-found capacity for sharing and
reciprocating her feminine succor.
After his ritual process is consummated, Milkman returns to Sweet, screaming for
“waaaaater” (330). Having finally gleaned the inherent promise of his ancestor’s flight,
Milkman now shares Claudia’s desire for unlimited access to uncontained, free-flowing
water. To Sweet’s offer to bathe him, he replies: “Bath! You think I’d put myself in that
tight little porcelain box? I need the sea! The whole goddam sea!... Don’t give me no
itty bitty teeny tiny tub, girl. I need the whole entire complete deep blue sea!” (330).
Settling for a wide river, Milkman dives head-first into the water:
And he began to whoop and dive and splash and turn. ‘He could fly! You hear me? My great-granddaddy could fly! Goddam!’ He whipped the water with his fists, then jumped straight up as though he too could take off, and landed on his back and sank down, his mouth and eyes full of water. Up again. Still pounding, leaping, diving. (332)
Having displayed the courage to press himself into water, having reemerged whole, sated
and eager for his next challenge, Milkman is finally and triumphantly free.
As well, Sula’s river is metaphorically associated with male charisma, potency, and reciprocity of feminine principles. Its narrator dwells on “the boys. The beautiful, beautiful boys who … thickened the river with their shining wet backs” (56). Indeed, as
Sula and Nel head to “the wide part of the river where trees grouped themselves in families” for their initiation as children of the goddess, they are said to witness male
123 delight in ewuji, the pleasing emanation that is Osun: “[t]hey passed some boys swimming and clowning in the water, shrouding their words in laughter” (57-58).
As we learn in each of Morrison’s initial three novels, for its redemptive properties to flood an initiant, water has to be sought out, dived into, and absorbed. It is only after emerging from this ritual process that the newly-redeemed exemplify the self-formative capacities of consciousness as supplemented by Osun.
CHAPTER 4 BETWEEN CULTURAL CONSERVATION AND HISTORICAL INNOVATION: THE RITUAL PROCESS OF OSUN IN TAR BABY
[T]aking that which is peripheral, or violent or doomed or something that nobody else can see any value in and making value out of it or having a psychological attitude about duress is part of what made us stay alive and fairly coherent, and irony is part of that—being able to see the underside of something, as well.… I am conscious of all sorts of things—nature and magic and a kind of mother wit as well as a certain kind of cosmology about how Black people during that time apprehended life simply because they didn’t trust anybody else’s version of it.… That’s why I can’t trust much research when I do novels because most of the information I want is not written.… [C]ertain kinds of things I have to either remember them or be reminded of them….
—Toni Morrison, with Bessie W. Jones and Audrey Vinson.
Each of Morrison’s early novels culminates with one character—Claudia, Nel,
Milkman—who is poised to spill over onto their community, embodying the sacred ideals and moral values that makes for the perspective of communitas, as rooted in a self- formative ethos. The ritual process for accomplishing such regeneration undergirds
Morrison’s entire fictive world so that, rather than breaking new thematic ground with
Tar Baby, it is, as Liz Heron has observed, “as if the logic of all her writing has been in working backwards and deeper toward their sources” (qtd in Harding and Martin 131).
In The Bluest Eye, Sula and Song of Solomon, Morrison makes it clear that, alone, the peremptory influence of Anglo-American cultural standards does not make for
Blacks’ devastation. Rather, it is uncritical compliance with such interpolation that clenches success for the “land [that] kills of its own volition” (The Bluest Eye 160).
Morrison’s more recent texts elaborate further on the ways in which subjective choices act to perpetuate the historical, political, and economic forces impinging on Black
124 125 existence. Thus, the author’s critique of static notions of race, gender, class, and other controlling assumptions internal to Black communities obtains an unprecedented complexity in her later novels.
Whereas dehumanization and futility overwhelm characters such as Pecola
Breedlove, Shadrack and Guitar Bains, “the ritualized violence” in Tar Baby and Beloved
“becomes at the same time comprehensible, measurable, and solvable. It has become a labor of love instead of a burden of destruction” (Harding and Martin, p. 131). With Tar
Baby and Beloved, Morrison’s fictive world reaches a developmental zenith, the crux of which is the overt demonstration of a ‘grammar’ of existence which underscores the very objective undergirding traditional African systems: an enduring quest for equilibrium between the twinned worlds. Both novels explore the tension between excavating the past and constructing the future, between cultural conservation and innovation, between conflicting perspectives and communal reconciliation.
With this amplified focus on reconciling such dualities comes Morrison’s outright identification of the Goddess Osun. No longer a phantom icon whose presence and movements remain private symbols of nascent power, as she is for Claudia, Nel and
Milkman, unwilling to wait idly by while characters such as Ruth Dead, Sula, Shadrack and Marie flirt with her promise: ‘the dead girl’ comes alive in Tar Baby as the “water- lady” who guides Son to his destiny; in Beloved, she walks out of water to claim her place in the land of the living. Both novels demonstrate water’s capacity to be both “a passage and a great barrier” to regeneration, and both stress Osun’s dual roles as Yeye, 126 the “Good Mother,” who protects and nurtures all of humanity and as a “giant cock,” who becomes malevolent in the face of resistance to her goals.1
When Tar Baby opens with the “water-lady,” directing a “Son” to the island retreat of mythic Black male heroes, it would seem that Morrison intends a single-minded narrative strategy of promoting the essentials of an idyllic African past. However, the encompassing scope of the novel centers on the “true and ancient properties” that
Morrison attributes not to any of the novel’s characters but to the women of her remembered past, to whom the novel is dedicated. The key word here is “true” and it represents Morrison’s efforts to distinguish the implicit grammatical principles that undergird and accompany Black metacultural systemics from Black cultural traditions that continue only as uncritical repetitions of what has been done in the past. Throughout
Tar Baby, Morrison juxtaposes the need to adapt to historical change with the equal need for cultural continuity. In the novel, images of Osun, “the ever-renewing source below the surface of the visible who makes renewal possible,” suggests ways to achieve equal measures of both (Murphy and Sanford 6).
With the line, “He believed he was safe,” Morrison begins another narrative account of the archetypal struggle to achieve such balance between the twin realms of earth and water (3). With dusk approaching, Son jumps from a ship and plans to swim toward the lights of a nearby seaport. His plan is thwarted, however, by a catalyst that evokes the enigmatic force of Osun. In Morrison’s portrayal, the Goddess’ famous jewelry combines with her foremost signs. Thus, “a bracelet of water” with a “wet
1 The first quotation appears in MacGaffey and Janzen, p. 106. The second quotation comes from Badejo, p.21 and 33, n.56 and 57. Badejo reports that this reference to Osun’s masculine capacities is one of several to appear in her praise poetry. 127
throat” is said to overwhelm Son. This force is next described as both cool and covert:
“he felt a gentle but firm pressure along his chest, stomach, and down his thighs. Like
the hand of an insistent woman it pushed him” (4). The text continues: “The hand was
forcing him away from the shore. The man turned his head to see what lay behind him.
All he saw was water, blood-tinted by a sun sliding into it like a fresh heart” (4). With
this narrative inscription of the sun’s shift into its fourth moment position of lighting the
spirit world, Son is now said to be quite certain of his situation:
His strength was leaving him and he knew he should not waste it fighting the current.… He knew he was in a part of the world that had never known and would never know twilight and that very soon he would be zooming toward the horizon in a pitch-black sea.… Still the water-lady cupped him in the palm of her hand, and nudged him out to sea. (5)
With the lights of the ship he abandoned to his right, “new lights” appear to Son’s left.
Now Osun’s goal is made clear: “Just as suddenly the water-lady removed her hand and the man swam toward the boat anchored in blue water and not the green” (5). As blue signifies etutu , peace, coolness of character, as well as cooling rites, it appears that Son will undergo a ritual process of transformation. Indeed, he is described as a liminal figure, like Shadrack before him, who has no property, no status and no position in any kinship system. Thus, before he escapes the H.M.S. Stor Konigsgaarten, Son is said to have “no things to gather—no book of postage stamps, no razor blade or key to any door” and his shipmates are referred to as “the others” (3). That Son must reconstruct himself outside of the homogenizing effects of an antithetical cultural mainstream is confirmed by this allusive report: as he climbs onto the shrewdly titled “Seabird II,” “[t]here was no trace of the sun and his canvas shoes were gone” (5). Stripped of all material possessions 128 and planted upon a boat that is commandeered by two “owners of birds,” Son is poised for the rebirth that accompanies the sun’s fourth moment.
Hiding in a closet on the boat, again Son resists the “Good Mother’s” pull and, again, his efforts prove futile:
He was determined to remain alert but the water lady brushed his eyelids with her knuckles. He dropped into sleep like a rock....
He woke thinking of a short street of yellow houses with white doors which women opened wide and called out, ‘Come on in here, you honey you,’ their laughter sprawling like a quilt over the command. (6)
In his dream vision, Son is being summoned to the transformative capacities of Osun, figured as a route comprised entirely of yellow houses, each containing a white threshold from which a woman beckons, coolly yet forcefully.
Son is awakened by “the forgotten sound of a woman’s voice—so new and welcoming it broke his dream life apart” (6). The narrator contrasts the women who populated Son’s dream with Jadine, the woman who speaks aboard the Seabird II”: “But nothing sprawled in this woman’s voice.… Her voice seemed warm on the inside, cold at the edges. Or was it the other way around?” (6). On the surface, these portrayals seem oppositional. In the complicated world of Tar Baby, however, appearances can be deceiving and seemingly solid identities can turn to water.
Evelyn Hawthorne tells us that “vision and blindness are among the most empowered symbols” in the novel (100). Indeed, Tar Baby is structured around these qualities. More than an introduction to Son, the prologue serves to establish the two character types with which the novel is concerned. Son is made to represent those who lack vision, whose perceptions are always partial. Then there are the water referents by which we are to recognize those associated with the consciousness of Osun, which incites 129 a fluid sense of self-containment and the capacity to face challenges and improvise solutions.
Chapter one both reinforces and expands these dualities, this time in terms of reality itself. It introduces the isolated Caribbean island in which Tar Baby is set, which is characterized by the convergence of distinct cosmologies. Here, as we’ve seen in Sula, there is more than one way of seeing and, therefore, of being. The chapter’s opening focus is on an animate organic world. Complete with an “exhausted,” “ill,” “grieving,”
“insulted,” and “brokenhearted” river, this world has been displaced by the construction of winter houses for rich exiles (10).
Closely associated with this organic world is the island’s Black population, descendants of enslaved Haitians who were brought to the island some 300 years earlier by French colonists. According to them, Isle de Chevaliers is named in honor of those who, having gone blind upon seeing the island on which they were to labor, continue to roam the hillsides on horseback. Gideon, Alma Estee, and Therese Marie Foucalt—who is said to be a descendent of these mythic men—must negotiate between this world, characterized by innervision and cooperation with nature, and that created by colonists.
At the center of this other world is Valerian Street, for whom the island’s name signifies the French soldiers, colonizers who brought the would-be slaves to reconstruct the island. It is in this world and not the former that the retired White American candy manufacturer has built, and maintains with God-like authority, his own little piece of patriarchal heaven, L’Arbe de Croix. Upholding various ‘beliefs and symbols’ associated with this metaculture together with Valerian are his creations: his wife, Margaret, the former beauty queen he picked from a parade float; two Black servants, Sydney and 130
Ondine; Jadine, niece to the servants, whose Parisian education Valerian has financed,
and; a select group of White families to whom he has sold portions of the island.
The novel revolves around Son’s negotiation of these intersecting worlds. Initially,
he appears to share an ethos like that of the island’s Black population. Indeed, he appears
at first to be an Osun figure. After he is released from the sea, nature openly assists Son
as he forages the island for food and shelter. A sailor by profession, Son’s skin is said to
be “as dark as a riverbed, his eyes … steady and clear” (113). As Trudier Harris notes,
Son “understands” the workings of the “natural world,” as the “Black magic” he performs
on Valerian's plants, the ant repellent he devises for the greenhouse, and the banana peel
insoles he suggests for Ondine’s sore feet all attest (145). Once he enters the world of
Valerian’s creation, however, it becomes apparent that Son’s regard for nature is, at best,
ambivalent.
Consider, for example, Son’s cursory response to watery nurture during the scene
of his first bath, after he is discovered in the Street household:
When he was wet all over, he let the shower head dangle while he picked up the bath gel, pumping the spout above the sponge. He lathered himself generously and rinsed. The water that ran into the drain was dark—charcoal gray. As black as the sea before sunrise.
His feet were impossible. A thick crust scalloped his heels and the balls of both feet. His fingernails were long and caked with dirt. He lathered twice before he felt as though he had accomplished anything. The sponge felt good. He had never used one before. Always he had bathed with his own hands.… He soaped his face again and misted the lather away. Some of it got into his mouth and reminded him of a flavor he could not name. He sprayed more and swallowed it. It did not taste like water; it tasted like milk. He squirted it all around his mouth before pressing the button to shut off the water. (132)
This depiction of water ridding Son of the dirt that has collected upon his body while he drinks liberally from water bearing the taste of ase-bearing mother’s milk clearly invokes the sun’s fourth moment, which signifies the “Good Mother’s” urging Son toward rebirth. 131
What he savors, however, is Jadine’s sponge. Son is attracted to the sponge’s owner
rather than to its definitive ability to absorb water.
Unbeknownst to Son, however, Jadine is next in a chain of Osun figures—
beginning with the water lady—who have drawn him first to the island, then to
Valerian’s house in order that he complete the ritual process. This is made clear in the
very next passage, in which “He had not followed the women” is repeated eight times as
the signifying structure around which Son’s journey to Valerian’s house is recounted.
This structure operates as contrapuntal interplay that defies Son’s own account of his
motivation for jumping from the ship on which he had worked, climbing onto the Seabird
II, then stealing into Valerian’s house. His initial report, in which the structure first
appears, reads “…whatever I jumped ship for it wasn’t because I wanted to rape a
woman. Women were not on his mind and however strange it looked, he had not
followed the women” (133). Notice how Son’s perspective is quickly replaced by the
narrator’s own. Each successive repetition of this structure works to achieve narrative
consensus that the force of Osun drives both his journey to, and his subsequent
adventures on, the island. Moreover, the repetition and revision of this structure
highlights the ways in which Son’s duplicitous character—his tendency to see only that
which supports his carefully constructed yet fragile sense of his place in the world, his preoccupation with safety-in-hiding, and his refusal to confront and overcome these character deficits—serves to obstruct the ritual process.
Immediately after the first invocation of “he had not followed the women,” the
narrator tells us that Son is hiding in a closet when the boat docks, therefore he “didn’t
even see them properly” (133). Once Jadine and Margaret exit the boat and enter a car, 132
Son sneaks on deck to see that “they got in, turned on the lights, then the engine (in that
order, just like women would) and were gone” (133). Next, he is “amused … that these
tiny women had handled that big boat” at all (133). Son’s appraisal of the women serves
more to characterize him: he scoffs at their practical decision to turn on lights before
moving forward yet his own determination to remain hidden is what prevents him from
seeing “properly”; he mocks the women’s capacity to maneuver the Seabird II when his
present predicament is clearly the result of his own inability to “handle that big boat” from which he absconded.
The signifying structure is next invoked to further signify the depth of Son’s
disregard for the force that guides him: “He had not followed them. He didn’t even know
where they were off to. He waited until the sea, the fish, the waves all shut up and the
only sound came from the island” before leaving the boat (133; 134). The “always
swear” in the narrator’s note that Son did not disembark until he had “inhaled the land
smell sailors always swear they love” immediately alerts the reader to mistrust this claim
(134). Now, the narrator casts Son without benefit of the light, and thus the sight, that the
women possessed: “Ahead, under the stars and above the black of the beach he could
barely see the hilly outline of the island against the sky” (134).
When the signifying structure is invoked for the third time, it commences a
paragraph in which Son’s character traits are reiterated. Oblivious to Osun’s influence,
Son’s priority is simply to follow a road already paved: “He had not followed the women.
He didn’t even know what they looked like or where they were going. He just walked for
an hour on the only road there was” (134). He “sees nothing that appears to offer rest”
until he comes upon Valerian’s home: “How cool and civilized the house looked. After 133
that hot solitary walk through darkness lined by trees muttering in their sleep, how cool, clean and civilized it looked. They are drinking clear water in there, he thought, with ice
cubes in it” (134). Thus, we learn that human refinement of natural phenomena is Son’s
idea of coolness.
His reflexive mistrust of nature’s ready succor is reiterated when, telling himself to
retreat to the Seabird II for sustenance and comfort, Son is literally offered an avocado by
the tree upon which he leans. He ponders the possibility that it may be a variety of tree
whose produce is poisonous. He recognizes nature’s internal safeguards—the fact that
toxic fruit “would not grow so close to the trunk”—but Son requires and searches for
further guarantees. Finding none, “He decided not to chance it and looked again toward
the house lights—the home lights—beaming like a safe port in front of him” (135). “Just
then,” the text reports, the avocado tree, envisaged as “a pubescent girl three months
pregnant,” grazes his cheek and offers her fruit to him (135). Accepting the tree’s eager
nourishment makes Son even thirstier.
Beginning with the refrain, “He had not followed the women,” the next paragraph
commences a revised account of Son’s motivation: “He had not even seen them clearly,
only their slim backs. What he went toward the house for was a drink of water … to
quench a thirst brought on by mosquitoes, the hot night and the meat of a teenaged
avocado” (135). The effect of this is to show the reader that for Son, ‘the truth’ is a
moment to moment invention.
To denote the true source of Son’s privation, the recursive structure is revised once
again and set off by parentheses:
Through the first window he looked into he saw not the women (for he was not following the women) but the piano. It made him tired, as though he had swum 134
seven seas for seven years only to arrive at the place he had started from: thirsty, barefoot and alone. No water, no shipboard bunk, no ice cubes could fight the fatigue that overwhelmed him at the sight of the piano. He backed away, away from the light and the window into the protection of the trees that were still muttering in their sleep. He would have sunk where he stood and slept under the dreaming trees and the holy sky except for the part of him that never slept and which told him now what it always told him: to hide, to look for cover. (136)
Here, the narrative moves to recollect the initial phase of the ritual process, in which this
liminal figure was first separated from the cultural conditions in which he was raised.
Although Son is said to have “obeyed the self that never blinked or yawned” by hiding in a gazebo, the ritual process continues to unfold as an entire cast of childhood-friends- turned-war-buddies comes alive before Son’s eyes (136).
Serving as marker for the cultural conditions from which Son was initially
separated is the piano. Young Son enjoyed playing so much that he withstood his
friends’ sexual taunts about his piano teacher, Mrs. Tyler. Son’s service in the Vietnam
War reflects the imposition of social structure that served not only to disconnect him
from his origins but also to disrupt his fledgling career. Throughout his tour of duty, Son
dreams of reclaiming both; he especially savors the idea that his “hands would be doing
something nice and human for a change” (137). After being discharged “without honor
or humor,” Son returns to Eloe and resumes playing, but badly.
With the sixth repetition of the signifying structure, we see clearly how Son is
becoming enmeshed in the unfolding ritual process:
He had not followed the women. He came to get a drink of water, tarried to bite an avocado, stayed because of the piano, slept through the next day because Drake, Soldier and Ernie Paul kept him awake in the night. That’s how he came to sleep in the day and wander the property at night contrary to common sense and all notions of self-preservation. …[H]e was so tired in the day and so hungry at night, nothing was clear to him for days on end. (137) 135
Son’s character is disrupted. His automatic inclination to duck and elude is preempted.
His ability to formulate any plan at all is thwarted. All the while, Osun’s plan for him
continues to unfold. “Then,” the text warns, “he woke up, in a manner of speaking”
(137). This act of signifying prepares the reader for a lapse in the processual pattern of
Son’s rites of passage. Whereas the narrative now reveals that “homesickness” is what
spurred Son’s initial, frenzied “jump… into the sea,” it is a hunger for “flesh” that
propels his repeated entries into Valerian’s house (138). After finding chicken in the
kitchen, curiosity finds him exploring the house and entering Jadine’s room.
Now, the recursive structure appears in a subordinate conjunctive clause that signifies the competing forces—the force of Osun and that of his inner character— operating on Son: “He meant to look but not to watch and not to stay because he had not followed the women. Had not even seen them clearly. So the first time he entered her
room he stayed only a few seconds, watching her sleep. Anybody could have told him it
was only the beginning” (138). Indeed, this passage marks the beginning of Son’s
campaign to displace his angst onto fascination with a woman who, by virtue of being
asleep, is passive, silent, controllable: “Considering the piano and Cheyenne and this
sleeping woman he was bound to extend his stay until he was literally spending the night
... gratified beyond belief to be sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, his shirt full
of fruit (and meat if he could find any), in the company of a woman asleep” (138).
The signifying structure is now repeated for the eighth and final time, as a
restrictive clause: “And little by little he forgot that he had not followed the women. He
thought he had. Only now did he remember that it was the avocado, the thirst, the piano.
And now here he was with the immediate plans of a newborn baby” (138). The final 136
repetition of this loaded structure completes the definitive counterpoint to Son’s account:
having jumped into the sea because he was “crazy with homesickness,” he had “followed
the women” to the place where his ritual process could be consummated (138).
Now, there is what Sandra Pacquet calls Son’s “identity-altering obsession with
Jadine” (510). He projects his desire for renewal onto the sleeping Jadine:
he used to slip in her room and wait hours, hardly breathing himself, for the predawn light to bring her face out of the shadows and show him her sleeping mouth, and he had thought hard during those times in order to manipulate her dreams, to insert his own dreams into her so she would not wake or stir… but would lie still and dream steadily the dreams he wanted her to have about 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 white, wet sheets flapping on a line…. Oh, he thought hard, very hard during those times to press his dreams of icehouses into hers, and to keep her still and dreaming steadily…. (119)
Son’s dream world is filled with markers of the Spiritworld and Osun, which he distorts
for his own purposes. He dreams not of spiritual renewal but of physical patronage, not of self-containment but of a self-contained world which is upheld by women for the exclusive benefit of Black men.
This perspective is elaborated upon in Son’s reaction to Gideon:
He watched the angle of the old man’s spine and for no reason that he could think of tears stung his eyes. It astonished him, those unshed tears, for he knew well the area into which his heart was careening—an area as familiar as the knuckle of his thumb. Not the street of yellow houses with white doors, but the wide lawn places where little boys in Easter white shorts played tennis, under their very own sun. A sun whose sole purpose was to light their way, golden their hair and reflect the perfection of their Easter white shorts. He had fingered that image hundreds of times before and it had never produced tears. But now watching Yardman—he 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, having watched his personal dirt swirl down a drain, while he himself stood wrapped waist to thigh in an Easter white towel—now he was as near to crying as he'd been since he'd fled home. You would have thought something was leaving him and all he could see was its back. (139-140) 137
Son’s dream is not for the Black community’s wholeness; it is for Black boys to be
granted, rather than to earn, the center position in such a community. His is a pronounced wish for a stationary, undemanding world in which boys play their way into
men of iwa, good character. But like Cholly Breedlove, who listens to the legendary tales
told by his aunt’s older women friends and dreams that his penis is changed into the long
hickory stick carried by the healer M’Dear, Son intends his maleness “not for support but for communication” of the otherworldly power aje invokes (Bluest Eye 108).
Indeed, ‘something is leaving’ Son. Since fleeing home, he has replayed the same
scene over and over: suspended between the dual realms of earth and water, he pursues
cover and Osun, simultaneously and with equal intensity. These contradictory impulses
are traced to the fact that “he barely remembered his real original name” (139). His
surname of Green signifies his lack of development while his given name, Son, indicates
that he is implicitly part of a continuing lineage: “Son. It was the name that called forth
the true him. The him that he never lied to, the one he tucked in at night and the one he
did not want to die” (139). This is the Son who is some homesick that he jumps right into
the ‘Good Mother’s’ hands. While “Son” seeks Osun, his “other selves,” seek safety at
all costs (139). Thus, Son plans to wrest the Osun figure, Jadine, away from Valerian’s
world and make her captive to his own.
Son and Valerian appear as polar opposites: Son seems the embodiment of a
timeless Black folk culture, complete with “spaces, mountains, savannas—all those were
in his forehead and eyes”; a consummate captain of industry, Valerian exemplifies wealth
and privilege, which derives from the exploitation of human and natural resources (158).
When Valerian fires Therese and Gideon for stealing from his supply of apples, Son 138 launches into a caustic critique of the arrogant hypocrisy that underlies Valerian’s outrage. As the battle of words ensues, each man is energized by separate, conflicting versions of the local myth:
Somewhere in the back of Valerian’s mind one hundred French chevaliers were roaming the hills on horses. Their swords were in their scabbards and their epaulets glittered in the sun. Backs straight, shoulders high—alert in the security of the Napoleonic Code.
Somewhere in the back of Son’s mind one hundred black men on one hundred unshod horses rode blind and naked through the hills and had done so for hundreds of years. They knew where the river began, where the roots twisted above the ground; they knew all there was to know about the island and had not even seen it. They had floated in strange waters blind, but they were still there racing each other for sport in the hills behind this white man’s house. (206)
This confrontation sets off a chain reaction of truth-telling and counter-attack which, in turn, precipitates radical change in the power structure at L’Arbe de la Croix. What becomes clear during the aftermath of this cataclysmic episode are the numerous similarities that obtain between the seemingly antithetical characters of Valerian and Son and the myths with which they each identify.
Valerian is said to have “[p]reoccupied himself with the construction of the world and its inhabitants according to [an] imagined message,” the contents of which,
“imperceptibly he had made … up” (243). Therefore, he is destroyed by Ondine’s
Christmas-dinner revelation that, as a young, stunted and bored bride, Margaret had abused her son. It is not the horror of the crime itself but his own “crime of innocence” that derails Valerian: he didn’t help his son because he had shielded his own eyes to the signs of obvious abuse. Valerian’s refusal to see his wife and son as anything more than his own creations has rendered him blind to either’s potential for human depth and complexity. What Valerian has always taken as his wife’s inanity is, in fact, the fortitude that he himself lacks: 139
He had not known because he had not taken the trouble to know. He was satisfied with what he did know. Knowing more was inconvenient and frightening. Like a bucket of water with no bottom.… Margaret knew the bottomlessness—she had looked at it, dived in it and pulled herself out—obviously tougher than he. (242)
Signifying the ritual process with which each of Morrison’s novels are concerned, this motif of immersion and emergence from water serves to attribute Osun consciousness to
Margaret—the other of the two women Son followed to the island.
While Valerian is “paralyzed” by his “crime of innocence, Margaret and the
‘insulted’ earth bloom in the cleared space of his decline:
Valerian began going back to his greenhouse. Not as early as before; now he waited until after the breakfast rain.… But he did not change anything in there. Didn’t sow or clip or transpose. Things grew or died where and how they pleased. Isle de Chevaliers filled in the spaces that had been the island’s to begin with. (242)
Indeed, Valerian begins to take direction from the organic cycles that have persisted in
spite of his determination to ‘improve upon’ nature’s bounty.
As Valerian surrenders his quest for control over every aspect of the environment,
Son redoubles his own. Having won over Jadine, who turned to him for comfort when
the only family she has known is shattered during the Christmas dinner debacle, Son will
attempt to contain her to his own world. Like that of Valerian, Son’s world is said to be
constructed entirely of “fabrications of the moment, misinformation required to protect
Son from harm and to secure that one reality at last” (139). Unlike Margaret, who dives
into water and reemerges with the “power, creativity, and integrity of a supplemented
consciousness to resolve its existential crises and resist determination by the other,”2 Son:
used to want to go down in blue water, down, down, then to rise and burst from the waves to see before him a single hard surface, a heavy thing, but intricate. He would enclose it, conquer it, for he knew his power then.... The conflict between
2 This quotation appears in Henry, p. 32. 140
knowing his power and the world’s opinion of it secluded him, made him unilateral. (167)
Son’s aversion to risk serves also to link him with the enslaved men who would become the mythic horsemen.
According to a “fisherman’s tale” Gideon relates to Son:
Their ship foundered and sank with Frenchmen, horses and slaves aboard. The blinded slaves could not see how or where to swim so they were at the mercy of the current and the tide. They floated and trod water and ended up on that island along with horses that had swum ashore. Some of them were only partially blinded and were rescued later by the French, and returned to Queen of France and indenture. The others, totally blind, hid.…
‘[They are] still there,’ said Gideon. ‘They ride those horses all over the hills. They learned to ride through the rain forest avoiding all sorts of trees and things.’ (152)
While this legend appears to indicate heroic resistance on the part of the horsemen, the narrative puts forth an explicit critique of all such reflexive mythologizing.
Whereas the narrative signifies upon the imperialist arrogance of the French soldiers’ with its teasing reference to their being “restful in the security of the Napoleonic code,” the blind horsemen are also described with telling language. The spontaneous blindness and equestrian imagery combines with the report that they avoid “trees and things” to suggest that not only did the blind horsemen shut down at the very prospect of a changing historical situation but they also abandoned the cultural values that might have allowed them to adapt to such change. Rather than approaching the island with the self-constituting power of those who rely upon the guidance of Orishas, and other ancestors—as signified by the equestrian imagery and reference to trees—this blind race recognizes freedom in phallic power and security in stasis. Rather than upholders of tradition, they are literally blind to metacultural strategies for transforming their circumstances. A “Son”—who values fraternity above all else yet has undergone no rites 141
of passage, who prizes Black cultural traditions but fails to renegotiate them when faced
with historical change—will soon join them in their liminal retreat from time and
circumstance.
First, however, Son pursues his love affair with Jadine. Initially, Jadine is barely
recognizable as one of the Osun figures Son followed to the Street house. As Marilyn
Sanders Mobley notes, Jadine’s “sense of self is based on denial of her own cultural
heritage and an identification with one that is not her own” (287). Having lost her mother
as a young child, Jadine was raised by Sidney and Ondine, during summers only and
under Valerian’s roof. Otherwise, Jadine attended boarding schools and a Parisian
college, all of which were financed by Valerian. While mothers and other female
caretakers often serve as primary transmitters of cultural values, Jadine’s aunt, Ondine,
admits to having “told [her] nothing at all” (281). When combined with her elite
education, this lack of personal instruction leaves Jadine a cultural orphan of sorts.
In Paris, Jadine is struck by the appearance of an African woman whose “too much
hip, too much bust,” “powerful” eyes, incredulous height, “long canary yellow dress,”
“gele as yellow as her dress,” “gold” footprints, and three carefully-held eggs are symbolically suggestive of “Yeye’s” feminine abundance, power and fertility (45-46).
Coming face to face with this “vision in a yellow dress,” the cosmopolitan, college- educated model and woman about Paris, who has entertained marriage proposals from three French men, suddenly feels “[l]onely and inauthentic” (45; 48). Jadine’s distress deepens when she interprets the woman’s spitting gesture as an insult, rather than as the blessing that saliva conveys (MacGaffey, Modern 163). Permanently shaken by this
“woman in yellow,” Jadine flees to the adoring arms of her aunt and uncle (48). 142
On the island of Isle de Chevaliers, Sydney and Ondine offer her no direction.
They too are overwhelmed by the influence of bourgeois society. Implicit in Morrison’s depiction of Sidney and Ondine is the self-displacement of Ruth Dead, Nel, and Pecola— drawn on a larger canvas. As servants to Valerian, Sidney and Ondine appropriate his assumptions of privilege and take particular pride in their station as head servants over lesser servants, the islanders Gideon and Therese. They even follow their employers’
habit of ignoring the day workers’ given names, calling them Yardman and Mary.
Indeed, they refer to all indigenous women as “Mary,” apparently because they are
unable to distinguish one from another.
Here again, Morrison correlates the lack of Black cultural moorings with an
aversion to water. Before Son’s arrival, Ondine dreams of “sliding onto water, frightened
that her heavy legs and ankles will sink her” (61). Later, Sydney articulates his fear of
being fired by Valerian in terms of water: “[t]he sea spread around him and his wife.
They were afloat in it and if removed from the island there was nowhere to land” (233).
When Son steals into the Street household, Sydney and Ondine are particularly
threatened by Valerian’s subsequent decision to install him in the house’s guest room.
Their indignance at having to serve Son is surpassed only by their fear of the symbols by
which they identify his difference. Sydney’s reference to him as a “stinking, ignorant swamp nigger” is similar to Jadine’s own description of Son as “River rat” with whom
“she was in strange waters" (100, 159, 126). But, it is a sure sense of superiority that will
keep Sydney forever separated from the Black man who graciously comes before him to apologize for having “scar[ed] everybody” (159). “I know you,” Sydney tells Son, “but you don’t know me. I am a Phil-a-delphia Negro mentioned in the book of the very same 143 name. My people owned drugstores and taught school while yours were still cutting their faces open so they could tell one from the other” (163). Ondine, too, declares that Son isn’t a “Negro—meaning one of them” (102). Son’s disruptive presence crystallizes
Ondine’s powerlessness: “Oh, I’m fine …” she reassures her husband, "but her voice was flat, like a wide river without any undertow at all" (97).
Jadine’s own impotence with regard to Son is also envisaged as an inability to agent water: "She spit full in Son's face but the saliva fell on the C of his pajama top"
(120). This is in direct contradiction to the example of the ‘woman in yellow,’ who projects her spit "down to the pavement and the hearts below" (46). Such encounters with Osun, the narrator warns, inspire a “hunger [that] never moves, never closes. It is placed, open and always ready for another canary-yellow dress, other tar-black fingers holding three white eggs; or eyes whose force has burnt away their lashes” (46). The image of “that unphotographable beauty” haunts Jadine, prompting the identity crisis with which she struggles throughout the narrative. Thus, at L’Arbe de la Croix, Jadine has a “dream of large hats” from which she awakens ashamed and repelled, although she does not recognize the hats as emblems of “Mae West” and other early White sex symbols (44). Then, there is the spectacle she experiences in Son’s hometown, in which all the women who have influenced Jadine and Son flaunt their breasts before her.
In Eloe, Jadine and Son are required to sleep in separate houses. Within the small, dark room to which she is assigned, Jadine feels as though “[s]he might as well have been in a cave, a grave, the dark womb of the earth, suffocating with the sound of plant life moving, but deprived of its sight” (252). Here, natural and maternal signifiers are conflated. The immanence of all life forms, the life cycle of birth, death and rebirth are 144
continuous with “the primal source of black cultural nourishment symbolized by the
mother. At the same time, the claustrophobic connotations that the text assigns to this
imagery signify Jadine's resistance and aversion to the various received cultural
constructions of what it means to be black and female” (Mobley 289).
Indeed, Eloe is unveiled as a patriarchal Eden, much like Valerian’s but, whereas
all Black islanders provide the intensive labor of harvesting the sugar plantations that
feed Valerian’s candy empire, here it is Black women whose work maintains the status
quo. Jadine is shunted off with the women, regarded as Son’s “prize,” and barged in
upon by Son’s Aunt Rosa, whose theatrical body language serves to accuse Jadine of being “obscene” for sleeping naked (253). It is here that Jadine envisions the women crowding her with overflowing breasts. Thus, this scene combines with Jadine’s other visions and dreams to signify that, rather than black culture and identity, she opposes an array of socially-constructed and-enforced definitions—from limited standards of beauty to sexual exploitation, rigid gender roles and interdictions against personal autonomy.
This is why Jadine denounces Eloe, calling it Son’s “cradle” (267). “Some cradle,”
Son retorts in a telling defense: “It took all the grown-up strength you had just to stay
there and stay alive and keep a family together” (268). Indeed, the passage goes on to
counter Son’s singular image of Eloe women as “fat black ladies in white dresses
minding the pie table in the basement of the church” (119). As it turns out, the women of
Eloe are self-contained figures who, as girls, honed their athletic skills, drove trucks and
roped horses. As adults, they kill the animals they will later transform into food and
build the homes in which they serve it. Moreover, as custodians of a culture that they,
alone, maintain, the women of Son’s hometown vigilantly uphold communal values. 145
Thus, the reason Son couldn’t “stay there and stay alive and keep a family together,” after all, is this: in a jealous rage, he killed his wife, Cheyenne, and is on the run—not from the
law but from his aggrieved mother-in-law. “Minding” far more than “the pie table in the
church basement,” Sally Brown “[p]ray[ed] every Sunday and h[e]ld on to a shotgun
every night,” waiting for a final chance to ‘serve’ Son (248).
Likewise, Son’s plan for Jadine is more controlling gesture than liberatory mission.
From the beginning, “he saw it all as a rescue: first tearing her mind away from the
blinding awe. Then the physical escape from the plantation” (219). Even after he wrests
Jadine away from Valerian’s home and the couple moves to New York, Son’s agenda
remains unchanged:
Still he thought of it not just as love, but as rescue. He took off his clothes and filled the tub, smiling to think of what the leaden waves of the Atlantic had become in the hands of civilization. The triumph of ingenuity that had transferred the bored treachery of the sea into a playful gush of water that did exactly what it was told.... Wilderness wasn’t wild anymore or threatening; wildlife needs human protection to exist at all. (221)
It is no coincidence that Morrison uses water as the metaphor for Jadine, here. Thinly
veiled within Son’s desire for Jadine is his desperate quest to contain the ‘funkiness,’ the
fecundity, the force and flow of life, itself.
As Morrison sees it, the most insidious threat to Black cultural coherence is the
viewing of culture as an either/or choice between tradition and progress, between past and future. The challenge, rather, is to balance cultural traditions with innovation; to renegotiate and improvise upon those cultural strategies that enable fluid adaptation to historical change. Believing that the past should be forgotten, Jadine is intent on making it ‘in the world’—the material culture of Western civilization—and she wants Son to join her there. She expects to save him from the insistent mamas of his past “who had 146 seduced him, and were trying to lay claim to her” (262). Son simply inverses her dichotomous thinking: he wants no part of the capitalist machinery and yearns to retreat to an unsullied, static past.
Tar Baby’s narrator has this to say of Jadine and Son: “Each knew the world as it was meant to be. One had a past, the other a future and each bore the culture to save the race in his hands” (232). Whereas Son is unwilling to examine the past or risk the future,
Jadine refuses to surrender to a moribund past, as is represented by the women who beckon to her from trees as she sinks in the mud of a swamp. Sein de Vieilles, which literally translates as ‘in the midst of ancient women,’ was created when the river, displaced by construction, became “demented” and “slowed to a stop just twenty leagues short of the sea” (10; 9). While the ancients are “arrogant—mindful … of their value, their exceptional femaleness; knowing … that the first world of the world had been built with their sacred properties,” they are, in fact, outmoded women with whom the Blind horsemen sleep “for sport” (183; 153).
Thus, what distinguishes Jadine from Son is a fluid sense of self, which enables her to face challenges and improvise solutions. When, for example, the women of overflowing breasts crowd her room in Eloe, Jadine feels “hurt, and part of the hurt was in having the vision at all—at being the helpless victim of a dream that chose you” (262).
Jadine, however, is neither helpless nor victimized. Rather, she cowers just “until being frightened was worse than anything they could do to her so she got mad and sat up”
(258). Then, she rises to the challenge before her: “since she could not shake it, she decided to reel it in. Cut off its head, slice it open and see what lay in its belly” (261).
Refusing to break from the complexities of this world, as Son does, or to “split into two 147
parts,” like the crying Black girls of New York, Jadine is poised to dive into and pull
herself out of water with a fluid sense of her own possibilities (215).
As the relationship between these conflicting figures progresses, Son’s character
deficits mount rapidly, reminding us of the cumulative process of victorious victimization that we have seen in characters like Cholly Breedlove. That is, Son’s characterization serves further to unmask the way in which those who submit to the seductive idea of having been irrevocably victimized become career victimizers themselves, demanding constant redress from others. Thus, while Son struggles adamantly against racism, he colludes in gender oppression. As well, Morrison packs his character with tension
around the fact that he is both Black and “Cierto Americano,” both exploited and
exploiter (167). Jadine, on the other hand, has lived her life with virtually no regard for
socially-constructed notions of racial, gender or even national boundaries.
The couple’s impending demise is presignified when Son embraces one of the
“crying girls” of New York, a character named Nommo who returns the couples’
kindness by disappearing with their money. Rather than demonstrating the sacred power
to bring things into existence, as her name implies, this Nommo signifies the raging
despair of Black women at the communal loss of Black metacultural integrity. This is
signified by Son’s observations of the city. There, Black men look “neither to the left or
right” in order to avoid the Black girls’ “silent” cries, “the old people were in kennels and
childhood was underground” (215; 216). Moreover, that the city has been stripped of its
trees, functions to specify the absence of an ancestral presence (221).
Soon after Nommo leaves, the couple collides in a vicious struggle over history,
culture and truth. In her name, he accuses all Black women of cherishing the role of 148
mammy to Whites; in his name, she accuses all Black men of profiting from Black
women’s resourcefulness, then exploiting each other with the gain. When it is over:
He stared at her. The Cheech and Chong T-shirt was up around her waist and her nakedness below embarrassed him now. He had produced that nakedness and having soiled it, it shamed him…. She just lay there, stroking her raw silk thighs the color of natural honey. There was sealskin in her eyes and the ladies minding the pie table vanished like shadows under a noon gold sun. (272)
Here, Jadine symbolizes exploited ‘nature’ and Son is the destructive, contaminating
outsider. Thus, it appears that Yeye finally withdraws from him: the white-dressed women’s departure at noontime, which “indicates the flourishing of life, the point of most
ascendant power,” is marked with the emblematic color of Osun (Thompson and Cornet
28).
The symbolic depiction of Osun’s withdrawal is reinforced in the remainder of this
passage. Not only does Jadine move out of their New York apartment but afterwards,
Jadine’s photographs of Eloe women—which are characteristically contained in a “heavy
yellow envelope” —literally change before Son’s eyes: “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…” (272-273). Beholding his people through another’s eyes, Son agrees to their
unsightliness and surrenders them. Thus, they become “dead” to him.
This passage marks a significant shift in the narrative consciousness: as Osun
appears to retreat from Son, both nature and the novel’s Osun figures seem to become
more empowered. This is first noted when Jadine returns to Isle de Chevaliers, by way of
Queen of France. Here, in this seat of French colonial power, nature has already begun to
mobilize its own internal capacities: “After thirty years of shame the champion daisy 149
trees were marshaling for war.… At dawn their new formations challenged the wit of
chevaliers” (275). Not only is the flora revolting against continuing occupation by the
French chevaliers but this former colonial outpost is also suffering from unchecked
notions of progress: with tourists clamoring to a paradise that has been tamed just for
them, the “Old Queen Hotel, gallant and royal since 1927” is said to be “dying from
behind” as cheap motels “with patios the size of card tables” multiply at its rear (274).
When Jadine arrives at L’Arbe de la Croix, we find that it has undergone a revolt of
its own. In the wake of Valerian’s decline, nature and Margaret both are asserting their
own power. Bricks are “popping up out of the ground” as if “they were poked from
beneath,” ants are chewing through copper wires, and the estate’s trees seem to grow to
gargantuan heights “overnight” (284-285). Once nervous and inept, Margaret is now
“sparkly, her movements directed and sure,” as she supervises Valerian’s most basic functions and assumes complete control of L’Arbe de la Croix (276).
Sidney has also changed. Usually servile, he now shows an outrageous impudence
with Valerian but he is worried that the regime change at L’Arbe de la Croix may soon
find him and Ondine out of a job. Thus, he and Ondine look to Jadine to support them.
Jadine, however, cannot abide by what she sees as the helplessness that her guardians wield as demand upon her. She tells Ondine, “I don’t want to learn how to be
the kind of woman you’re talking about because I don’t want to be that kind of woman”
(282). Instead, Jadine realizes that her identity is intimately tied to the Osun figure she
first encountered in Paris, “that woman’s woman—that mother/sister/she,” in whose
presence Jadine had felt “[l]onely and inauthentic” (46; 48). Thus, after just a few days
in Isle de Chevaliers, Jadine decides to “go back to Paris and begin at Go.… [T]angle 150
with the woman in yellow—with her and all the night women…” (290). That is, Jadine seems poised to undergo a ritual process of Osun: to dive into water and reemerge, as
Margaret did, with the “power, creativity, and integrity of a supplemented consciousness to resolve its existential crises and resist determination by the other” (Henry 32). In
Jadine’s final scene in the novel, she recasts this mission as continuous with the lesson imparted by her primary mother figure: “Perhaps that was the thing … Ondine was saying. A grown woman did not need safety or its dreams. She was the safety she longed for” (290). What comes next, however, seems to suggest that the self- containment Jadine desires will prove too rigid for the ultimate goal of the ritual process.
As Jadine’s plane lifts above the island, the narrative reflects upon the soldier ants below: “Straight ahead they marched, shamelessly single-minded, for soldier ants have no time for dreaming. Almost all of them are women and there is so much to do…. The life of their world requires organization so tight and sacrifice so complete there is little need for males and they are seldom produced” (290). This is because the queen requires just one act of copulation with a male ant, who dies immediately thereafter, before storing his sperm for a future of “bearing, hunting, eating, fighting, burying” (291). This anecdote signifies a lack of balance, which militates against the sacred ideal of human community. As the passage continues, however, it suggests that Jadine’s struggle for self-containment will lend itself to the perspective of communitas, which draws its distinction from the fact that all of its participants are regarded as equal in terms of shared humanity, regardless of their status in sociopolitical structures. That is, the passage’s final lines invoke a nascent desire for the creative pursuit of just such a sacred ideal:
sometimes, late in life … she might get wind of a summer storm one day. The scent of it will invade her palace and she will recall the rush of wind on her belly— 151
the stretch of fresh wings, the blinding anticipation and herself, there, airborne, suspended open, trusting, frightened, determined, vulnerable—girlish, even, for an entire second and then another and another. She may lift her head then, and point her wands toward the place where the summer storm is entering her palace and in the weariness that ruling queens alone know, she may wonder whether his death was sudden. Or did he languish? If so, if there was time left, did he think how mean the world was, or did he fill that space of time thinking of her? But soldier ants do not have time for dreaming. Still, it would be hard. So very hard to forget the man who fucked like a star. (292)
As it intimates the capacity for creative synthesis that underlies and accompanies communitas, this passage signifies not only upon its initial imagery of a world dominated
by task-oriented females but also upon Son’s fantasy of a world fashioned for the sole
benefit of males (139).
Jadine has thus departed when Son returns to Isle de Chevaliers in search of her.
There, Son is located at the crossroads—the point where doors open or close, where his
decisions will forever after affect his life. The narrative description is vivid:
The man sat on the stone wall that separated Rue Madeleine from the sea. His legs hung over the ledge below which were rocks and a thin strip of dirty sand. To the left a rickety pier extended some two hundred feet into the water where black boys leaped, splashed, screamed and climbed back up to leap again. The garbage on the sand was mostly paper and bottles. No food garbage down here. Here, away from the tourist shops, away from the restaurants and offices, was that part of the boulevard where the sea threw up what it could not digest. Whatever life there is on the sand is desperate. A gull negotiated the breeze and swooped down on a black starfish. The gull pecked it, flew away and returned to peck again and again until finally the starfish yielded the magenta string that was its heart. The man watched the gull tear it out with a great deal of interest. (293)
Note that the “star” of Jadine’s discourse returns here in the form of a black starfish, who finally surrenders its heart to a bird. This passage thus denotes aje in their role of protective progenitors who, like their leader, Osun, use their power covertly. Son has continually wavered in the face of his options, which are craftily refigured here as that of either continuing his “desperate” scramble for life on land or of moving left to join the joyful boys in their ritual of immersion in and emergence from water. Just as the “water- 152
lady” originally nudged Son to the left, where the Seabird II was “anchored in blue
water” with two Osun figures at its helm, “the Mothers” again seem poised to enact a
final cooling rite on his behalf.
To reiterate the necessity of such intervention, Morrison repeats and expands the scene following Jadine’s exit from their New York apartment:
Being still was the problem. In the apartment in New York he could not sit still for long—except to look again at the photographs she had taken in Eloe. A fat yellow envelope of pictures had lain unopened on the coffee table…. Having nothing quiet to do with his huge hands … he opened the envelope and looked at the pictures of all the places and people he had loved. Then he could be still. Gazing at the photos one by one trying to find in them what it was that used to comfort him so, used to reside with him, in him like royalty in his veins. Used to people his dreams and anchor his floating days. When danger was most imminent and he fell asleep in spite of himself they were there—the yellow houses with white doors, the ladies at the pie table at Good Shephard—Aunt Rosa; Soldier’s mother May Downing whom they called Mama May; Drake’s grandmother Winnie Boon who switched them every spring; Miss Tyler who had taught him how to play piano, and the younger women: Beatrice, Ellen, and the children who had been born when he was away. The men: Old Man, Rascal, Turner and Soldier and Drake and Ernie Paul who left the service a first lieutenant and now had his own mortuary in Montgomery Alabama and doin fine. There were no photos of them, but they were there in the pictures of trees behind their houses, the fields where they worked, and the river they fished, the church where they testified, the joints where they drank. It all looked miserable in the photographs, sad, poor and even poor-spirited. (294- 295)
This is the community that has nurtured and guided Son. This is the community that so
thoroughly modeled communitas that, even after he has moved away, the very memory of it serves to restore him. That the very environment reflects their continuing presence is testament to this community’s vitality.
Son’s tacit disregard for the entire community of his youth serves to land him at the
crossroads—literally straddling the wall between land and sea. The narrative’s return to
time present is marked by the repetition of the structure that signifies Son’s determination
to avoid self-examination: “He left … the photos on the table, and it was hard to sit still 153
on the airplane; hard to sit still on the sea wall. So he stood up and walked toward the
market. Maybe Therese was there” (295).
Therese, the novel’s final Osun figure, is a descendant of the blind horsemen: she is one of the “children who, as they got into middle age, went blind too. What they saw, they saw with the eye of the mind, and that, of course was not to be trusted” (152). In addition to this enigmatic capacity, Therese’s “magic breasts” are another marker of
Osun. They are “akin to the 'Sein des Vieilles,' created when ... masculine civilization desecrated the pristine female landscape. Like the river deformed into a swamp, Therese has atrophied, her maternal function displaced by Enfamil formula” (Erichson 303). Her function as the “Good Mother” is restored, however, when she delivers Son from stasis at the crossroads for, in Therese’s dream visions, she had already seen him “r[i]de away wet and naked on a stallion” (104).
At the helm of the boat that Son believes will deliver him to L’Arbe de la Croix and
Jadine, Therese “leaned forward straining as if to hear fish calling from the sea” (304).
Suddenly, she turns the other face of Osun and becomes what Sandra Pacquet calls “a
menacing, devouring figure:”3
‘Tell me. If you cannot find her what will you do? Live in the garden of some other white people house?’
He looked around to tell her to mind her own business, but the inability to see her face stopped him.
‘Small boy,’ she said, ‘don’t go to L’Arbe de la Croix.’ Her voice was a calamitous whisper coming out of the darkness toward him like open jaws. (305)
3 This quotation appears on p. 513. 154
Yeye’s motives are not at all sinister: after Son refuses to consummate the ritual process
that would allow him to achieve a life of balance between the twin realms of land and
water, she invokes the formidable force of a ‘giant cock’ and releases him to a dream
world of folk life untouched by the passage of historical time and the corresponding
exigency of fluid improvisation.
Thus, weaned from the breast of the “Good Mother,” Son undergoes a symbolic
rise from infancy:
‘Therese!’ he shouted, turning his head around to the place where the urging of her jaws had come from. ‘Are you sure?’
If she answered, he could not hear it, and he certainly couldn’t see her, so he went. First he crawled the rocks one by one, one by one till his hands touched shore and the nursing sound of the sea was behind him. He felt around, crawled off and then stood up. Breathing heavily with his mouth open he took a few tentative steps. He threw out his hands to guide and steady his going. By and by he walked steadier, now steadier. The mist lifted and the trees stepped back a bit as if to make the way easier for a certain kind of man. Then he ran. Lickety-split.… Looking neither to the left nor to the right. (306)
Son’s installation in this world firmly locates him in alliance with the novel’s many
characters who went blind rather than face challenges ahead.
Rather than a transcendent event, Son’s passage represents escape into stasis where
he is “well-poised to renew the phallic quest of the blind horsemen” (Pacquet 513). His
correspondence with Valerian is also resolved here: Valerian, too, is finally reduced to a
baby who is fed, bathed, and otherwise managed by Margaret and Sydney; surrounded by
untended yet thriving greenhouse plants, his days are entirely devoted to private reverie.
As well, Son achieves fraternity with the Black men of New York, who are said to move
“on tippy-toe looking neither to the left or the right” because they “did not wish to see the crying, crying girls split into two parts” (216; 215). 155
With Tar Baby, we come to the realization that Morrison’s depictions of Black metacultural systemics are not merely nostalgic devices, rather they point to possibilities for a livable present. Morrison’s graphic configurations of water, in particular, direct us not to a “nebulous past heaving its moribund throes under the weight of Western victimization” but to a Black metacultural grammar of existence in which equilibrium is of primary value (Nwankwo 175). Indeed, “[i]t is in the tension between excavating the past and constructing the future, between conservation and innovation,” that reviving ‘the dead girl’ becomes existential imperative (Evans 107).
CHAPTER 5 “THE UNDERWATER FACE SHE NEEDED”: ‘CLEARING’ RITES IN BELOVED
One of the things that’s important to me is the powerfully imaginative way in which we deconstructed and reconstructed reality in order to get through. The act of will, of going to work every day—something is going on in the mind and the spirit that is not at all the mind or the spirit of a robotized or automaton people.
—Toni Morrison, “In the Realm of Responsibility”
In Beloved, ‘the dead girl’ is the disruptive embodiment of a “disremembered and unaccounted for” past (274). The story is loosely based on a newspaper account of
Margaret Garner, who escaped with her children from a Kentucky plantation to
Cincinnati. In 1856, she killed her young daughter rather than see her returned to bondage and became an instant cause celebre amongst abolitionists. Fascinated by the newspaper’s report that “everyone who interviewed [Garner] remarked about her serenity and tranquility,” Morrison refused to do any further research before embarking on an imaginative reconstruction of the lived-experiences behind the Garner headlines
(“Conversation,” with Naylor 583). The narrative is meant to recover the “interior life of people that have been reduced to some great lump called slaves” (“In the Realm,” with
Darling 253). Thus, the novel’s most outstanding achievement is its methodical demonstration of the complex ritual processes that enable its characters to confront the ever-present specter of the past and use it to reinforce the improvisatory, affirmative attitude toward life that is also part of the genuine legacy of Black’s history in the U.S.
I presume that Beloved is both Sethe’s dead daughter returned and, as Denver ultimately decides, something “more” (166). Indeed, she represents the “60 million or
156 157
more” specified in the novel’s epigraph (166). Despite, or perhaps in light of, its many
ambivalences, the narrative systematically deploys a series of signifying structures that go
beyond merely proving Beloved’s identity. More importantly, the implicit grammatical
principles that underlie and accompany these structures specify a Black metacultural
world in which dead does not mean departed; time, space and circumstance are unified
and perpetual forces; and ritual thought and activity serve as vehicles to a permanent
otherworldly reality. The holistic system that these signifying structures denote depends
for its decoding upon reciprocal applications of shared knowledge and dialogic exchange.
Morrison integrates these structures into extensive portrayals of the everyday experiences
of various characters, thus allowing the reader ample opportunity to share in and learn
from cultural perspectives of the novel’s fictive community. Whether or not the reader
chooses to participate in this necessarily interactive and self-reflexive process, these
repetitive structures “have inscribed within them the very principles by which they can be
read” (Gates xiii-xxiv).
Revisiting such concepts as iron, nommo and ase serves to clarify the novel’s implicit bid that the dead and the living, past and present, history and consciousness are linked in perpetual and reciprocal relationship. Not only do these concepts, and the themes they represent and embody, find symbolic expression in the narrative structures, but they are also exhibited in the structure of the novel. Beloved shuttles rapidly through space and time, with most of the narrative action emanating from various characters’ remembrances—of past events, personalities, and signs that were personally beheld, those that were related by others, and those that are somehow and simply known. The narrative’s seriate organization makes for an overall form that is multilayered, multifocal, 158 and characterized by shifting, often competing, perspectives. Each of the novel’s autonomous segments “evoke, and often invoke and activate, diverse forces,” all of which are equally central to the whole of the narrative (Drewal and Drewal 7). Before turning to a close examination of the remarkable ways such fundamental principles manifest in Beloved, I would first like to summarize the narrative by temporarily arranging its discrete units in chronological order.
The story originates not with any of the novel’s main characters but with the
Middle Passage journey of Sethe’s mother and a woman named Nan. Sethe knew her own mother by the brand which marked her skin, only. Nan, one-armed and otherwise unfit for hard labor, was the woman who nursed enslaved children while their mothers toiled on the plantation. Because Nan’s milk first went to the owner’s children, Nan never had enough milk for the Black children. Other than the transformative power of the song and dance performed in the community of her birth, Sethe remembers little else of her experiences before being brought, at aged 13, to Kentucky’s “Sweet Home” plantation. There, under the enlightened patriarchy of Mr. Garner, Sethe ‘marries’ Halle, one of five men enslaved at Sweet Home, and gives birth to three children. Sethe makes ink and performs other domestic chores alongside Mrs. Garner, until the latter becomes terminally ill. When Mr. Garner dies suddenly, the despotic Schoolteacher takes over and the Sweet Home Men begin plotting the entire group’s escape. Sethe, who is pregnant, becomes determined to get her children out when she discovers that the
Darwinian Schoolteacher has begun charting, ranking, and systemizing the Blacks’
‘racial characteristics’ for the scientific book he plans to publish. 159
Just before Sethe is to make her escape, Schoolteacher’s nephews pin her down and
suck her breast milk. This violation only increases Sethe’s resolve to get her ase-bearing
substance to her “crawling-already? baby” who, along with Sethe’s two sons, has already
been ushered to the Cincinnati home of Baby Suggs. Since 1848, when her son, Halle,
purchased her freedom, Baby Suggs has leased 124 Bluestone Road from the Bodwin
siblings. The Bodwins are staunch abolitionists who, nevertheless, share a severe disdain
of African Americans, as shown by the caricature of Black dismemberment in the service
of Whites’ needs that is displayed in their home. This statue is of a Black man whose
“head was thrown back farther than a head could go”; his “gaping red mouth” is a
receptacle for anything its owner wants to put in it and he kneels on a pedestal which
reads “At Yo Service” (255).
During her own escape, Sethe gives birth to a second daughter with the help of
Amy Denver, a White fugitive from indentured servitude for whom the baby, Denver, is
named. After Amy helps her to the Ohio River, Sethe is ferried across by a man who had renamed himself Stamp Paid “when he handed over his wife to his master’s son” (184).
Stamp Paid “extended his debtlessness” by shuttling runaways across the Ohio while other “underground agent[s]” took over from there (185; 69). Thus it was that Ella delivered Sethe and child to Baby Suggs, who has opened her heart and her home at 124
Bluestone Road to minister to the practical and spiritual needs of the community’s free
Blacks. Sethe expects her husband and the other “Sweet Home Men,” Paul A, Paul D,
Paul F and Sixo, to join her at Baby Suggs’ house. The men have yet to make it by the time Baby Suggs throws an elaborate party, with the help of her friend Stamp Paid, to
celebrate the arrival of her daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Sethe enjoys “twenty- 160
eight days—the travel of one whole moon,” a cycle that is repeated in the novel’s total of
28 chapters—of communitas before Schoolteacher catches up to them.
Desperate to save them from re-enslavement, Sethe wounds her sons and succeeds
in killing her “crawling-already? baby.” Sethe is jailed briefly, with the newly-born
Denver in tow. Mr. Bodwin and the Colored Ladies of Delaware intervene on her behalf.
When Sethe returns home, the community, which is already outraged by the extravagance of Baby Suggs’ party, is even more offended by Sethe’s pride.
When the narrative opens some eighteen years later, in 1873, Sethe’s boys have
already run away and Baby Suggs has died. This leaves Sethe and Denver alone in 124
Bluestone, where they have long withstood “the outrageous behavior of that place,” the
“turned-over slop jars, smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour air” (4). As the house’s
last remaining occupants, “Sethe and Denver decided to end the persecution by calling
forth the ghost that tried them so” (4). This attempt at direct communication fails but
Sethe does experience what the narrative suggests is a recurring remembrance:
and there it was again. The welcoming cool of unchiseled headstones; the one she selected to lean against on tiptoe, her knees wide open as any grave. Pink as a fingernail it was, and sprinkled with glittering chips. Ten minutes, he said. You got ten minutes I’ll do it for free.
Ten minutes for seven letters. With another ten she could have gotten “Dearly” too? She had not thought to ask him and it bothered her still that it might have been possible—that for twenty minutes, a half hour say, she could have had the whole thing, every word she heard the preacher say at the funeral (and all there was to say, surely) engraved on her baby’s headstone: Dearly Beloved. But what she got, settled for, was the one word that mattered.…
Counting on the stillness of her own soul, she had forgotten the other one: the soul of her baby girl. Who would have thought that a little old baby could harbor so much rage? Rutting among the stones under the eyes of the engraver’s son was not enough. Not only did she have to live out her years in a house palsied by the baby’s fury at having its throat cut, but those ten minutes she spent pressed up against dawn-colored stone studded with star chips, her knees wide open as any 161
grave, were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil. (4-5)
More than a mere recollection, this vivid scene implicitly links Sethe with the cosmic
processes of life and death. It is iron, “a spectacle,” “a remembrance,” or a fleeting,
transitory glimpse into the “mysterious, permanent dimension of reality which, until
revealed, is shut off from human view” (Drewal and Drewal, p 1). The power of this
passage is not just related to its evocation of iron. Much of this passage’s impact is
produced by the way it compounds its representation of iron with that of other Black
metacultural concepts, charging them all with symbolic referents to the exacting ethos of
the Spiritworld.
Sethe’s time with the engraver seemed eternal and carried more vital force than the
baby’s blood because dawn, the color of the headstone Sethe chose to lean against with
“her knees wide open as any grave,” is the sign of a life beginning in Bakongo thought.
As well, the “glittering chips” serve to invoke the Bakongo concept that a “glittering
object” “at once arrests the spirit with its light and hints of movement to the other world”
(Thompson “Kongo,” 175). What is more, the preacher’s utterances appear to possess
ase, the Yoruba conception “that to utter the name of something may draw that
something into actual existence … not only within the mind and body of he who utters and he who hears the word, but also in the physical world as well” (Raymond Prince, as qtd. in Drewal and Drewal 5) That such absolute power and potential is present in all things, including the dead, is specified immediately after Sethe’s remembrance of acquiring the gravestone. She recalls Baby Suggs’ assertion: “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to the rafters with some dead Negro’s grief” (5). 162
Later, after she is certain of Beloved’s identity, Sethe will divulge her pivotal role in redoubling the force of Reverend Pike’s words:
Reverend Pike spoke in a real loud voice, but I didn’t catch a word—except the first two, and three months later when … they let me out for good, I went and got you a gravestone, but I didn’t have enough money for the carving so I exchanged … what I did have and I’m sorry to this day I never thought to ask him for the whole thing: all I heard of what Reverend Pike said. Dearly Beloved, which is what you are to me and I don’t have to be sorry about getting only one word…. [A]s soon as I got the gravestone in place you made your presence known in the house and worried us all to distraction. (183-184)
In this way, the novel’s introductory chapter functions to establish the fascinating network of signifying structures that accompany the narrative’s demonstrations of ase andiron. Seriate repetitions of these structures serve to explain not only how but also why the corporeal Beloved will assert herself in the world of the living.
Thus, in chapter one, we learn that it is precisely because Sethe “worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe” that she is continually overcome by visceral manifestations of a permanent otherworldly reality:
Unfortunately, her brain was devious. She might be hurrying across a field, running practically, to get to the pump quickly and rinse the chamomile sap from her legs. Nothing else would be in her mind. The picture of the men coming to nurse her was as lifeless as the nerves in her back where the skin buckled like a washboard. Nor was there the faintest scent of ink or the cherry gum and oak bark from which it was made. Nothing. Just the breeze cooling her face as she rushed toward water. And then sopping the chamomile away with pump water and rags, her mind fixed on getting every last bit of sap off…. Then something. The plash of water, the sight of her shoes and stockings awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, 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…. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her—remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that. (6) 163
Rather than the travails of plantation slavery, the focus of Sethe’s iron is the trees of the
Sweet Home plantation. These symbols of immortality mark the place of enduring and reciprocating spirit—on the grounds of Sweet Home and in Sethe’s consciousness. Thus, these spiritual emblems are juxtaposed with the physical marker of enslavement that is etched onto Sethe’s body. Whereas the “tree” on Sethe’s back illustrates the dismembering capacities of the slave system, the trees in this iron represent the metacultural understandings and practices that fuel her interior life. Whereas Sethe could not “feel” the former, has “never seen it and never will,” her open interaction with sights, sounds and tactile sensations of the organic world brings the latter “rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes” (18; 16).
That Paul D arrives at Sethe’s home just after this iron is significant. For not only is he the first of the novel’s characters to emerge from a past that refuses to stay put but, as we will learn in the novel’s second chapter, what compels this rambling man to remain with Sethe is the very same catalyst behind Sethe’s iron. Just as Sethe’s visceral remembrances are instigated by the “breeze cooling her face as she rushed toward water,”
Paul D is said to have simply “looked at [Sethe’s] wet bare feet and asked to join her”
(22).
When Sethe questions Paul D about her husband’s fate, the semantic network by which Beloved can be ‘read’ is further established. Immediately upon invoking Halle’s name, Sethe “looked down at her feet and saw again the sycamores” (8). As Halle has been missing for more than eighteen years, Sethe’s glimpse into the permanent dimension of reality attests to both his corporeal death and, most importantly, his spiritual immortality. Later in the novel, we will learn that Baby Suggs and Denver also witness 164
to the perpetuity of Halle’s vital force, through irons of their own. Baby Suggs is said to
have been “prepared for [news of his death]” because, less than a month after his
disappearance, “[h]e was with her—everywhere” (139). Precisely because Baby Suggs
“used to tell … [her Halle’s] things,” or his story, Denver is able to glimpse, in the
present tense, the father who disappeared before she was born: “my daddy do anything
for runny fried eggs” (207). The extraordinary insight shown by these characters is
especially significant considering the fact that Denver and Baby Suggs are also associated
with trees.
The novel’s first chapter establishes this crucial information with strategic
indirection. Denver is said to remember “Baby Suggs telling her things in the keeping
room. She smelled like bark in the day and leaves at night, for Denver would not sleep in
her old room after her brothers ran away” (19). The initial indeterminacy of the pronoun signifies that this seemingly innocuous report is anything but; rather, it alludes to the wooded area in which Baby Suggs presided over communal rites for restoring balance between the twin worlds as well as to Denver’s secret ritual space in the woods that separate her house from a stream. In this way, the novel’s introductory chapter locates each of the novel’s main characters within the semantic network by which we are to
recognize and ‘read’ the spiritual contours and practical objectives of Beloved.
Chapter one denotes the impassioned way Paul D kisses “every ridge and leaf” of
Sethe’s lacerated back (18). This description thus anticipates the second chapter’s depiction of Paul D’s own remembrance, or iron, of trees:
the … maze he had explored… was in fact a revolting clump of scars. Not a tree, as she said. Maybe shaped like one, but nothing like any tree he knew because trees were inviting; things you could trust and be near; talk to if wanted to as he frequently did since way back when her took his midday meal in the fields of Sweet 165
Home. Always in the same place if he could and choosing the place had been hard because Sweet Home had more pretty trees than any farm around. His choice he called Brother, and sat under it, alone sometimes, sometimes with Halle or the other Pauls, but more often with Sixo…. (21)
Here, Morrison traces the origins of Paul D’s ritual thought and activity.
A survivor of the Middle Passage, Sixo is the novel’s archetypal African. He
communicates with both the “Presence” of America’s native population and that of the
wind (24). He also holds detailed knowledge about the path of the stream and is capable
of “melt[ing] into the woods” (25). As this chapter recovers the experiences Sixo is said to have chronicled for Paul F, Halle, Paul A and Paul D, it serves moreover to demonstrate the processes by which New World Africans forged the private social exchanges that conceded the formation and ongoing development of an integrated cultural subsystem and a sense of collective identity.
Through his stories, Sixo teaches the Sweet Home men to look to the community of
ancestors for the meaning of their own lives:
Sixo went among the trees at night. For dancing, he said, to keep his bloodlines open, he said. Privately, alone, he did it. None of the rest of them had seen him at it, but they could imagine it and the picture they pictured made them eager to laugh at him—in the daylight, that is, when it was safe” (25).
While the U.S.-born men find Sixo’s rite curious, they are prompted, nevertheless, to
their own ritual exchanges with the trees of Sweet Home. Thus, Sixo’s cultural
understandings and practices led to the formation of a distinct grammar for existence
among the Sweet Home men, which imbued their lives with spiritual meaning.
To suggest that this metacultural grammar inspired Sethe’s own practices, the
narrative juxtaposes Sethe’s memories with those of Paul D:
she… had to bring a fistful of salsify into Mrs. Garner’s kitchen every day just to be able to work in it, feel like some part of it was hers, because she wanted to love the work she did, to take the ugly out of it, and the only way she could feel at home 166
on Sweet Home was if she picked some pretty growing thing and took it with her. The day she forgot was the day the butter wouldn’t come or the brine in the barrel blistered her arms.
At least it seemed so. A few yellow flowers on the table, some myrtle tied around the handle of the flatiron holding the door open for a breeze calmed her, and when Mrs. Garner and she sat down to sort bristle or make ink, she felt fine. (22)
Sethe improvised upon Sixo’s model in order to approach and order her particular
experience as the sole Black woman on the plantation. It is particularly significant that
Sethe’s ritual activity is focused around the yellow flowers of Osun, “the protector of
birth, defender of mothers and adoptive mother of helpless children” (Santos 69). From
the instigative role that such flora assumes to the self-containment that results, this
passage clearly attributes to Sethe the self-formative capacities of consciousness that follow from the ritual process of Osun.
As the passage continues, the far-reaching efficacy of her rite is denoted:
she felt fine. Fine. Not scared of the men beyond. The five who slept in quarters near her, but never came in the night. Just touched their raggedy hats when they saw her and stared. And if she brought food to them in the fields… they never took it from her hands. They stood back and waited for her to put it on the ground (at the foot of the tree) and leave. Either they did not want to take anything from her, or did not want her to see them eat. Twice or three times she lingered. Hidden behind honeysuckle she watched them. How different they were without her, how they laughed and played and urinated and sang. All but Sixo… (22-23)
With this, Morrison juxtaposes the characteristic effects of each gender’s ritual process.
By recommending only indefinite explanations for the men’s response to Sethe’s food
offerings, Morrison directs readers’ attention to the definitive insertion of the
parenthetical reference to trees. This supplemental information denotes the true
significance of the men’s behavior: they insist that Sethe place their food at the foot of a
tree because it is there that they carry out propitiatory rites before eating. Moreover, it is
suggested that such ritual activity elicits the men’s high regard for Sethe. 167
Here again, Sixo is emphasized in order to stress his incipient role in the
incorporation of such existential grammars among all of Sweet Home’s Blacks.
Throughout the narrative, both Sethe and Paul D will recall the ways in which this
archetypal figure modeled ways not only to ameliorate the loss of direct ties to ancestral
knowledges but also to forge affiliatory bonds with one another. As they served both to
cultivate and reinforce fundamental cultural understandings and practices and to provide some measure of group coherence and agency, such communal bonds became all the more crucial for enslaved peoples. Not recognized by those in power as legitimate or binding, such social ties became by definition acts of critical resistance within the slave system.
Thus, Sixo is included in the long, knotty story of the infanticide that Sethe shares
with Paul D:
I wish I’d known more, but, like I say, there wasn’t nobody to talk to. Women, I mean. So I tried to recollect what I’d seen before where I was before Sweet Home. How the women did there. Oh they knew all about it. How to make that thing you use to hang the babies in the trees—so you could see them out of harm’s way while you worked in the fields. Was a leaf thing too they gave em to chew on. Mint, I believe, or sassafras. Comfrey, maybe. I still don’t know how they constructed that basket thing … I forgot what the leaf was. I could have used that.… It’s hard, you know what I mean? By yourself with no woman to help you through.… Sixo was the biggest help.… Taught me a lot, Sixo. (160-161)
By calling attention to Sethe’s distress at being unable to recall the cultural knowledges
of the women who constituted her community of origin, Morrison illuminates slavery’s
particular toll on women and its devastating effects on Black families and communities.
Moreover, this passage resignifies how Sixo helped to fill a critical void in Sethe’s life by
teaching her some of the existential grammars that would, under normal circumstances,
be transmitted from mother to child. 168
That Sethe looked to Sixo for the fundamental cultural understandings and
practices upon which she would build her own ritual activities is further emphasized in
another of her remembrances. In it, she recalls how, after initiating the plan for their
escape from Sweet Home, Sixo “watched the sky. Not the high part, the low part where
it touched the trees. You could tell his mind was gone from Sweet Home” (197). In its
later reenactment of the infanticide, the narrative attributes this same gesture to Sethe but
this time it is precipitated by the sign with which Morrison signifies the presence of Osun
in Sula: “Sethe feels her eyes burn and it may have been to keep them clear that she looks
up. The sky was blue and clear. Not one touch of death in the definite green of the
leaves” (261).
What is more, the very first occurrence of this gesture to appear in the narrative is
in association to Baby Suggs, who was both the only woman enslaved at Sweet Home
before being replaced by Sethe. Sensing impending trouble just prior to Sethe’s
infanticide, Baby Suggs not only probes ‘the low part of the sky where it touched the
trees’ but she also tunes in to familiar loci of Osun’s power: “Baby Suggs, holy, looked
up. The sky was blue and clear. Not one touch of death in the definite green of the
leaves. She could hear birds and, faintly, the stream way down in the meadow.…” (138).
Taken together, these passages signify that not only did private social exchanges among
Sweet Home’s Blacks lead to the formation of an integrated metacultural system, but also
that the women elaborated upon this system by designating the “Good Mother” as its center. Just as Sethe’s invocation of Sixo’s signifying gesture is preceded by the sign of
Osun, Baby Suggs appends her invocation of this gesture with a direct reference to
Osun’s role as principal aje. 169
Throughout the novel, then, Morrison repeatedly deploys metaphorical references to birds, trees, the watery white Spiritworld, and other signifiers of the ritual process of
Osun. By associating some aspect of this interwoven sign system with the everyday interactions and practices of the novel’s primary characters, Morrison denotes Black metacultural knowledges as fundamental, interrelated and reciprocal. By tracing their origins to characters who are long-dead, the author depicts these signs as perpetually extending through space and time to recollect ‘living’ characters into a network of ancestral affiliation.
124 Bluestone, itself, is made to signify the persistence of this network, despite the historically disruptive force of slavery or individual attempts at “beating back the past”
(73). Not only is it identifiable as “the gray and white house on Bluestone Road” but the interior of Sethe’s home is also replete with signs of its productive relationship to the watery whiteness of the spirit world and the ritual processes of Osun (3). When Paul D enters the house, he is immediately arrested by the home’s white stairway:
Out of the dimness of the room in which they sat, a white staircase climbed toward the blue-and-white wallpaper of the second floor. Paul D could see just the beginning of the paper; discreet flecks of yellow sprinkled among a blizzard of snow-drops all backed by blue. The luminous white of the railing and steps kept him glancing toward it. Every sense he had told him the air above the stairwell was charmed and very thin. (11)
Note how intent is assigned to the white stairs. This sign is then compounded with equally evocative symbols of a covert Osun and the auspicious blue color that is associated with etutu or cooling rites.
As Victor Turner notes in The Ritual Process such signs are not merely factors in cognition. They are, moreover, evocative devices, capable even of entangling strangers in the existential issues with which ritual processes are concerned. This stairway is 170
envisaged as yet another “glittering object,” capable of embedding the spirit and
illuminating its pathway to the other world. Thus, when Denver first speaks of the
house’s ghost, Paul D “looked quickly up the lightning white stairs behind her” (13). His
sensorial recognition that the white stairway functions as Kalunga, the point at which the
material and spiritual realms intersect, is confirmed in the narrative’s recurring
invocations of this structure.
Nevertheless, Paul D insists upon battling this ‘dead girl.’ The narrator signifies
upon how pedestrian are his efforts against this otherworldly force:
holding a table by two legs, he bashed it about, wrecking everything, screaming back at the screaming house.… Paul D did not stop whipping the table around until everything was rock quiet. Sweating and breathing hard, he leaned against the wall in the space the sideboard left. Sethe was still crouched next to the stove, clutching her salvaged shoes to her chest. (18)
Paul D has succeeded in destroying the house’s furnishings, perhaps, but “everything” is
hardly quieted. Indeed, sound is emphasized in the signifying structure that immediately follows this report: “The three of them, Sethe Denver, and Paul D, breathed to the same beat, like one tired person. Another breathing was just as tired” (19).
“It was gone” appears next, but this is only partially true (19). Three textual
indicators lead me to this observation. The first of these is the aforementioned signifying
structure. Secondly, there is the narrative’s inscription of a two-line pause between this
reference to ‘another, weary breather’ and the announcement “it was gone.” Finally, this
announcement introduces a shift to Denver’s narrative perspective, in which she
expresses resentment that “the two of them had gone up there” and left her alone. This
serves to further signify upon the aforementioned reference to “the three of them, Sethe
Denver, and Paul D” standing in unified opposition to the house’s Other. Just as the
ghost had, Denver recognizes Paul D as the interloper, who had not only “stepp[ed] 171 lightly, easy-footed” up “the white stairs” with her mother “but had also “gotten rid of the only other company she had” since the departure of her brothers and Baby Suggs (19).
As in Sula, childhood loneliness drives Denver to secret ritual activity at the
Kalunga line of life and death. She has spent many hours in the “woods, between the field and the stream, hidden by post oaks” where:
five boxwood bushes, planted in a ring, had started stretching toward each other four feet off the ground to form a round, empty room seven foot high, its wall fifty inches of murmuring leaves.…
It began as a little girl’s houseplay, but as her desires changed, so did the play. Quiet, primate and completely secret except for the noisome cologne signal that thrilled the rabbits before it confused them. First a playroom (where the silence was softer), then a refuge (from her brothers’ fright), soon the place became the point. In that bower, closed off from the hurt of the world, Denver’s imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her out. Veiled and protected by the live green walls, she felt ripe and clear, and salvation was as easy as a wish. (28-29)
That this ritual process for soliciting the adoptive mother of helpless children elicits extraordinary capacities in Denver is further demonstrated in the narrative’s finely measured account of its most striking example of iron:
Once when she was in the boxwood, an autumn long before Paul D moved into the house…, she was made suddenly cold by a combination of wind and the perfume on her skin. She dressed herself, bent down to leave and stood up in snowfall: a thin and whipping snow very like the picture her mother had painted as she described the circumstances of Denver’s birth in a canoe straddled by a whitegirl for whom she was named.
Shivering, Denver approached the house, regarding it, as she always did, as a person rather than a structure. A person that wept, sighed, trembled and fell into fits.… A breastplate of darkness hid all the windows except one. Its dim glow came from Baby Suggs’ room. When Denver looked in, she saw her mother on her knees in prayer, which was not unusual. What was unusual (even for a girl who had lived all her life in a house peopled by the living activity of the dead) was that a white dress knelt down next to her mother and had its sleeve around her mother’s dress. And it was the tender embrace of the dress sleeve that made Denver remember the details of her birth—that and the thin, whipping snow she was standing in, like the fruit of common flowers. (29) 172
It is only through concerted effort of the will that such momentary spectacles admit
revelation. Thus, it is significant that upon emerging from her ritual space, not only does
Denver behold the house as synonymous with the ase of “dead girl” but she also has a vision of the “dead girl” dressed in the symbolic color of the watery world of the dead.
This iron leads Denver to experience an interlocking series of iron.
The narrative of Denver’s birth constitutes much more than a mere description of a
past event. Rather, it reveals Beloved’s multiplied, seriate compositional style, which is
predicated on the fundamental concept that ase unites all beings in an eternal state of interrelation, and it demonstrates the performative power of ase to activate worldly
manifestations of the permanent dimension of reality. Denver’s is the first account of the
story, originally told to her by her mother, to appear in the text:
Easily she stepped into the told story that lay before her eyes on the path she followed away from the window. There was only one door to the house and to get to it from the back you had to walk all the way around to the front of 124…. And to get to the part of the story she liked best, she had to start way back: hear the birds in the thick woods, the crunch of leaves underfoot; see her mother making her way up into the hills where no houses were likely to be. How Sethe was walking on two feet meant for standing still. How they were so swollen she could not see her arch or feel her ankles.… But she could not, would not, stop, for when she did the little antelope rammed her with horns and pawed the ground of her womb with impatient hooves. While she was walking, it seemed to graze, quietly—so she walked, on two feet meant, in this sixth month of pregnancy, for standing still.… She sank and had to look down to see whether she was in a hole or kneeling. Nothing was alive but her nipples and the little antelope. Finally, she was horizontal—or must have been because blades of wild onion were scratching her temple…. (29-30)
As demonstrated by the pointed language in this passage, some narratives are so
illustrative that they are referred to as “pictures, images to be looked at.” Such narratives
constitute iron in that they are made “visible through the storyteller’s dramatization,” 173
then the spectator’s, or reader’s, participation furthers the vitality of the vision (Drewal
and Drewal 1).
Thus, as Denver’s iron continues, Sethe picks up the story-telling for which Denver
is the implied audience:
Concerned as she was for the life of her children’s mother, Sethe told Denver, she remembered thinking: ‘Well, at least I don’t have to take another step.’ A dying thought is ever there was one, and she waited for the little antelope to protest, and why she thought of an antelope Sethe could not imagine since she had never seen one. She guessed it must have been an invention held on to from before Sweet Home, when she was very young. Of that place where she was born (Carolina maybe? or was it Louisiana?) she remembered only song and dance. Not even her own mother….
Oh but when they sang. And oh but when they danced and sometimes they danced the antelope. The men as well as the ma’ams, one of whom was certainly her own. They shifted shapes and became something other. Some unchained, demanding other whose feet knew her pulse better than she did. Just like this little one in her stomach. (30-31)
In this ritual activity the dancers tap the permanent dimension of reality, thus
rediscovering themselves as much more than slaves. Manifesting the fluid movements of
the antelope, the dancers escaped, at least temporarily, their conditions of physical constraint.
In this way, the narrative confirms the didactic processes by which such Black
metacultural grammars for existence are renewed by succeeding generations. All that
remains of Sethe’s early memories is the transformative power of this dance. However,
the mere act of naming and referring to her unborn child as the little antelope is sufficient
to invoke this very power. Thus, while Sethe is resigned to her impending death, “the
thought of the herself stretched out dead while the little antelope live on—an hour? a day
and a night?—in her lifeless body grieved her so she made the groan that made the person
walking on a path not ten yards away halt and stand right still” (31). 174
The battery of practicable knowledges that Sethe engages in this scene will be
recovered later in the narrative, in her own and Denver’s subsequent retelling to Beloved.
Now, however, the omniscient narrator continues the part of the story that links directly
to the insight this iron provides Denver (32-35). In this segment, Amy Denver leads the
crawling Sethe to a lean-to and massages her busted feet, warning, “it’s gonna hurt, now.
Anything dead coming back to life hurts” (35). The narrative returns to time-present
now, with Denver incorporating the “truth” of Amy’s statement: “Maybe the white dress
holding its arms around her mother‘s waist was in pain. If so, it could mean the baby
ghost had plans” (35).
‘Stepping out’ of the iron with this new insight, Denver enters the house and tells
Sethe about the white dress. Probing for meaning, she asks:
‘What were you praying for, Ma’am?’
‘Not for anything. I don’t pray anymore. I just talk.’
‘What were you talking about?’
‘You won’t understand, baby.’ (35)
Denver will indeed understand. For, we are told, she “knew the downright pleasure of
enchantment, of not suspecting but knowing the things behind things. Her brothers had
known, but it scared them; Grandma Baby knew, but it saddened her…. Even Sethe
didn’t love it. She just took it for granted” (37).
As Denver encourages her to ferret out the white dress’ purpose, Sethe succinctly
explains the workings of time, space, and circumstance, the lingering force of ase and the fleeting yet recurring power of iron to reveal the permanent dimension of reality:
‘I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are 175
still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.’
‘Can other people see it?’ asked Denver.
‘Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm—every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can’t never go there. Never. Because even though it’s all over—over and done with—it’s going to always be there waiting for you. That’s how come I had to get my children out. No matter what.’
Denver picked at her fingernails. ‘If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.’
Sethe looked right in Denver’s face. ‘Nothing ever does,’ she said. (36)
Not only does Sethe’s explanation fall in line with fundamental grammatical principles of
Yoruba cultural systems but it also evokes those of the Bantu.
In Muntu: an Outline of Neo-African Culture, Jahnheinz Jahn compares the Bantu system with four other Black cultural systems, suggesting that its designation of an all- encompassing unity is an implicit grammatical principle in African metacultures. Muntu is often translated as ‘human being’ but the Bantu word encompasses the living and the dead, ancestors and gods—all of whom control nommo or ase. Moreover, in the Bantu system, all entities belong in one of four categories and are “conceived of not as substance but as force” (100). After Muntu, Kintu encompasses objects, “those forces which cannot act for themselves and which can become active only on the command of a 176
Muntu.” Kuntu embraces modalities such as laughter or harmony, which are capable of acting independently.
The third category, Hantu, concerns Sethe’s understanding of time, space, and circumstance as unified and perpetual forces. Jahn writes:
Hantu is the force which localizes spatially and temporally every event and every ‘motion,’ for since all beings are force, everything is constantly in motion. To the question, ‘Where did you see it?’ the answer may be, ‘Where did I see it? Why in the reign of King X.’ That is, a question of place can be answered in terms of time. To the question, ‘When did you see it? the answer may be: ‘In the boat, under the liana bridge after Y.’ Here the question of time is answered by an allocation of place. This is by no means unusual; everyone who looks at a clock reads time by the position of the hands—a determination of place; and the mathematician who wants to represent motion indicates the distance on one axis of his co-ordinates and the time on the other. (102)
Such understanding resonates in Morrison’s description of the way in which Sethe decodes the instrument by which time is tracked in her workplace: “She couldn’t read clock time very well, but she knew when the hands were closed in prayer at the top of the face she was through for the day” (189). This clock, which is the property of Sethe’s employer, is one of the few intrusions of conventional processes of documenting time to appear in the novel.
Otherwise, the narrative specifies time, space and circumstance as reciprocal, ceaseless forces. This is true with regard to the house, the permutations of which serve to localize the shifting ase of the dead girl. Hence, 124 Bluestone is introduced in Book
One as “spite[ful],” in Book Two as “loud,” and in Book Three as finally “quiet.” Time and space also merge with circumstance when Sethe trades sex for the dead baby’s coffin. Thus, “those ten minutes she spent pressed up against dawn-colored stone studded with star chips, her knees wide open as any grave, were longer than life…” (5). 177
It is significant that Sethe is “talking about time,” about the fact that nothing ever
dies, when the “white dress” appears. Elisha P. Renne’s explanation for the pervasive use of white cloth among the Bunu, Yoruba of Northwestern Nigeria, helps to explain this signifying structure:
the production and use of white cloth in Bunu society would appear to embody beliefs about the ‘essential unity of personal, social and natural domains of Being.’
There are both ritual and everyday ways in which white cloth palpably communicates these ideas and values. The particular qualities of white cloth—for example, its color, absorbency, and susceptibility to decay—make it an evocative symbol for mediating relations among individuals, social groups, and spirits. Yet its opacity and impermanence also suggests less benign associations, such as hiding and desertion. White cloth, ideally used to facilitate harmonious social and natural relations, may also be used to subvert them. While cloth may be used to represent and to placate spirits, it is not always clear whether these spirits are harmful or helpful. Similarly the harmonious social relations that the use of white cloth seeks to promote may not be beneficial for all involved…. (23)
Morrison’s “white dress” is clearly used in ways that invoke “the ambiguity of social life, where the ideals of a common good are continually and necessarily being constrained by countervailing interests” (23).
Moreover, Renne’s note about “children of water” sheds further light on the figure of the “white dress” that kneels beside Sethe, formulating “plans” of its own (25). The
Bunu society of ejinuwon, consists mainly of “women who had children who died young,
or who themselves were born after several previous siblings died. They are believed to
have spirit-doubles who live under water, … who routinely trouble them” (Renne 25).
As Diedre Badejo notes, such premature death, or death before reaching the status of an
elder, makes for an imbalance that threatens the individual and communal psyche. In
order to correct the resulting disharmony, “the child’s troublesome spirit must be made to
remain with its mother so that it may complete its life cycle properly.” Because “the 178
repeated death of a child (abiku) cannot itself elevate the child to the status of ancestor,”
the child is otherwise resigned to liminality (Badejo 68).
Morrison says that she intentionally invokes such a conviction in Beloved: “It is
believed that, in particular, children or young people who die uneasily return out of the
water in forms of members of your family” (“Toni Morrison,” with Carrabi 39). From
the crawling-already? baby, to the figure of the white dress, to the corporeal Beloved,
Morrison portrays an abiku who has returned to her mother in order to complete her life
cycle properly.
Not only is Denver, the last known survivor of all Sethe’s children, the only person to see “the white dress” but also Beloved will tell Denver that Sethe “is the one I need.
You can go but she is the one I have to have” (76). To satiate this abiku’s desire, Denver
endeavors “to construct out of the strings she had heard all her life a net to hold Beloved”
(76). Consider the affective power that Beloved wields in both eliciting and bringing to
life the continuing story of Denver’s birth. Beloved’s eagerness to hear the story invokes
in Denver the performative power of ase. Thus, the narrative spirals beyond Sethe’s
story to become iron:
Denver was seeing it now and feeling it—through Beloved. Feeling how it must have felt for her mother. Seeing how it must have looked. And the more fine points she made, the more detail she provided, the more Beloved liked it. So she anticipated the questions by giving blood to the scraps her mother and grandmother had told her—and a heartbeat. The monologue became, in fact, a duet as they lay down together, Denver nursing Beloved’s interest like a lover whose pleasure was to overfeed the loved.… It was smelling like grass and feeling like hands—the unrested hands of busy women: dry, warm, prickly. Denver spoke, Beloved listened, and the two did the best they could to create what really happened, how it really was, something only Sethe knew…. (78)
As Trudier Harris notes, “Denver gives ‘blood,’ life force, to the ‘scraps’ of stories she
has heard…. Her infusion of blood thereby grants a ‘heartbeat’ to what she relates” 179
(168). Whereas Harris locates this demonstration in Judeo-Christian mythology, I see the
inscription of ase and iron.
A second definition of iron helps to explain how it is that, together, Denver and
Beloved are able to recreate “something only Sethe knew.” As John Henry and Margaret
Drewal write in Gelede:
iron also is used to designate ‘a generation.’ A generation consists of the members of a lineage (idile) who are born into the world at approximately the same time, whose children would make up the next generation. Implicit in a generation is the collectivity of people required to formulate it. A spectacle, by definition, likewise implies a collectivity of participant/spectators and a multiplicity of images and ideas converging in the same time frame.… Continuity or regeneration is implicit in the concept of lineage; a generation represents one of its diachronic units. (2)
Both usages of iron indicate “temporary, transitory, and cyclical” manifestations of “a permanent other worldly reality” (2). As the current generation of Sethe’s lineage,
Denver and Beloved are able to recall, or reconstruct, her story—including the parts that
Sethe resists remembering.
When the narrator provides the final retelling of the story of Denver’s birth, a
dazzling array of symbols specify the ritual processes of the “Good Mother” (78-85).
There is the yellow-haired Amy Denver’s healing touch and the leaf-shoes she makes for
Sethe’s tender feet, her hair-braiding, Sethe’s own determination to get milk to her baby
girl, and the women’s journey to the Kalunga line of life and death:
At noon they saw it; then they were near enough to hear it. By late afternoon they could drink from it if they wanted to. Four stars were visible by the time they found it, not a riverboat to stow Sethe away on, or a ferryman willing to take on a fugitive passenger—nothing like that—but a whole boat to steal. It had one oar, lots of holes and two bird nests.
‘There you go, Lu. Jesus looking at you.’
Sethe was looking at one mile of dark water, which would have to be split with one oar in a useless boat against a current dedicated to the Mississippi hundreds of miles away. It looked like home to her, and the baby … must have 180
thought so too. As soon as Sethe got close to the river her own water broke loose to join it. (83)
Along with the river, the stars which mark the approaching time of rebirth in the world of
the dead, and Amy Denver herself, who is said to have been “pulled out of the hill” by
the unborn baby, the boat—complete with metonymic representations of aje’s birthing
site—is but another vessel of Osun, “the protector of birth” (42; Santos 69).
Thus,
Sethe couldn’t think of anywhere to go but in.… On her knees again, she crawled into the boat. It waddled under her …. Panting under four summer stars, she threw her legs over the sides, because here come the head….
And the strong hands went to work a fourth time, none too soon, for river water, seeping through any hole it chose, was spreading over Sethe’s hips… When a foot rose from the river bed and kicked the bottom of the boat and Sethe’s behind, she knew it was done…. (82)
Now, to specify what follows the birth as a cooling rite that serves to protect this baby
from her sister’s fate, Morrison deploys the symbolic color of etutu.
The newly born baby:
trembled in the cool evening air. Amy wrapped her skirt around it and the wet sticky women clambered ashore to see what, indeed, God had in mind.
Spores of bluefern growing in the hollows along the riverbank float toward the water in silver-blue lines hard to see unless you are in or near them, lying right at the river’s edge when the sunshots are low and drained. Often they are mistook for insects—but they are seeds in which the whole generation sleeps confident of a future. And for the moment it is easy to believe each one has one—will become all of what is contained in the spore: will live out its days as planned. This moment of certainty lasts no longer that that; longer, perhaps than the spore itself. (84)
Note the narrative’s denotation of iron, the temporary and cyclical manifestation of a lineage, members of whom are born into the world at approximately the same time.
What promises to boost Denver’s chances in this existential lottery is the ritual process by which her birth is conducted. 181
The very next passage not only elaborates upon the symbols that are both the
means and the ends of Osun’s ritual process but it also further demonstrates Yeye’s
function as intersubjective mediator of the secret, enigmatic powers thought to be
possessed innately by women:
On a riverbank in the cool of a summer evening two women struggled under a shower of silvery blue. They never expected to see each other again in this world and at the moment couldn’t care less. But there on a summer night surrounded by bluefern they did something together appropriately and well. A pateroller passing would have sniggered to see two throw-away people. Two lawless outlaws—a slave and a barefoot whitewoman with unpinned hair—wrapping a ten-minute old baby in the rags they wore. But no pateroller came and no preacher. The water sucked and swallowed itself beneath them.
There was nothing to disturb them at their work. So they did it appropriately and well. (85)
Denver’s birth functions as etutu, as a propitiatory rite in which all the participants—
Sethe, Amy, Denver, the river, the boat with two bird nests, and “the cool evening air”—
collaborate in a demonstration of extraordinary, covert power.
The complete narrative of Denver’s birth function to establish both Sethe’s and
Denver’s participation in the ritual process of Osun. Because such rites admit but a
“moment of certainty,” a temporary manifestation of the permanent dimensions of reality, they must be periodically reintroduced and renewed by succeeding generations of each lineage. Because Sethe resists engaging all aspects of her past, the next generation must assume the ritual activities that serve to regenerate existential certitude.
This is precisely why the narrative recurs so frequently to the crawling-already?
baby’s determination to climb the house’s white stairway (39, 160, 205). She was
purposefully heading to the second floor, which is wallpapered with signs of a covert
Osun, permeating the watery Spiritworld under the auspices of etutu or cooling rite:
“discreet flecks of yellow sprinkled among a blizzard of snowdrops all backed by blue” 182
(11). Periodic reintroductions of such rites are specified in the narrative’s repeated reports of Denver’s childhood ritual activity. Once Paul D drives the ‘dead girl’ out of the house and climbs the white stairs with Sethe, Denver is said to redouble her efforts.
Thus, “[a] fully dressed woman walked out of the water” and journeyed to the
“slate-gray house” on Bluestone Road, explaining her arrival at Sethe’s house with the words “I was looking for this place I could be in” (50; 65). Upon seeing her, Sethe breaks water—just as a pregnant woman does right before giving birth. What’s more,
Sethe correlates this event with that of Denver’s birth: “the water she voided was endless.… Like a horse, she thought, but as it went on and on she thought, No, more like flooding the boat when Denver was born. So much water…. But there was no stopping water breaking from a breaking womb and there was no stopping now” (51). The woman also embodies signs of Osun: she craves sugar,” her desire for water seems boundless and her eyes are the very personification of cool.1
When she announces her name as Beloved, Sethe is immediately visited by a
“remembrance of glittering headstone” (53). As her stay at 124 continues, Beloved encourages the methodical process by which Sethe comes to embrace such iron and to summon ase or as Morrison says, “talk… herself into being” (“Toni Morrison,” with
Carrabi 86). With Paul D, Sethe has begun to recount stories of their shared past. She believes that with him, “her story was bearable because it was his as well” (99). But it is in sharing the narrative of her individual past with Beloved that Sethe opens wide the door to her own awakening or ewuji.
1 See pps. 53-55 for the narrative’s initial descriptions of Beloved. On p. 55, Denver is said to be rattled by Beloved’s eyes: “the whites of them were much too white—blue white.” 183
It begins with Beloved asking Sethe “where your diamonds?… Tell me your
diamonds” (58). This suggests the inherent value of giving voice to the stories of one’s
own past. Moreover, Beloved’s questions invoke another sign of “glittering objects,”
which intimate movement between the twin worlds. That the glittering earrings did indeed serve to light the dead baby’s return to 124 Bluestone is confirmed by Denver’s impatient reaction to the sprawling narrative Sethe tells in response to Beloved’s insistent questions:
Denver hated the stories her mother told that did not concern herself…. The rest was a gleaming, powerful world made so more by Denver’s absence from it. Not being in it, she hated it and wanted Beloved to hate it too, although there was no chance of that at all.… Denver noticed how greedy she was to hear Sethe talk. Now she noticed something more. The questions Beloved asked: ‘Where your diamonds?’ ‘Your woman she never fix up your hair?’ And most perplexing: ‘Tell me your earrings.’
How did she know? (62-63)
As the disruptive embodiment of this “gleaming, powerful world” of the past, Beloved
compels Sethe to actively engage vexatious ‘rememories’:
It became a way to feed her. Just as Denver discovered and relied on the delightful effect sweet things had on Beloved, Sethe learned the profound satisfaction Beloved got from storytelling. It amazed Sethe (as much as it pleased Beloved) because every mention of her past life hurt. Everything it was painful or lost. She and Baby Suggs had agreed without saying so that it was unspeakable; to Denver’s inquiries Sethe gave short replies or rambling incomplete reverie. Even with Paul D, who had shared some of it and to whom she could talk with at least a measure of calm, the hurt was always there—like a tender place in the corner of her mouth that the bit left.
But as she began talking about the earrings, she found herself wanting to, liking it. Perhaps it was Beloved’s distance from the events itself, or her thirst for hearing it—in any case it was an unexpected pleasure. (58)
At the behest of this oloro, this “confidante, the owner of words,” Sethe goes on to recall
that she knew her own “ma’am” only by the mark which was burned into her skin, that 184 her request for a mark of her own was answered with a slap,2 that she looked for this marker when her mother was hanged.
In the midst of these recollections, Sethe suddenly grabs and begins folding damp, white sheets. This loaded symbol mediates Sethe’s foray into “remembering something she had forgotten she knew. Something privately shameful that had slipped into a slit in her mind right behind the slap on her face and the circled cross” (61). Thus,
what was getting clearer and clearer as she folded and refolded damp laundry was the woman called Nan who took her hand and yanked her away from the pile before she could make out the mark. Nan was the one she knew best, who was around all day, who nursed babies, cooked, had one good arm and half of another. And who used different words. Words Sethe understood then but could neither recall nor repeat now…. What Nan told her she had forgotten, along with the language she told it in. The same language her ma’am spoke, and which would never come back. But the message—that was and had been there all along. Holding the damp white sheets against her chest, she was picking meaning out of a code she no longer understood. (61-62)
Beloved provokes Sethe to recover the crucial knowledge that she was both chosen and named by her mother. In retrieving the message, Sethe also recollects that which compelled enslaved African Americans’ conversion to the perspective of communitas.
As it functioned to mitigate the destruction of familial ties under slavery, this sacred ideal of community also served to cultivate metacultural understandings and practices which would otherwise be conveyed by parents. Hence, Morrison’s depiction of Nan, who was reduced to the job of nursing because of her disability but who turned this task into a larger calling: not only did she nurture children rendered motherless by
2 Judging by her violent reaction to Sethe’s request for a similar mark, Sethe’s mother was branded by her owner. Interestingly enough, Morrison’s description of this mark (“a circled cross”) is identical to the Kongo cosmogram for the four moments of the sun, “emblem of spiritual continuity and renaissance par excellence,” as illustrated in Thompson and Cornet, 28. 185
the slave system but she also taught them her language; in doing so, she disclosed the
implicit messages, or grammatical principles, encoded therein.
For Sethe, this legacy has long been fraught with ambiguity. “Privately shameful”
is her long-held presumption that her mother was hanged for attempting escape—without
“small girl Sethe.” Having been systematically robbed of both her original language and
the mother who ‘should have’ taught it to her, Sethe is “angry, but not certain at what”
(62).
To resignify the capacity of communitas to counter the ravages of slavery, the
narrative moves abruptly to recollect the most sustained mother figure Sethe has had: “A
mighty wish for Baby Suggs broke over her like surf. In the quiet following its splash,
Sethe looked at the two girls sitting by the stove: her sickly, shallow-minded boarder, her irritable, lonely daughter. They seemed little and far away (62). These relationships are juxtaposed in order to specify the way that Sethe’s own want for mothering makes for her own ambivalence and excesses as a parent. Moreover, the striking water imagery serves to emphasize the force with which the Good Mother extends herself as the adoptive mother of helpless children (Silva, qtd. in Santos 69).
As enslaved persons, Sethe and Halle could not legally marry; thus, Baby Suggs
and Sethe were related in practice rather than an in law. Indeed, their actively cultivated
kinship-bond flourished in spite of Halle’s absence. Now, it continues unabated, despite
the ‘fact’ of Baby Suggs’ death. Thus, when Sethe is overwhelmed by the news Paul D
brings—that on the day he was to escape, Halle suffered a mental breakdown—she is said
to wish for Baby Suggs, once again. What follows, moreover, is a direct summoning:
She wished for Baby Suggs’ fingers molding her nape, reshaping it, saying, ‘Lay em down, Sethe. Sword and shield. Down. Down. Both of em down. Down by 186
the riverside. Sword and shield. Don’t study war no more. Lay all that mess down. Sword and shield.’ And under the pressing fingers and the quiet, instructive voice, she would. Her heavy knives of defense against misery, regret, gall and hurt, she placed one by one on a bank where clear water rushed on below. (86)
Baby Suggs is another aje, a mature woman of exemplary character who has access to the
Spiritworld and who, thereby, possesses abundant knowledge of the cyclical processes of life and death. As I discussed in relationship to Sula’s Eva, such Osun figures are especially powerful avatars of ase who are said to “embody the concept of balance”
(Drewal and Drewal 15). Sethe’s recovery of this preeminent figure serves, moreover, to uncover the ritual processes by which Baby Suggs effected an entire community’s conversion to a particular mode of communitas, which specifies the “Good Mother” as its center.
As Sethe resolves to pay homage to Halle, the narrative moves to recover Baby
Suggs in her entirety (86). First, Baby Suggs remembered temporally: “Before 124 and
everybody in it had closed down, veiled over and shut away; before it had become the
plaything of spirits and the home of the chafed, 124 had been a cheerful, buzzing house
where Baby Suggs, holy, loved, cautioned, fed, chastised, and soothed” (86). Next, the
narrative specifies the force of meaning with which Baby Suggs imbued the space of 124
Bluestone. Reportedly, friends and strangers alike came—to eat, to rest, to purchase
shoes made by Baby Suggs, to leave messages or retrieve them—and went freely. All
that Baby Suggs required of these visitors was deference to a grammar of existence in
which the fundamental power of the word and the exigency of balance are accorded
primary value. Thus, in 124, “Talk was low and to the point—for Baby Suggs, holy
didn’t approve of extra. ‘Everything depends on knowing how much,’ she said, and
‘Good is knowing when to stop’” (87). 187
That she held such massive knowledge of life and death explains how this
character, who is otherwise “uncalled, unrobed, unannointed,” came to be known as
“Baby Suggs, holy” (87). For she served as the community’s model for successfully
reconciling this world with fundamental principles of the spirit world. Indeed, Baby
Suggs is first empowered upon crossing Kalunga: her heart is said to have “started beating the minute she crossed the Ohio River” (147). Upon crossing this threshold between the two worlds, equipped her with what the text will repeatedly emphasize as her
“great heart,” she casts nommo or ase: rather than call herself “some bill-of-sale name,” she chose for herself the term of endearment, Baby, and the surname, Suggs, bequeathed to her by the mate she could not legally marry (142).
After thus renaming herself in accordance with her lived-experience and settling
into the local Black community, Baby Suggs commits herself to the practice of balance:
having already “decided that, because slave life had ‘busted her legs, back, head, eyes,
hands, kidneys, womb and tongue,’ she had nothing left to make a living with but her
heart—which she put to work at once” (87). Because she “opened her great heart to those
who could use it,” the community came to affirm both her chosen name and the force
undergirding her vocation with the designation “Baby Suggs, holy” (87).
As Sethe’s remembrance continues to unfold, Baby Suggs’ holiness is said to
permeate yet another place: “the Clearing—a wide-open place cut deep in the woods
nobody knew what for at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared it in
the first place” (87). The narrative signifies upon itself here, for everyone in the
community “knew what for.” This is consecrated space, reminiscent of the ‘hush
harbors’ in which enslaved African Americans stole away from the status quo in order to 188
remember and regenerate the Black metacultural universe. That such covert sites have
been significant to African Americans is not surprising. For, Kalunga is localized at the
river, the sea, the cemetery and at crossroads amid dense forestation.
Thus, “every black man, woman, and child who could make it through” is said to
have “followed” Baby Suggs, holy to the Clearing in order to participate in a ritual
process for creating their own experiences of existential certitude (87). Morrison’s
exacting negotiation of this scene begins with:
In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees.
After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted…. (87)
Notice that “the clearing” is not capitalized here. For later, when this ritual process is
well underway, it will be. Note also that once Baby Suggs tacitly invokes the opening formula of the ritual process, “the people” are revised as a “company” that has become
part and parcel of the trees—those empowered symbols of spiritual renascence. Lastly, observe that only after signaling that she is “ready”—that she has effectively bridged the gap between the twinned worlds—does Baby Suggs unleash the power of the word upon the “company”: “Then she shouted, ‘Let the children come!’ and they ran from the trees toward her” (87).
Four times Morrison revises and repeats this antiphonal structure. When Baby
Suggs is said to petition the children to “Let your mothers hear you laugh, … the woods
rang” (87). Then she calls the grown men: “They stepped out one by one from among the
ringing trees.” When she implores them to “Let your wives and children see you dance,
… groundlife shuddered under their feet” (87). Each repetition of this call and response 189
pattern furthers the narrative’s demonstration that the clearing itself contributes to the
instigative effects of this ritual process.
With Baby Suggs, holy’s final call to the women, in which she commands them to
release cries “[f]or the living and the dead,” the group accesses a transcendent state where
identities, consciousness, and place fuse into a fluid stream of creative synthesis:
It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got all mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced; women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. (88)
Under the tutelage of Baby Suggs and the Clearing—the name of which is now
capitalized in deference to its pivotal role in the achievement of the secondary stage of
the ritual process—the community experiences a unitary state.
Now that she has successfully evoked the expansive capacities of shared
consciousness, which are a necessary precursor to communitas, Baby Suggs attends to the
authentic needs of this community of formerly enslaved persons:
In the silence that followed Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.
She did not tell them to clean up their lives or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.
She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. (88)
Rather than look to the promise of a heavenly afterlife, Baby Suggs’ is concerned to directly confront and renegotiate life in this world. Thus, she translates communal experiences, which might otherwise prove disabling, in terms of a Black metacultural grammar of existence that imbues life with spiritual meaning. 190
First, in the passage cited above, she targets consciousness, citing the force of the
imagination as key to personal agency in daily life. Secondly, Baby Suggs, holy
emphasizes the body’s utility for upholding agency and resisting determination by others:
“‘Here,’ she said, ‘in this here 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.… You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to
be loved” (88). With her final suggestion that an immortal spirit dwells within each
body, Baby Suggs, holy succeeds in her bid to link mind, body and spirit in reciprocal
union:
More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize. Saying no more, she stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart had to say while the others opened their mouths and gave her the music. Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh. (89)
Baby Suggs, holy hereby performs the philosophic issues of life and death. The group casting of ase helps her to carry these existential beliefs into action, thus consummating a ritual process that proves “not merely affecting but also efficacious, not merely symbolic or metaphorical but instrumental” (Drewal and Drewal 5).
This passage thus constitutes a succinct exhibition of the ultimate goal of the ritual
process: achieving communitas, the unified state in which variously endowed individuals
are nevertheless regarded as equal in terms of shared humanity. This rite of passage
enables the entire community of formerly enslaved people to heal from the lingering
effects of enslavement, to reaffirm their humanity as well as the personal power inherent
therein, to recover agency, both individually and as a collective. Throughout, Baby
Suggs, holy stresses the sacred ideal of humanity as predicated upon a primary regard for 191 the self. As well, the means of this ritual process are also its end: fulfilling the sacred ideal of humanity in relationship to the self, the living and the dead, brings this world into perfect harmony with the spirit world.
This narrative recount of Baby Suggs, holy’s fundamental rite for creating communitas is followed with: “Sethe wanted to be there now” (89). Thus, Sethe, accompanied by Denver and Beloved, heads to this site in order “to pay tribute to Halle”
(89). To get to the Clearing, they pass through the Kalunga line of life and death, which
Morrison aptly envisages as “a bright green corridor of oak and horse chestnut” (90).
Before going forward, the narrative pauses to collect the final segment in the story of Sethe’s escape. Here we learn that Sethe and the newly-born Denver were ferried across the Ohio River by Stamp Paid, and that Ella delivered them to Baby Suggs’ home.
As well, there is Sethe’s first night in Baby Suggs’ home, in which the older woman bathed Sethe and tended to her lacerated back before bringing her children to her. When the boys are brought to her, Sethe is said to have “kept kissing them” (93).
Sethe’s glittering earrings are recovered, as well. Baby Suggs finds them, just as she is questioning Sethe about Halle. When Sethe has no report, Baby Suggs says:
“‘Well, put these on. Maybe they’ll light his way.’ Convinced that her son was dead, she handed the stones to Sethe” (94). The symbolic import of her words—that such objects are capable of embedding the spirit and illuminating its pathway to the Spiritworld—is reiterated in the passage’s final line: “Sethe jingled the earrings for the pleasure of the crawling-already? girl, who reached for them over and over again” (94).
Thus having resignified the exacting ethos of the spirit world, the narrative returns to Sethe’s unfolding rite. In the Clearing, Sethe sits on Baby Suggs’ “old preaching 192 rock” (94). Baby Suggs’ ideal community is recalled but here it is prefaced by the calamitous act that served to cast the residents of 124 outside of the ties of communitas:
From the pure clear stream of spit that the little girl dribbled into her face to her oily blood was twenty eight days. Days of healing, ease and real-talk. 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, which made it better.… That’s how she got through the waiting for Halle. Bit by bit, at 124 and in the Clearing, along with the others, she had claimed herself. Freeing your self was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another. (95)
A wrenching experience in its own right, the infanticide is also concomitant with Sethe’s loss of communitas. Thereby signifying the objective of Sethe’s unfolding rite as that of recreating bonds capable of nullifying the devastation wrought by the slave system, the narrative returns to time-present.
Sethe sits on Baby Suggs’ rock, with the girls “watching her from the trees” (95).
When she silently invokes Baby Suggs’ touch, promising that she will then “lay it all down, make a way out of this no way,” Sethe does feel a light touch, “no more than the strokes of bird feather, but unmistakably caressing fingers” at her nape (95). Just as her communion with aje is progressing to the “place where she could take the next step: ask for some clarifying word; some advice,” Sethe turns to thoughts of Paul D:
She knew Paul D was adding something to her life—something she wanted to count on but was scared to. Now he had added more: new pictures and old rememories that broke her heart. Into the empty space of not knowing about Halle—a space sometimes colored with righteous resentment at what could have been his cowardice, or stupidity or bad luck—that empty place of no definite news was filled now with a brand-new sorrow and who could tell how many more on the way. Years ago—when 124 was alive—she had women friends, men friends from all around to share grief with. Then there was no one … and she returned their disapproval with the potent pride of the mistreated. But now there was someone to share it and he had beat the spirit away the very day he entered the house and no sign of it since. (95-96) 193
Here, Sethe’s invocation of a future with Paul D is juxtaposed with the sweeping loss of
communitas by which her past is marked. Book-ending the infanticide is Sethe’s
underlying fear of abandonment: her concern that her own mother had attempted to
escape without her spurs her suspicion that Halle, too, has deserted her. After the
murder, Sethe’s fear comes to life: 124 is left alone to endure the baby’s indignation at
being abandoned, herself.
As Sethe’s thoughts thus wander, the “caressing fingers” begin strangling her. The
overall effect of this is to specify that Sethe’s principal task at the Clearing is to confront and renegotiate the defining event that precipitated the loss of communitas for all the inhabitants of 124, to “rouse, channel and domesticate [the] powerful emotions” that gave rise to and followed from the infanticide (Turner, Ritual 43).
Thus, the original event is recreated in its entirety. The infants Sethe originally
held are there; now Beloved and Denver are young women, as Sethe was when she
committed the infanticide. In this ritual reenactment, however, the killing is thwarted and
the resulting damage is cooled.
Denver rescues Sethe from the murderous fingers and Beloved embraces her
wounded neck with “fingers [that] were mighty cool” (97). In fact, “the girl’s fingers
were so cool and knowing” that “the peace Sethe had come there to find crept into her”
(97). Just as in Baby Suggs’ rite, the group accesses a transcendent state in which
identities, consciousness, and place merge in creative synthesis:
We must look a sight, [Sethe] thought, and closed her eyes to see it: the three women in the middle of the Clearing, at the base of the rock where Baby Suggs, holy, had loved. One seated, yielding up her throat to the kind hands of one of the two kneeling before her. (97) 194
Sethe envisages this scene as iron. The effect of this is to position the recreation of the infanticide in terms of Sethe’s explanation of “rememory.” Recall her words:
the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there.… The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there … and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. (36).
This recreation of the original scene, then, is linked to the lesson of Baby Suggs’ own rites in the Clearing: past events do persist but they are painful only until they are cooled, until they are relinquished to the instigative effects of the ritual process.
Thus, the trio experiences the transformative potential of shared consciousness.
Even Denver, who had reacted jealously when Beloved first touched Sethe, becomes embroiled in the incitement of the ritual process:
Denver watched the faces of the other two. Beloved watched the work her thumbs were doing and must have loved what she saw because she leaned over and kissed the tenderness under Sethe’s chin.
They stayed that way for a while because neither Denver nor Sethe knew how not to: how to stop and not love the look or feel of the lips that kept on kissing” (97-98).
This is a revised version of the scene in which Sethe “kept kissing” her children—“their necks … their palms”—upon her arrival at 124 Bluestone (93). It also recovers Baby
Suggs’ reminder that “in this here place, we flesh … flesh that needs to be loved.… Love your hands! Raise them up and kiss them” (88). As such, this scene marks the achievement of a unitary state in which each participant has a visceral experience of the tremendous love that both motivated Sethe’s original crime and, now, evinces the capacity for healing it.
Just as the ritual process is nearly consummated, suddenly Sethe breaks from the iron: “blinking rapidly, [she] separated herself,” but not before noticing that Beloved’s breath smelled like “new milk” (98). This is precisely when another, contrapuntal, voice 195
takes over as narrator of this passage. Sethe’s reaction, coming just after the trio accessed the unitary consciousness that would bring them to the final stage of the ritual process, is said to “break… the tableau apart” (98). That is, Sethe interrupts the cooling rite during its penultimate stage, just before reaggregation would occur and group conversion to communitas would be achieved.
To emphasize this nullification of the entire ritual process, the narrator reports:
“[a]s they leave the Clearing they looked pretty much the same as they had when they
had come” (98). The only difference, we are told, is this:
Sethe was bothered, not because of the kiss but because, just before it, when she was feeling so fine letting Beloved massage away the pain, the fingers she was loving and the ones that had soothed her before they strangled her had reminded her of something that now slipped her mind. (98)
Now, Sethe proceeds to rationalize the insights she gained from this rite.
She is said to become “clearer-headed” once she “gets away from the enchantment of the Clearing” (98). This is when she decides that the hands by which she was choked belong to 124 Bluestone’s ghost, that “[a]fter Paul D beat it out of 124, maybe it collected
itself in the Clearing” (98). However, the next line, “Reasonable, she thought,” signifies
upon Sethe. The effect of this is to direct the reader to examine the way that Sethe’s
reasoning proceeds from talking herself out of the iron, the fleeting glimpse into the
permanent dimensions of reality, which generated the “peace” she experienced there.
Indeed, Sethe goes so far as to repress her intuitive motives for, and the
ramifications of, this rite:
Why she had taken Denver and Beloved with her didn’t puzzle her now—at the time it seemed impulse, with a vague wish for protection. And the girls had saved her, Beloved so agitated she acted like a two year old. (98) 196
Thus rationalizing the healing rite that would have cooled all those involved in her
original crime of passion, Sethe can now admit “the something that had slipped her
mind” upon leaving the Clearing:
[l]ike a faint smell of burning that disappears when the fire is cut off or the window opened for a breeze, the suspicion that the girl’s touch was exactly like the baby’s ghost dissipated. It was only a tiny disturbance anyway—not strong enough to divert her from the ambition welling in her now: she wanted Paul D.… More than commemorating Halle, that is what she had come to the Clearing to figure out and now it was figured. (99)
Precisely because worldly manifestations of the permanent dimension of reality are, by
definition, fleeting, Sethe is able to neatly displace onto Paul D the complicated desire
that was unveiled in her iron.
As she hurries through the Kalunga line of life and death—which is said to be even
cooler as the sun heads for the land of the dead—Sethe experiences, then promptly
dismisses, yet another insight she has gained:
Rushing through the green corridor, cooler now because the sun had moved, it occurred to her that the two were alike as sisters…. They hung back in the trees that ringed the Clearing, then rushed into it with screams and kisses when Sethe choked—anyhow that’s how she explained it to herself…. On her mind was the supper she wanted to fix for Paul D … to launch her newer, stronger life with a tender man” (99).
That Sethe intends for this romance to supplant the ritual process, which carries potential
for recreating communitas among all the inhabitants of 124 Bluestone, is further specified
in the text’s recursion to the signifying structures that function throughout as signs of the
house’s productive relationship to the watery whiteness of the spirit world and the ritual processes of Osun. Sethe returns from the Clearing to find “the space under the white stairs, the wooden tub and Paul D sitting in it”; when he stands to embrace her, “[h]er dress soaked up the water from his body (100). 197
When she follows Sethe into the house, Beloved is devastated by “the whispers
coming from behind the white stairs”:
She took a step and felt like crying. She had been so close, then closer. And it was so much better than the anger that ruled when Sethe did or thought anything that excluded herself. She could bear the hours … when Sethe was gone. Bear even the nights when she was close but out of sight, behind walls and doors lying next to him. But now—even the daylight time that Beloved had counted on, disciplined herself to be content with, was being reduced, divided by Sethe’s willingness to pay attention to other things. Him mostly.… Him who kept her hidden at night behind doors. And him who had hold of her now whispering behind the stairs after Beloved had rescued her neck and was ready now to put her hand in that woman’s own (100-101).
Beloved’s insatiable desire for Sethe causes her to oscillate between the two faces of
Osun throughout the remainder of this chapter.
Leaving the house abruptly, she becomes immediately enraptured by the sign of
aje’s hot capacities:
Denver had not arrived, or else she was waiting somewhere outside. Beloved went to look, pausing to watch a cardinal hop from limb to branch. She followed the blood spot shifting in the leaves until she lost it and even then she walked on, backward, still hungry for another glimpse.
Then, Beloved seeks out cool water:
She turned finally and ran through the woods to the stream. Standing close to its edge she watched her reflection there. When Denver’s face joined hers, they stared at each other in the water. (101)
Now Denver accuses her of choking Sethe in the Clearing. Beloved first responds by tracing Sethe’s distress to the slave system itself and claims the capacity to cool its effects: “I kissed her neck. I didn’t choke it. The circle of iron choked it” (101). When
Denver continues to reproach her, Beloved becomes hot, once again: “‘Look out, girl,’
said Beloved and snatching her arm away, ran ahead as fast as she could along the stream
that sang on the other side of the woods” (101). This is the crux of Beloved’s dualistic
role in the novel. Not only does this Osun figure reflect the destructive capacities of the 198
slave system but she also personifies the potential to heal the effects of this historical
violation.
Thus, it is significant that the narrative now moves not only to recover but also to elaborate upon the processes of bringing “the dead girl back into living life” (Morrison,
“A Conversation” 593). We learn that when a schoolmate questioned the seven-year-old
Denver “the question about her mother,” a “thing … leapt up in her … a thing that had been lying there all along” (102). Not only did Denver quit school but refused to ask the question of family members, “because certain odd and terrifying feelings about her mother were collecting around the thing that leapt up inside her” (102) Thereafter, “the monstrous and unmanageable dreams about Sethe found release in the concentration
Denver began to fix on the baby ghost.… Now it held for her all the anger, love and fear she didn’t know what to do with” (103). When, finally, she posed the question to Sethe,
Denver went mute rather than hear “an answer she could not bear” (103).
As the passage continues, not only does it elaborate Denver’s primary role of instigating the aggrieved baby but it also specifies Denver’s own early embodiment as an
Osun figure. First, there is the quickening of Osun in Denver: “For two years she walked in a silence too solid for penetration but which gave her eyes a power even she found hard to believe. The black nostrils of a sparrow sitting on a branch sixty feet above her head, for instance” (103). Then, the text signifies that Denver’s unflinching focus not only enabled the “dead girl” to gain a stronger foothold in the house but it also incited her to Osun’s hot face:
For two years she heard nothing at all and then she heard close thunder crawling up the stairs. Baby Suggs thought it was Here Boy paddling into places he never went. Sethe thought it was the India-rubber ball the boys played with bounding down the stairs.… 199
Sethe slammed the stove lid. ‘Buglar! Buglar! I told you all not to use that ball in here.’ She looked at the white stairs and saw Denver standing at the top.…
The return of Denver’s hearing, cut off by an answer she could not bear to hear, cut on by the sound of her dead sister trying to climb the stairs, signaled another shift in the fortunes of the people of 124. From then on the presence was full of spite. Instead of sighs and accidents there was pointed and deliberate abuse. (103-104)
We are told that this is precisely the point at which Sethe’s Sons finally desert 124
Bluestone and Baby Suggs “grew tired, went to bed, and stayed there until her big old
heart quit” (104).
Now, the narrative invokes Baby Suggs’ final inauspicious words:
Except for an occasional request for color she said practically nothing—until the last day of her life when she got out of bed, skipped slowly to the door of the keeping room and announced to Sethe and Denver the lesson she had learned form her sixty years a slave and ten years free: that there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople. ‘They don’t know when to stop,’ she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever. (104)
Baby Suggs’ recognized that, with the hot force of Osun running rampant therein, 124
Bluestone had become subject to a critical imbalance.
We are told that, as the house’s last remaining residents, Sethe and Denver came together “to call up and reason with the baby ghost, but got nowhere” (104). However, once Paul D arrives, rids the house of its ghost and climbs the white stairs with Sethe,
Denver redoubles her ritual activity:
During the first days after Paul D moved in, Denver stayed in her emerald closet as long as she could, lonely as a mountain and almost as big, thinking everybody had somebody but her; thinking even a ghost’s company was denied her. So when she saw the black dress with two unlaced shoes beneath it she trembled with secret thanks. (104)
Although she is sure that Beloved was responsible for the near-strangulation of Sethe,
Denver decides that “the choice between Sethe and Beloved was without conflict,” that
“[w]hatever her power and however she used it, Beloved was hers” (104). 200
Now, the narrative moves to signify the full context of Denver’s unwavering
devotion to Beloved, which issues from far more than loneliness or fear of Sethe.
Spelling out the schoolmate’s questions for the first time, the narrative implies that
Denver agreed with his assertion that she, herself, shared culpability for the infanticide.
Thereafter, it seems, the Osun figure endeavored to cool its effects. Thus, before bringing Denver’s recollections to an end, the narrative recasts Denver’s ritual activity as propitiatory: “like the little four o’ clocks that searched openly for sunlight, then closed themselves tightly when it left, Denver kept watch for the baby and withdrew from everything else. Until Paul D came. But the damage he did came undone with the miraculous resurrection of Beloved” (105). In this way, the narrative moves to consolidate Osun’s doubled countenance and function: like Beloved, Denver reflects both the hot, destructive capacities of a giant cock and the cool, constructive force of Yeye.
Denver emerges from her remembrance to find Beloved engaged in her own ritual
process of Osun. “[S]tanding barefoot in the water, lifting her black skirts up above her calves, the beautiful head lowered in rapt attention” to the mating ritual of two box turtles, Beloved studies the strategy by which she will drive her opponent from Sethe’s bed. Thus, after “moving” Paul D to the coldhouse behind 124, Beloved demands:
“touch me on the inside part and call me my name” (116). For Paul D, Beloved’s sexual imposition serves to dislodge the “tobacco tin” that had long taken the place of his heart, per the dismembering logic of the capitalist system of domination under which he had labored on a tobacco farm. Thereafter, Paul D finds that “[f]or his life he could not walk up the glistening white stairs” to Sethe’s bedroom (126). 201
With the story of Sethe’s infanticide, the narrative appears to shift its focus from
the characters’ countervailing interests. Revealed in the narrative’s four separate
accounts of the event, however, is Morrison’s overall concern to show that not only are
opposing perspectives, or forces, always at work but also to demonstrate the ways in
which meanings shift with each shift in perspective. As readers are led through a total of
eleven discrete perspectives on the infanticide, we are continually challenged to weigh
multiple significations and to revise our own conclusions about both the gravity of
Sethe’s predicament and the recourse to which she finally resorts.
The initial chapter begins not with the arrival of the “four horsemen,” but with
Baby Suggs’ reflections after John and Ella delivered to her Halle’s children. Her
grandchildren’s arrival is quickly followed by Sethe’s, thus spurring Baby Suggs’ hope
that Halle would also locate Underground Railroad agents to help him evade slave
trackers and find his way to 124 Bluestone. For Baby Suggs, this “would be a cause for celebration” (135). Halle does not show up but a celebration ensues, nevertheless. With
its detailed account of that gala, this chapter serves to prefigure the chapters in which the
infanticide is recounted.
Thus, we are told that:
It was Stamp Paid who started it. Twenty days after Sethe got to 124 he came by and looked at the baby he had tied up in his nephew’s jacket, looked at the mother he had handed a piece of fried eel to and, for some private reason of his own, went off with two buckets to a place near the river’s edge that only he knew about where blackberries grew, tasting so good and happy that to eat them was like being in church. Just one of the berries and you felt anointed. He walked six miles to the riverbank; did a slip-run-slide down into a ravine made almost inaccessible by brush. He reached through brambles lined with blood-drawing thorns thick as knives that cut through his shirt sleeves and trousers. All the while suffering mosquitoes, bees, hornets, wasps, and the meanest lady spiders in the state. Scratched, raked and bitten, he maneuvered through and took hold of each berry with fingertips so gentle not a single one was bruised. (136) 202
Clearly, Stamp Paid’s arduous task serves as an act of propitiation, a cooling rite, with
which to commemorate Sethe’s triumphant journey to 124 Bluestone. The narrative
correlates Stamp Paid’s blackberry excursion with his regular role of shuttling fugitives
along the perilous tracks of the Underground Railroad. Thus, he is described as a “sly,
steely old black man: agent, fisherman, boatman, tracker, savior, spy” (136).
When he returns to 124 with the berries, Baby Suggs “decided to do something
with the fruit worthy of the man’s labor and his love” (136). “That’s how it began,”
follows this line, signifying that the nascent celebration evolved with Baby Suggs’ determination to reciprocate Stamp Paid’s hard-won offering. Her plan to invite Ella and
John to share the “three pies, maybe four,” is further augmented by Sethe’s and Stamp
Paid’s suggestions of more menu items. In this way, the origins of the resulting festivities are traced to reciprocal applications of charity, which stand in striking
contradistinction to the community’s response to the:
feast for ninety people.… Ninety people who ate so well, and laughed so much, it made them angry.…
Too much, they thought. Where does she get it all, Baby Suggs, holy?… How come she always knows what to do and when? Giving advice; passing messages; healing the sick, hiding fugitives, loving, cooking, cooking, loving, preaching, singing, dancing and loving everybody like it was her job and hers alone. (137)
The neighbors’ response serves to bring an abrupt end to the cycle of triumphant
goodwill that Baby Suggs, holy had inspired. Thus, the narrative’s extended portrayal of
the celebration serves to trace the origins of the infanticide to this exacting failure of
communitas. 203
Now we are told that “[t]he scent of their disapproval lay heavy in the air”—so heavy that “Baby Suggs woke to it” (138; 139). Afterward, the narrative drifts from one allusive detail to another:
Later, as she stood in the garden, chopping at the tight soil over the roots of the pepper plants, she smelled it again.… Baby Suggs, holy looked up. The sky was blue and clear. Not one hint of death in the definite green of the leaves. She could hear birds and faintly, the stream way down in the meadow.… Nothing seemed amiss—yet the smell of disapproval was sharp.… Baby Suggs leaned back into the peppers and the squash vines with her hoe. Carefully, with the blade at just the right angle, she cut through a stalk of insistent rue. Its flowers she stuck through a split in her hat; the rest she tossed aside. The quiet clok clok clok of wood splitting reminded her that Stamp was doing the chore he promised to the night before. She sighed at her work and, a moment later, straightened up to sniff the disapproval once again. Resting on the handle of the hoe, she concentrated.… It wasn’t whitefolks—that much she could tell—so it must be colored ones. And then she knew. Her friends and neighbors were angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess.
Baby closed her eyes. Perhaps they were right. Suddenly, behind the disapproving odor, way way back behind it, she smelled another thing. Dark and coming. Something she couldn’t get at because the other odor hid it.
She squeezed her eyes tight to see what it was but all she could make out was high-topped shoes she didn’t like the look of.
Thwarted yet wondering, she chopped away…. (138)
Here, Morrison employs “indirect intent [and] metaphorical reference,” the “defining
characteristics” of signifying, to lay the markers upon which subsequent chapters will
depend for their decoding (Mitchell-Kernan 120).
Metaphorical references to Baby Suggs’ iron are redeployed throughout the
narrative’s disparate accounts of the infanticide. There, they function to cue the reader
that signifying is occurring, that the entire context of this initial deployment must be
brought to bear in their interpretation. This is because “the apparent meaning of the
sentence signifies its actual meaning.… Apparent meaning serves as a key which directs
hearers to some shared knowledge, attitudes, and values or signals that reference must be 204
processed metaphorically” (Mitchell-Kernan 121). Thus, unless the reader actively
responds to each chapter with reciprocal applications of the knowledge that is shared,
incrementally, throughout the narrative, the multiple causative factors and attendant
meanings of the infanticide will escape her/him.
The first chapter to recount the infanticide commences with the arrival of “the four
horsemen”—schoolteacher, his nephew, a veteran slavecatcher, and a sheriff. Three of
them dismount. The sheriff remains on his horse, with rifle in hand. From this vantage
point, he waits to catch anyone who might attempt to run from 124 Bluestone. This
experienced public servant has learned “to keep back a pace,” in anticipation of” the
“disbelievable things” fugitives do when caught: “Grab the rifle at its mouth; throw
himself at the one holding it—anything” (148).
What implicitly constitutes such fugitives’ final act of resistance to being captured
and returned to enslavement is, from the sheriff’s perspective, patently absurd. Even as told from his frame of reference, the end result of such confrontations resonates precisely
because the reader knows what is about to unfold: “you ended up killing what you were
paid to bring back alive. Unlike a snake or a bear, a dead nigger could not be skinned for
profit and was not worth his own dead weight in coin” (148). The next line signifies
further upon the sheriff’s presumption of absolute authority: with but a wave of his rifle,
he brings to a standstill the “six or seven Negroes” who are attempting to pass 124
Bluestone (148).
Once the nephew spots people in the backyard, the sheriff dismounts and the four
horsemen move to the rear of the house. What they see there is:
A crazy old nigger … in the woodpile with an ax. You could tell he was crazy right off because he was groaning—making low, cat noises like. About twelve 205
yards beyond that nigger was another one—a woman with a flower in her hat. Crazy too, probably, because she too was standing stock-still—but fanning her hands as though pushing cobwebs out of her way. Both, however, were staring at the same place—a shed. (149)
Metaphorical references that were deployed in the previous chapter hereby serve to
identify these characters for us. Because the last chapter’s depiction of Baby Suggs’ iron
included indirect references to Stamp Paid’s chopping wood as well as to Baby Suggs’
sticking flowers into her hat, we recognize “the crazy old nigger in the woodpile” and the
“[o]ther one” as Baby Suggs. Once we apply this knowledge here, we are forced to
consider not only how severely racism limits the four horsemen’s perspectives, but also
how finite are Sethe’s options for challenging this siege.
For the four horsemen, the characters we know as Stamp Paid and Baby Suggs are
not human. They have neither individual identities nor distinct faces. Thus, these
“niggers” are distinguished by their physical locations and the objects in their possession.
Moreover, their emotive responses to the unfolding debacle are considered bizarre.
The matter-of-fact manner in which this perspective is rendered continues as
Nephew seizes the ax and the four horsemen move to the shed:
Inside, the boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other. She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time, when out of nowhere—in the ticking time the men spent staring at what there was to stare at—the old nigger boy, still mewing, ran through the door behind them and snatched the baby from the arch of its mother’s swing. (149)
From schoolteacher’s perspective, this rumination follows: the “pickaninnies they had
hoped were alive and well enough to take back … and raise properly to do the work
Sweet Home desperately needed, were not” (149). Because the shrewd plantation owner is first and foremost a man of science, he reasons that Sethe had “gone wild, due to the 206
mishandling of the nephew who overbeat her and made her cut and run.… [S]ee what
happened when you overbeat creatures God had given you responsibility of” (150).
The next outlook to appear in the text is that of the nephew, “the one who had
nursed her while his brother held her down” (150). Despite his uncle’s constant warnings
“against that kind of confusion,” he is shaking and asking himself: “What she go and do that for? On account of a beating? Hell, he’d been beat a million times and he was
white.… But no beating ever made him … I mean no way he could have … What she go and do that for?” (150).
These two passages do not merely emphasize the brutality to which Sethe was
subjected but they also denote the impassive manner in which the attacks were carried
out. The implication is that, along with “the work Sweet Home desperately needed,”
such abuse was also in store for Sethe’s children.
The sheriff dismisses the other three. As he leaves, schoolteacher shows only
annoyance at what he views as a senseless destruction of property. Nephew and “the
catcher,” however, are so shaken that they refuse to:
look at the woman in the pepper plants with the flower in her hat. And they didn’t look at the seven or so faces that had edged closer in spite of the catcher’s rifle warning. Enough nigger eyes for now. Little nigger-boy eyes in the sawdust; little nigger-girl eyes staring between the wet fingers that held her face so her head wouldn’t fall off; little nigger-baby eyes crinkling up to cry in the arms of the old nigger whose own eyes were nothing but slivers looking down at his feet. But the worst were those of the nigger woman who looked like she didn’t have any. Since the whites in them had disappeared and since they were as black as her skin, she looked blind. (151)
This momentary awareness, laced perhaps with a bit of human compassion, is short-lived.
As they ride off, the three are said to leave the sheriff “among the damnedest bunch of
coons they’d ever seen. All testimony to the results of so-called freedom imposed on 207
people who needed every care and guidance in the world to keep them from the cannibal
life they preferred” (151).
This perspective is quickly countered by that of Baby Suggs, who enters the shed as
the sheriff is trying to figure out a way to bind Sethe’s hands without touching her.
Immediately, “Baby Suggs noticed who breathed and who did not and went straight to
the boys lying in the dirt” (151). When the sheriff leaves the shed in order to secure
means to transport Sethe to jail, Baby Suggs ushers everyone into the house. There, the
loving matriarch attends to her grandsons’ wounds. Then, she supports the crying baby
“on her shoulder for a full two minutes” before commanding Sethe to nurse her. In this
way, “she traded the living for the dead, which she carried into the keeping room,”
presumably to prepare the body for burial. When Sethe refuses Baby Suggs’ order to
clean the dead baby’s blood from her breasts before nursing: “like rivals over the heart of
the loved, they fought.… Baby Suggs lost when she slipped in a red puddle and fell. So
Denver took her mother’s milk right along with the blood of her sister” (154).
Meanwhile, in order not to carry Sethe on his horse, the sheriff has confiscated a cart from a neighbor of 124 Bluestone and has ordered Stamp Paid to drive it. As Sethe is led to the cart, we hear the singular perspective of the neighbors, a crowd of whom has gathered outside the house. When Sethe walks by in silence, the group is said to respond in kind:
Was her head a bit too high? Her back a little too straight? Probably. Otherwise the singing would have begun at once, the moment she appeared in the doorway…. Some cape of sound would have quickly been wrapped around her, like arms to hold and steady her on the way. As it was, they waited till the cart turned about, headed west to town. And then no words. Humming. No words at all. (152) 208
With “probably” and “as it was,” the text signifies upon itself. These structures direct
readers to that which was specified in the previous chapter: the community is freshly
angry at Baby Suggs and her kin. Thus, regardless of Sethe’s actions here, they would
have withheld their tongues, refusing to cast ase on her behalf.
Now the text counters this communal reaction with Baby Suggs’ own. She “meant
to run, skip down the porch steps after the cart, screaming. No. No. Don’t let her take
that last one too” (152). Her intention is to unleash the power of the word, as she does
regularly in rites at the Clearing, but she has yet to recover from her fall. By the time
Baby Suggs does reach the yard, Sethe and Denver are gone and a wagon is approaching.
Thus, Baby Suggs is interpolated by another delegation of Whites.
A woman waits in the wagon, oblivious to the scene upon which she is intruding, as
a “red-haired boy and a yellow-haired girl” run through the crowd to give Baby Suggs a pair of “high-topped and muddy” shoes (152-153). Already, the children exhibit the perspective that Baby Suggs is but a laborer who, like the statue in the Bodwins’ house, is forever kneeling in service to Whites. Thus, the boy thrusts the shoes at Baby Suggs, commanding: “Mama says Wednesday.… She says you got to have these fixed by
Wednesday.… She says Wednesday, you hear? Baby? Baby?” (153). Baby Suggs takes
the shoes, but responds directly to her God, “saying, I beg your pardon. Lord, I beg your
pardon. I sure do” (153).
Is this her way of defying the child’s wanton invocation of authority or is Baby
Suggs recognizing the meaning of the “high-topped” shoes, as signified in the last
chapter? Recall this passage: 209
Baby closed her eyes.… Suddenly, behind the disapproving odor, way way back behind it, she smelled another thing. Dark and coming. Something she could not get at because the other odor hid it.
She squeezed her eyes tight to see what it was but all she could make out was high-topped shoes she didn’t like the look of. (138)
Applying the signifying structures that accompanied Baby Suggs’ iron allows us to
decode the “dark and coming thing” as the encroachment of Whites on her home. Here we realize that, because the pervasive force of the community’s condemnation blocked her vision of the impending siege, Baby Suggs could glimpse only the image that would accompany the second incursion.
In the next two chapters, Morrison achieves a masterful display of signifying at the levels of both structure and theme. In the first of these, Stamp Paid presents to Paul D a newspaper account of the infanticide, complete with a drawing of Sethe. Although Paul
D cannot read, he fully understands that the very appearance of a Black subject in this official document signifies not just bad news but bad news that “whitepeople would find interesting, truly different, worth a few minutes of teeth sucking if not gasps” (156).
Thus, he “simply looked at the face, shaking his head no. No. At the mouth, you see.
And no at whatever it was those black scratches said, and no to whatever it was Stamp
Paid wanted him to know” (155).
Nevertheless, Stamp Paid begins his recount of the infanticide: he “started with the
party … but stopped and backed up a bit to tell about the berries—where they grow and
what was in the earth that made them grow like that.”3 The effect of this is to emphasize
3 This quotation appears on 156. The blackberries function as an evocative symbol for the novel’s black characters. An isolated section of water is precisely “[w]hat was in the earth that made them grow like that”; there, they “just grow—fat and sweet—with nobody to bother ’em.” 210
Stamp Paid’s implicit understanding that the true significance of the story is intelligible
only after every detail of its context has been uncovered. Because Paul D simply denies
that the mouth in the clipping belongs to Sethe, Stamp Paid does not tell him what “he
thought … was important” (157).
However, the narrative proceeds with Stamp Paid’s recount of the full significance
of the infanticide, after all. The first “important” note is that Baby Suggs was alert to
oncoming trouble: “He was going to tell him how restless Baby Suggs was that morning,
how she had a listening way about her; how she kept looking down past the corn to the
stream so much he looked too…. Which is why they both missed it: they were looking
the wrong way—toward water” as the four horsemen approached the house (157). The
reader knows already that Baby Suggs has envisioned a “dark and coming thing”; here
we learn that she summoned the evocative agent of water to counter this impending force.
The second of the story’s discrete segments serves to recover the failure of
communitas with which the community responded to Baby Suggs’ elaborate celebration.
Whereas the previous chapter focuses on the community’s refusal to embrace Sethe after the infanticide, this section serves to reveal that they had also refused their support beforehand. Thus, Stamp Paid intended to tell Paul D about the party:
because that explained why nobody ran on ahead; why nobody sent a fleet-footed son to cut ‘cross a field soon as they saw the four horses in town hitched for watering while the riders asked questions. Not Ella, not John, not anybody ran down or to Bluestone Road, to say some new whitefolks with the Look just rode in. The righteous Look every Negro learned to recognize along with his ma’am’s tit.… Nobody warned them, and he’d always believed it wasn’t the exhaustion from a long day’s gorging that dulled them, but some other thing—like, well, like meanness—that let them stand aside, or not pay attention, or tell themselves somebody else was bearing the news to the house on Bluestone Road where a pretty woman had been living for almost a month. Young and deft with four children one of which she delivered herself the day before she got there and who now had the benefit of Baby Suggs’ bounty and her big old heart. Maybe they just 211
wanted to know if Baby really was special, blessed in some way they were not. (157)
Here, Stamp Paid interprets the failure of communitas as the result of the community’s intention to directly challenge Baby Suggs’ holiness. Then, he counters with this perspective: not only does he emphasize Baby Suggs’ “bounty and her big old heart” but he also juxtaposes this with Sethe’s own youthful ingenuity, suggesting that the latter
“benefits” from the former.
When this perspective is combined with two previous reports, a fascinating pattern of signification emerges. There is Stamp Paid’s disclosure that just before the four horsemen arrive, Baby Suggs “kept looking … to the stream.” As well, there is the four horsemen’s note that the “woman with a flower in her hat” is “standing stock-still—but fanning her hands as though pushing cobwebs out of her way,” as she stares at the shed.
Together, these signifying structures imply that Sethe’s final response to the horsemen’s incursion constitutes a direct “benefit” of Baby Suggs’ ritual activity as aje, “the
Mothers,” “who can transform themselves into birds,” who “possess the secret of life itself, the knowledge and special power to bring human beings into the world and to remove them” (Drewal and Drewal 8).
Thus, in the final segment of his narrative, Stamp Paid identifies Sethe with the same force of aje:
Stamp did not tell him how she flew, snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing; how her face beaked, how her hands worked like claws, how she collected them every which way: one on her shoulder, one under her arm, one by the hand, the other shouted forward in the woodshed filled with just sunlight and shavings now because there wasn’t any wood. The party had used it all…. Nothing else was in there except the shovel—and of course the saw. (157)
Stamp Paid intended to bring all such context—the seriate network of seemingly disparate occurrences that served to generate the infanticide—to bear in his report. With his 212
incessant refrain of “this ain’t her mouth,” however, Paul D signifies that he simply cannot bear the true significance of the infanticide (157; 158; 159).
Thus, Stamp Paid succeeds only in describing his role of gathering the blackberries
before Paul D utters a definitive version of his signifying refrain: “I can tell you for sure:
this ain’t her mouth. May look like it but it ain’t” (158). “So,” the text reads, “Stamp
Paid didn’t say it all. Instead he took a breath and leaned toward the mouth that wasn’t
hers and slowly read aloud the words that Paul D couldn’t” (158).
It is this ‘official’ version of the story, which comprises only the apparent meaning
of the infanticide, that Paul D lays before Sethe in the very next chapter. In response,
Sethe tells Paul D the long, circular narrative of how it is she came to kill her baby.
Throughout the telling, Sethe is figured as a spinning “wheel” (159). This gestural act of
signifying serves to reinforce the circuitous structure of Sethe’s narrative. This structure
elaborates upon Stamp Paid’s unvoiced narrative, in which he emphasize the series of
catalysts that served to generate the infanticide. His portrayal went unspoken precisely
because such signifying structures depend for their decoding upon dialogic exchange and
reciprocal applications of shared knowledge. Initially, it seems that Sethe’s narrative will
also collapse under Paul D’s refusal to engage it.
When she begins her story with the disjunctures at the very base of her life—not
having a mother to model nor other mothers “to talk to,” as she struggled to keep her
children safe while laboring as a slave—her words fall on deaf ears (160). With Sethe
“[c]ircling him the way she was circling the subject” Paul D waits for her to get “to the
main part—the answer to the question he had not asked outright, but which lay in the
clipping he showed her” (161). He smiles eagerly, waiting for Sethe to confirm what he 213
had insisted to Stamp Paid: that she is not the smiling woman in the newspaper. In
response, Sethe is moved to fully disclose her story:
Perhaps it was the smile, or maybe the ever-ready love she saw in his eyes … that made her tell him what she had not told Baby Suggs, the only person she felt obliged to tell anything to. Otherwise she would have said what the newspaper said she said and no more. Sethe could recognize only seventy-five printed words (half of which appeared in the newspaper clipping), but she knew that the words she did not understand hadn’t any more power than she had to explain. It was the smile and the upfront love that made her try. (161)
Determined to distinguish the actual significance of the infanticide from its apparent meaning, Sethe launches her story with knowledge they both share:
I don’t have to tell you about Sweet Home—what it was—but maybe you don’t know what it was like for me to get away from there.…
I did it. I got us all out. Without Halle too. Up till then it was the only thing I ever did on my own. Decided. And it came off right, like it was supposed to. We was here.…I birthed them and I got em out and it wasn’t no accident. I did that. I had help, of course, lots of that, but still it was me doing it; me saying Go on and Now. Me having to look out. Me using my own head. But it was more than that. It was a kind of selfishness I never knew nothing about before. It felt good. Good and right. I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide. Look like I loved them more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love. But when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon—there wasn’t nobody I couldn’t love if I wanted to.… (162)
Sethe identifies the way she claimed herself as a free person by constructing a sense of
self-containment grounded in unbridled love.
Silently, Paul D reflects on the grammar of existence he internalized on the chain
gang—not the communitas that he forged in the in the company of 45 other Black men
but the structure that was enforced by the camp’s guards:
Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right or permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon—everything belonged to the men who had the guns.… Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them.… So you protected yourself and loved 214
small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to won; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up.… A woman, a child, a brother—a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom. (162)
Although he recognizes the real significance of Sethe’s metaphoric references, Paul D
chooses not to engage them directly.
Sethe realizes that, unless Paul D acknowledges and reciprocates the knowledge
they share, there is no point in going forward with her story:
Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn’t get it right off—she could never explain. Because the truth was simple…. (163)
Because “the significance or meaning of [her] words must be derived from known
symbolic values,”4 Sethe does not even attempt to convey the crux of her story to Paul D.
The narrative proceeds, nevertheless, with Sethe’s recall:
Simple: she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher’s hat, she heard wings. Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe. And the hummingbird wings beat on. (163)
The facile capacity with which “the Mothers” act to protect their progeny is related here, but Paul D will insist that Sethe’s was an unreasoned reaction.
Indeed, Sethe’s response is not founded in the view that reason is superior to and
independent of experiential knowledge and sensory perceptions. Rather, having
4 Mitchell Kernan, p. 96. 215 experienced hell on earth as an enslaved person and understanding that “nothing ever dies,” she reacted to this terrorizing act of imposition with an improvisational and unrestrained affirmation of life (36). “You got two feet, Sethe, not four … and right then a forest sprang up between them; trackless and quiet” (165). The significance of the gulf between them is further denoted by another sign of the crossroads, which is compounded with the appearance of Beloved at its apex: “it was important not to leave without looking. He stood up, turned and looked up the white stairs. She was there all right.
Standing straight as a line with her back to him” (165). After thus devoting three chapters to teasing out the actual significance of the infanticide, the narrative has Paul D leave Sethe’s home—but not before signifying that, like the reader, Paul D will be challenged to weigh multiple meanings and revise his conclusions about both the gravity of Sethe’s predicament and the recourse to which she resorted.
Now, the narrative drives toward the completion of the ritual process for which
Sethe, Denver and Beloved were drawn to the Clearing—the narrative space which marks the boundary not only between this world and the next but between the communitas that had been created there and its dissemblance. When this process recommences in Section
Two of Beloved, a new, equally evocative, locale takes the place of The Clearing. The three women hasten to a frozen creek because, at last, “Sethe was trying to take [Baby
Suggs’] advice: to lay it all down, sword and shield. Not just to acknowledge the advice
Baby Suggs gave her but to actually take it” (173).
Thus, when Beloved finds a pair of skates left over from Baby Suggs’ shoe business, Sethe seizes upon the opportunity: she “couldn’t skate a lick but then and there she decided to take Baby Suggs’ advice: lay it all down” (174). Dropping her work to 216
search for more skates, Sethe finds just one—a man’s. That they improvise a way to
share the three skates, one of which was made for a man, sets the scene for the poetic
revisioning of their original attempt to confront and renegotiate the infanticide. Now that
Paul D has left, the trio can recommence the ritual process that had collapsed under the
weight of Sethe’s focus on forging a future with him.
The structure, “Nobody saw them falling,” serves as opening formula of their rite.
Each reiteration of this structure punctuates another phase of the unfolding ritual process,
until identities, consciousness, and place fuse into a fluid stream of creative synthesis:
Each seemed to helping the other two stay upright, yet every tumble doubled their delight. The live oak and soughing pine on the banks enclosed them and absorbed their laughter while they fought gravity for each other’s hands. Their skirts flew like wings and their skin turned pewter in the cold and dying light.
Nobody saw them falling. (174)
Not only is the primary sign of aje loaded unto each of the women but they are said also
to take on the watery tint of pewter as the sun’s fourth moment arrives. Note how this
scene is envisaged as iron, yet “no one” witnesses their momentary experience of the
permanent dimension of reality. For Sethe, this signifies a new-found sense of self-
containment. Whereas the initial cooling rite broke down under her fixation with Paul D,
here Sethe exhibits single-minded focus on her own experience (95).
That the gap between the twinned worlds is nearly bridged is revealed in this note:
“the sky above them was another country. Winter stars, close enough to lick, had come out before sunset. For a moment, looking up, Sethe entered the perfect peace they
offered” (174). As the processual pattern of this rite of passage continues to unfold, the
trio experiences a rousing, channeling and domestication of powerful emotions, just as occurred in Baby Suggs’ rites. After summoning the community’s men to dance and the 217
children to laugh, Baby Suggs called upon the women: “Cry,” she told them. For the
living and the dead. Just cry” (88). As the community complies with Baby Suggs’
command, the line between individual and group identity becomes blurred, until the
entire group comes to experience the transformative potential of shared consciousness
that makes for communitas. Likewise, Denver’s wild dance upon the skates evokes
shared laughter. When Sethe’s laughter turns to tears, the girls “touched her lightly on
the shoulders,” thus signifying the achievement of the unitary state with which ritual
processes are concerned (175).
Whereas the failure of their initial rite was signified by the narrator’s note that
“leav[ing] the Clearing they looked pretty much the same as they had when they had
come,” here the trio is united as they depart the ritual space and pass through Kalunga:
“Walking back through the woods, Sethe put an arm around each girl at her side. Both of
them had an arm around her waist. Making their way over the hard snow, they stumbled
and had to hold on tight, but nobody saw them fall” (98; 175). Note the final revision of
the structure that serves as opening formula. Its present perfect verb shifts into past tense to signify their arrival at another phase of the ritual process.
At once, the narrative arranges in reciprocal union Sethe’s acknowledgment of
Beloved, her mother-in-practice’s sole, poignant memory of her first-born child, and her
own ma’am’s momentous disclosure of the sign by which she could be distinguished
from other field laborers:
When the click came Sethe didn’t know what it was. Afterward it was clear as daylight that the click came at the very beginning—a beat, almost, before it started; before she heard three notes; before the melody was even clear. Leaning forward a little, Beloved was humming.
It was then, when Beloved finished humming, that Sethe recalled the click— the settling of pieces into places designed and made especially for them. No milk 218
spilled from her cup because her hand was not shaking. She simply turned her head and looked at Beloved’s profile: the chin, mouth, nose, forehead, copied and exaggerated in the huge shadow the fire threw on the wall behind her. Her hair, which Denver had braided into twenty or thirty plaits, curved toward her shoulders like arms. From where she sat Sethe could not examine it, not the hairline, nor the eyebrows, the lips, nor …
‘All I remember,’ Baby Suggs had said, ‘is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Her little hands I wouldn’t know em if they slapped me.’
…the birthmark, nor the color of the gums, the shape of her ears, nor …
‘Here. Look here. This is your ma’am. If you can’t tell me by my face, look here.’
… the fingers, nor the nails, nor even…
But there would be time. The click had clicked; things were where they ought to be or poised and ready to glide in.
‘I made that song up,’ said Sethe. ‘I made it up and sang it to my children. Nobody knows that song but me and my children.’
Beloved turned to look at Sethe. ‘I know it,’ she said. (175-176)
The “click [that] came at the very beginning” is the unlocking of the chain by which generations of this lineage have been bound. As each discrete unit of this legacy of disrupted mothering is first recalled, then relinquished to the instigative effects of the ritual process, its devastating effects can finally be cooled in time-present.
Now, the narrative itself moves to join time and space to this circumstance:
There was no tremor in her voice as she instructed them to keep the fire—if not, come on upstairs.
With that, she gathered her blanket around her elbows and ascended the lily- white stairs like a bride. Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter stars seemed permanent. (176)
Notice that, as she climbs the structure that functions as sign for the pathway to the
Spiritworld, Sethe is envisaged anew. Once she moves through the crossroads toward the 219 symbolic colors that paper the walls at its apex, ritual space and time is ascribed to the environment, itself.
Before portraying the culmination of the ritual process for which 124 Bluestone has long been mobilizing, the narrative pauses to clarify the purpose of this rite of passage.
Once again, Baby Suggs is recollected—this time from the perspective of Stamp Paid.
He is attempting to visit Sethe in order to soothe his conscience, not only about having informed Paul D of Sethe’s infanticide but also about his misappraisal of Baby Suggs’ retreat from leading weekly rites at the Clearing. He recalls:
When she told him what her aim was, he thought she was ashamed and too ashamed to say so. Her authority in the pulpit, her dance in the Clearing, her powerful Call (she didn’t deliver sermons … she called and the hearing heard)—all that had been mocked and rebuked by the bloodspill in her backyard. (176-177)
But had she “just up and quit,” as Stamp Paid first thought; had “the white folks … tired her out at last,” as he later came to believe? (177; 180)
Stamp Paid’s recollection of their last conversation suggests otherwise:
‘Can’t nobody Call like you. You have to be there.’
‘What I have to do is get in my bed and lay down. I want to fix on something harmless in this world.’
‘What world you talking about? Ain’t nothing harmless down here.’
‘Yes it is. Blue. That don’t hurt nobody. Yellow neither.’
‘You getting in the bed to think about yellow?’
‘I likes yellow.’
‘Then what? When you get through with blue and yellow, then what?’
‘Can’t say. It’s something can’t be planned.’…
‘Sethe’s the one did it.’
‘And if she hadn’t?’ (179) 220
What Baby Suggs indicates here is that she is taking her own advice of “laying it all down.” In retreating from this world to engage color, Baby Suggs is, in fact, redirecting her “Call” to the spirit world, calling upon forces capable of uniting social structure with the organic realm. Not surprisingly, then, the symbolic colors upon which she focused are those associated with peace, or etutu, and Osun—the same tonalities that combine with white in the wallpaper of 124’s second floor, which the “crawling-already? baby” was determined to reach, which Sethe has just accessed.
Indeed, the grammar of existence such signs reference is so thoroughly encoded in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road that, with this revelation that Baby Suggs devoted her last eight years to meditating upon these symbolic colors from her bed in the keeping room, the narrative now shifts into high gear its drive to culminate the ritual process by which the ruptures wrought by slavery will be cooled and communitas will be effected, once again, at 124 Bluestone.
That ritual time and space remains in effect is signified by the narrator’s report that
“[f]or the first time, [Sethe] was going to be late for work” (181). Sethe proceeds, nevertheless, to gather firewood, stoke the fire, and make breakfast, all of which is followed by the narrator’s signifying pronouncement: “Too bad she would be late for work—too, too bad. Once in sixteen years? That’s just too bad” (182).
Now the narrative yields to Sethe’s own voice, which once again serves to designate time, space and circumstance as unified and perpetual forces: “Whatever is going on outside my door ain’t for me. The world is in this room. This here’s all there is and all there needs to be” (183). Thus, when she finally heads for work, Sethe is said to 221
be “wrapped in a timeless present,” which will prove too compelling for her job to disrupt
(184).
Whereas she is said to be “excited to giddiness by the things she no longer had to
remember,” Sethe actually devotes this day to reconciling the most devastating incidents
of her past with Beloved’s appearance (183). For Sethe, Beloved’s presence provides
definitive proof of her triumph over the invasive forces against which she has struggled:
“you came back to me and I was right all along: there is no world outside my door”
(184). Throughout Sethe’s workday, then, the narrative specifies space and time as
congruous with the circumstance of Sethe’s victory.
She refuses to acknowledge her boss’ complaints about her late arrival:
she just turned her back and reached for her apron. There was no entry now. No crack or crevice available. She had taken pains to keep them out but knew full well that at any moment they could rock her, rip her from her moorings, send the birds twittering back into her hair. Drain her mother’s milk, they had already done. Divided her back into plant life—that too. Driven her fat-bellied into the woods— they had done that. All news of them was rot. They buttered Halle’s face; gave Paul D iron to eat; crisped Sixo; hanged her own mother. She didn’t want any more news about whitefolks … about the world done up the way whitefolks loved it. All news of them should have stopped with the birds in her hair. (188)
Here, Sethe’s workplace is envisaged as but an extension of the system of enslavement.
Privately then, Sethe raises the specter of aje, the force which renders her capacity to outmaneuver this incursive system. In this way, she perpetuates ritual space, despite the imposition of social structure. That ritual time is also in effect throughout Sethe’s workday is denoted in the report that her work is done before Sethe realizes that she has neglected her usual routine of reserving food for her family’s dinner. This note enables
two narrative agendas.
First, it allows for the narrative resignification of the unity of time, space and
circumstance. Thus, we are told: “[s]he couldn’t read clock time very well, but she knew 222
when the hands were closed in prayer at the top of the face she was through for the day”
(189). Here, the question of time is answered by an allocation of place, which serves to inform Sethe of her circumstance. Secondly, the note enables the narrative to emphasize
Sethe’s reasons for taking incidentals from the restaurant, before she departs: “she just didn’t want the embarrassment of waiting out back of Phelps store with the others till every white in Ohio was served before the keeper turned to the cluster of Negro faces looking through a hole in his back door” (189).
Now, the narrative has her recall “Sixo’s argument on the subject” of stealing
(190). When Sixo is caught eating a shoat, he denies having stolen it; his action, he tells
schoolteacher, is more accurately described as: “‘improving your property’”:
‘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.’
Clever, but Schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined. (190)
With its placement in this section of the narrative, schoolteacher’s lesson seems to
recommend Sethe’s stealing as a way of defying the store’s condescending treatment of
Blacks.
As the narrative continues, however, we learn that this lesson serves also to signify
directly upon Sethe: “now, with a paying job and a boss kind enough to hire an ex-
convict, she despised herself for the pride that made pilfering better than standing in line
at the window of the general store with all the other Negroes. She didn’t want to jostle
them or be jostled by them. Feel their judgment or their pity, especially now” (191). In
this way, the narrative reiterates Sethe’s unwieldy pride before returning to time-present.
After singularly devoting her day to the perpetuation of ritual time and space, Sethe
is envisaged as a fundamentally different person: 223
The workday had come to a close and already she was feeling the excitement. Not since that other escape had she felt so alive.… Today would be a day she would accept a lift, if anybody on a wagon offered it. No one would, and for sixteen years her pride had not let her ask. But today. Oh, today. Now she wanted to speed, to skip over the long walk home and be there.
When Sawyer warned her about being late again, she barely heard him.…
‘Un huh,’ she said, wondering how she could hurry time along to get to the no-time waiting for her.
She needn’t have worried. Wrapped tight, hunched forward, as she started home her mind was busy with the things she could forget. (191)
Remade by her release from the structure of work, which is figured as another “escape,”
Sethe is not only willing to ask an estranged neighbor for a ride, but also, for the first
time in the novel, she openly engages her rememory.
‘Think-talking’ to Beloved throughout her walk home, Sethe recollects the cataclysmic event that provoked her escape from Sweet Home. She explains, “This is the first time I’m telling it and I’m telling it to you because it might help explain something to you although I know you don’t need me to do it” (193). Indeed, what Sethe describes is her initial emanation as aje.
She relates overhearing schoolteacher invoke her name, telling his nephews to “put
her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right” (193). Although she
does not know the official definition of schoolteacher’s term, Sethe nevertheless
experiences an immediate, visceral response to this White supremacist injunction: “I
commenced to walk backward, didn’t even look behind me to find out where I was
headed” (193). Indeed, Sethe was “headed” toward an emanation as aje, the signs of
which pervade her body when she hits upon the preeminent symbol of spiritual
renascence: “When I bumped up against a tree my scalp was prickly…. My head itched
like the devil. Like somebody was sticking fines needles into my scalp” (193). In order 224 to learn the authoritative meaning of the word, characteristics, Sethe then turns to the only figure of authority she trusts at Sweet Home. As she answers Sethe’s questions,
Mrs. Garner becomes increasingly distracted by the quickening of supplemental consciousness in Sethe, saying: “If you’d wash you hair you could get rid of that lice”
(195).
Recalling Sixo’s insistence that Garner was murdered, Sethe explains how schoolteacher took over what had been a generally liberal plantation, imposing harsh punishments and subjecting its occupants to ‘scientific’ study. Sethe goes on to explain that Sixo formulated a plan for taking their freedom, a plan that came to replace Halle’s hope of accumulating enough money to buy his entire family out, as he had done for his mother. It was Sixo who:
started watching the sky. He was the only one who crept out at night and Halle said that’s how he learned about the train.…
[The Sweet Home men] whispered among themselves and Sixo watched the sky, the low part where it touched the trees. You could tell his mind was gone from Sweet Home. (197)
Although the men left her out of the planning stages, Sethe synthesizes Sixo’s escape plan and his ritual activity with her own resolve to rescue her children from schoolteachers’ atomizing rule.
Thus, Sethe explains, when the signal for the Underground Railroad Train did come, she succeeded in delivering her children to the “woman who waited in the corn.
Ha ha. No notebook for my babies and no measuring string neither.” Later Sethe would discover that before she had ventured her own escape, Sixo and Paul A had been recaptured and killed, Paul D had been recaptured and collared, and Halle had gone mad after seeing schoolteacher’s nephews pin her down to suck from her breasts. It is “the 225
Mothers” singular capacity that she reinforces in her final words: “only me had your milk, and God do what he would, I was going to get it to you. You remember that, don’t you; that I did? That when I got here I had milk enough for all?” (198).
Here, Sethe confronts more of her neglected past, renegotiating it in a way that
emphasizes the extraordinary power with which she “got through” (198). While she is
relieved at having reframed her story, her narrative not only goes unheard by its intended
audience but it also stops short of the infanticide and its devastating consequences.
As she approaches the house, its appearance suggests to her that the effects of the infanticide have been undone: “Sethe could see her chimney; it wasn’t lonely-looking anymore. The ribbon of smoke was from a fire that warmed a body returned to her—just like it never went away, never needed a headstone. And the heart that beat inside it had not for a single moment stopped in her hands” (198). However, Stamp Paid hears “a conflagration of hasty voices” around the house, which he believes to be “the mumbling of the black and angry dead”: those who know that the “jungle,” the “swift unnavigable waters, screaming baboons, red gums ready for blood” “lived under … white skin” (172;
198).
Stamp Paid finally abandons his repeated attempts to visit Sethe, “and when he
did,” the text reads,
124 was left to its own devices. When Sethe locked the door, the women inside were free at last to be what they liked, see whatever they saw, and say whatever was on their minds.
Almost. Mixed in with the voices surrounding the house, recognizable but undecipherable to Stamp Paid, were the thoughts of the women of 124, unspeakable thoughts, unspoken. (199)
The next chapter opens with Sethe’s voice, after all: “Beloved, she my daughter” (200).
As Karla F. C. Holloway notes, that this statement is cast in Black English functions as “a 226
sign that the text is about to embrace recursion and signify upon itself” (“Beloved” 519).
Indeed, the opening line of Sethe’s discourse signifies the commencement of the narrative’s drive to fully authorize the implicit grammatical principles by which the trio’s
“unspeakable thoughts” can be not only spoken but also deciphered.
Sethe’s soliloquy is followed by that of Denver, then that of Beloved. Each takes up a chapter of its own, each serves to recollect the women’s innermost motivations, and
each makes an exclusive claim to Beloved. As these chapters ensue, the narrative
undergoes an incremental process of abandoning most conventions of written English.
Whereas the text of both Sethe’s and Denver’s discourse is rarely separated into paragraphs, Beloved’s soliloquy features the indentations by which paragraphs are distinguished but its opening line is the only one that is marked, syntactically, as a sentence. Quotation marks do not surround the words of any of the three discourses.
Finally, in the chapter that follows the three soliloquies, the text divests itself of allegiance to all but the most rudimentary standards of English grammar.
Sethe’s discourse is crowded with once-latent impressions of being abandoned by
her own mother, of wanting to be a daughter, and of never getting enough milk from Nan.
These memories are followed by Sethe’s anticipation of the sensorial experiences that she
and Beloved are free, finally, to experience together: “Because you are mine and I have
to show you these things and teach you what a mother should” (201). As well, Sethe
recollects the watery signs that identify Beloved as the crawling-already? baby—signs
from which “Paul D distracted [her]” (202). She is concerned, moreover, to place these
disparate markers in reciprocal union with the infanticide. Directly addressing Beloved,
she explains: 227
My plan was to take us all to the other side where my own ma’am is. They stopped me from getting us there, but they didn’t stop you from getting here. Ha ha. You came right on back like a good girl, like a daughter which is what I wanted to be and would have been if my ma’am had been able to get out of the rice long enough before they hanged her and let me be one. (203)
Here, Sethe designates the infanticide as her attempt to reverse the severance of
matrilineal ties by which generations of her lineage has been plagued.
Sethe goes on to explain how, long before her mother was hanged, the implicit
connection between them was thwarted by the slave system: “[s]he’d had the bit so many
times she smiled. When she wasn’t smiling she smiled, and I never saw her own smile”
(203). Hereafter, such forced smiles function as sign of the systematic destruction of
Black mother-daughter bonds. Sethe traces this sign from her mother to the “Saturday
girls,” who pasted smiles on their faces while prostituting themselves in order “to pay for
what their children needed, or their ma’ammies” (204). Then, Sethe pursues the singular
occasion in which she subjected herself to this particularly divisive mode of exploitation:
“I got close to it myself when I got out of jail and bought, so to speak, your name. But
the Bodwins got me a cooking job at Sawyer’s and left me able to smile on my own like
now when I think about you” (204). Here, the sign of the systematic destruction of Black
mother-daughter bonds is transposed; through the dispensation of kind Whites, Sethe is
free to perpetuate authentic relationships with her child, as neither her own mother nor
“the Saturday girls” could.
The next paragraph recollects the sign of white stairs: “[b]ut you know all that because you smart like everybody said because when I got here you was crawling already. Trying to get up the stairs. Baby Suggs had them painted white so you could see your way to the top in the dark where lamplight didn’t reach. Lord, you loved those stairsteps” (205). With this, a striking level of meaning is added to this recurring 228
structure. Sethe signifies that not only does Beloved already “know” her mother’s story,
by virtue of crawling up the white stairway, but also that Baby Suggs purposefully placed
at the very center of 124 this objective of reversing the patterned severance of matrilineal
ties. Thus, Sethe’s final claim specifies the signs of etutu and Osun, which flourish in the
wallpaper at the top of the stairway: “I couldn’t lay down nowhere in peace, back then.
Now I can. I can sleep like the drowned, have mercy. She come back to me, my
daughter, and she is mine” (204).
Denver’s soliloquy both echoes and expands upon Sethe’s. Opening with the claim
of a formative link to Beloved, Denver’s discourse recovers her lifelong alliance with
Beloved:
Beloved is my sister. I swallowed her blood right along with my mother’s milk. The first thing I heard after not hearing anything was the sound of her crawling up the stairs. She was my secret company until Paul D came. He threw her out. Ever since I was little she was my company and she helped me wait for my daddy. Me and her waited for him (205).
Here, Denver traces her capacity to establish relationship with her dead sister to the fact
that she ingested her blood along with mother’s milk, both of which bear ase.
As her soliloquy continues, Denver explains that her two years of hysterical
deafness were “[s]o quiet. Made me have to read faces and learn how to figure out what
people were thinking, so I didn’t need to hear what they said. That’s how come me and
Beloved could play together. Not talking. On the porch. By the creek. In the secret
house” (106). Thus, their alliance was consolidated at Kalunga. Here, the liminal
threshold between the twin worlds is localized at the porch, which separates 124
Bluestone from the surrounding neighborhood; at the creek, where land meets water; and
“between the field and the stream” where Denver’s secret house stands (28). 229
Denver’s discourse reveals more details about how this ritual activity, by which she sustained kinship bonds with the sister she was robbed of, enabled her to manage her outright terror at her mother’s capacity as aje. Thus, she recovers both her own and her brothers’ reactions to the infanticide:
She missed killing my brothers and they knew it. They told me die-witch! stories to show me the way to do it, if I ever needed to. Maybe it was getting that close to dying made them want to fight the war. That’s what they told me they were going to do. I guess they rather be around killing men than killing women, and there sure is something in her that makes it all right to kill her own.… I don’t know what it is, I don’t know who it is, but maybe there is something else terrible enough to make her do it again.… Whatever it is it comes from outside this house, outside the yard, and it can come right on in the yard if it wants to. So I never leave this house and I watch over the yard, so it can’t happen again and my mother won’t have to kill me too. (205)
Denver’s distress stems as much from the loss of empathic siblings as from the exact nature of the threat that Sethe poses, which is signified here by the pejorative term for aje.
In recalling the ways she sought to counter this enduring threat, Denver implements her own reconstruction of severed kinship ties (209). First, she sought refuge in her brothers. Denver reports that, after Howard and Buglar finally flee the house, the “[o]nly place [Sethe] can’t get me in the night is Grandma Baby’s room” (206). During the day, she claims the protection of the baby ghost, whose breathing only she can hear by virtue of her hysterical deafness (208). Moreover, Denver says this “quiet let me dream my daddy better” (208). In Denver’s dreams, the father she has never known is forever enroute to 124: “to help me watch out for Ma’am and anything come in the yard” (207).
Otherwise, Denver explains, “Grandma used to tell me his things” (207).
Indeed, Denver goes on to emphasize Baby Suggs’ determination to supply her with knowledge of her lineage. Not surprisingly, Baby Suggs’ words specify the ways in which both Denver and the dead baby have participated in the ritual processes of Osun: 230
“after I heard my sister crawling up the stairs to get back to her bed, she told me my
things too. That I was charmed. My birth was and I got saved all the time. And that I
shouldn’t be afraid of the ghost. It wouldn’t harm me because I tasted its blood” (209).
For Denver, Beloved’s appearance serves to confirm their kinship ties: “when she
wondered about Ma’am’s earrings—something I didn’t know about—well, that just made
the cheese more binding: my sister come back to help me wait for my daddy” (208).
Beloved’s own knowledge of their lineage, which comes by way of a glittering object,
combines with information Baby Suggs shares with Denver, such as her reminder that “I
should always listen to my body and love it” (209). These metaphorical references
function to confirm the implicit understanding behind Baby Suggs’ resolution to arm
Denver with such knowledge: that maintaining communitas with the self, the living and
the dead, is of utmost priority for the self, the living and the dead. That this sacred ideal
of community obtains in her lifelong relationship with ‘the dead girl’ is reiterated in the
final lines of Denver’s discourse: “Love her. I do. She played with me and always came
to be with me when I needed her. She’s mine, Beloved. She’s mine” (209).
With its opening pronouncement of an exclusive claim to Beloved, its redeployment of signs of the ritual process of Osun, and its concern with reclaiming severed kinship bonds, Beloved’s soliloquy echoes the other two. Her discourse is unique, however, in its references to “the other side” (203).
For words to describe how she has longed for Sethe across space, time, and
circumstance, Beloved resorts to the idiom of iron:
how can I say things that are pictures I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing
All of it is now it is always now (210). That Beloved has accessed this permanent, otherworldly reality, is further suggested
further by the inclusion, in her disjointed discourse, of incidents that occurred before her
(current) lifetime, from seeing “her take flowers away from leaves”5 to experiencing the
Middle Passage.
Throughout her soliloquy, Beloved combines images of the Middle Passage with
those of death, suggesting that death is preceded by the liminality of status reversal that
millions of Africans experienced in their horrific journeys to enslavement in the New
World. The Middle Passage is invoked in Beloved’s memory of crouching in a dark,
overcrowded space which is teeming with rats and of being provided with very little
water. “We are all trying to leave our bodies behind,” she says, but “it is hard to make
yourself die forever you sleep short and then return” (210).
While she insists that she is not dead, Beloved notes that others succeed in dying.
There is “the little hill of dead people” that “the men without skin” push into the sea,
“which is the color of bread” (211). As well, Beloved says “the man on my face has done
it” (210). This structure is especially noteworthy because this dead man appears to be
Halle. Beloved says:
I love him because he has a song … his singing is of the place where a woman takes flowers away from their leaves and puts them in a round basket … she is crouching near us but I do not see her until he locks his eyes and dies on my face … the others do not know he is dead I know his song is gone (212)
As we have already learned, the Sweet Home men’s ritual activity under the trees
included singing such songs as “Storm Upon the Water” (40). As well, the narrative has
repeatedly specified that no one knows whether or not Halle has died. The structure of
5 The narrative includes specific references to flower-picking by Sethe and Baby Suggs. Sethe does so before the crawling-already? baby is born; she is a baby, still, when Baby Suggs does so. 232
“the man on [her] face” thus appears in juxtaposition to “the woman with [her] face … in the sea” (211). Beloved says: “when he dies on my face I can see hers” (212). That is, not until Halle passes from her perceptual range does she envisage the face of her other parent.
Thus, Beloved’s discourse cites the reclamation of disrupted kinship bonds as that
which propels her arrival at Sethe’s door. Because there is “no one to want [her],” to
“call” her by her “name,” Beloved hastens to the water in which “no boats go” until
Sethe’s “diamonds” light her path through “blue water” to 124 Bluestone (212-213). In
describing her reunion with Sethe, Beloved recovers and reconciles the signifier that
Sethe deployed in her own soliloquy: “Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile her
smiling face is the place for me it is the face I lost she is my face smiling at me
doing it at last a hot thing now we can join a hot thing” (213).
Indeed, “the join” recommences when the next chapter opens with Beloved’s
restatement of “I am Beloved and she is mine.” In its initial paragraph, Beloved’s
rambling reminiscences are revised into a coherent discourse which serves to recollect
and give voice to the story of each known female member of their lineage. While
Beloved specifically identifies Sethe as its subject, her discourse is also loaded with
metaphorical references to Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother, and Denver. Thus, the apparent
meaning of this signifying passage serves to directs readers that metaphorical references
which have already been deployed must be employed in the interpretation of this
passage’s actual significance.
The passage begins with Beloved identifying Sethe as “the one who picked flowers,
yellow flowers in the place before the crouching. Took them away from their green 233 leaves. They are on the quilt now where we sleep.” In addition to Sethe, this report also serves to identify Baby Suggs. Just before the infanticide, when she invokes the ritual process of Osun to discern the source of the disapproval that filled the air, Baby Suggs is also said to take flowers ‘away from their leaves’: the “flowers she stuck through a split in her hat; the rest she tossed aside” (138). As well, the pervasive force of the community’s condemnation, which served to block Baby Suggs’ iron of the “dark and coming thing,” is recalled in Beloved’s statement: “I wanted to help her when she was picking flowers, but the clouds of gunsmoke blinded me and I lost her” (214). Finally, in tracing the flowers to Baby Suggs’ quilt, Beloved recovers Baby Suggs response to the failure of communitas that precipitated the infanticide: she retreated to her bed to focus her “great heart” on the ritual engagement of the symbolic colors of yellow and blue.
Both Sethe and Sethe’s mother are identified in Beloved’s reference to the second occurrence of losing Sethe: “[s]he was about to smile at me when the men without skin came and took us up into the sunlight with the dead and shoved them into the sea. She went there. They did not push her. She went there” (214). Here, Beloved attributes the infanticide to the four horsemen’s arrival and recovers Stamp Paid’s repeated references to the sunlight that filled the shed in which the infanticide occurred. With her insistence that Sethe died voluntarily, Beloved recovers the tragedies at the base of Sethe’s life: that her mother was killed while attempting to escape without her; that she never had the opportunity to see her mother’s authentic smile. When Beloved says, “I wanted to join her in the sea but I could not move,” she is recalling Sethe’s own remorse that “Nan yanked her away from the pile [of hanged bodies] before she could make out…her mother’s] mark” (62). Beloved’s third reference to losing Sethe reads: “Sethe’s is the face I found and lost
in the water under the bridge. When I went in, I saw her face coming to me and it was
my face too. I wanted to join. I tried to join, but she went up into the pieces of light at
the top of the water. I lost her again, but I found the house she whispered to me (214).
This serves to recover Sethe’s intention in the shed to not only kill her children but also
herself. Sethe succeeded in killing only the “crawling-already? baby before the four
horsemen interpolated her, thus preventing her from joining the baby in the world of the
dead. Denver is identified here, as well. For, in her own soliloquy, Denver recalled
having “played with” the baby ghost, during the “quiet time,” at the creek behind 124 as
well as other Kalunga. Thus, the bridge marks the place of the liminal threshold between the twin worlds, where Denver silently engaged the “dead girl,” then disappeared “into
the pieces of light at the top of the water” when she left for home.
When Beloved reprises each instance of losing Sethe, Denver’s identity is further
signified. The text reads:
Three times I lost her: once with the flowers because of the noisy clouds of smoke; once when she went into the sea instead of smiling at me; once under the bridge when I went in to join her and she came toward me but did not smile. She whispered to me, chewed me, and swam away. (214)
The final line of this passage recovers the way Denver’s rapacious need for Beloved
functioned to summon her to 124 Bluestone. In the “secret house,” “Denver’s
imagination” is said to “produce its own hunger and its own food, which she badly
needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her out” (28). After Paul D rid the house
of its ghost, “Denver stayed in emerald closet as long as she could, lonely as a mountain
and almost as big, thinking everybody had somebody but her” (104). Once Beloved
appears and settles into 124 Bluestone, the text reports of Denver: “[t]o go back to the 235 original hunger was impossible. Luckily for Denver, looking was food enough to last”
(118).
Beloved concludes this chapter’s introductory paragraph with: “Now I have found her in this house. She smiles at me and it is my own face smiling. I will not lose her again. She is mine” (214). An ellipsis follows this text, functioning as a sign that the narrative is about to signify upon itself.
Indeed, the three voices call, respond and flow into each other until each speaker’s identity, as well as all reference to time and place, becomes indistinct. What resonates throughout is the impassioned circumstance of reclaiming the beloved:
I have your milk
I have your smile
I will take care of you
You are my face; I am you. Why did you leave me who am you?
I will never leave you again
Don’t ever leave me again
You will never leave me again
You went in the water
I drank your blood
I brought your milk…
You forgot to smile
I loved you
You hurt me
You came back to me
You left me 236
I waited for you
You are mine
You are mine
You are mine (216-217)
This collective discourse functions to remember and give voice to the story of each known female member of the trio’s lineage, which bestows the transformative potential of shared consciousness to recreate bonds capable of nullifying the devastation wrought by the slave system. With this collective reclamation of matrilineal ties, the ritual process is finally fulfilled.
Thus, in Part Three of the novel, 124 is no longer surrounded by “the mumbling of the black and angry dead” (198). But the “quiet” marking 124 in Part Three of the novel does not come from Beloved’s departure. Not only does this abiku intend to stay with her mother and live out her life cycle properly, but she has also become pregnant with devastating potential. Instead, it is Sethe who begins to disappear, overpowered by this insatiable representative of “350 years of indifference.” (Morrison, in Carrabi 87).
Denver becomes alarmed by the way her mother has ceased to work, devoting her days to feeding Beloved the last of 124’s food supply and alternately serving as either Beloved’s playmate or whipping post. Spurred on by Baby Suggs, whose words of encouragement were “clear as anything,” a reluctant Denver ventures out to seek help from the community (244). Not only does she recall the neighborhood but, step by step, Denver also discovers that she has become empowered enough to master the environment which, for twelve years, she had lacked the courage to enter.
Thus, thirty neighborhood women descend upon 124 Bluestone to reclaim the communitas that Baby Suggs had forged there. Indeed, “the first thing they saw was not 237
Denver sitting on the steps, but themselves. Younger, stronger, even as little girls lying on the grass asleep.... Baby Suggs laughed and skipped among them, urging more.... [T]here they were, young and happy, playing in Baby Suggs’ yard, not feeling the envy that surfaced the next day” (258). With this, the narrative recovers not only the
“dead girl” in these women, not only Baby Suggs’ beneficent presence, but also the communal breach of communitas. Now, it reenacts Baby Suggs’ ritual process, by which the entire community had regenerated the sacred ideal of community, again and again.
This time, however, it is Ella who unleashes the performative power of ase:
and then Ella hollered.
Instantly the kneelers and the standers joined her. They stopped praying and took a step back to the beginning. In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what it sounded like. (259)
Just as Baby Suggs, holy had done in rites at the Clearing, the corps of women invoke a power that extends “beyond the meaning of words, in sound and sensation rather than in logical meaning and the Logos” (Krumholz para 33). That is, they issue the call that taps
“the dead below the river”6:
For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. (261)
As Beloved stands beside her, “naked and smiling,” Sethe is invigorated by this recommencement of the ritual process (261).
Thus, deployed once again are the signifying structures that have served to designate Sethe’s emanatation as Osun:
6 Cornet and Thompson, 28. 238
It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash.…
Sethe feels her eyes burn and it may have been to keep them clear that she looks up. The sky is blue and clear. Not one touch of death in the definite green of the leaves. It is when she lowers her eyes to look again at the loving faces before her that she sees him. Guiding the mare, slowing down, his black hat wide- brimmed enough to hide his face but not his purpose. He is coming into her yard and he is coming for her best thing. She hears wings. Little hummingbirds stick needle beaks right through her head cloth in to her hair and beat their wings. And if she thinks anything, it is no. No no. Nonono. She flies. The ice pick is not in her hand; it is her hand. (262)
Byway of the unfolding ritual process, significant differences obtain in this re-enactment of the original scene that preceded the infanticide. Gone is the anger that had kept the neighbors from sounding the warning that “whitefolks with the Look” were in the area
(138). Now, neighboring women cast ase on Sethe’s behalf and look on her with “loving faces” (262). Absent also, is Sethe’s belief that “she could discriminate among them,”
that she could distinguish “kind” Whites like Bodwin, who secured both her release from
jail and her job at Sawyer’s restaurant (188; 191). This time, Sethe attacks the
interpolator, rather than her own children.
For Beloved, however, this scene constitutes an exact reenactment of being
abandoned by her mother: “Sethe is running away from her, running, and she feels the
emptiness in the hand Sethe has been holding. Now she is running into the faces of the
people out there, joining them and leaving Beloved behind. Alone. Again. ” (262). As
Sethe attempts to kill Bodwin, Beloved sees an exacting reconfiguration of the liminal
existence to which was cast by the infanticide: “A hill of black people, falling. And
above them all, rising from his place with a whip in his hand, the man without skin,
looking. He is looking at her” (261).
Despite Sethe’s attempt to revise the past, it is Beloved, not the historical menace
of the slave master, who is dispelled in this reenactment. For the scene demonstrates the 239
way in which the thirty neighborhood women manifest the transformative potential of
shared consciousness in order to fulfill the inexorable priority of the present. According
to Ella, who had “convinced the others that rescue was in order,” “[t]he future was sunset; the past was something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you
might have to stomp it out” (256). Beloved is ousted by this communal consciousness,
which Sethe had shared until she became convinced by Beloved’s presence that the past
could be undone. In turn, Beloved reflects a communal unconsciousness: the legions of
“disremembered and unaccounted for” lives that were destroyed in the transatlantic slave
trade and in the system of plantation slavery (274).
The novel’s final two chapters function to distinguish a point of balance between
these countervailing interests. The first of these chapters serves to recollect Paul D’s own
struggle with these competing claims, as signified by the “tobacco tin”—which serves as
a sign of his inability to integrate his past into his present—and its final implosion in
Beloved’s hands. Beloved thrust Paul D into a sea of memory so swift that he returns to
124 Bluestone a changed man. Hence, the chapter’s opening line: “His coming is the
reverse route of his going” (263).
He first visits the cold house, “halfway expecting to hear her. Touch me. On the
inside part and call me by my name” (263). The narrative report, “[i]n daylight he can’t
imagine it in darkness with moonlight seeping through the cracks,” is immediately
countered by Paul D’s recollection, after all:
Nor the desire that drowned him there and forced him to struggle up, up into that girl like she was the clear air at the top of the sea.… It was … like a brainless urge to stay alive. Each time she came, pulled up her skirts, a life hunger overwhelmed him and he had no more control over it than over his lungs. And afterward, beached and gobbling air, in the midst of repulsion and personal shame, he was 240
thankful too for having been escorted to some ocean-deep place he once belonged to. (264)
Here, we learn that theirs was a ritual exchange, in which Paul D, too, was ‘touched on
the inside part and called by his name.’ This cooling rite, in which his “tobacco tin” burst
open to reveal a “red heart,” propelled him to recollect his past experiences and, thus, to
literally remember himself (117).
Now, from the distance created by eighteen years of struggle to define his own manhood, Paul D compares the tenuous identity his master, Garner, had conferred upon him with the example set by Sixo: “When he looks at himself through Garner’s eyes, he sees one thing. Through Sixo’s, another. One makes him feel righteous. One makes him feel ashamed” (267). As Paul D recollects the adventures that took him from the
Cherokee camp in Alfred, Georgia, watershed events in American history function as mere backdrop for his private quest to reconcile these opposing ‘grammars’ of existence.
Recalling the “time he worked both sides of the War,” Paul D matter-of-factly
notes the way racism kept the Union from arming Black soldiers so that the menial jobs
to which they were assigned were no different than those delegated by the Confederacy
(267). As well, he remembers discovering that the Union’s victory and the resulting
Emancipation Proclamation did not render Black life free from White supremacist terror,
as revealed by the Black bodies that littered the roadways during his journey through
Alabama. Of his passage north, Paul D recalls “crowds of alive people, neither hunting
nor hunted” but it is “the miracle” of receiving pay for work as well as making “his first
earned purchase” that imbues his free life with meaning (269).
Thus, even in freedom, Paul D’s life remained circumscribed by commerce,
random acts of racist terror and other forms of White supremacist, capitalist domination. 241
This is the identity that Garner both created for him and shielded him from. Thus,
outside of Garner’s patriarchal Sweet Home, Paul D emerges as a liminal figure: “he
decided that to eat, walk, and sleep anywhere was life as good as it got. And he did it for
seven years till he found himself in southern Ohio, where an old woman and a girl he
used to know had gone” (270). Later, at Sethe’s bedside, Paul D will contrast this
identity with Sixo’s. Sixo’s description of relationship with the Thirty Mile Woman
reflects the most basic components of communitas: “she is a friend of my mind. She
gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the
right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind”
(272-273). While Sixo embodies the integrity of a decidedly African grammar of existence, for Paul D this legacy is also fraught with ambiguity and limitation.
For example, when Sixo reverts to speaking in his native language only, he has no
one with whom to converse. Ultimately, his death is prompted by this refusal to modify
traditional cultural modes in ways that accommodate novel circumstances. When Paul
D’s and Sixo’s escape attempt is foiled, schoolteacher abruptly revises his order to keep
them alive because Sixo not only attacks his captors but also sings aloud as he does so.
“This one will never be suitable,” Schoolteacher declares before killing Sixo; “[t]he song
must have convinced him,” the narrative signifies (226). Sixo’s final act of resistance
does, however, serve to distract their interpolators just long enough to allow the Thirty
Mile Woman to escape “with his blossoming seed” (229). Thus rejoicing in the
knowledge that his lineage will thrive in the free states, Sixo dies laughing and shouting,
“Seven-O!” (226). 242
Clearly, Paul D cannot fully adopt Sixo’s model any more than he can completely
disregard Garner’s. This duality functions to distinguish the challenge for African
Americans: to recreate themselves in ways that enable physical survival in a society
structured by White supremacism while also drawing upon Black metacultural modes and
practices which lend critical measures of coherence, insight and autonomy to their
American experience. Conversion to the perspective of communitas is a primary means
by which Blacks upheld traditional values and group cohesion while also creating a new,
distinctly African American, culture.
With “Now his coming is the reverse of his going,” the narrative returns to time-
present. The repetition of this structure serves to emphasize that the Paul D who returns
to 124 Bluestone is a transformed man—one who has confronted and renegotiated his
past, who has molded a point of balance between the opposing grammars with which he
identifies. Just as the thirty neighborhood women’s’ execution of communitas served to cast out Beloved, Paul D appears, now, to consolidate communitas. Entering the house:
Carefully, not quite in a hurry but losing no time, he climbs the luminous stairs. He enters Sethe’s room. She isn’t there and the bed looks so small he wonders how the two of them had lain there.… He turns his eyes back to the bed and keeps looking at it. It seems to him a place that he is not. With an effort that makes him sweat he forces a picture of himself lying there, and when he sees it, it lifts his spirit. (270)
Paul D’s demonstration of iron serves to resignify one of the novel’s most crucial
lessons. As Baby Suggs declared, personal agency arises from the force of the imagination. Rather than launching a futile attempt to change the past, Paul D taps the
permanent dimension of reality in order to impact the present. Thus, “leaving the image
of himself firmly in place on the narrow bed,” he continues his search for Sethe (270).
When he finds her lying listlessly in Baby Suggs’ bed, his desire to forge
communitas with her is signified by his “sudden” remembrance of Sixo’s description of 243
enjoying the sacred ideal of community with the Thirty Mile-Woman. Paul D’s new-
found commitment is confirmed by the narrative note, “[h]e wants to put his story next to
hers” (273). Finally, Baby Suggs’ pertinent reminder—that communitas is built upon a
primary self-regard—is reiterated in Paul D’s final words to Sethe: “You your best thing,
Sethe” (273).
However, Baby Suggs, holy, went much further in her delineation of the ritual
process. She specified that to achieve balance between the twin worlds, communitas must be extended from the self to the living and the dead. Thus, the narrative equilibrates
Paul D’s and Sethe’s urgent “need” to construct “some kind of tomorrow” with the equally urgent demands of the past (273).
The “60 million or more,” who have been abandoned to the communal
unconscious, are denoted as the palpable “absence,” “the bleak and minus nothing,”
which registers as soon as Paul D crosses the house’s threshold (270). He recognizes it
as “[s]omething more than Beloved…. He can’t put his finger on it, but it seems, for a
moment, that just beyond his knowing is the glare of an outside thing that embraces while
it accuses” (270-271).
In the novel’s final chapter, the ‘dead girl’ is therefore specified as the hot side of
an otherwise cool Osun, as “a loneliness that roams…. It is alive, on its own. A dry and
spreading thing” (274). That this countenance functions as consequence of collective
disremembrance is further signified in the structure which serves as the novel’s closing
formula. Each repetition of “It was not a story to pass on” serves to delineate Beloved’s
actual significance as iron, Oloro and Ewuji. 244
As a vision, as a remembrance and as a narrative, she constitutes a temporary, transitory glimpse into the permanent dimension of reality:
It was not a story to pass on.
They forgot her like a bad dream. After they made up their tales, shaped and decorated them, those that saw her that day on the porch quickly and deliberately forgot her. (274)
As the passage continues, her designation as iron is smoothly compounded with her role as Oloro, an intersubjective confidante:
It took longer for those who had spoken to her, lived with her, fallen in love with her, to forget, until they realized they couldn’t remember or repeat a single thing she said, and began to believe that, other than what they themselves were thinking, she hadn’t said anything at all. So, in the end, they forgot her too. Remembering seemed unwise. They never knew where or why she crouched, or whose was the underwater face she needed like that. (274-275)
Note the way the final line alludes to the second definition of iron as a temporary, worldly manifestation of a continuing lineage.
The next invocation of the structure picks up both meanings of iron and combines them with Osun’s function as an agent of awakening, ewuji:
It was not a story to pass on.
So they forgot her. Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep. Occasionally, however, the rustle of a skirt hushes when they wake, and the knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seem to belong to the sleeper. Sometimes the photo of a close friend or relative—looked at too long—shifts, and something, more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can touch it if they like, but don’t, because they know things will never be the same if they do. (275)
In this way, the novel’s closing formula specifies the “dead girl” as not only unforgettable but also unavoidable.
The structure is revised in the novel’s final lines. To stipulate the imperative of reconstructing the untold narratives of ancestors who died in the slave system, its verb 245
shifts into present tense. The effect of this is to mark their enduring, yet temporary, transitory and cyclical presence as manifestations of a permanent otherworldly reality:
This is not a story to pass on.
Down by the stream in the back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there.
By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss.
Beloved. (275)
That the specter of the past remains active in the present is but part of the lesson, here.
The “water and what is down there too” is a direct reference to both the Spiritworld and
Awoyegunle, the “secret of being alive (that) settles at the bottom (of the water)” (Badejo
32 n 50). With this, Morrison suggests moreover that collective disregard of the
ancestors amounts to a collective failure to know and actualize the self.
CHAPTER 6 “THE SECRET OF BEING ALIVE [THAT] SETTLES AT THE BOTTOM [OF THE WATER]” IN JAZZ
I wanted to have my work be as complex, as intricate, as subtle as the music was, or anything that black people did in a group.
—Toni Morrison, “A Conversation,” with Gloria Naylor
Like their predecessors, Jazz (1993) and Paradise (1998) explore Black existential crises, which arise from historical transition and the imposition of structure that both underlies and accompanies it. In these texts, as in each Morrison novel, Osun functions as mediating agent for the gendered metacultural strategies by which African Americans have, historically, maintained crucial measures of insight, order and self-determination.
What is unique about the ritual processes of Osun in Jazz and Paradise is that they function to elaborate upon the self-formative capacities of consciousness which were underscored in Beloved’s closing pages. That is, these novels more fully explore not only the communicable process of revitalizing such internal resources but also the potential of shared consciousness to regenerate communal bonds of affiliation.
Morrison conceived Jazz and Paradise as the second and third installments of a trilogy, beginning with Beloved (1987), which explores the tension between loving others and loving the self or, as Morrison puts it, the question of “who is the Beloved?” (“In the
Realm” 254). Each novel was inspired by fragments of historical events,1 which
1 In “A Conversation with Gloria Naylor,” Morrison reports “being obsessed by two or three little fragments of stories that I heard from different places” (583). The first was an original newspaper clipping about Margaret Garner’s trial, which inspired Beloved. Jazz came after Morrison saw a photo, taken by James Van der Zee and published in Camille Billlups’ The Harlem Book of the Dead, of a young woman
246 247
provoked Morrison to question what “compels a good woman to displace the self, her
self… as though the self were really a twin or a thirst or a friend or something that sits
right next to you and watches you (“A Conversation” with Naylor 585). As each
narrative methodically recounts the painstaking ritual process by which an otherwise
‘dead girl’ struggles to regain self-consciousness, Osun flows beneath the surface,
supplementing consciousness in ways that inspire improvisatory responses to the novels’
patterns of violence and loss and ushering in communities of caring capable of mitigating
the cleavages wrought by the structures of the larger society.
Set in 1920's Harlem, Jazz examines the paradoxes of Black life that accompanied
the Great Migration. During the years between emancipation and World War II, masses of Blacks fled from the dwindling agricultural economy and Jim Crow-era violence of the
South to claim their places in burgeoning industrial cities of the North. Within this
historical context, Morrison builds her narrative on the now-familiar topos in which
liminal figures are forced to reconstruct themselves within a mainstream that is both
antithetical and peremptory.
Each of Jazz’s characters must negotiate the omnipresent force of the City, which,
by the narrator’s description, “seizes” its residents and bends them to its imperatives.
Whereas, in Tar Baby, it is the river, flora and fauna that become convinced that the
world is forever altered, in Jazz’s Harlem it is Black Southern transplants who believe
“At last, at last, everything's ahead. The smart ones say so and people listening to them
who had lay dying, refusing help, so that the lover who shot her could escape (583-584). Finally, Paradise was inspired by a caveat included in post-Civil War-era newspaper advertisements, urging formerly enslaved people to emigrate to sparsely populated Western territories: “Come Prepared or Not at All” (interview, Time Magazine, January 19, 1998, p. 63). 248 and reading what they write down agree: Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, you all, and everything's ahead at last” (7).
Here, the river is lined by mere “strips of green grass,” the “sun sneaks” and snow “sits where it falls … waiting for horse-drawn wagons to tamp it down” (7; 8; 10).
“Daylight,” as one character reports, belongs in the South, for the City upstages the sun with “the trick of shapes and light and movement” (18; 34). Therefore, it is “no wonder” that Black émigrés “forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky, completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night” (35).
Thus, the characters’ detachment from traditional Black metacultural knowledges forms the core of the novel’s conflicts. For primary among the City’s “tricks’’ is its seeming ability to the transform nature itself:
there is nothing to beat what the City can make of a nightsky. It can empty itself of surface, and more like the ocean itself, go deep, starless.… Looking at it, this nightsky booming over a glittering city, it’s possible for me to avoid dreaming of what I know is in the ocean, and the bays and tributaries it feeds: the two-seat aeroplanes, nose down in the muck, pilot and passenger staring at schools of passing bluefish; money, soaked and salty in canvas bags, or waving their edges gently from metal bands made to hold them forever. These are down there, along with yellow flowers that eat water beetles and eggs floating away from thrashing fins; along with children who made a mistake in the parents they chose; along with slabs of Carrara pried from unfashionable buildings. There are bottles too, made of glass beautiful enough to rival stars I cannot see above me because the citysky has hidden them. (35-36)
This displaced ocean serves to distract the City’s Black residents from what the narrator
“know[s] is in the ocean”: not only the spoils of progress as defined by mainstream
American cultural standards, but also the unfulfilled potential that follows from disremembrance of traditional Black metacultural knowledges. 249
This passage serves to recall the central lesson of Beloved, as revealed in one of its final lines: “and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there” (275). That is to say, Black collective disregard of the ancestors and the attendant existential grammars by which they approached, negotiated and, acted in and upon the world, amounts to a collective failure to know and actualize the self in ways that enable crucial measures of order, insight and agency.
From the very start, however, the disembodied narrator announces her intention of
“taking on” the City—even while depicting it as a dominating structure against which she has no physical recourse:
Nobody says it’s pretty here; nobody says it’s easy either. What it is is decisive, and if you pay attention to the street plans, all laid out, the City can’t hurt you.
I haven’t got any muscles so I can’t really be expected to defend myself. But I do know how to take precaution. Mostly it’s making sure nobody knows all there is to know about me. Second, I watch everything and everyone and try to figure out their plans, their reasonings, long before they do. You have to understand what it’s like, taking on a big city: I’m exposed to all sorts of ignorance and criminality. Still, this is the only life for me….
Hospitality is gold in this city; you have to be clever to figure out how to be welcoming and defensive at the same time. When to love something and when to quit. If you don’t know how, you can end up out of control or controlled by some outside thing …. (8-9)
By the narrator’s description, what constitutes “gold” in the City is being both cool and covert, open yet self-contained, and maintaining control of one’s own head. Otherwise, she warns, “nothing [is] safe—not even the dead” (9). Thus, even as she assumes the role as the City’s spokesperson, the narrator consistently defies its perspectives with an introspective that is clearly Osun. Throughout the text, then, she revises her own words and portrayals, and urges the reader to retrieve the novel’s “secret messages disguised as public signs” (64). 250
In terms not only of narrative perspective but also of theme and structure, Jazz is
suffused with the introspective presence of Osun. Indeed, throughout the novel this
figure is conflated with jazz music, which has proven to be one of the most extraordinary
expressions of Black metacultural aesthetics to ever emerge. In an excellent article on
the jazz aesthetic in Jazz, Dirk Ludigkeit explains:
As the new music of the 1920’s, jazz incorporated and expressed in its various elements a new and greater sense of individual and communal freedom and achievement. As the most prolific, accomplished, and emotionally satisfying contemporary aesthetic response to the world in Africa-American Culture (sic), this music became nearly synonymous with the culture from which it had sprung, transcending boundaries of class and gender. As one form of black secular music, jazz stood in a continuum of tradition with earlier black sacral music, in which the fusion of the material and spiritual world characteristic of African aesthetics and religions had been preserved. (170)
If jazz is “nearly-synonymous” with the grammatical principles implicit to African
American culture, then Osun, as figure for the antiphonal modality by which Black metacultural traditions are continually regenerated and revised, is likewise “nearly- synonymous” with jazz.
Both partake of an identical method: an established theme is repeated, built upon,
and improvisationally reinvented according to local and individual needs. The repetitive
structure acknowledges the original theme—not merely as foundation but, perhaps more importantly, as fodder for the elaboration of new forms, which are remarkable for their capacity to simultaneously redefine the individual, the group and the source material, itself.
The correspondence between jazz and the paradigmatic figure of consciousness is
even more striking when we consider Ralph Ellison’s reminder that jazz is as much about self-making as it is about collective elaboration upon traditional forms. In his 1964
Shadow and Act, he writes: 251
True jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment... springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each 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. (234)
In Jazz, this aesthetic is emblematic of the larger metacultural tradition with which Osun
is inextricably connected. The narrative’s jazz performances are initially dominated by
the narrator’s solo performances; these are frequently intercut by breakout performances
of individual characters. When, over the course of the novel, a “creatively negotiated
balance” is struck “between individual and collective efforts,” the narrative functions to
underscore the very sociocultural vision that Osun represents: a society founded upon and
sustained by the age-old properties of reciprocity, balance, and order—between
community and its individual members, as well as between women and men, humans and
nature, and spiritual and physical existence. Together, these expressive modes provide a
striking counter narrative of modernity, which rejects Western notions of progress and
functions instead to perpetuate and elaborate upon a distinct array of gendered Black
metacultural principles and values, and rites.
There is the indissociability of the narrative’s technique, theme and structure, which is announced in Jazz’s epigraph: “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.” Just as the
epigraph prefigures the narrative’s opening line of “Sth,” which is literally both ‘the name of the sound and the sound of the name, “each chapter builds and revises the story of the novel within the work itself” (Mbalia 639).
In the novel’s first chapter, for example, the narrator sums up the entire narrative:
how middle-aged Joe Trace fell for an 18 year old girl “with one of those deepdown,
spooky loves” (3); how, in a rage of love, he kills her; how his wife, Violet, also raging 252
with love, goes to the funeral and stabs the dead girl’s face; how each becomes so
obsessed with the memory of the dead girl (although for Violet, it’s lack of memory
which haunts) that she emerges as “the only living presence” in their home (11); how
Violet involves the dead girl’s aunt in their spectacle and; how the disembodied narrator,
herself, claims to know all there is to know about everyone involved and about the City,
which, she insists, drives their unlicensed behavior. In chapter two, the narrative begins
again and, although this is a new take on the old story, it so seamlessly builds onto the
original that even the final lines of the originating chapter call out for a response in the
next. Thus, chapter one closes with this report: “He is married to a woman who speaks mainly to birds. One of whom answers back: I love you” (24). “[O]r used to” is the retort with which chapter two opens (27).
Just as the narrative improvises and elaborates upon itself, chapter by chapter, it
does the same with regard to its predecessors. Thus, Violet and Joe bear a metonymic
“Trace” of the ‘dead girl’ as “[s]omething more than Beloved,” as “an outside thing that
embraces while it accuses” (Beloved 270). Each of the Traces is an orphan who is
tormented by broken familial bonds and removed from “country ways.” Thus, each
becomes possessed by a frantic, involuntary desire so insatiable that it becomes
murderous. Joe’s attack on Dorcas is entirely motivated by his “Wild” mother’s
abandonment; Violet’s violence derives from her own experience of maternal desertion.
Indeed, long before he kills Dorcas, Joe is said to have “traveled with” an “inside
nothing” and the narrator specifies that Violet was “out of control or controlled by some
outside thing” when she attacked Dorcas’ dead body (37; 9). The Traces, however, are
not alone in their want of a ritual process capable of both “rousing and channeling” the 253
extreme emotions that fuel this autonomic thirst for violence and awakening in them the
creative and self-constituting capabilities of consciousness (Turner, Ritual 52-53).
The Traces are said to be exactly “[l]ike the others”: “country people, but how soon
country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like
forever” (33). The ‘dead girl’ serves here to represent not only the personal devastation
that accompanies the critical loss of ancestral ties and the disremembrance of Black
metacultural modes and practices, but also the collective repercussions of which Beloved
warned. Therefore, Harlem is rife with “a loneliness that roams. It is alive, on its own. A
dry and spreading thing” (Beloved 274)
Indeed, all of Harlem bears a trace of ‘the dead girl’, the haunting presence of
disrupted ancestral ties, knowledges, values and practice, which is not only inerasable but also unavoidable. However, like The Bottom before it, this liminal community, is inundated by the City that surrounds it; “and all the while, heaven, unnoticed and as beautiful as an Iroquois, drifts past their windows” (36).
Ostensibly, the City owes much of its deterministic power to the new “race music”
to which it and other urban centers gave birth (79). Jazz’s New York is said to be a “City
seeping music that begged and challenged each and every day” and “just hearing it is like
violating the law” (58; 67). As Lawrence Levine notes, jazz was regarded “by many
contemporaries as a cultural form independent of a number of the basic beliefs of
bourgeois society, free of its repressions, in rebellion against many of its grosser
stereotypes” (293). Jazz was threatening precisely because it served to both explode the
myths and traditions of the larger society and “expose and return what was repressed”
(Levine 293). While Jazz does associate the music with a bevy of raw, libidinal 254
impulses, the narrative suggests that violence is moreover the result of a failure to master
the existential grammars, the communally-oriented principles and values that underlie
and accompany Black metacultural forms. Such disremembrance, left unchecked, not
only makes for liminality but it also serves to exacerbate the random, ‘roaming’,
‘spreading’ violence that, historically, Whites have perpetuated against Blacks. 2
This is true of each of the Traces. It is also true of the narrator, a liminal figure who admits to having “lived a long time, maybe too much, in my own mind” (9). Who will later admit to having correlated “pain” with “affection” and asks aloud “What, I wonder, would I be without a few brilliant spots of blood to ponder?” (219). This is also true of Alice Manfred, who shares the view held by “respectable arbiters” of societal norms as well as by many of her contemporaries in the Black middle-class: jazz is
“barbaric, sensuous, jungle music which assaulted the senses and the sensibilities, diluted reason, led to the abandonment of decency and decorum, undermined dignity, and destroyed order and self-control” (Levine 294). Therefore, she is terrified by her own report that cities all over the country are thus filled with both “brutalizing men and their brutal women” (74).
Like the Traces, however, Alice carries within her an outraged loneliness that once
had her “starving” for the blood of the lover for whom her husband left her (86). For
months, Alice has a recurring dream in which she is a hot Osun, exacting vengeance upon her nemesis. The narrative signifies on the inequitable nature of Alice’s objective as continuous with her failure to master consciousness as supplemented by ‘the Good
2 In the novel, racist violence is attributed to the disintegration of Violet’s family; the murder of Dorcas’ parents; Joe’s beating with a pipe; and Blacks being driven from family-owned lands in Vesper County, Virginia. 255
Mother’: “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).
What she does, after all, is attend to the sudden death of l her estranged husband
and redouble her efforts to repress the “fear [that] had sprouted through her veins all her life” (85). Later, she channels this fear into guarding her orphaned niece, Dorcas, from the licentious City and its music. Still, Alice can barely contain her own “appetite” for violence. Threatening to “expose and return what was repressed,” the music “made her hold her hand in the pocket of her apron to keep from smashing it through the glass pane to snatch the world in her fist and squeeze the life out of it for doing what it did and did and did to her and everybody else she knew or knew about” (Levine 293; 59).
Whereas Alice attributes violence to the music, itself, Jazz includes several key
passages that confirm the idea that, rather than another tool by which the larger society,
bends Blacks to its imperatives, jazz functions, instead, as a ritual means for recalling,
reinventing, and elaborating upon a distinct array of gendered Black metacultural
principles and values. For example, there is the “Fifth Avenue March” scene, in which
we are told that jazz is inseparable from the “drums” that are said to speak for the masses
of “silent black women and men” marching through lower Manhattan in protest against
the mob violence that left two hundred Blacks dead in East St. Louis.
As “Colored Boy Scouts” distributed leaflets to “whitemen in straw hats who
needed to know what the freezing faces already knew,” Alice Manfred struggled to
connect the leaflets’ “slippery, crazy words” to her young niece, whose parents were 256 among the dead. “Then suddenly,” the narrative reads, “like a rope cast for rescue, the drums spanned the distance, gathering them all up and connected them: Alice, Dorcas, her sister and her brother-in-law, the Boy Scouts and the frozen black faces, the watchers on the pavement and those in the windows above” (58). Both the ‘talking drums’ of old and the new urban music are communal modes of self-assertion which serve to channel
“complicated anger,” as well as to both erase conventional boundaries and forge communal ties between performer and audience, between separate geographical locations, between the living and the dead (59). The music’s uncanny capacity to elaborate upon such grammatical principles and values as reciprocity, balance, and order while simultaneously transforming individual experiences into shared consciousness constitutes the first stage toward compelling a community’s conversion to the perspective of communitas.
That those in the City’s Black enclave have an implicit capacity to recast their relationships to the self, to one another, and to the City through the medium of jazz is also demonstrated in the novel’s early section on the ritual process of “Thursday men.”
These are men, “capable,” “graceful,” and “complet[e],” who improvise upon the
“artificial rhythm,” the contrived arrangement, of the seven-day week (50). For them, this imposed standard “has to be broken into human parts and the break comes on
Thursday”:
for satisfaction pure and deep, for balance in pleasure and comfort, Thursday can’t be beat”—as is clear from the capable expression on the faces of the men and their conquering stride in the street. They seem to achieve some sort of completion on that day that makes them steady enough on their feet to appear graceful even if they are not. They command the center of the sidewalk; whistle softly in unlit doors. (50) 257
With this, Morrison suggests that the extemporaneous remaking of received conditions in
accordance with an internal, or subconscious, rhythm serves to unleash the “creative and
self-constituting capabilities of consciousness” (Henry 32).
Each Thursday, the men reintroduce this ritual process for tapping such
subconscious resources and thus achieving existential certitude, self-containment and agency. For their instigative effects to remain effectual, however, such ritual processes
must be regenerated on a daily basis:
It doesn’t last of course, and twenty-four hours later they are frightened again and restoring themselves with any helplessness within reach. So the weekends, destined to disappoint, are strident, sullen, sprinkled with bruises and dots of blood. The regrettable things, the coarse and sour remarks, the words that become active boils in the heart—none of that takes place on Thursday. (50-51)
Here, the narrative signifies on the necessity of regularly engaging the ritual process
before going on to stipulate that not only does the ritual process function to unleash the
formative capabilities of individual consciousness but it also incites the expansive
possibilities of shared consciousness:
the fact is, his day is a day for love in the City and the company of satisfied men. They make the women smile. The tunes whistled through perfect teeth are remembered, picked up later and repeated at the kitchen stove. In front of the mirror near the door one of them will turn her head to the side, and sway, enchanted with her waistline and the shape of her hips.
Up there, in that part of the City—which is the part they came for—the right tune whistled in a doorway or lifting up from the circles and grooves of a record can change the weather. From freezing to hot to cool. (51)
As music in which “the fusion of the material and spiritual world characteristic of African
aesthetics and religions had been preserved,” jazz constitutes a Black metacultural force
which is compelling enough to change the very atmosphere of Harlem to Osun’s
coolness; which, in other words, is to precipitate a communal shift to the perspective of
communitas (Ludigkeit 170). 258
Unlike the City, which is a force of historical action, the combined forces of jazz
and Osun mark the place of a “poetic union between a historicized consciousness” and a
transhistorical subconsciousness; together, these forces elicit the “power, creativity, and
integrity of a supplemented consciousness to resolve its existential crises and resist
determination by the other” (Henry 32). Precisely because it serves to arouse both the
creative, self-constituting capabilities of consciousness and the expansive possibilities of
shared consciousness, which make for communitas, the ritual process lies at the center of
Jazz. Moreover, Jazz underscores communitas, the goal of the ritual process, and its
capacity to counter the cleavages of structure—the severance of kinship ties, the
disremembrance of metacultural knowledges and practices, and the dissociation from the
self—as experienced in the City by the novel’s characters.
As spokesperson for the City, the narrator operates like the leader of a jazz band,
structuring the narrative performance in ways that incorporate individual voices but also
allow for limited “solo flights” by the characters. As Ludigkeit suggests, while she
“structures the performance to allow shifts in emphasis, foregrounding first one, then
[sic] another of the voices within the collective,” the narrator also maintains “unrelenting
control over how much of their [the characters’] personal stories will be revealed” (176).
While it is true that this narrative structure typifies the musical conventions of 1920’s-era
jazz, both those conventions and the narrative are organized, moreover, in accordance
with the larger metacultural tradition that follows from Yoruba art and ritual
performance. That is, they exemplify the same seriate style of composition as Jazz’s
predecessors, each of which constitutes an overall form that is “multifocal” and
“characterized by a shifting perspective” that implicitly acknowledges “innate individual 259
power and potential,” or ase (Drewal and Drewal 7). This is why Jazz’s tightly-
controlled first person narrative perspective begins quickly to unravel even as the narrator
attempts to establish authority and project the City as ultimate determinant of the
narrative events.
Immediately in Jazz’s very first chapter, for example, the narrator identifies Violet as an Osun figure. Indeed, the narrator’s opening statement—“Sth, I know that woman”— is followed by the announcement that Violet “used to live with a flock of birds” (3). From there, the narrator proceeds with a compendium of overt references to
Violet as Osun and aje. Not only does Violet have Osun’s “knack for” doing “heads,”
but she regularly experiences herself as the owner of two bodies (13). As such, she
regularly experiences iron, or accesses the Spiritworld: “She wakes up in the morning
and sees with perfect clarity a string of small, well-lit scenes. In each one something
specific is being done.... But she does not see herself doing these things. She sees them
being done” (22). Thus armed with a supplemented consciousness, Violet is privy not
only to Joe’s affair but also to the murder long before either occurs. When Violet
progresses from “private cracks” to the very public violence of attacking the dead girl’s
body, it is ‘the Mothers’ capacity for transformation, rather than the seemingly
omnipotent City, that arms Violet with “an independent hand that can find in a parrot’s
cage a knife lost for weeks” (24). Likewise, Violet’s escape from the funeral is ensured
not by the City but by a natural element: “the snow she ran through was so windswept
she left no footprints in it” (4). Once home, Violet releases her confidantes. Thereafter,
she becomes obsessed with Dorcas, whose photograph stands on the Trace’s mantel. 260
That ‘the dead girl’ fills the same directive role left vacant by the birds is signified
by the narrator’s note that, save for Dorcas’ picture, the rooms of the Trace’s home “are
like the empty birdcages wrapped in cloth” (11). Thus, from bits of information that she
collects from “everybody,” Violet reconstructs the ‘dead girl’ until, perfecting Dorcas’
dance steps, she literally steps into her footprints—the same “footprints,” that Beloved
warned us would continue to “come and go “until, finally, “all trace is gone”(275).
Earlier I suggested that all of Harlem bears a trace of ‘the dead girl’ as a haunting
reminder of disrupted ancestral ties and disremembered Black metacultural knowledges,
values and practices. Indeed, the entire narrative is indelibly marked and the characters
integrally connected by this absent presence. That is, Osun functions as something of a
mutating, internal double to the novel’s characters and narrator. Throughout the
narrative, she provides them with crucial contrapuntal perspectives that “consistently
defy the collected eventualities of time ‘past, present, and future’ (K. F. C. Holloway
“Beloved” 521). However, until the characters awaken to, or consciously revive the
‘dead girl,’ they experience themselves as helplessly suspended between memory and
desire, as incoherent and tragically erratic.
It is by direct engagement with this intersubjective mediator of consciousness that each of Jazz’s characters, as well as its narrator, comes to realize a ritual process by which both self- and communal-recovery are achieved. These contrapuntal discourses are figured as an extended jazz performance, which functions not merely to entertain but
also to direct us to the necessity of reconciling contemporary priorities with Black
metacultural modes and practices. Thus, beginning with Violet’s interior monologue in
chapter four, the seemingly omnipotent narrator begins to lose control of the characters’ 261
voices and a creatively negotiated balance between individual improvisation and
collective narration begins to emerge.
Violet is the first of the characters to assert a first-person narrative voice. This improvisatory break from the narrator’s authority follows from Violet’s first seeking out another woman’s confidence, then seeking her own. In order to make herself subject in her own mind, Violet must, like Sethe, tell her own story to other women. In full view of the narrator, but freed by her own voice, Violet seeks out the dead girl’s aunt, imploring
her, “We women, me and you. Tell me something real. Don’t just tell me I’m grown and
I ought to know. I don’t” (110). Sharing her tale with Alice Manfred, creating a space of
intimate “clarity,” Violet asks questions which both demand and instigate their own answers (83). This ewuji, or awakening, is also extended to Alice, who “listened as closely to what she [herself] was saying as did the woman sitting by her” (87).
As their relationship progresses from that of nemeses to confidantes, both women
undergo Morrison’s now-familiar ritual process in which is invoked the formative
capabilities of consciousness and the expansive possibilities of shared consciousness.
That their shared rite of passage enables each woman to become coherent to herself is
emphasized when Alice owns up to, but does not divulge to Violet, the violence she once
dreamed of directing at her own husband’s lover. Violet, too, begins directly engaging
the motives she has attributed to “that Violet.” Violet reports that before confiding in
Alice, “the business going on inside of me I thought was none of my business” (97).
Once the two women have opened up to one another, Violet asserts the first-person voice
and reintegrates the dead girl: “that Violet is not somebody walking round town, up and
down the streets wearing my skin and using my eyes shit no that Violet is me!” (95-96). 262
Now the narrator regains control and relates the story of Violet’s past in Rome,
Virginia. Violet’s father had been driven from Rome for his work with the Readjuster
Party, who courted Blacks in challenging the control of the conservative Democrats in
nearly every Southern state after 1877 (Woodward 57). Infrequently, he hazarded trips
back to see his wife and children, bearing treats for all. Violet’s grandmother, True
Belle, left Baltimore to care for her indigent daughter and grandchildren. In Baltimore, she had served as nanny for Vera Rose’s bi-racial child, whom she called Golden Gray.
Having regaled the grandchildren with stories of the adored golden boy, True Belle, bequeathed to Violet a deep-seated belief in her own unworthiness. Meanwhile, with the family’s eviction from their homestead being one of the final incidents of local violence against Blacks which she would withstand, Violet’s mother, Rose Dear, committed suicide by jumping into a well.
At seventeen, Violet went to nearby Palestine, as True Belle insisted, to work
cotton for three weeks. There, Joe Trace fell from a tree and landed before her. After
deciding that, with him, “Never again would she wake struggling against the pull of a
narrow well,” Violet refused to leave (104). Thus,
She moved in with a family of six in Tyrell and worked at anything to be with Joe whenever she could. It was there she became the powerfully strong young woman who could handle mules, bale hay and chop wood as good as any man. It was there where the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet grew shields no gloves or shoes could match. All for Joe Trace, a double-eyed nineteen year-old who lived with an adopted family, worked gins and lumber and cane and cotton and corn, who butchered when needed, plowed, fished, sold skins and game–and who was willing. (106)
However, the “limitlessness beckoning from the well” continues to haunt Violet. Not
only does it motivate her to self-induce three abortions but, after the couple moves to the 263
City, it flourishes, unchecked and combined with her early teachings and physical
dislocation, until it provokes the destructive urges of “that Violet” (101).
Like Sethe before her, Violet was robbed of her mother as a young child; the
tragedy at the base of these women’s lives makes for their ambivalences and excesses as
adults. Violet is said to be “drowning” in “mother-hunger” when Joe kills Dorcas (108).
Thus, she cannot decide whether the ‘dead girl’ is nemesis, mother, or daughter: “Who
lay there asleep in that coffin?... The scheming bitch who hadn’t considered Violet’s feelings one tiniest bit, who came into a life, took what she wanted and damn the consequences? Or mama’s dumpling girl?” (109).
With the narrator having filled in the details of Violet’s past, the chapter ends with
Violet’s own voice, in conversation with Alice. As the two women discuss their
confusion about life, Violet interjects,
‘Oh shoot! Where the grown people? Is it us?’
‘Oh, Mama.’ Alice Manfred blurted it out and covered her mouth. Violet had the same thought: Mama. Mama? Is this where you got to and couldn’t do it no more? The place of shade without trees where you know you a re not and never will be loved by anybody who can choose to do it? Where everything is over but the talking?
They looked away from each other then. The silence went on and on until Alice said, ‘Give me that coat. I can’t look at that lining another minute.’(110)
With the women’s focused invocation of their mothers, particularly Violet’s
identification with the mother who had abandoned her, the women engage the process of
reclaiming their matrilineal lines. It is significant that this process is continuous with
Alice’s mending Violet’s coat and attending to other domestic chores, or ‘women’s work.’ 264
Finally, Violet recollects Alice’s riff on improvisatory self-containment: “Nobody’s asking you to take it. I’m sayin make it, make it!” (113). The laughter with which this conversation ends serves to jog Violet’s memory about another controlling idea that, in addition to adoration of Golden Gray, her grandmother had bequeathed to her:
Violet was reminded of True Belle, who entered the single room of their cabin and laughed to beat the band. They were hunched like mice near a can of fire, not even a stove, on the floor, hungry and irritable. True Belle looked at them and had to lean against the wall to keep her laughter from pulling her down to the floor with them. They should have hated her. Gotten up from the floor and hated her. But what they felt was better. Not beaten, not lost. Better. They laughed too, even Rose Dear shook her head and smiled, and suddenly the world was right side up. Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears. (113)
This final act of reframing and reclaiming her matrilineal ties provides the means for
Violet to reclaim and reframe her self. Thus, she proceeds to laugh at “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” (114).
Confirmation that Violet’s ritual process is thus consummated is provided in the chapter’s final line, by the narrator: Violet “buttoned her coat and left the drugstore and noticed, at the same time as that Violet did, that it was spring. In the city” (114).
While Joe’s ritual process follows from the same need for self-coherence, it takes a
different form. Whereas Violet confides in another woman, Joe reports that his complex
of feelings for Dorcas is “not a thing you tell to another man” (121). Besides, he says, “I
couldn’t tell myself because I didn’t know all about it” (123). Thus, after a brief
introduction in which she claims to “know him [Joe] so well,” chapter five proceeds as an
extended solo passage in which Joe speaks directly to the reader.
Despite the narrator’s warning, “he is bound to the track” because the City “makes
you do what it wants, go where the laid-out roads say to,” Joe’s murderous love as well 265
as his eventual renewal are coherent only in terms of Black metacultural knowledges
(120). Whereas the narrator reports that Dorcas “was Joe’s personal sweet—like candy”,
Joe tells us that she is Osun: “No. This was something else. More like blue water and
white flowers, and sugar in the air. I needed to be there where it was all mixed up just
right, and where that was, was Dorcas” (122). His report, that sharing his story with
Dorcas enables his eighth “change… into new,” implies that his violent reaction to
Dorcas’ decision to leave him serves, for him, to invoke yet another ritual process (123).
Indeed, just before his direct discourse turns to his initial attempt to explain Dorcas’
murder, Joe recollects a maxim that functions to situate his existential crisis in terms of the ‘old ways’: “They say snakes go blind for a while before they shed skin for the last
time” (129).
In the disjointed monologue that follows, Joe echoes the narrator’s suggestion that
the “track” directs his actions. But this is not the City’s directive; rather Joe correlates
his “tracking” of Dorcas with his long-ago trailing of his mother, Wild. For, as he
explains, “In this world the best thing, the only thing is to find the trail and stick to it”
(130). He even saw the party crowd, in whose presence he shot Dorcas, as “the Flock of
redwings” that served as sign of Wild.
Joe goes on to account for each of the developmental stages that made for his first
seven “changes—from his adoptive mother’s explanation of his parent’s desertion, which
led him to name himself Trace, or that which his parents “went off without,” to his
marching/dancing in the streets with the “colored troops of the three six nine” at the close
of World War I (124; 129). Finally, he directs his address to Dorcas and laments having
become an “old cock,” who must pay for a young girl’s attention and the space in which 266 to indulge it every Thursday and compete with the “wise, young roosters” who “didn’t have to do a thing—just wait for the chicks to pass by and find them” (133). This recasting of Joe as a “Thursday man” serves to recollect the Harlemites’ implicit capacities to recast their relationships to the self, to one another, and to the City through the medium of jazz.
Joe is already so versed in ritual knowledge of Osun that he recommences his original quest for her in his search for Dorcas. However, he has yet to master the jazz aesthetic with which he could tap Osun not merely as the subconscious generator of his complex emotions but also as fodder for the elaboration of new forms with which to redefine himself, the larger community and the source material, itself. That Joe is about to recover the ‘old ways’ and thus embark upon just such a ritual process is suggested in the chapter’s final lines:
I saw you and made up my mind.... And I made up my mind to follow you too. That’s something I know how to do from way back. Maybe I didn’t tell you that part about me. My gift in the woods that even he looked up to and he was the best there ever was. Those old people, they knew it all. I talk about being new seven times before I met you, but back then, back there, if you was or claimed to be colored, you had to be new and stay the same every day the sun rose and every night it dropped. And let me tell you, baby, in those days it was more than a state of mind. (135)
What Joe did not tell Dorcas, what he has to remember now himself, is that he was once a ‘wise, young rooster’ who was versed in those strategies, which are always/already implicit to Black metacultural systemics, for balancing cultural traditions with innovation; for renegotiating and improvising upon those cultural strategies that enable fluid adaptation to historical change.
Indeed, it is “risky” as the narrator retorts in the next chapter’s opening lines,
“trying to figure out anybody’s state of mind” which is why, in chapter six, she abruptly 267
shifts to a story about Violet’s grandmother. Having lost control of the Violet and Joe,
the autonomous voices of whom continue to break into the narrative, the narrator must
now reassert her own artistry in the contest that the narrative has now become. To do so,
she riffs on True Belle’s history, in 19th century Georgia, then Baltimore.
She readily admits that does not know much about True Belle but, she says, “it’s
not hard to imagine” the story of True Belle being ferried out of town on the heels of her owner, Vera Louise, who is outrunning the emergence of the sign that would inform her neighbors that she has been carrying on an affair with a local Black boy (136). While
Vera Louise takes her parents’ payoff money and leaves without even informing the father of her pregnancy, the narrator speculates that True Belle left behind her husband and young daughters with the hope that Vera Louise might help her buy them all out of slavery. “Then again, maybe not,” she continues, noting that, at any rate, True Belle certainly had no choice but to move with her owner to Baltimore.
Now there is a new take on the already told story: True Belle answered Rose Dear’s
pleas for help by claiming she was dying, taking leave of her job, and returning to Vesper
County with both “Baltimore tales for grandchildren she had never seen” and $10.00, which was paid to her for services rendered in the twenty two years’ since the
emancipation proclamation had been signed into law. In Rome, she “rented a small
house, bought a cookstove for it and delighted the girls with descriptions of life with the
wonderful Golden Gray” (143). After providing this revised exposition, what
preoccupies the narrator is the story of how Golden Gray went to find and kill the Black
father who, he believes, willingly abandoned him (143). 268
Here the narrator works with the bare-bones theme of an outraged child seeking
vengeance upon the parent of which he was robbed. In her imaginative take on this tale,
she operates with a virtuoso’s flair, improvising on the story in ways that, like the fifth
avenue drums, will ‘span the distance, gather all— narrator, characters, and reader—and connect them.’
“I see him in a two seat phaeton,” she begins. Immediately, she envisages for him
a face to face encounter with Osun. Thus, driving through heavy rain, Golden Gray spots
a “naked berry-black woman,” with “large and terrible eyes (144). Surprised at being
seen by anyone, the woman turns abruptly and hits her head against a tree, which renders
her unconscious. Golden Gray moves quickly back to the carriage, “certain that what he
is running from is not a real woman but a ‘vision’” (144). It is the “rippling movement”
of the baby inside her bulging stomach that finally compels Golden Gray to revise the
“picture of himself walking away from her a second time” into an iron in which he
gathers the “black, liquid female,” and carries her to his carriage (145). “The rain seems
to be following him” throughout the remainder of the journey, during which he hopes two
things: that the road will not shift her body so as to touch him and that she will not
awaken (145). Once he arrives at the home of his father, which True Belle has described
for him, he shelters his horse and removes his trunk before moving the unconscious
woman.
With the paradigmatic figure of consciousness acting as an unconscious presence
both in and upon the narrative, the narrator really begins to swing. Now, she provides a
near-instantaneous revision of the story in which ewuji, awakening, occurs for both
performer and her subject matter: 269
When he stopped the buggy, got out to tie the horse and walk back through the rain, perhaps it was because the awful-looking thing lying in the wet weeds was everything he was not as well as a proper protection against and anodyne to what he believed his father to be, and therefore (if it could just be contained, identified)—himself. Or was the figure, the vision as he thought of it, a thing that touched him before its fall? The thing he saw in the averted glance of the servants at his boarding school; the bootblack who tap-danced for a penny. A vision that, at the moment when his scare was sharpest, looked also like home comfortable enough to wallow in? But who could live in that leafy hair? that unfathomable skin? But he had already lived in it and with it: True Belle had been his first and major love, which may be why two gallops beyond that hair, that skin, their absence was unthinkable. And if he shuddered at the possibility of her leaning on him, of her sliding a bit to the left and actually resting while she slept on his shoulder, it is also true that he overcame the shudder. Swallowed, maybe, and clicked the horse.
I like to think of him that way. (149-150)
Thus what began as the narrator’s self-assertion “within and against the group” of
characters emerges as a series of jazz moments that serve to repeat, build upon and
improvisatorially reinvent the original theme in accordance with the needs of both the performer and participant.
Indeed, a primary need for both Golden Gray and the narrator is the recollection,
renegotiation, and regeneration of a distinct array of gendered Black metacultural
principles, values and rites. For one, there is iron, fleeting visions or remembrances of
the mysterious, permanent dimension of reality, which is ordinarily shut off from human
view. Thus, for example, when he revised his actions in order to transform the picture it
made, Golden Gray partook of iron. Now, arriving at his destination, he avoids returning
to the phaeton for the unconscious woman. In a direct address, the narrator enjoins him
to tap into the transitory phenomena that constitute iron: “Can you see the fields beyond,
crackling and drying in the wind? The blade of black-birds rising out of nowhere,
brandishing and then gone?” Immediately, then, Golden Gray revises the picture of
himself in accordance with the permanent dimension of reality by going to retrieve Osun: 270
“No one is looking at him, but he behaves as though there is. That’s the way. Carry yourself the way you would under the reviewing gaze of an impressionable but casual acquaintance” (153). In fact, the narrator reports that, throughout her account of his story, Golden Gray, too, “is shaping a story for himself to tell somebody” (154).
While she recognizes that Golden Gray does not, himself, comprehend the power of iron, the narrator is unconcerned. For she knows the force of Osun is also working on him: “He wants to brag about this encounter, like a knight errant bragging about his coolness as he unscrews the spike from the monster’s heart and breathes life back into the fiery nostrils. Except this monster without scales or flaming breath is more dangerous for she is a bloody-face girl of moving parts, of luminous eyes and lips to break your heart”
(154-155). With Osun’s values thus reiterated, what follows is a reenergized jazz composition in which the narrator not only improvises upon both the original theme and the character of Golden Gray but she also negotiates a reciprocal balance between these solo flights and those of Golden Gray.
Thus, in the final elaboration of the story, Golden Gray voices his own story. For him, his father’s long-absence is figured as a phantom limb, which represents the Black and unknown ‘Other’ within himself: a “part of me that does not know me, has never touched me or lingered at my side” (158). Now, the narrator provides further exposition: how “rocked” he was to discover “who and what his father was”; how “it was True
Belle” who “told him what he had to do”; how “During the journey he worried a lot about what he looked like, what armor he could call on”(159-160). Here, the narrator apprehends Golden Gray’s spoken narrative as iron, as the particular type of narrative which is “visible through the storyteller’s dramatization and the spectator visualizes it 271 further in his mind’s eye” (Drewal and Drewal 1). Thus, in a signifying riff she indicates
Osun as the force with which he can help both himself and the “wild black girl” whose own fright had served to render her unconscious: “He thought she would be his lance and shield; now he would have to be his own. Look into the deer eyes with the dawning gray of his own” (160). Here, gray, which is synonymous with watery whiteness, is elaborated with the emergence of the sun’s fourth moment to signify an emergent coolness and self- containment for Golden Gray, as engendered by Osun.
With the narrator now operating in concert with Golden Gray, the narrative quickly takes on a new form, which functions to simultaneously redefine the performers, participants, and the source material, itself. First, in response to his spoken narrative and her own elaboration of it, the narrator now identifies with Golden Gray’s existential dilemma and chastises herself for how limited her vision of him has been:
How could I have imagined him so poorly? Not noticed the hurt that was not linked to the color of his skin, or the blood that beat beneath it. But to some other thing that longed for authenticity, for a right to be in this place, effortlessly without needing to acquire a false face, a laughless grin, a talking posture. I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am. (160)
Next, she improvises further upon the narrative, inscribing it with the equestrian imagery that signifies the god/dess’ descending on, or mounting, the head:
Even his horse had understood and borne Golden Gray along with just a touch or two of the whip. Steadily it had plodded, through valleys without trails, through streams without bridges or ferries for crossing. Eye gaze just above the road, undistracted by the small life that darted toward its hooves, heaving its great chest forward, pacing to hold on to its strength and gather more. It did not know where it was going and it knew nothing of the way, but it did know the nature of its work. (160)
Finally, she redefines herself as a horse ridden by “Good Mother,” as well, and casts nommo on Golden Gray’s behalf: 272
I have to alter things.… I want to be the language that wishes him well, speaks his name, wakes him when his eyes need to be open.… I want him to stand next to a well… his mind soaked and sodden with sorrow, or dry and brittle with the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything). There then, …to stand there next to it and from down in it, where the light does not reach, a collection of leftover smiles stirs, some brief benevolent love rises from the darkness and there is nothing for him to see or hear, and there is no reason to stay but he does. For the safety at first, then for the company. Then for himself—with a confident, enabling, serene power that flicks like a razor and then hides. (161)
With this, the narrator reminds us that such empowering experiences of iron, or glimpses
into the permanent dimension of reality, are temporary, transitory and cyclical (161).
“But,” she assures us,
he has felt it now, and it may come again. No doubt a lot of other things will come again: doubt will come, and things may seem unclear from time to time. But once the razor blade has flicked—he will remember it, and if he remembers it he can recall it. That is to say he has it at his disposal. (161)
What has previously operated as a tool of violence is hereby stripped of its violent
capacities and re-made as a symbol of the transformative potential of ritual process. The
implication is that Joe, Violet and their entire community possess the same implicit
capacity to recast their relationships to the self, to one another, and to the City—with
regular invocation of the ritual process.
In its entirety, the narrative of Golden Gray constitutes the unreliable narrator’s defining act of self-assertion, which serves for both narrator and characters to channel
complicated emotions, to garner self-containment, to erase conventional boundaries and
forge communal ties between self and ‘Other’ as well as between the living and the dead
(59). She accomplishes this, first, by recollecting then reconfiguring the long-dead
figures of Golden Gray and Wild, the charged images of whom, respectively, have long-
abided in Violet’s and Joe’s subconscious. Secondly, she mobilizes the well, which
haunts Violet, as evocative signifier of the ritual process of Osun. Finally, she recovers 273
Hunters Hunter, the community’s name for the expert hunter who True Belle calls Henry
Lestroy but whose true name is Lestory. Indeed, he constitutes the story that connects
Wild, Golden Gray, Joe, and Violet with the ritual process that will serve to reconfigure
the autonomic thirst for violence by which each has been controlled.
Thus, the story begins again in the next chapter with this response: “a thing like
that could harm you. Thirteen years after Golden Gray stiffened himself to look at that
girl, the harm she could do was still alive” (165). Here we learn that not only did
Hunter’s Hunter help to birth Joe but he also found parents for the baby after the woman refused to nurse. He recognizes the signs of abuse that have made her Wild as well as the signs that mark her as Osun: the flock of redwings that announce her nearby presence and her characteristic “babygirl laugh” (167). Hunters Hunter alone recognizes that Wild suffers, herself, from “motherlessness,” a hunger that seems to abate only after Golden
Gray becomes her constant companion (167). Years later, her unseen presence in nearby woods causes pregnant girls to “mark their babies,” Old men to go “soft in the head” and young men to “sharpen their blades till the edges whistled” (167). Because Joe and
Victory are among the latter, in the young adoptive brothers with whom he shared his masterful hunting skills, Hunter’s Hunter attempted to instill compassion for Wild. He signifies that Wild is, in fact, Joe’s mother; from then on Joe is said to have “wrestled with the notion of a wild woman for a mother” before making three different journeys to find her (176).
Thus, the narrator, who has largely lost control of her characters and willingly admits to her unreliability, has used this seemingly digressive story to bind together the characters and narrative. Golden Gray gives voice to the fragmentation of the self and 274
the thirst for violence that each of the characters experiences as a result of sundered
kinship ties. Moreover, once the narrator revises him and casts for him the ritual process
at the well, he resolves this dilemma not by resorting to violence but by embracing ‘the
dead girl,’ made conscious. His exchange with Hunter’s Hunter confirms this. Upon
finding Golden Gray in his house, full of “whiteboy sass,” Hunter’s Hunter tells him: “If
she told you I was your daddy, then she told you more than she told me. Get a hold of
yourself. A son ain’t what a woman say. A son is what a man do. You want to act like
mine, then do it, else get the devil out my house” (172). Whereas Golden Gray’s “sober
thought was to blow the man’s head off,” the narrator signifies that “it must have been
the girl who changed his mind” (173).
Wild stands firmly at the center of Jazz, as another material representation of the
subconscious presence of Black metacultural knowledges that lurks in the minds of each
of the characters. Serving as archetypal Osun,3 Wild appears, for the community at large, as iron, as “spectacle… a fleeting and transitory phenomenon,”4 whose cool and covert
presence is always signaled by “redwings, those blue-black birds with the bolt of red on
their wings” (176). The process by which she shifts, for Golden Gray, from an
unknowable other to ewuji and oloro is not explicated. Instead, it is the narrator who
improvises the crucial contrapuntal perspective that ushers in the ritual process by which
his self-recovery is achieved. With his story, then, she demonstrates the ritual process for
3 Indeed, she is the reappearance of both Beloved, who was last seen naked and pregnant in the woods, and Sethe, the aje who hit her head on a tree when trouble ensued in Beloved. Further evidence that Wild constitutes a reappearance of Beloved is her potential for producing abiku in pregnant women. Thus, pregnant girls are warned against any contact with her “lest the baby come here craving or favoring the mother’s distraction” (165).
4 Drewal and Drewal 1. 275
conscious integration and mastery of that which is wild in both the characters and in
herself.
Indeed, the narrator is principal among the characters who appear to shift abruptly
between self-assertion and involuntarily following the City’s imperatives. It is in the
wake of the narrator’s process of floundering about for control of her own head that the
self-containment of which the other characters are in desperate need begins to take form.
Once she, herself, is finally “touched and released by” Wild, the introspective presence of
Osun assumes leadership in the novel and drowns out the City’s claim to absolute power and authority over the characters (221). Thereafter, the narrative hastens its portrayal of the complex ritual processes that enable the novel’s characters to confront and revise the ever-present specter of the past, resolve their own existential crises, and lead others to the perspective of communitas.
Thus, as chapter seven continues with Joe’s trailing of Dorcas, the narrator
juxtaposes Joe’s voice in alternating paragraphs with the story of Joe’s search for his
mother”(Ludigkeit 178). Indeed, “the practice is again strongly reminiscent of call-and-
response patterns,” for Joe’s four separate searches for the wild woman who has abandoned him emerges as one and the same desperate pursuit of Osun (Ludigkeit 178).
Thus, this section is replete with repetitions of the Osun symbols with which, in his direct
address, Joe associated Dorcas.5
When Joe enters Wild’s Chamber of Gold, during his third search, we learn that
Golden Gray has gone to live there, as well. This is signified by Joe’s finding there the
5 Both chapters feature “the flock of redwings” (130; 176), blooming trees and shrubs (134; 177), honey (129; 177), and a rock situated in prohibitive territory (134; 182). 276
same fine accoutrements that were attributed in chapter six to Golden Gray: “a set of
silver brushes and a silver cigar case. Also. Also, a pair of men’s trousers with buttons
of bone” (184). What is more, the final item Joe finds there bears fresh signs of Osun:
“Carefully folded, a silk shirt, faded pale and creamy—except at the seams. There, both thread and fabric were a fresh and sunny yellow” (184). The chapter closes with Joe’s lament about Wild, “But where is she?” (184)
The next chapter opens, with “There she is” (187) The female that Joe locates
during this fourth and final search is Dorcas. Thus, in chapter eight, the focus shifts to
Dorcas. The narrator seems to address her directly, warning that “this is an adult party,”
where “the music will solve and dissolve any problem,” that “here with grown-ups and as in war—people play for keeps” (187; 188; 189). Dorcas’s voice alternates with that of the narrator; she recounts the conversation in which she dismissed Joe, her expectation that he is tracking her, and her dawning realization that her new beau, the ‘young cock’
Alton, does not compare to Joe, whose sole concern was for her pleasure.
At once, Dorcas responds to being shot and to the narrator’s insistence that “this is
the place for romance” (192):
‘they need me to say his name so they can go after him. I know his name but Mama won’t tell. The world rocked from a stick beneath my hand, Felice. There in that room with the ice sign in the window.... Now it’s clear. I want to sleep, but it is clear now.... Listen. I don’t know who is that woman singing but I know the words by heart.’ (193)
“Sweetheart” is the rejoinder with which the next chapter opens: “That’s what that
weather was called. Sweetheart weather, the prettiest day of the year. And that’s when it
started” (195). It is no coincidence that Dorcas’ best friend, Felice, first appears at the
Trace home on this day, “a day so pure and steady trees preened” and the entire
community becomes entranced (195). For her synthesis into the Trace household marks 277
the final stage of their wrestling their collective wills back from the narrator, and a City
seeping music that commands its listeners to “Come and do wrong’ (67).
The narrator becomes “nervous” to see Felice mounting the couple’s stairs because
what they will speak of and come to know, share and extend, will literally transform the
City as well as the music that seemed to have functioned under and promulgated its
imperatives (198). Sweetheart weather serves as the opening rite of this process. Now,
the music is re-linked to the creative capacities of a consciousness as supplemented by
Osun:
Young men on rooftops changed their tune; spit and fiddled with the mouthpiece for a while and when they put it back in and blew out their cheeks it was just like the light of that day, pure and steady and kind of kind. You would have thought that everything had been forgiven the way they played. The clarinets had trouble because the brass was cut so fine, not lowdown the way they love to do it, but high and fine like a young girl singing by the side of a creek, passing the time, her ankles cold in the water. The young men with brass probably never saw such a girl, or such a creek, but they made her up that day. On the rooftops. Some on 254 where there is no protective railing; another at 131 … and somebody right next to it, 133, where lard cans of tomato plants are kept, and a pallet for sleeping at night. To find coolness and a way to avoid mosquitoes unable to fly that high up or unwilling to leave the tender neck meat near the street lamps. So from Lenox to St. Nicholas and across 135th Street, Lexington, from Convent to Eighth I could hear the men playing out their maple-sugar hearts, tapping it from four-hundred-year- old-trees and letting it run down the trunk, wasting it because they didn’t have a bucket to hold it and didn’t want one either. They just wanted to let it run that day, slow if it wished, or fast, but a free run down trees bursting to give it up.
That’s the way the young men sounded that day. Sure of themselves, sure they were holy, standing up there on the rooftops, facing each other at first, but when it was clear that they had beat the clarinets out, they turned their backs on them and joined the light just as pure and steady and kind of kind. (196 -197)
All of this is Osun, the symbols of whom serve as both the instigators and resultants of this ritual process (Turner, Ritual 52-53).
The present, this passage suggests, is a literal gift of the Black past, pre-sent and
bequeathed as an open-ended call for continuous improvisatory responses, which turn as 278 much on self-making as on the collective elaboration of Black metacultural traditions.
What this antiphonal process solicits is an improvisatory and affirmative approach to a life in which the organic and social orders are continuously harmonized.
These goals of the ritual process are further elaborated in the Traces’ interaction with Felice. Assuming a first-person narrative voice, Felice tells how they encourage her to share her own perspective on Dorcas and cry about the loss of her friend. In their presence, she does just that—often in direct response to Dorcas’ statements from the previous chapter. Before this, however, Felice’s direct address focuses on the losses she, herself, has borne. These include the near-constant absence of her parents, who worked in another town; her experiences of classmates’ colorism, and the “trick” ring stolen for her by her mother. By encouraging Felice to confront and vent her anger and sadness, and by doing the same with her, the Traces engage the ritual process. As Turner reminds us, “Powerful drives and emotions associated with human physiology … are divested in the ritual process of their antisocial quality and attached to components of the normative order, energizing the latter with a borrowed vitality... (Ritual 52-53).
As well, Violet directs Felice to the self-formative capacities of consciousness:
She said for me to go to 143rd Street and look at the big one on the corner and see if it was a man or a woman or a child.
I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, ‘What’s the world for if you can’t make it up the way you want it?’
‘The way I want it?’
‘Yeah. The way you want it. Don’t you want it to be something more than the way it is?’
‘What’s the point? I can’t change it.’
‘That’s the point. If you don’t, it will change you and it’ll be your fault cause you let it.’ (207-208) 279
Felice is stunned by the lucidity of Violet’s revelations. She hears in them easy
evidence—particularly in Violet’s direct reference to trees as earthly symbols of spiritual immortality—of the insanity others attach to her through the name “Violent.” But she also ascertains Violet’s own experience with self-making.
She talked like that. But I understood what she meant. About having another inside you that isn’t anything like you.…
‘How did you get rid of her?’
‘Killed her. Then I killed the me that killed her.’
‘Who’s left?’
‘Me.’ (208-209)
Here, Violet is talking about self-containment or gaining control of one’s head. This
statement serves to revise Sethe’s hesitant final question, in Beloved, into a definitive
declaration.
Moreover, Violet’s words bring Felice to a new understanding about recovering the
‘dead girl’:
The way she said it. Not like the ‘me’ was some tough somebody, or somebody she had to put together for show. But like, like somebody she favored and could count on. A secret somebody you didn’t have to feel sorry for or have to fight for. Somebody who wouldn’t have to steal a ring to get back at whitepeople and then lie and say it was a present from them.... It’s beautiful. But although it belongs to me, it’s not mine. I love it, but there’s a trick in it, and I have to agree to the trick to say its mine. Reminds me of the tricky bland kid living inside Mrs. Trace’s head. A present taken from whitefolks, given to me when I was too young to say No thank you. (210-211)
Initially, Felice has no intention of returning to the Trace home for dinner, as Violet
insists. For days after her initial visit, however, she finds herself contemplating “the way
Mr. Trace looked at [her] and the way his wife said ‘me’” (210). Indeed, this budding
threesome offers each party a new chance to re-make the past; that is, to improvise new 280
responses to ‘the old,’ which involves both self-making and collective elaboration of
Black metacultural traditions.
In the Traces, Felice will find parents who, unlike her own parents, are both present and wise. This is suggested by Felice’s direct comparisons of her own mother and father with Violet and Joe. For the Traces, Dorcas’ young friend serves as the child they never had. Specifically, Felice alleviates Violet’s hankering for mothering as well as for the mother-daughter relationship of which she was deprived.
When Felice makes her second visit to the Trace’s home the occasion is marked by
a series of new takes on ‘the old.’ For example, when served a catfish dinner, Felice
invokes similar meals made in the past by her own grandmother and mother. Moreover,
when music wafts through an open window, the ritual process is recommenced. Joe and
Violet dance so intimately that Felice feels discomfited—even after they invite her to join
them. Afterward, Joe and Violet are abuzz with plans for beginning anew. First on their
list is, of course, a new bird—which Joe suggests. This is followed by a victrola, and a
new job for Joe. Violet will “do” Felice’s hair and Felice will bring records (214; 215).
With these collectively-improvised plans in place, the trio’s ritual process for self-
making and collective elaboration of Black metacultural traditions comes to a close. As
did the rooftop jazzmen’s ritual process, the Trace’s incorporation of young Felice into
their lives bears potential for communal conversion to the perspective of communitas.
Thus, Felice closes her direct address by reflecting upon the continuing sweetheart
weather, which served as both an instigator and resultant of the young jazzmen’s ritual
performance, as well as by applying the knowledge that Violet shared with regard to
becoming intimate with trees, those symbols of spiritual immortality. 281
In Jazz’s final chapter, the narrator joins, unambiguously, in the ritual process. Re-
assuming complete narrative control, she revisits her early “‘predict[ion]’ that just like
the Violet/Joe/Dorcas triangle that ended in murder and attempted (re)murder, love
requited, unrequited and stunted, the Violet-Joe-Felice circle will suffer the same fate”
(Joshua 176). Here, she rejects adherence to a mainstream cultural hegemonic and celebrates Black metacultural strategies for resisting determination by the other:
It was loving the City that distracted me and gave me ideas. Made me think I could speak its loud voice and make that sound human. I missed the people altogether....
So, I missed it altogether. I was sure one would kill the other. I waited for it so I could describe it. I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle. I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me. Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable … while I was the predictable one, confused in my solitude into arrogance, thinking my space, my view was the only one that was or that mattered. (220-221)
This narrator, then, functions to expose, duplicate, and finally, through the creative and
self-constituting capabilities of consciousness, subvert overdetermining structures.
What is the source of her new-found capacities? It is the ritual process of Osun, as
represented by Wild and her “chamber of gold,”
That home in the rock; that place sunlight got into most of the day. Nothing to be proud of, to show anybody or to want to be in. But I do. I want to be in a place already made for me, both snug and wide open. With a doorway never needing to be closed, a view slanted for light and bright autumn leaves but not rain. Where moonlight can be counted on if the sky is clear and stars no matter what. And below, just yonder, a river called Treason to rely on.
I’d love to close myself in the peace left by the woman who lived there and scared everybody. Unseen because she knows better than to be seen. After all, who would see her, a playful woman who lived in a rock? Who could, without fright? Of her looking eyes looking back? I wouldn’t mind. Why should I? She has seen me and is not afraid of me. She hugs me. Understands me. Has given me her hand. I am touched by her. Released in secret.
282
Now I know. (221)
Thus cooled, the narrator now releases the characters.
Now, Felice is said to be made anew: “her tempo is next year’s news. Whether
raised fists freeze in her company or open for a handshake, she's nobody's alibi or
hammer or toy” (222). The Traces recast their own bond, as well. Like the Thursday
Men, they improvise upon an imposed standard and remake their schedules around their
own needs and desires: “they have stopped night sleeping—exchanging that waste of
time for short naps whenever the body insists, and were not surprised by how good they
felt. The rest of the day goes however they want it to” (223). As well, the couple plans to furnish their bed with a new blue blanket, topped with a satin hem, to “cool … their lava forever” (224) [my emphasis].
To remain in tune with one another, the Traces devote time to “figuring things out,
telling each other those personal stories they like to hear again and again, or fussing with
the bird Violet bought” (223). This regular engagement of the ritual process both rouses
and channels the extreme emotions that once served as fuel for an autonomic thirst for
violence and awakens in them the creative and self-constituting capabilities of
consciousness. Thus, before his “double eyes,” which have functioned throughout as
sign of ‘the dead girl’ in his own mind, the last trace of Joe’s mortal impulses “slowly,
slowly … forms itself into a bird with a blade of red on the wing. Meanwhile Violet rests
her hand on his chest as though it were the sunlit rim of a well and down there somebody
is gathering gifts … to distribute to them all” (206; 225). In this way, both of the Traces
re-frame their ancestral ties. 283
Moreover, Violet’s new bird is a crucial aspect of the couple’s new life. It proves
listless, until the couple immerses it in coolness: “Violet decided, and Joe agreed, nothing
was left to love or need but music. They took the cage to the roof one Saturday, where
the wind blew and so did the musicians in shirts billowing out behind them. From then
on the bird was a pleasure to itself and to them” (224).
The novel’s final, lyrical passages proceed as a praise poem of sorts, which
function as a ritual invocation of Osun. Here, the narrator signifies the riverain goddess’
holistic sociocultural vision of a society founded upon and sustained by the age-old
properties of reciprocity, balance, and order—between community and its individual
members, humans and nature, women and men, and spiritual and physical existence.
Thus, not only are Joe and Violet said to be “the sound of snapping fingers under
the sycamores lining the streets” but so are their neighbors in the city and beyond: “Even
when they are not there, when whole city blocks downtown and acres of lawned
neighborhoods in Sag Harbor cannot see them, the clicking is there” (226). Thus, the
City’s residents are said to constitute the music that emerges from immortal spirit. Like
Violet’s bird, they seek communitas with like forces: “the click of dark and snapping
fingers drives them to Roseland, to Bunny’s; boardwalks by the sea” (227).
After wondering if these figures recognize themselves as Osun, the narrator
elaborates upon the self-knowledge that she, herself, has gained in being “touched and
released” by this force. Hence her assertion that “the body is the vehicle, not the point,” as well as her overt display of “public love” (228; 229). Whereas before, in this and prior
Morrison narratives, she has “only known it in secret, shared it in secret and longed, aw longed to show it” here, she confides “That I have loved only you, surrendered my whole 284 self reckless to you…. That I want you to love me back and show it to me” (229). With this conspiratorial confession in its final lines, the book’s publication constitutes an extension of the communitas which, under threat of hegemonic domination, is necessary for Black metacultural survival and elaboration. Thus, the narrative concludes by drawing on negation to explicitly implore the reading audience to ‘make’ the Goddess
Osun: “But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me” (229).
Because it ends with this direct address by the introspective presence of Osun, we might expect Jazz to conclude Morrison’s narrative project. However, the trilogy continues with Paradise, in which an entire group of women have displaced the self and must recover the ‘dead girl.’ In Morrison’s seventh novel, ‘the everflowing’ functions once again as intersubjective mediator, supplementing consciousness in ways that both inspire improvisatory responses to narrative patterns of loss and violence and usher in a communitas which serves to mitigate such structural maneuvers altogether.
CHAPTER 7 WATER, GARDENS, AND ‘ENDLESS WORK’ IN PARADISE
Some people are embarrassed about … [being used as an ancestral medium]; they both fear and distrust it also; they don’t solidify and recreate the means by which one enters into that place where those people are. I think the more black women write, the more easily one will be able to talk about those things. Because I have almost never found anyone whose work I respected or who took their work that seriously, who did not talk in the vocabulary that you and I are using; it’s not the vocabulary of literary criticism.… And it’s not taught. People speak, of course, of the muse and there are other words for this. But to make it as graphic a presence or a collection of presences as I find it absolutely to be, it’s not even a question of trying to make it appear that way—that’s the way that it appears.
—Toni Morrison, “A Conversation,” with Gloria Naylor
Like their predecessors, Jazz (1993) and Paradise (1998) explore Black existential crises, which arise from historical transition and the imposition of structure that both underlies and accompanies it. In these texts, as in each Morrison novel, Osun functions as mediating agent for the gendered metacultural strategies by which African Americans have, historically, maintained crucial measures of insight, order and self-determination.
What is unique about the ritual processes of Osun in Jazz and Paradise is that they function to elaborate upon the self-formative capacities of consciousness which were underscored in Beloved’s closing pages. That is, these novels more fully explore not only the communicable process of revitalizing such internal resources but also the potential of shared consciousness to regenerate communal bonds of affiliation. Paradise is set in all-
Black Ruby, Oklahoma, which is the third town to be settled by descendants of formerly- enslaved men, now known as the “Old Fathers.” “They shoot the white girl first,” begins the first chapter, entitled “Ruby,” in which nine men raid the Convent, a mansion on the
285 286 edge of town that is home to a motley crew of women—drifters who have come together by chance but now form a separatist community that threatens to undermine the “one black town worth the pain” (5). As the men search out “the women they are obliged to stampede or kill,” we hear the “story that explained why neither the founders of Haven nor their descendents could tolerate anyone but themselves” (3; 13).
Hence, we learn that the Old Fathers’ migration from Mississippi and Louisiana to
Oklahoma was marked by rejection in every town in between (13). When they came to realize that even the headline of a feature in a Black newspaper, “Come Prepared or Not at All,” referred not to an eager and capable work ethic but to money, the migrants’
“overheated determination became cold-blooded obsession” (14). While the Old Fathers relied on the “signs God gave to guide them” to their first homeland, aptly named Haven,
Oklahoma, the numerous hardships and rebuffs they encountered along that journey are stored in the collection of narratives that are told and retold until they become part of the communal memory and ethos of their descendants.
Ostensibly, Ruby, circa 1976, is still functioning in accordance with its founding principles of communal pride, self-sufficiency, and mutual support and, in many ways, it is indeed paradisiacal. Crime and, hence, police do not exist here. The town’s inhabitants hold one another to high standards of propriety; both individual misdeeds as well as individual needs are all firmly dealt with by the community, itself. Indeed, “there wasn’t a slack or sloven woman anywhere in town” and women move unescorted through the night because, here, they are not regarded “as prey” (8).
Of course, this is the perspective—and justification—of the men who raid the
Convent; as such, it is especially ironic given the violent opening line of the chapter. 287
Further underscoring this incongruity is the fact that, while the unified perspective of
these men dominates “Ruby, a contrapuntal perspective emerges at chapter’s end:
Bodacious Black Eves unredeemed by Mary, they are like panicked does leaping toward a sun that has finished burning off the mist and now pours its holy oil over the hides of game.
God at their side, the men take aim. For Ruby. (18)
Here, the attackers’ perspective, in which the women are correlated with Eve’s loss of
innocence and ejection from the biblical Eden, is juxtaposed with another, yet-heard
narrative perspective in which these same women are anointed with “holy oil” and
bounding toward dawn—the first of the four moments of the sun, which signifies rebirth,
the time when life begins anew (MacGaffey, Religion 43).
With this signifying passage, Morrison suspends the action. This key moment will
be recovered only after the histories of the inhabitants of Ruby and the Convent are more
fully relayed. Thus the next seven chapters explore not only how the men come to target
their beloved town but also how the women bring about their own rebirth during the
sun’s first moment.
Morrison’s hallmark narrative structure serves these ends. First, there is the seriate
style in which the individual chapters are composed. Each is named for, and contains the
narrative perspective of, a different female character–both from the Convent and from
Ruby. The narrative structure assumes, moreover, the form of what Turner calls “the
‘plot’ structure” of Ndembu twinship ritual; that is, it is structured to actuate the ritual process as a gradual “unifying of a pair of opposites, dominantly expressed in symbols for male-female difference, opposition and union” (50). The masterful way in which
Morrison utilizes seriality, a fundamental organizing principle in Yoruba artistry, to 288
advance in Paradise a “plot” which is fundamental to Ndembu ritual thought and activity
is nothing short of remarkable.
The first chapter, “Ruby,” is named for the town, which itself is named for Ruby
Morgan, the deceased sister of the most powerful of the “new fathers.” That the dominant perspective in this chapter is not that of Ruby Morgan, nor even the citizens of
Ruby, Oklahoma, but, rather that of the men who are intent on vanquishing the Convent women sets the stage for the narrative’s drive to not only recover but also reauthorize the perspective of the “dead girl.” This contrapuntal perspective is thus not only given the last word in “Ruby,” but it is also foregrounded in all but one of the remaining chapters.
Each of the first four chapters to follow “Ruby” is named, respectively, for the
disparate women who descend upon the Convent in desperate need of the Ritual Process.
These chapters are followed by “Patricia,” which is named for the Rubyite who acts as
something of a willing ‘dead girl’ in that the chapter details the process by which she
came to construct, then destroy, her counter-reading of Ruby’s history. Named for
Consolata, the sixth chapter relates this character’s background and her concomitant development into the Osun figure who leads the Convent women in the ritual process.
With the narrative’s ritual process thus made explicit, the two remaining chapters act to specify the characters for whom each is named as implicit participants in the narrative’s collective recovery and re-authorization of the ‘dead girl.’ “Lone” is thus named for the mid-wife who not only helps Consolata to first access her spiritual power but also attempts to prevent the massacre; “Save-Marie” refers to the child who becomes the first
‘dead girl’ since Ruby Morgan in Ruby’s history. In this way, the narrative is structured to begin, ensue, and end with the perspectives of ‘the dead girl.’ 289
In juxtaposing the experiences and perspectives of females, both of Ruby and of the
Convent, with shifting accounts of Ruby’s history, the narrative functions, moreover, to
redraw, then finally to collapse, the boundaries of a town in which the fathers are said to
rule with absolute power and in which “outsider and enemy” have come to mean the same thing (212). Because the ‘new fathers’ are versed in the “lessons [that] had been
learned and relearned in the last three generations about how to protect a town,” they see themselves as uniquely qualified for their assumed roles as guardians and, if need be, violent defenders of Ruby’s integrity (16). In fact, they believe their absolute authority
has been earned by the “ten generations” of ancestors who had direct knowledge of that
which lies just outside such self-built havens: “Out There where your children were sport, your women quarry, and where your very person could be annulled” (16). Thus, there is but one authorized perspective and one official history in Ruby, both of which are rigidly controlled by the fathers.
While the narrative gives much consideration to the hard-won grounds on which
the new fathers’ position is based, its shifting perspectives combine to reveal Ruby as
polarized along gender and generational lines as well as between subjective memory and
collective agency. In fact, the narrative’s seriate structure reveals that all the while the
Convent women are being scapegoated for the town’s unraveling, Ruby’s troubles are
due not so much to its many divisions as to the fathers’ iron-fisted determination to
control meanings and squelch contesting interpretations.
A case in point involves the male leaders’ proud announcement, in “Ruby,” that
Ruby’s women enjoy protected status. This is challenged by subsequent chapters’ pointed demonstrations of ways in which both women and youngsters are subjected to 290 patriarchal authority. For example, in the opening pages of chapter two, “Grace,” the male members of the Morgan and Fleetwood families gather to settle a problem involving
K.D., the Morgans’ nephew and sole heir, and Arnette, daughter/sister of the Fleetwoods.
No women are present as the local Baptist minister, Richard Misner, attempts to negotiate a truce between the two prominent families. The men carry on a battle of wills until
Misner asks K.D. questions that allude to the unspoken fact of Arnette’s pregnancy. “He expected this forthright question to open up a space for honesty, where the men could stop playing bear and come to terms” but the question brings on a “sudden quiet” (59).
As if to answer the question that the men would not, the narrator adds: “In that awkward silence they could hear above their heads the light click of heels: women pacing, servicing, fetching, feeding—whatever it took to save the children who could not save themselves” (60).
This contrapuntal interplay continues throughout the remainder of the meeting, exemplifying the status quo in Ruby: as they make critical decisions for all women and younger men, elder men defer to women in word, only; meanwhile, women go about the mundane business of maintaining the present and securing the future. K.D. is directed to apologize to Arnette, the Morgans promise financial assistance for Arnette’s college plans, and the conversation ends with a bevy of platitudes regarding women’s importance. The section ends, however, with a resounding reprise of this counterpoint: as the pastor leads them in a final prayer, “They bowed their heads and listened obediently to Misner’s beautifully put words and the tippy-tap steps of women who were nowhere in sight” (61). 291
Such patriarchal authority is also demonstrated—and challenged—in “Seneca,”
when Reverend Misner gathers the townspeople together to discuss the Oven, the
communal centerpiece that had been reverently carried from Haven to Ruby. The Oven’s
motto, carefully placed by the Morgan twins’ grandfather, has come partially undone and
a fierce battle ensues over what the words did and should say. For the elder men, the
original words are not only clear, but, as the Methodist minister puts it, they are direct:
“Beware the Furrow of His Brow. That’s what it says clear as daylight. That’s not a
suggestion; that’s an order” (86). The young “sons,” who are full of newcomer Misner’s
teachings about the Civil Rights Movement, want the motto changed to “Be the
Furrow…” (87). Despite Misner’s reminder to the increasingly outraged elders that they
are there “not just to talk but to listen too,” the discussion comes to an abrupt end with
Steward Morgan’s blunt threat: “If you, any 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” (85; 87).
Whereas this scene demonstrates the extremes to which the new fathers will go to
maintain their authority, what follows it serves to elaborate the contrapuntal role which was ascribed to women in “Grace.” For example, “Seneca” goes on to reveal several holes in the master narrative of Ruby’s patriarchs—holes which, as with Arnette’s pregnancy, the fathers seem to silently agree not to broach. Sharing no such consensus, the women offer a consistent counterpoint throughout the chapter. Dovey Morgan, for example, understands the Oven argument not only as a personal “battle” for control between her husband and Reverend Misner, but also as “fueled in part, Dovey thought, by what nobody talked about: young people in trouble or acting up behind every door” 292
(83). Not only does she read the issues for herself but she also discusses them openly
with peers who are just as independent-thinking and invested in their community as she:
“Dovey had talked to her sister (and sister-in-law) about it; to Mable Fleetwood; to Anna
Flood; to a couple of women in the Club. Opinions were varied, confusing, even
incoherent, because feelings ran so high over the matter” (83). As for the surface issue, not only does Dovey countermand the town’s generation gap by wondering aloud what one of the young people, Billie Delia, thinks about changing the Oven’s motto, but she also issues her “own opinion”: “Specifying it, particularizing it, nailing its meaning down was futile. The only nailing needing to be done had already taken place. On the Cross”
(93).
For Dovey’s husband, Steward, and his brother, Deacon, however, the epic, three-
generation struggle to finally secure a “Haven” necessitates the ongoing sacrifice of
individual subordination to the group. In fact, the Morgan twins see themselves as
Ruby’s sole custodians, as “God’s steward and deacon, his mediators on earth” (Fraile-
Marcos para. 35). Their exceptionalist self-regard is not so far off when we consider the
ways in which the twins’ characterizations function to invoke the existential issues with
which the ritual process is concerned. That is, Morrison loads these characters with
multiple and interrelated Black metacultural concepts, each of which functions, like the
narrative’s seriate style of organization, to elaborate the narrative’s ritualized goal of
“unifying a pair of opposites” (Turner, Ritual 50).
First, as the Yoruba conceptualize twins as having “one soul,” the Morgan brothers
serve, implicitly, to presignify the narrative consummation of the ritual process’ goal of
“unifying of a pair of opposites” (Equaroje; Turner, Ritual 50). That Osun is an especial 293
“confidante to twins” suggests, moreover, a ritual process that designates Osun as its
center (Badejo 14). Furthermore, this drive toward unification is also expressed in the
fact that the each of the twin’s marriage is comprised of ‘double’ siblings. As such, the
couples not only symbolize “the theme of doubling” which, in turn, alludes to the
“largely ... symmetrical and complementary” nature of the twin worlds but they serve,
moreover, as primary signs of the “male-female difference, opposition and union” by which “the ritual plot” is represented (MacGaffey, Religion 90; Turner, Ritual 50).
Yet another way in which the ritual plot is elaborated comes by way of the
narrative’s frequent juxtapositioning of the twins’ perspectives with those of their wives.
For example, contrapuntal interplay between the twins’ perspectives and those of their
wives serves to show that, rather than a moral undertaking, what drives these “new
fathers” is a singular quest to preserve their own power. After having threatened his
young detractors with brutality over the Oven’s motto, Steward is said to admit just what
Dovey has already intuited: “Personally, he didn’t give a damn. The point was not why it
should or shouldn’t be changed, but what Rev. Misner gained by instigating the idea”
(94). As it is from his wife’s perspective that we are informed of Steward’s opposition to
the Civil Rights Movement, Dovey seems implicitly to understand that, for Steward,
Misner’s socially progressive ideas are but part of a more threatening pattern that
emerged in the ‘Arnette talks’:
A man like that could encourage strange behavior; side with a teenage girl; shift ground to Fleetwood. A man like that, willing to throw money away, could give customers ideas. Make them think there was choice about interest rates. (56)
Indeed, how far he is willing to go to preserve his own power is further indicated in
Steward’s private “wonder[ing] if that generation—Misner’s and K.D.’s—would have to
be sacrificed to get to the next one” (94). 294
Soane Morgan, too, knows that her husband is also willing to forfeit all others for
the sake of his own eminence. When, for example, she questions why Arnold
Fleetwood’s store is struggling despite the fact that the Morgan twins own Ruby’s bank,
Deacon tells her she does not “need to” understand (107). Although her continuing
questions go unspoken, they show that Soane does indeed understand the source of the problem: “why wasn’t he worried enough by their friends’ money problems? Why, for instance, couldn’t Menus keep the house he bought?” (107). Whereas the brothers are said to be “in eternal if silent conversation,” the sisters are of another mind, altogether
(155).
While neither woman directly challenges her respective husband, their contrapuntal
interplay serves for the reader to equilibrate the male leaders’ rigidly controlled
communal historiography, their master narrative. In “Seneca,” once again, Soane’s
perspective functions to balance Ruby’s chronicles by foregrounding the principal role of
ritual thought and activity in the lives of Ruby’s women. Soane reveals that the Oven,
which the men lovingly transported from Haven to Ruby and reassembled, was roundly
dismissed as impractically excessive by Ruby’s women: “privately they resented the
truck space given over to it…. Resented also the hours spent putting it together” (103).
She explains that, in Ruby’s infancy, the Oven did come to serve a practical purpose,
after all: it functioned as the ritual site at which the town gathered after river Baptisms.
For Soane, once its ritual function was supplanted by modern churches, complete with
baptismal basins, the Oven ceased to hold any “real value…. A utility became a shrine”
(103). 295
Soane’s comments here are of particular importance. For, unlike the majority of issues that drive Ruby’s many divisions, which stem mainly from the fathers’ will to
power, her concern is for the well-being of the entire community. Indeed, while the
fathers attempt to hold the community captive to their master narrative of Ruby’s history,
women like Soane quietly pursue ritual activities in which fundamental communal values
are repeatedly recalled, renegotiated and regenerated. For example, Dovey recalls the
ritual activity known as the “garden battles” of 1963. Courtesy of the economic bounty
that brought modern appliances to Ruby’s homes, women suddenly had time on their hands, which they happily devoted to the creative activity of cultivating flower gardens
for the sole purpose of the pleasure they provided. Though referred to as “battles,” the sudden transformation of Ruby’s lawns into flower beds was fueled, in fact, by a cooperatively developed communal rite: “Exchanging, sharing a cutting here, a root
there, a bulb or two became so frenetic a land grab, husbands complained of neglect and
the disappointingly small harvest of radishes, of the too short rows of collards, beets”
(89). By replacing conventions that had outlived their utility with those that
accommodated present desires, the women succeeded, collectively, in changing the very
atmosphere of Ruby:
Iris, phlox, rose and peonies took up more and more time, quiet boasting and so much space new butterflies journeyed miles to brood in Ruby. Their chrysalises hung in secret under acacias, and from there they joined blues and sulphurs that had been feeding for decades in buckwheat and clover. The red bands drinking from sumac competed with the newly arrived creams and whites that loved jewel flowers and nasturtiums. Giant orange wings covered in black lace hovered in pansies and violets. (90)
The garden transformations demonstrate the women’s capacity to adapt to historical
change by renegotiating and regenerating those cultural strategies that have long enabled
group cohesion and collective agency. 296
Such capacity is demonstrated, as well, by the youth who want to reinterpret the oven’s motto in ways that not only commemorate the past but also accommodate their own capacity for collective agency in the present. Whereas, as Misner suggests, the fathers think that “past heroism was enough of a future to live by,” the narrator signifies a future Ruby in which tradition is balanced with innovative cultural strategies, which enable fluid adaptation to historical change (161). Hence, the garden battles passage concludes with: “Like the years of garden rivalry, the butterflies were gone that cool
October evening, but the consequence remained—fat, over-wrought yards; clumps and chains of eggs. Hiding. Until spring” (90).
The very next passage, in which Dovey is visited by an ancestral presence, suggests that this impending force is iron, “a fleeting, transitory, cyclical” glimpse into the
“‘mysterious, permanent dimension of reality which, until revealed, is shut off from human view’” (Drewal and Drewal 1). Indeed, it appears that the advent of the gardens has served to invite this ancestral presence, for he announces himself, initially, with a dense flurry of butterflies, the color of which Dovey has never before seen. Interestingly, he regularly visits her only at her spare house in the center of town, complete with a lush garden, rather than at the outlying ranch she shares with her husband. Dovey embraces this ancestral presence as her “friend,” and confidante, sharing with him “things she didn’t know were on her mind” (92.
Complicating what may appear as Paradise’s reliance on easy binarisms—between men and women, youth and elders, subjective memory and collective agency—most of the novel’s many ancestral presences are men. Moreover, these presences are not the sole 297
province of women. In fact, “Seneca” attributes to the ritual invocation of an ancestral
presence the Old Fathers’ locating the first town they would establish.
From Steward’s private reminiscences, we learn the principal role of ritual thought
and activity in the life of his grandfather. Zechariah, as the story goes, beckons his son
away from the campsite where a bedraggled group of 79 people slept, after being ejected
from yet another Oklahoma town. After leading Elder Morgan deep into the woods,
Zechariah kneels at Kalunga, or the crossroad amid dense forestation. There, Zechariah
commences the ritual process: “after a few seconds of silence, he began to hum the
sweetest, saddest sounds Rector ever heard,” a “humming prayer” that would continue
through the night (97). As the ritual process unfolds in the narrative, the site itself contributes to the instigative effects of this rite, in which father and son access a transcendent state where identities, consciousness, and place fuse into a fluid stream of creative synthesis. Just as the sun shifts into its critical fourth moment, Zechariah’s humming prayer seems to unite the two men with the very environment, including the trees, those empowered symbols of spiritual renascence. The narrative continues:
The heartbreaking music swallowed him [Elder], and he felt himself floating inches aboveground.… Surrounded by pine trees, he felt rather than saw the sky fading at groundline. It was then he heard footsteps—loud like a giant’s tread. Big Papa, who had not moved a muscle or paused in his song, was quickly silent. Rector sat up and looked around. The footsteps were thundering, but he couldn’t tell from which direction they came. As the hem of skylight widened, he could make out the silhouettes of tree trunks.
They saw him at the same time. A small man, seemlike, too small for the sound of his steps. He was walking away from them. Dressed in a black suit, the jacket held over his shoulder with the forefinger of his right hand. His shirt glistening white between broad suspenders. Without help of stick and with nary a groan, Big Papa stood up. Together they watched the man walking away from the palest part of the sky. Once, he lingered to turn around and look at them, but they could not see the features of his face. When he began walking again, they noticed he had a satchel in his left hand. (97) 298
For Zechariah, who was lame before, the night-long rite has served to accomplish the unitary state with which ritual processes are concerned. Thus, when he summons the people to him, at the sun’s first moment: “They found him right there, standing straighter than the pines, his sticks tossed away, his back to the rising sun. No walking man was in sight, but the peace that washed Zechariah’s face spread to their own spirits, calming them” (97).
Zechariah’s physical transformation into a “walking man” and his spiritual assuredness combines with his announcement that “He is leading the way” to induce the group’s creative, self-constituting capacity for communitas. Therefore, “from then on the journey was purposeful, free of the slightest complaints” (97). That no one but Zechariah and “sometimes a child” could ever see the walking man’s irregular appearances does not confound the others. For their lives are now so imbued with spiritual meaning that they trudge forward until the ancestral presence finally indicates the exact location in which to erect the town of Haven.
The remembrance of this narrative serves to calm Steward and fix his resolve about defending the motto as, he believes, Zechariah had inscribed it. However, he fails to see what the women seem to intuit: that the means of the ritual process are also its end. That is, for all their talk of upholding tradition, the new fathers’ master narrative affirms their forefathers’ physical endurance and prowess, only. The metacultural knowledges and practices that had also enabled the Old Fathers’ achievements have been left out of the community’s official history and ethos.
Just as it is only in private that Steward avows this crucial aspect of the town’s origins, his brother holds secret his most “powerful” memory of a chance encounter with 299
Osun (107). As small boys, Steward and Deacon accompanied their male family
members on a tour of “colored” settlements. In one affluent town, they watch as nineteen
women, dressed in white, lemon yellow and salmon-colored dresses, pose for a
photographer: “Deek heard musical voices, low, full of delight and secret information,
and in their tow a gust of verbena” (109). Of all the sights of the trip, of both struggling
towns and wealthy ones, Deek’s “remembrance” of “the nineteen summertime ladies” is
said to be “pastel-colored and eternal” (110).
However, the very next page signifies on his lack of true remembrance, with its description of the great satisfaction he takes in the reductive rendition of Osun’s awesome power that he ascribes to the women of Ruby: “Quiet white and yellow houses full of industry; and in them were 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” (111). As Deacon goes on to muse that his grandfather
would have “scoffed at the ease” of their lives in Ruby, it is clear that he fails to
understand the crucial lesson inherent to the town he remembers so fondly. That is, he does not ascertain the correlation between a town’s prosperity, the time for creative pursuits that such prosperity allows, and the enigmatic affect of the “summertime ladies.”
Likewise, Deacon is surely among the “husbands [who] complained of neglect”
when Ruby’s women responded to their new-found prosperity by vanquishing their
vegetable gardens and instituting the creative, communal rite known as the “garden
battles” (90). To my earlier discussion of the way the townswomen change the very
atmosphere of Ruby when they adapt to historical change by renegotiating and
regenerating those cultural strategies that have long enabled group cohesion and 300
collective agency, I would add that they, alone, serve to re-member the “pastel colored
and eternal” power of Osun.
Judging by “Patricia,” Pat Best Cato does not appear to be among these women.
As the town’s school teacher, Pat sets out to record the family trees of Ruby’s families.
The project quickly grows, however, to reflect Pat’s determination to uncover the entire
truth of Ruby’s family histories. Pat’s goal is hindered by the Rubyites’ hesitancy to share, which only serves to reinforce her own resentment about her long-time status as an outsider within Ruby. Thus, “Patricia” reveals Pat’s project as full of conjecture and personal animosity, despite her insistence that she “interpreted—freely, but, she thought, insightfully because she alone had the required emotional distance” (188). The narrator’s signifying deployment of “she thought” serves to warn us that Pat’s ‘counter-reading of
Ruby’s history is, too, a subjective account. Indeed, we are told that, long ago, “she gave up all pretense to objective comment” (187).
With this nod to self-reflexivity, “Patricia” goes on to reveal some of the more
radical details behind Ruby’s official history, details which explain its present-day status
quo. Pat confronts the many secrets, hollows, and glaring omissions in the new fathers’
master narrative. For example, Pat wonders aloud about the matrilineal heritage of
Ruby’s citizens: “Who were these women who, like her mother, had only one name?…
Women whose identity rested on the men they married” or the fathers to whom they were born” (188). Those like Steward, who claim to hold the entire history of Ruby’s families in their “powerful memories,” turn out to be highly unreliable sources (13). For example, when Pat asks him “where his grandfather got his last name,” Steward casually admits that he is unsure of the original family name (192). Other sources reveal “some things” 301
but “refused to talk about other things” while Ruby’s “older women … hinted the most
while saying the least” (188). Thus, Pat must rely on stories that circulate in her students’ papers, gossip and “woman talk” (188).
Ultimately, Patricia's work is a historiography of the self which leads to new insight
into the ways in which not only sexism but also colorism contribute to her position within
Ruby's hierarchy. For instance, Pat insists that Ruby’s forefathers took great pride in their common identity as pure, “blue-black people,” even after realizing that color discrimination prevented them from obtaining gainful employment in their home town or being accepted in newly-formed Black settlements (193). The families of the second- migration leaders, the third generation of “eight-rock, a deep deep level in the coal mines,” continued not only to retain, but also to enforce their racial purity (193). Because
“the generations had to be not only racially untampered with but free of adultery too,” Pat
surmises that “everything that worries them must come from women” (217).
Thus, those who threaten a status-quo that hinges on colorist and sexist structures
are psychically, and sometimes physically, destroyed. There is Menus, who was not only
“forced to give back or return” the “pretty sandy-haired girl” he had planned to marry but
was also stripped of the house he’d bought for her—with a loan from the Morgans’
bank—and “hadn’t been sober since” (195). As well, there is Delia Best, Pat’s “pale-
skin[ned]” mother who died during childbirth, as she waited in vain for the men to honor
their wives’ pleas to drive to the Convent for help (198). This legacy extends to
Patricia’s own “lightish but not whiteish” daughter, Billie Delia Cato (199). Billie Delia
is labeled as “the fastest girl in town” because of innocent behavior that occurred when
she was just three-years-old (59). Unable to overcome her outsider-within-status, Billie 302
Delia flees the town, returning only for the wedding of her friend, Arnette, and K.D.
Meanwhile, the contrapuntal narrator is careful to assert Billie Delia’s virginity at the time of the wedding.
Others are ostracized for breaking the town’s implicit “blood rules” and the injunctions against adultery and fornication that necessarily accompany them. Pat notes that Menus’ mother, Martha, was suspected of adultery and, thus, compelled to flee
Ruby. As well, while watching the annual Christmas play, in which the 8-rock’s history is conflated with the biblical exodus, Pat comes to realize that her dead husband’s family is one of two lineages that have been stricken from the 8-rock’s history.
Ultimately, Pat’s endeavor “to record accurately the relationships among the fifteen families of Ruby, their ancestors in Haven and, further back...” reveals the high costs exacted by Ruby’s attainment of ‘paradise’ (188). For example, Pat has vouched that she
“alone would figure out why a line had been drawn through Ethan Blackhorse’s name in the Blackhorse Bible and what the heavy ink blot hid next to Zechariah’s name in the
Morgan bible” (188). This mystery unravels when Pat’s signifies about Ruby Morgan’s husband:
An army buddy of her brothers, it was said. But from where? His first name, Coffee, was the same as Zechariah’s before he changed it to run for lieutenant governor; his last name was as generic as you could get. He was killed in Europe, so nobody got to know him well, not even his wife. You could tell from his photograph there wasn’t a brush of Private Smith in his son. K.D. was a mirror of Blackhorse and Morgan Blood. (191)
This passage denotes a striking revelation about K.D.’s patriliny, for the Morgan’s official lineage does not include Blackhorse blood. Moreover, by couching this seeming digression between notations about the Jeff and Sweetie Fleetwood’s “defective” children, and then going on to explain the communal practice of “takeovers,” Pat 303 explicitly names the “problem with blood rules” (196). That is, she suggests that the community’s isolation, combined with its long-time pursuit of racial purity, results in endogamy and otherwise incestuous relations (191; 196).
“Patricia” demonstrates that not only has the town’s public history been interpreted in ways that obscure the internal sources of Ruby’s unfolding ruination but also that no one in Ruby is ‘emotionally distant’ from the fact that “paradise seems to materialize through the enforcement of utter isolation and exclusion, the preservation and mythologizing of the past, and the construction and institutionalization of new myths that situate the second-migration leaders as the elite and confer on them a sacred power”
(Fraile-Marcos para. 27). Ultimately, “Patricia” reveals Pat as foremost among those
Rubyites who implicitly uphold, even as they silently rail against, the ethos by which the town is so rigidly maintained.
While she prides herself, for instance, on being more broad-minded than most of her neighbors, she, too, reverts to isolationism in response to the African-centered worldview and global perspective Rev. Misner instills in the town’s youth. “Africa doesn’t mean anything to me,” she tells him, “Slavery is our past” (210). Understanding that “Isolation kills generations,” Misner asks her to “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” (213). Here,
Misner speaks of the kind of “Paradise” that will later be confirmed in the narrative. Pat will come to realize, only, that not only had she evaded true dialogue in the very same manner she attributes to other Ruby residents but she had also “defended people and things and ideas with a passion she did not feel” (214). 304
As well, Pat’s belief in the “sacred power” of the leaders is confirmed when she
attributes the bizarre fact that no one has died in Ruby since 1953 to the town’s
determination to censure her father’s mortuary business, “because he broke the blood rule
first” (199). Indeed, Pat is so emotionally invested in the tenets upon which Ruby is
maintained that she admits to seeing in Billie Delia “the young girl that lived in the minds of the 8-rocks, not the girl her daughter was” (204). That she goes on to destroy her collection of “upside-down trees, the trunks sticking in the air, the branches sloping down,” altogether, serves moreover to demonstrate the successful workings of the new fathers’ ideology (188).
If “Patricia” serves to substantiate “structure” as a “differentiated, segmented, often
hierarchical system of institutionalized positions,” Paradise’s remaining chapters
function to solidify the perspective of communitas which has been building throughout
the narrative (Turner, Ritual 172). I have already discussed the ways in which Paradise’s
seriate structure incorporates contrapuntal interplay from the perspectives of Soane,
Dovey, and other select women in Ruby, each of whom is associated with open dialogue,
fluidity of meaning, cooperation across differences, and ritual means of adapting to
change. Because they are ensconced in the vicissitudes of structure, however, these
women display such qualities only in private, among themselves. In contrast, the
Convent, which is both literally and figuratively located outside of Ruby, epitomizes the
sacred power of communitas. The women who find their way to Convent are, moreover,
classic representations of the “weak,” the “marginal,” the “outsider” figures who, Turner
tells us, “often come to symbolize the moral values of communitas over the coercive
power of supreme political rulers” (Ritual 109; 111). 305
Indeed, Lone DuPres reports that women from Ruby and beyond have long sought
solace and renewal at the Convent: “for more than twenty years,” “women dragged their
sorrow up and down the road between Ruby and the Convent”; “crying women, staring
women, scowling, lip-biting women or women just plain lost” (269; 270). As well,
Menus and other disempowered men have also retreated to the Convent. As Magali
Cornier Michael notes,
This attraction to the Convent for some of Ruby’s inhabitants points not only to cracks within Ruby’s positioning of itself in binary opposition to the Convent but also to a recognition of the potential of versions of separatism that are non- hierarchical and grounded in caring.…
In contrast to the closed community of Ruby, the Convent invites all to join in continuously (re)creating its dynamic, diverse community. (para. 30)
Indeed, the Convent is consistent with the sacred ideal of human community, where
“concrete idiosyncratic individuals, who, though differing in physical and mental endowment, are nevertheless regarded as equal in terms of shared humanity” (Turner,
Ritual 177).
Thus, when a mute Pallas appears at the Demby hospital where Billie Delia works,
Billie Delia takes her instead to the Convent. She reassures the shoeless, purseless, and
speechless stranger that:
This is a place where you can stay for a while. No questions. I did it once and they were nice to me. Nicer than—well, very nice.… A little nuts maybe, but loose, relaxed, kind of.… Anyway, 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. (175-176)
This is exactly what Pallas experiences there. Initially recognizing that her “pain was
down too far,” the women care for Pallas’ immediate physical needs, only (172-3). After
a few days, however, Pallas is brought before Consolata, who draws out the young woman’s story: “She just stretched out her hand and Pallas went to her, sat on her lap, 306
talk-crying at first, then just crying, while Connie said, ‘Drink a little of this,’ and ‘What
pretty earrings,’ and “Poor little one, poor, poor little one. They hurt my little one’”
(173).
Along with the women who have found in the Convent refuge from structure,
Consolata reflects communitas as it is typically symbolized “by matrilateral ancestors,
especially by mother images” (Turner, Ritual 116). Indeed, these women are yet another
incarnation of Morrison’s watery pariah figures, who serve always to bring about the
community’s conversion to communitas. As such, the communitas they forge designates
the ‘Good Mother’ as its center.
Even Sweetie, who betrays the unconditionally loving attention she experiences
there, does so in a manner that accurately reflects the source of the Convent women’s
difference. They “seemed like birds, hawks, to Sweetie,” the overwrought mother of the
sickly Fleetwood offspring who had simply walked out of her house, “stepp[ed] into a
street she had not entered in six years,” and marched forward through the snow, sans
coat, until she is redirected to the Convent (125). Considering that with her, Rev. Misner
had “felt as though his relationship with the God he spoke to was vague or too new, while
hers was superior, ancient and completely sealed,” Sweetie’s perception of the women as
Osun is significant (62).
Soane, too, recognizes Consolata, with whom she has shared a long-standing and
caring relationship, and her boarders in this way. Having invited the women to the
wedding reception of K.D. and Arnette, Soane comes to realize that she had “misread the warning,” the dream knowledge shared by her dead sons (154). The wedding debacle
that follows serves to confirm their admonition that “[t]he strange feathers she had 307
invited did not belong in her house” (155). Indeed, the Convent women’s difference is
indissociable from the Convent, itself.
From the time it was constructed in 1922 as “an embezzler’s folly” and hideout from structure, the “big stone building out in the middle of nowhere” seems the exclusive purview of Osun (169). That Ruby’s townspeople refer to the mansion as “the Convent,” though it has never actually been one, serves as testament to its continuing function as a refuge from the structure that obtains in Ruby. The name, the “Convent,” refers to the fact that the mansion on the outskirts of Ruby later became a Catholic boarding school
“where stilled Arapaho girls … learned to forget” (3; 4). Although the nuns who established their school there endeavored to destroy, remove, or at least hide all evidence of the “embezzler’s joy,” the mansion, like the Arapaho girls, continued to betray “traces of the sisters’ failed industry”:
The female-torso candleholders in the candelabra hanging from the hall ceiling.… The nursing cherubim emerging from layers of paint in the foyer. The nipple- tipped doorknobs. Layabouts half in old-timey clothes, drinking and fondling each other in prints stacked in the cellar stairs. A Venus or two among several pieces of nude statuary beneath the cellar stairs.… [B]rass male genitalia that had been ripped from sinks. (72)
Indeed, these are signs of Osun and her sacred power over procreation, which the nuns
have endeavored to overwrite with their own religious symbols. However, as Gigi’s apprehension of one the nuns’ pictures suggests, their replacements differ from the originals only in terms of whose pleasure they are meant to address.
In the picture, in which Saint Catherine of Siena kneels with “a knocked-down
look, cast-up begging eyes, arms outstretched holding up her present on a platter to the a
lord,” Gigi sees an “I-give woman serving up her breasts like two baked Alaska on a
platter” (73; 74). Gigi is annoyed by the nuns’ move to privilege the spirit over the body 308
simply by recasting the female body in the service of “a lord,” as well as by their holding
“brass dicks hidden in a box” while “pudding tits [are] exposed on a plate” (74). Despite
the nuns’ best efforts to supplant signs of the ‘Good Mother’ with those of an
overwhelmingly masculine God, the “tubs ands sinks, which could not be inexpensively
removed, remain “cooly corrupt” and “the stone walls of the house … a cool blessing,” in
time-present (4; 169) [emphasis mine].
In addition to the building’s being a locus of Osun, both Mary Magna and
Consolata, who, alone, remain in the mansion long after the school is closed, are
designated as cool and covert figures. Consolata specifies Mary Magna as such, not only because the nun “had lake-blue eyes, steady, clear” but also because Consolata “could see
a cool blue light beaming softly under the habit. It came, she thought, from the heart of
her” (224). Mavis confirms Consolata’s perception; as the first traumatized drifter to
show up at the Convent, she decides to stay on “mostly because of Mother” and the
blinding light that she emits (46).
Known as “Mother Superior” to the townsmen and as “Mother” to the women who
visit regularly for the home-grown produce and specialty foods by which Mary Magna
and Consolata support themselves, Mary Magna’s status as Osun is further confirmed by
Connie’s statement to Mavis: “She is my mother. Your mother too” (11; 44; 48).
Moreover, Mary Magna’s near-death awareness of “the girls,” liminal figures who
“bunch around the door, but … don’t come in” and who require “feeding,” serves to
prefigure both Mavis’ own discovery in the house of unseen children—including her own
dead twins—and the ritual process that will allow each of the Convent women to not only 309
access the Spirit world but also to regularly traverse the Kalunga line that separates it
from the world of living (48).
Central to this emergent rite is Consolata, who, as a young child, was snatched
from a garbage pile in her native Brazil and brought to the school by Mary Magna. With
her first tasks being to purge the embezzler’s artifacts from her new home, which seemed
to her a castle “full of a beauty Mary Magna said had to be eliminated at once,”
Consolata was trained to clean, cook, and garden while also attending school with the
“Indian” girls (225). There she found little of the “magic” that had attended her initial kidnapping but she remained faithful to the only Mother figure she had ever known, the hand of whom she fondly remembers “stretching over the litter like a dove’s wing” (225;
228). Thus, “[f]or thirty years Consolata worked hard to become and remain Mary
Magna’s pride” by surrendering her “body and soul” to “the living God” (224; 225).
That is, until the “wing of a feathered thing” began “fighting for wingspread” in her own body (226; 227).
This nascent Osun is reawakened in 1954, when the new town of Ruby has just
built a pharmacy to which Mary Magna now travels for supplies. Consolata is
accompanying her one afternoon on just such a trip, when long-buried remembrances are
triggered by the sight of a jubilant gathering of Ruby’s townspeople:
As Consolata watched that reckless joy, she heard a faint but insistent Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. Then a memory of just such skin and just such men, dancing with women in the streets to music beating like an infuriated heart, torsos still, hips making small circles above legs moving so rapidly it was fruitless to decipher how such ease was possible. These men were not dancing, however; they were laughing, running, calling to each other and to women doubled over in glee. And although they were living here in a hamlet, not in a loud city full of glittering black people, Consolata knew she knew them. (226) 310
Here, the very sight of overjoyed Black people elicits Consolata’s recall of the Black
metacultural practices she “knew” in her native Brazil. “Sha sha sha,” the signifier that
serves to distinguish her sudden remembrance of this knowing, is now combined with the
sign of an emergent Osun, to indicate the desire that soon overwhelms her for Deacon
Morgan:
It was while Consolata waited on the steps [of the pharmacy] that she saw him for the first time. Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. A lean young man astride one horse, leading another.… Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. Consolata saw his profile, and the wing of a feathered thing, undead, fluttered in her stomach. (226)
In this way, the ‘dead girl’ is revived. For the disassociation of body and spirit that
Consolata had assimilated during “those thirty years of surrender to the living God
cracked like a pullet’s egg when she met the living man” (225).
For Consolata, reawakening to Osun, within the context of her fledgling
relationship with Deacon Morgan, is equivalent to recovering her pre-colonized state:
“Consolata let the feathers unfold and come unstuck from the walls of a stone-cold womb
Out here where wind was not a help or threat to sunflowers, nor the moon a language of time, of weather, of sowing or harvesting, but a feature of the original world designed for the two of them” (229). Indeed, Consolata’s description of their meetings—at a “burnt- out farmhouse” on remote land complete with “two fig trees growing into each other”— serves an inverted echo of that which “Ten generations” of Deacon’s male ancestors “had known … lay Out There: space, once beckoning and free, became unmonitored and seething; became a void where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose—behind any standing tree, behind the door of any house, humble or grand” (230;
16). 311
Consolata’s powerful sexuality serves, for Deacon, to validate the doctrine with
which he has been ingrained. After Deacon severs their relationship, Consolata’s
“hunger” “to go home,” her conviction that “he and I are the same” is sated, nevertheless
(236; 240; 241). When a “sunshot seared her right eye, announcing the beginning of her bat vision,” Consolata is said to have been “spoken to” (241). Thereafter, with Lone
DuPres’ intervention, her light-blindness is correlated with an ability to see into other
people’s minds and to raise the dead.
Initially, what Lone understands as “information, Consolata perceives as “magic,”
in which she “did not believe; … the church and everything holy forbade its claims to
knowingness and its practice” (244). Lone, the elder midwife in Ruby who, as such,
possesses sacred powers over procreation, assures her of the holistic tenor of Black
metacultural knowledges and practices but Consolata’s “religious habits [were]
entrenched. Her safety did not lie in the fall of a broom or the droppings of a coyote.
Her happiness was not increased or decreased by the sight of a malformed animal. She
fancied no conversation with water” (244). Once, however, Consolata does “practice,” or
revives a boy as he lay dying, she comes “to accept Lone’s remedies for all sorts of ills
and to experiment with others while the ‘in sight’ blazed away” (247). Indeed, “the
dimmer the visible world, the more dazzling her ‘in sight’ became” (247).
Consolata finds no comfort in her gift of “pure sight,” however, after Mary Magna
dies, (248). Thus begins the liminal or transitional phase that will lead to Consolata’s
own ritual process. Not only does she have “no identification, no insurance, no family,
no work,” but she also sinks into a drunken pit of despair, feeling orphaned, powerless,
and divested of self: “she felt like a curl of paper—nothing written on it—lying in the 312 corner of an empty closet” (247; 248). Like Shadrack, Milkman, Violet Trace, and others before her, Consolata is, therefore “a blank slate, on which [will be] inscribed the knowledge and wisdom of the group, in those respects that pertain to … [her] new status”
(Turner, Ritual 103).
The ‘group’ whose knowledge she will come to carry into action is not, however, the Catholic Church. Rather it is through Black metacultural knowledges that Consolata engages a ritual process for not only regaining the ‘dead girl,’ the fundamental self, which was so long ago stolen from Brazil but also for assuming the role of “the protector of birth, defender of mothers and adoptive mother of helpless children” (Santos 69). For, as Consolata’s “in sight” allows her to see the body forming itself in Pallas’ womb, she remembers the baby that Arnette had attempted to abort at the Convent.1 Called into action by yet “another one screaming No! as if that made it so,” Consolata sobers up and goes into the garden. There, she seeks guidance but “Mary Magna had nothing to say”
(251).
Thus, as Consolata sits in the garden—which she has arranged, like Ruby’s women, in deference to her own preferences, only—listening to Mary Magna’s “refusing silence,” the sky above her is said to take on “gold and blue-green” “plumage” and to “strut… like requited love on the horizon” (251). Here, the gold of Osun and the placid blue of etutu combines with the cooling wind, “blowing grains of soil against her legs” in the “winter- plagued garden,” to launch the opening segment of a ritual process of Osun (251).
1 Like Beloved before him, this baby rails against the prospect of not fulfilling his life-cycle. Thus, the “five- or six-month baby revolted: “Feisty, outraged, rigid with fright, it tried to escape the battering and battered ship that carried it…. Had it not tried to rescue itself, it would break into pieces or drown” (250). 313
In the very next passage, then, Consolata is visited by an ancestral presence.
Almost at once, this Osun figure overwhelms her: not only did Consolata immediately
“begin… to slide toward his language like honey oozing from a comb” but also “She felt light, weightless, as though she could move, if she wanted to, without standing up” (252).
“Flirtatious, full of secret fun,” the man sidles up to her, “without having moved,” and removes his tall hat and “mirror type” sunglasses (252). Now, Consolata finds herself face to face with the “cascading” tea-colored hair” and the same “round and green” eyes that she had possessed as a child (252). Thus, this introductory cooling rite functions to reawaken Consolata to “the secret child” within, who embodies the ‘masculine’ complement to her ‘feminine’ qualities that she had sought in a male God and in Deacon
(Badejo 19). Though unchanged by the passage of time and circumstance, this wholly self-contained ‘dead girl’ is only revived through the ritual process.
Finally, the amalgamation of Osun signs which have always obtained—albeit with perpetually shifting representations—in the mansion, congeal in the motley crew of
“throwaway” women who come to call the Convent home (4). Portrayed as distinct individuals with very different characteristics, experiences, class positions and ages, together, these women typify the figure of perpetual transformation. Significantly, their races are specified in the novel’s first line, only: “They shoot the white girl first” (3).
This line inaugurates Morrison’s move to “domesticate… the racial project,” to empower the Convent as a space which, finally, turns on “racial specificity minus racist hierarchy”
(Morrison, “Home” 8). As Krumholz notes, “[b]y specifying the White girl, Morrison has reversed the accepted racial logic in which blackness is the exception and whiteness the norm” (6). Moreover, with race divested of its ideological weight at the Convent, 314
what moves to the forefront is culture—a racially- and gender-specific metaculture, in fact, which turns on the mediating figure of Osun.
Thus, the narrative flows from directly Consolata’s ancestral visitation, the
introductory phase of the ritual process, to a cooling rite in which Consolata prepares a
meal for the Convent women. What follows, then, is a measured, metaphorical tour de
force, in which the description of the meal preparation actually functions to enact the
cooling phase of a ritual process of Osun. This signifying passage begins in this way:
In candlelight on a bitter January evening, Consolata cleans, washes and washes again the two freshly killed hens. They are young, poor layers with pinfeathers difficult to extract. Their hearts, necks, giblets and livers turn slowly in boiling water. She lifts the skin to reach under it, fingering as far as she can. Under the breast, she searches for a pocket close to the wing. Then, holding the breast in her left palm, the fingers of her right tunnel back the skin, gently pushing for the spine. Into all these places—where the skin has been loosened and the membrane separated from the flesh it once protected—she slides butter. Thick. Pale. Slippery. (252)
That the meal consists of female birds is but the first aspect of the process by which this
passage functions to mobilize symbols that are both the means and the ends of a ritual
process of Osun.
Secondly, Consolata thoroughly rinses the surface of their bodies, which are
undeveloped and paltry yet unwieldy. Then, the easily accessible parts of their bodies are
submerged in water. Meanwhile, Consolata works methodically to separate their flesh
from their wings and spines; finally, she buttresses these spaces with the abundance, the
coolness, the covertness of Osun, coded here as butter.
That the narrative itself partakes of this cooling rite is signified by its demarcation,
both before and after this passage, of a narrative pause of three spaces. As well, the
passage begins without the indentation that, conventionally, indicates a new paragraph.
These narrative ‘peculiarities’ function in a reciprocal manner. The former serves to 315
bridge the twin worlds and bring participants into a ritually transcendent state, serves to
effect the narrative’s conversion to ritual time. The latter functions both to literally
extend this conversion to the realm of textual space as well as to stress the indissociable relationship between the current representation and those that are delineated in the immediately preceding and subsequent passages.
Accordingly, then, the narrative enactment of the ritual process proceeds with no
indentation to indicate a new paragraph. Discrete passages, in which are recollected the
particular trauma that has precipitated each young woman’s self-displacement, are
juxtaposed, in call and response mode, with the highly symbolic stages of Consolata’s
meal preparation. The same narrative pause of three spaces separates each call from
Consolata’s response. The effect of this dialogic exchange is to denote the facility of a
ritual process of Osun for addressing all manner of individual need. No matter the
particularities of the call, Consolata’s reply functions to invoke the sign of a ritual
process of Osun.
Hence, Pallas’s unwanted pregnancy is met by this rejoinder: “As soon as the hens
are roasted brown enough and tender she sets them aside so they can reclaim their
liquids” (255). Gigi, whose “mother is unlocatable; her father on death row,” “had not approved of herself in a long, long time” (257). She is answered in this way: “Consolata is peeling and quartering small brown potatoes. She simmers them in water seasoned with pan juices … before arranging them in a skillet where they turn darkly gold” (257).
Mavis, a formerly abused wife who accidentally killed her twin daughters, has become increasingly preoccupied with “how fast... [the infants] were growing. And whether she could keep up” (260). In response, Consolata prepares a decadent dessert in which 316
“sweet, warm fluid moves” (260). Finally, there is Seneca, who was abandoned by a young mother who had convinced her that they were, in fact, sisters. A veteran of foster homes and various sexual abuses, she cuts herself. In return, Consolata summons the women to the completed meal, telling them: “I will teach you what you are hungry for”
(262).
With the cooling phase of the ritual process fulfilled, Consolata’s own displaced
‘dead girl is now re-embodied:
The women look at each other and then at a person they do not recognize. She has the features of dear Connie, but they are sculpted somehow—higher cheekbones, stronger chin. Had her eyebrows always been that thick, her teeth that pearly white? Her hair shows no gray. Her skin is smooth as a peach. Why is she talking that way? And what is he talking about? they wonder. (262)
Thus readied to lead the women in the ritual process, Consolata tells them: “[F]ollow me.
Someone could want to meet you” (262).
First, however, Consolata speaks about her own experience of the tension caused by the Manichean split between spirit and body. Then, recollecting Lone’s teachings—
“Don’t separate God from His elements…. Don’t unbalance His world”—Consolata orders the women, naked, to the floor, paints a silhouette around each body, and implores them to “Never break them in two. Never put one over the other” (244; 263).
Now, she continues to advise the women, recovering the contrapuntal iconography and perspective with which Chapter One ended. As I discussed earlier, that passage juxtaposes the men’s perspective, in which the women are correlated with Eve’s loss of innocence and ejection from the biblical Eden, with the yet-heard narrative perspective in which the women are anointed with “holy oil” and bounding toward the first solar moment. Here, Consolata revises the former: “Eve is Mary’s Mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve” (263). What is more, she elaborates upon the latter: 317
Then in words clearer than her introductory speech (which none of them understood), she told them of a place where white sidewalks meet the sea and fish the color of plums swam alongside children. She spoke of fruit that tasted the way sapphires look and boys using rubies for dice. Of scented cathedrals made of gold where gods and goddesses sat in the pews with the congregation. Of carnations tall as trees. Dwarfs with diamonds for teeth. Snakes aroused by poetry and bells. The she told them of a woman named Piedade, who sang but never said a word. (263- 264)
Prefigured in chapter one, the narrative perspective of Osun is hereby fully recovered.
Not only does this passage signify Black metacultural strategies for negotiating liminality, mitigating the debilitating effects of a rigid social structure and renewing existential certitude but it also conflates these strategies with symbols that are both the means and the ends of a ritual process of Osun. Moreover, the description of Piedade alludes to
Yeye’s function both as “the protector of birth, defender of mothers and adoptive mother of helpless children” and as intersubjective mediator of the secret, enigmatic powers thought to be possessed innately by women (Santos 69).
Portuguese for “mercy,” Piedade is the Brazilian native’s designation for the reconciliation of the “magic” she perceives in her “gift” and the Christian doctrine, as represented in both Catholicism and in Lone’s insistence on “Him” being a him— stripped of patriarchal presumption. It is this Osun figure to which Consolata introduces the women as she leads them in a ritual process that functions to unveil the permanent dimensions of reality, organize earthly experiences in accordance with this reality, and directly engage intense emotions in order to channel them creatively.
As Ana Maria Fraile-Marcos summarizes,
The stories of each of them unravel as a single loud dreaming shared by all, a communion and simultaneously a confession of sorts through which they purge and eventually purify themselves. Little by little, they cast off their former identities as they transfer their old selves to the empty silhouettes on the floor by drawing in the templates their particular natural features, and those not so natural—the scars that speak of Seneca’s pain and anxiety for love, a heart locket that speaks of Gigi’s 318
heart, a baby and a vampire woman’s face speaking of Pallas’ love and hatred. The women start repossessing themselves, reconstructing or recovering their unique souls. (13)
The entire ritual process unfolds over a period of several months. “By March,” the
breaching of the gap between the twinned worlds occurs: “days passed uncut from night
as careful etchings of body parts and memorabilia occupied them” (265). Thereafter,
they occupy both sides of Kalunga: “They had to be reminded of the moving bodies they
wore, so seductive were the alive ones below” (265).
Thus embroiled in the patterned phases of the ritual process, the women are both
new and the somehow the same. This is indicated in the narrator’s signifying passage
about the ways in which potential visitors’ perceptions of these women is dependent upon
the extent of their own affiliation with such figures. Save for the fact that the women’s
heads have been ‘redone,’ we are told, “A customer stopping by would have noticed little
change” (265). A neighbor, however, “would notice more”: how cool and covert the
women have become, the “markedly different look in the tenants’ eyes—sociable and
connecting when they spoke to you, otherwise they were still and appraising” (265-266).
Finally, we are told that a friend would immediately see “their adult manner; how calmly
themselves they seemed” but would also sense a palpable absence (266). Only after
passing neighbors in Ruby, only “then might she realize what was missing: unlike some
people in Ruby, the Convent women were no longer haunted” (266) [my emphasis].
The next chapter features the narrative perspective of just such a friend, Lone, the
never-married midwife whose function has been supplanted by the community’s
preference for both the male doctors and “comforts of the Demby hospital” as well as by the suspicion that she is personally responsible for the Fleetwood’s “defective” children
(271). Like the Convent women, Lone is pariah. This is because Ruby’s men both resent 319
her “secret skill” with regard to ushering in life and fear her ability to “read minds” (272).
Moreover, she is yet another aje, who is said to know “what neither memory nor history
could record: the ‘trick’ of life and its ‘reason’” (272). Thus, with “Lone” the
introspective presence of Osun is re-doubled in the narrative.
Not only does the very first paragraph of this chapter cast Lone as the friend who
immediately notices both the women’s lack of “haunting” and their newly-cleaned heads
but it also resignifies gardens as primary loci of Osun:
July not over, and the Convent garden had melons already ripe for picking. Like their heads. Smooth outside, sweet inside, but Lord, were they thick. None of them would listen. Said Connie was busy, refused to call her and didn’t believe a word Lone said. After driving out there in the middle of the night to tell them, warn them, she watched in helpless fury as they yawned and smiled. Now she had to figure out what else to do, otherwise the melons that got split would be their bald heads. (269)
Lone overheard the men’s plan to raid the Convent at the streambank, where she was collecting herbs while “the rain she had been smelling” was “far but still coming” (272).
The smell of approaching rain is but one of the “signs” Lone recognizes as “the
language God spoke in” (272). Thus, she stills herself in “the thirsty grass” and tunes in
to learn why “He wanted her to hear the men gathered at the Oven” and what He wanted
her to do about it” (273). The text reads:
At first she didn’t know what was going on, or what to do. But as in the past when she was confused, she closed her eyes and whispered, ‘Thy will. Thy will.’ The voices rose then, and she heard as clear as if she had been standing among them what they said to one another and what they meant. What they vocalized and what they did not. (274)
This passage is especially noteworthy because it demystifies Lone’s simple process of
opening herself to such extraordinary insight. This process, Lone insists, is available to everyone, yet most people “avoid… the obvious” (272). Pat Best, who burned her counter-reading of Ruby’s history, is a prime example of this but so, too, is Lone. For it 320
is upon hearing the “deep, male voices” at the Oven that Lone decides, finally, to “stop
nursing resentment at the townspeople’s refusal of her services; stop stealing penny
revenge by ignoring what was going on and letting evil have its way” (273).
As Lone listens in, the concerns of the would-be attackers’ carry none of the
altruistic overtones that accompany a local preacher’s weekly sermons on the same topic:
there was no pity, here. Here, when the men spoke of the ruination that was upon them—how Ruby was changing in intolerable ways—they did not think to fix it by extending a hand in fellowship or love. They mapped defense instead and honed evidence for its need, till each piece fit an already polished groove. (275)
As she “divine[s] the thoughts behind” their words, Lone explicates the personal grudges and potential advantages that propel seven of the nine men’s involvement in this plot to
attack “[n]ot women locked safely away from men; but worse, women who chose
themselves for company, which is to say not a convent but a coven” (277; 276).
What Lone “could not have imagined” the contrapuntal narrator supplies (279).
Thus, we are told of Steward’s and Deacon’s private motivations, which revolve around
their awesome fear of Osun. For Steward, the Convent women threaten “the nineteen
Negro ladies of his and his brother’s youthful memory and perfect understanding” who
were “scheduled to live forever in pastel dreams (279). Whereas Steward desecrates
Osun’s image by limiting her to the scope of his own private fulfillment, Deacon does so
by unloading his “personal shame” onto his long-ago lover, Consolata (279). Each twin
is both attracted to and terrified of Osun, who is resignified, respectively, as “the sunlit
skin and verbena,” and the “beautiful, golden-skinned, outside woman” (277). It is the
fact that she is “uncontrollable” that most threatens the twins’ “cherished view” of
themselves as both infallible and omnipotent (279). 321
With Lone rushing to prevent the attack, the narrative begins its measured return to
the opening action. By now, however, and courtesy of the narrative’s seriate structure,
the new fathers’ exceptionalist master narrative has been thoroughly deconstructed, and
the Convent women’s ritual process for recovering ‘the dead girl’ is well underway.
Now, mid-way through “Lone,” the seriate structure is consolidated with a fascinating
network of rhetorical strategies, the combined function of which is both to reveal and
forward the narrative’s overall mobilization of a ritual process of Osun to surmount the effect of the would-be-attackers’ ase.
Hence, the remainder of this chapter is divided into 13 discrete units, in which the
would-be-attackers’ perspective—which dominated the first chapter—is juxtaposed with,
and ultimately overwhelmed by a shifting, multiplying Osun perspective. This
perspective is figured in Lone, herself, as well as in her determined mobilization of
Ruby’s ‘true’ citizens, in the Convent women as well as in their garden, and in the
narrative’s repeated focus on the scented rainfall. What is more, the structural
peculiarities that function to distinguish each of the 13 units serve also to denote each
aspect of this perspective as part and parcel of an overall ritual process of Osun.
Just as in the passage in which is portrayed Consolata’s ritual meal preparation,
each of these units is set off from the surrounding text by triple spaces; neither is indented
to indicate a new paragraph. Again, the pauses constitute a cooling rite, which serves to
bridge the twin worlds and bring participants into a ritually transcendent state; the lack of
indentation functions both to literally extend this conversion to the realm of textual space
as well as to stress the indissociable relationship between the current representation and
those that are delineated in the immediately preceding and subsequent passages. This 322
amalgamation of rhetorical strategies not only makes for an irreducible density of
meaning but it functions, moreover, to enact, rather than merely describe, the ritual
process.
Take, for example, the initial three units, which seem to focus on the mounting
futility of Lone’s mission to prevent the massacre. Close attention to the passages’
signifying structures, however, reveals an elaboration of Osun force which serves to
augment Lone’s singular efforts. In the first of these sections, Lone seeks help from
Richard Misner; not finding him home, she retreats to his next-door neighbors, Frances
and Sut Poole. Now, Lone implore Frances to alert her husband:
‘Wake him.’
‘I’m not going to disturb my husband for some wild–’
‘Wake him, Frannie. I am not a crazy woman and you know it.’
The first drops were warm and fat, carrying the scent of white loco and cholla from regions north and west. They smashed into gentian, desert trumpets and slid from chicory leaves. Plump and slippery they rolled like mercury beads over the cracked earth between garden rows. As they sat in the kitchen light, Lone, Frances and Sut DuPres could see, even smell, the rainfall, but hey could not hear it, so soft, so downy, were the drops.
Sut was unconvinced that Lone’s demand to rush out and stop them was called for.... (281).
As if to buffer Lone’s objective, Ruby is inundated with water, which is envisaged in
much the same way as is Osun: infused with the fragrance of flowers, abundant and
forceful yet cool and covert. Once this mediating force is asserted, Lone carries on despite the fact that the Pooles’ refuse her appeal, “thinking if this mission were truly
God’s intention, nothing could stop her” (282). 323
This seems, indeed, to be the case. For just when the Lone’s next step is also stymied, the final of the initial three units begins. Here, the introspective presence of
Osun is resignified even as its opposition is further specified. The would-be attackers are said to move from the Oven to Sargeant Person’s “male cozy”—a shed in which he
“ruminated and avoided the women in his family.” Just as they are “finalizing details” over alcohol-laced coffee, “the rain started.” After rushing to cover Sargeant’s equipment from the rain, the “drenched” men “found themselves light-hearted and suddenly hungry.” A contrapuntal reminder, “The scented rainfall drummed,” precedes the passage’s final note: “the men ate thick steaks prepared the old-fashioned way.”2
With this, the opening rite in which the mediating agent of Osun is shown to bolster
Lone’s singular efforts comes to an end. To ready itself for the patterned stages of the ritual process that will unfold over the next ten sections, the narrative demarcates a triple space followed, this time, by three textual bullets. Now, the narrative quickly shifts to coolness by folding the repetitive structure of the coming rain into its portrayal of the culmination of the Convent women’s own ritual process. With no indentation to indicate a new paragraph, the narrative both recovers and refigures the contrapuntal iconography from its introductory chapter:
The rain’s perfume was stronger north of Ruby, especially at the Convent, where thick white clover and Scotch broom colonized every place but the garden. Mavis and Pallas, aroused from sleep by its aroma, rushed to tell Consolata, Grace and Seneca that the longed for rain had finally come. Gathered in the kitchen door, first they watched, then they stuck out their hands to feel. 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
2 Each of the quotations in this paragraph appears on p 282. 324
bow to the rapture of holy women dancing in hot sweet rain. They would have laughed, had the enchantment not been so deep. If there were any recollections of a recent warning or intimations of harm, the irresistible rain washed them away. (283)
Here, just as in chapter one, “Bodacious Black Eves” are anointed with “holy oil” during
the sun’s first moment (18). However, as they are now culminating a ritual process of
Osun, the women are no longer “like panicked does leaping toward ...[the] sun” (18).
Rather, they are specifically designated as “holy women dancing in hot sweet rain”
toward their rebirth. That the women have attained a state of ritual transcendence which,
moreover, constitutes iron, “a temporary, worldly manifestation of a permanent otherworldy reality” is explicitly asserted in this line: “Consolata, fully housed by the god
who sought her out in the garden, was the more furious dancer” (Drewal and Drewal 2;
283).
Still, in the nine units which make up the remainder of the chapter, Osun’s multiple
perspectives continue to be both elaborated and juxtaposed with that of the would-be-
attackers. The effect of this is to consolidate the narrative’s ongoing objective to redraw,
before finally collapsing, the boundaries of a town in which the fathers seem to exercise
absolute authority. Thus, as the chapter lurches on toward a revisive consummation of
the opening action, its fifth segment focuses on Lone’s determined mobilization of
Ruby’s ‘true’ citizens.
After Lone’s car becomes unstuck from the ditch that earlier had failed it, Lone
rouses Pious DuPres, in whose family she had been reared, of whose “deliberate righteousness” she is sure (284). Just as she expects, Pious and his wife, Melinda, rush to
her assistance, seeing “in a group intent on hurting women—for whatever reason—... the monster’s handiwork” (284). Indeed, the variety of select helpers that Pious hand-picks 325
from among Ruby’s families serves to further demonstrate that Ruby is not, after all, so
easily divided between 8-rock and non-8-rock, male and female, or even between the
Convent and the town itself. Rather it is polarized between those who adapt to historical
change by renegotiating and regenerating those cultural strategies that have long enabled
group cohesion and collective agency and those who simply replicate that which has
occurred in the past. That Ruby, founded on the grounds of the former perspective, will
no longer sustain the latter is denoted in the 10th discrete unit of “Lone, in which “the
citizens of Ruby” gather at the Oven, where the rain has “undermined” the very ground
on which the landmark stands, before going “to meet the men” (287). This section is,
moreover, strategically positioned after three others, each of which comprise the
narrative’s final move to revise the novel’s opening action in accordance with the
multiple Osun perspectives that have come, by now, to assume the novel’s center.
Thus, in section six, the Convent women return “from their night dance,” oil their
clean-shaven heads, and ask Consolata “to tell them again about” Piedade. Consolata’s reply functions to reiterate the ends of the ritual process. That is, she speaks of joining
Osun at the Kalunga line of life and death (“We sat on the shorewalk”/“She bathed me in
emerald water”), and she alludes to the ritual unification of pairs of opposites. As well,
she elaborates upon Osun as both a paradigmatic figure of consciousness (“Piedade had
songs that could still a wave, make it pause in its curl listening to language it had not
heard since the sea opened”) and as an intersubjective mediator (“Shepherds with colored
birds on their shoulders came down from mountains to remember their lives in her
songs”) (285). In the very unit, the women are thus said to “sleep, wake, and sleep again
with images of parrots, crystal seashells and a singing woman who never spoke. At four 326 in the morning they wake to prepare for the day,” the coming of the sun’s first moment
(285).
Section eight recovers the attacker’s original approach to the convent and implicitly explains their original impression that the “mansion floated, …disconnected from God’s earth” (18). That is, the narrative account of the men’s arrival is now revised to emphasize the first moment of the sun, the time when life begins anew, at work with the cooling effect of Osun:
Sunlight is yearning for brilliance when the men arrive. The stonewashed blue of the sky is hard to break, but by the time the men park behind shin oak and start for the Convent, the sun has cracked through. Glorious blue. The water of the night rises as mist from puddles and flooded crevices in the road’s shoulder. When they reach the Convent, they avoid loud gravel crunch by weaving through tall grass and occasional rainbows to the front door. The claws, perhaps, snatch Steward out of the world. Mottled and glistening from rain, they flank the steps. (285)
Even as the men charge the Convent, the sun’s first moment, water, and etutu all function as instigative symbols which “unite the organic with the sociomoral order, proclaiming their ultimate … unity, over and above conflicts between and within these orders”
(Turner, Ritual 52).
That Steward is “snatched out of the world” by the same garden in which Consolata first began direct communication with Osun serves to resignify gardens as Kalunga.
When the ninth segment of “Lone” recovers the massacre, this is precisely where the women are said to take refuge. Hence the men’s realization upon spotting them in the garden: “the women are not hiding. They are loose” (287).
Now comes the section I invoked earlier, in which the ground on which Ruby has long-stood is said to be irrevocably altered:
Shortly after the men have left Sargeant’s place, the citizens of Ruby arrive at the Oven. The rain is slowing. The trash barrel swirls with debris. The stream has crested but doesn’t overflow its banks. It seeps underground instead. Rain 327
cascading off the Oven’s head meets mud speckled with grout flakes washed away from bricks. The Oven shifts, just slightly, on one side. The impacted ground on which it rests is undermined. In trucks and cars the citizens go to meet the men. (287)
Here, the force of Osun is made to saturate Ruby and destabilize its primary icon, the
ritual function of which has long been supplanted by its appointment as the shrine around which the new father’s master narrative, and thus their power, revolves. With this, the
‘true citizens’ of Ruby begin shifting ground to the perspective of communitas and rush
to stop the massacre.
All arrive just in time to see Deacon Morgan try to prevent his twin, Steward, as he
shoots Consolata in the forehead. After Sargeant informs them that the other women
were killed, as well, the community heads home, “[b]ewildered, angry, sad, frightened,”
wondering “[h]ow could so clean and blessed a mission devour itself and become the
world they had escaped” (292). Yet when Roger Best, the town’s under-employed
caretaker, arrives there is not one dead person in sight.
Indeed, “in sight,” Consolata’s term for “pure sight,” is key to understanding the
women’s disappearance as a direct consequence of the ritual process that has been
unfolding since Ruby’s “garden battles” of 1963 (248). To demonstrate the ongoing
function and communal reach of this rite, the novel’s final chapter focuses on the
prospect of redemption for the entire town of Ruby before portraying the Convent
women’s ongoing existence.
“Save-Marie” is named for Save-Marie Fleetwood, the first native Rubyite to die
since Ruby Morgan’s 1952 death. That Paradise’s first and final chapters are named for
Ruby’s dead forwards the novel’s implicit bid that Ruby’s foremost dilemma has been its
estrangement from the exacting ethos of the Spiritworld. The resumption of death within 328
Ruby’s boundaries functions as iron, as a “temporary, transitory, and cyclical”
manifestation of “a permanent other worldly reality” (Drewal and Drewal 2). Save-
Marie’s death is, moreover, symptomatic of the beginning of a new cycle for Ruby’s
people, which is a direct result of the decision, by many in the community, to shift
ground to communitas in the wake of the assault on the Convent women.
This shift in communal perspective is explicitly represented in the scene in which a
contrite Deacon Morgan not only seeks out Reverend Misner’s solace but also, in an equally uncharacteristic show of humility, he walks barefoot through the streets of Ruby
to obtain it. Once there, Deacon divulges information that has been carefully edited out
of the legendary story that circulates in Ruby: the Old Fathers had fled Louisiana and
Mississippi after having been uncovered as charlatans (302). As its focus concerns his
“long remorse” at having drifted so far from the lessons the Old Fathers had finally
learned, Deacon’s story serves, moreover, to reveal the limitations that have plagued
Ruby since its founding by leaders of the second-generation (302). That is, in charging
himself with “having become what the Old Fathers cursed: the kind of man who set
himself up to judge, rout and even destroy the needy, the defenseless, the different,”
Deacon implicitly suggests that the Old Fathers had come finally to realize, and found
Haven upon, the most basic tenets of communitas.
In order to clarify his current relationship with his brother, Deacon goes on to share
a tale about his grandfather’s decision to disown his own twin after an unforgivable act
by the latter, “Not because he was ashamed of his twin, but because the shame was in
himself” (303). With this, Deacon analogizes that Steward’s murder of Consolata reveals
not a breach, but rather a troubling unity between himself and his own twin. 329
Here, the narrative’s persistent theme of twins and doubling as well as its seriate structure, both of which are constitutive of its “ritual plot,” are simultaneously laid bare and elaborated. Whereas the narrative’s seriate structure functions to undermine the polar logic that fuels the structure of Ruby, the novel’s numerous sets of twins and other siblings serves to further dissolve opposition into unity, as per ‘the ritual plot.’ For example, the sisters Dovey and Soane Morgan have come to an impasse because Soane refuses any accountability for Steward’s murder of Consolata. While Dovey alone has admitted to feeling “the weight of having two husbands, not one,” when the sisters are en route to the massacre-in-progress, both are said to “have known something awful was happening” before fretting privately about not having challenged the gradual accumulation of character deficits in their husband (90; 287).
Dovey implicitly links her willing ignorance of the “unknowable parts” of her husband to her reliance on her ancestral presence (287). Just before the massacre,
Dovey’s ancestral presence is said to be “moving away from her,” leaving “her hands ... wet” with “ suds” (287). When Soane later attempts to dodge personal culpability for the massacre, the contrapuntal narrator signifies a causal relationship between Dovey’s loss and the sisters’ unified character: “Soane does not know what she means, other than how to locate a sliver of soap to clean away any little taint she can” (292). The effect of this is to further elaborate the doubled relationships among the Morgans.
Moreover, that the most stringent of Ruby’s “new fathers” has now come to realize that opposition is best understood as complementarity functions to unify him with the very characters he had earlier sought to destroy. That is, Deacon has come to uphold the very Black metacultural grammar for existence which the narrative has typified in the 330
characters of Lone, Consolata, and the Convent women. Fueled by an enduring quest for equilibrium, this grammar is most concerned with balancing all forces in harmonious order and stabilizing “the transitory nature of human life” by correlating it with “the permanent features of experience” (MacGaffey, Modern 147).
Therefore, Deacon commits to the process of regenerating communitas, as
practiced by the Old Fathers. However, this will not be an uncritical repetition of what
has been done in the past. Rather, Deacon will integrate a lesson that his grandfather
never grasped, which Misner helps him uncover with these words: “To lose a brother is a
hard thing. To choose to lose one, well, that’s worse than the original shame” (303).
Steward comes to understand that the uneasy relationship with his twin reflects his own
concerns about himself, as indicated by his final exchange with Misner: “‘I’ve got a long
way to go, Reverend.’ ‘You’ll make it,’” Misner replies. “‘No doubt about it” (303).
Now the narrative demarcates a pause between this passage and each of the next
three to come, all of which feature no indentation to indicate a new paragraph. The effect
is the same as in previous deployments of this structural peculiarity: the narrative, itself,
is shifting to coolness in preparation for the ritual process that is to unfold on the coming
pages. Thus, with the very next scene, the narrative is no longer anticipating Ruby’s
redemption; it is, in fact, enacting the opening formula of another patterned stage of the
ritual process that has been building since the time of the women’s garden battles.
In this section, Misner and Anna Flood visit the scene of the massacre. There, they
find only chickens, fresh eggs and a garden filled with “blossom and death,” a “mix of
neglect and unconquerable growth” (305). The significance of these Osun signs do not
register with them; before leaving, however, the couple “saw it. Or sensed it rather, for 331 there was nothing to see” (305). Indeed it is only through “in sight” that a door, as Anna insisted, a window, as Misner recalled, to the permanent dimension of reality can be accessed. The passage ends with the couple’s silent wondering “what on earth” could be on the other side of such a portal (305).
With no indentation to indicate a new paragraph, the answer comes in the very next unit, in which Misner delivers the sermon at the funeral of Save Marie Fleetwood. There,
Misner “envisions the little girl” and iron unfolds before him: “when he bowed his head and gazed at the coffin lid he saw the window in the garden, felt it beckon toward another place—neither life nor death—but there just yonder, shaping thoughts he did not know he had” (305; 306). Thus, Misner advises the funeral attendees: “although life in life is terminal and life after life is everlasting, He is with us always, in life, after it and especially in between, lying in wait for us to know the splendor” (307).
Misner’s gaining of “in sight” is significant for he, too, has been privy to ancestral visitations. Whereas before “he could hear the light breathing of his companion, but no word of advice or consolation,” here Misner gains direct access to the Spiritworld (161).
Indeed, the unit ends with this note: “His words embarrassed him a little but on that day, nothing had ever been clearer” (307).
The final stage of the ritual process for Ruby’s redemption is envisioned from the perspective of Billie Delia:
Billie Delia was perhaps the only one in town who was not puzzled by where the women were or concerned about how they disappeared. She had another question: When will they return? When will they reappear, with blazing eyes, war paint and huge hands to rip up and stomp down this prison calling itself a town?… 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; who had seen in lively, free, unarmed females the mutiny of the mares and so got rid of them. (308) 332
Contrary to this report, the narrative has already ascribed the same understanding to Lone
(297-298). While Lone’s knowing is cast in the Christian jargon she favors, both women
specify that not only have the Convent women transcended the structure of Ruby but also
that the town can no longer abide those who refuse to adapt to change in ways which
serve to both commemorate the group’s past and accommodate individual agency.
Indeed, this estranged daughter of Ruby seems to represent a younger double of Lone: an
emergent Osun, fluid yet hot enough, perhaps, to balance the force of the emerging fathers of her own generation.
This suggestion, along with that of Ruby’s eventual conversion to the perspective
of communitas, is furthered in the section’s penultimate note that “a minimiracle had
already occurred: Brood and Apollo had reconciled, agreeing to wait for her to make up
her mind” (308). Because iron, both in its definition as a fleeting, transitory glimpse into
the “mysterious, permanent other worldly reality” and as a cyclical, worldly
manifestation of a continuing lineage, admits but a “moment of certainty,” the ritual
thought and activity that serve to invoke iron must be periodically reintroduced and
renewed by succeeding generations of each lineage (Drewal and Drewal 2). Thus, even
as the Morgans’ relationships seem to verge on destruction, the narrative theme of
doubling functions, here again, to signify the younger generation of Ruby as poised to
recommence the ritual process.
Thus, while the Poole brothers have reunited and agreed to allow Billie Delia time
to get her head, her ori, together, all involved are said to implicitly understand their
symbolic roles in the ritual plot of opposition and union: “she knew, as they did ... that the threesome would end only when they did” (308). This trio functions, moreover, to 333
resignify the prospect that the younger generation will further propel a communal shift
from structure to the perspective of communitas. For the youngsters have already re-
inscribed the Oven with the words, “We Are the Furrow of His Brow” (298).
With this, the narrative shifts to its closing formula. As per the ‘ritual plot,’ a
concise series of shifting scenes begins on a new page. Each is set off from the
surrounding text by triple spaces; none is indented to indicate a new paragraph. In these
episodes, one Convent woman after the other, save for Consolata, is envisaged as briefly
interacting with a loved one.
The effect of this is to mark the Convent women as temporary, transitory and
cyclical manifestations of a permanent otherworldly reality. They are not, as several
critics have suggested, envisaged as spectral presences.3 For the force of their ase is
tenable, as is demonstrated when Mavis actually embraces her daughter, Sal (315). As
Misner came to witness and confirm at the funeral, their ongoing existence partakes of
“neither life nor death,” but of “life after life … everlasting” (307).
Neither Gigi, Pallas, Mavis nor Seneca appears to resolve the issues that have long-
separated them from their respective loved ones. The narrative seems to suggest that
each will continue to be coaxed into the mundane world in order to engage the processual
ritual patterns by which conversion to communitas is achieved. This is indicated by the
ellipsis that separates Consolata’s unique experience, from that of the others.
3 Both Dalsgard [10)] and Fraile-Marcos [13] characterize the women’s reappearance as spectral. While Michael begins with “[i]t remains unclear whether they have survived in the flesh or in some sort of ghost- like form,” she quickly adds: “the latter being more likely since they seem to haunt those who have hurt them in the past” [12]. 334
Having consummated the ritual process of recovering the ‘dead girl,’ thus settling the question of ‘who is the Beloved,’ this orphan goes home:
In ocean hush a woman black as firewood is singing. Next to her is a younger woman whose head rests on the singing woman’s lap. Ruined fingers troll the tea brown hair. All the color of the seashells—wheat, roses, pearl—fuse in the younger woman’s face. Her emerald eyes adore the black face framed in cerulean blue. Around them on the beach, sea trash gleams.…
There is nothing to beat this solace which is what Piedade’s song is about, although the words evoke memories neither one has ever had: of reaching age in the company of the other; of speech shared and divided bread smoking from the fire; the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home—the ease of coming back to love begun.
When the ocean heaves sending rhythms of water ashore, Piedade looks to see what has come. Another ship, perhaps, but different, heading to port, crew and passengers, lost and saved, atremble, for they have been disconsolate for some time. Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in Paradise. (318)
Consolata seems to have settled into communitas with the ‘Good Mother’ at the Kalunga line of life and death.
This ‘Paradise’ is envisaged not as an ever-blissful hereafter, static and free of the challenges of structure. Rather, even here, it appears that the gendered Black metacultural principles with which the ritual process is implicitly concerned must be
“renewed by succeeding generations of actors” (Tiryakian 102). Here, just as in the mundane world, forever meditating this ‘endless work’ is Osun, “the ever-renewing source below the surface of the visible who makes renewal possible” (Murphy and
Sanford 6).
CONCLUSION TO THE “GETTING PLACE”
If you teach Morrison's novels as a way of reflecting the larger tradition, then you're getting to the getting place.
—Robert G. O’Mealley, Introduction, “Music and the Echoes of Memory” Plenary Session, Fourth Biennial Conference of the Toni Morrison Society
I am a dark rock surged upon and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am and the ebb but reveals me again.
—Zora Neale Hurston, “How it Feels to be Colored Me”
I don’t know how my mother walked her trouble down/ I don’t know how my father stood his ground/ I don’t know how my people survived slavery/ I do remember, that’s why I believe
—Bernice Johnson Reagon, “I Remember, I Believe”
I see realized the promise in Denver's stride as she walks purposefully down the road into a future that the ancestors cannot write. The daughters of the new millennium are writing the texts of the reimagined woman and of community re- invented, of women and community that could not have existed before now, of women and community that we will need to challenge the debilitating illusions of our time, to fight the malaise of the goddesses and gods within us, to impose the reasons for life on life.
—Opal J. Moore, “Enter, the Tribe of Woman”
Throughout this study, I have endeavored to explicate the striking rhetorical strategies by which Osun is reassembled and the entire Black metacultural field in which the timeless figure thrives is mobilized in the novels of Toni Morrison. In concluding this study, I would like to make an argument which might, seem, initially, to negate the very grounds on which this study stands. That is: to focus exclusively on Osun is to overlook the full scope of Morrison’s genius. For Osun is but one of many paths to the same place.
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This figure functions in Morrison’s novels as a mnemonic device for delivering
readers to a place of remembrance with regard to Black metacultural traditions.
Morrison’s singular achievement lies not only in the fact of her narrative representations
of such Black metacultural figures as Osun but, moreover, in the curious assemblage of
rhetorical strategies, the structures of signification and modes of figuration, by which she enacts an entire semiotic system of Black metacultural grammars within the texts.
Grounded in the author’s concept metaphor of “reviving the dead girl,’ the novels engage the work of recovering, renegotiating and recommencing those gendered metacultural grammars by which early generations of African Americans not only survived slavery and an enduring legacy of racial tyranny but also instituted and maintained crucial
measures of insight, order, and agency in the ‘New World.’ To say that Morrison’s
narrative project functions to extend to its readers the “hand” of Osun so that we, too,
might be “touched by her. Released in secret” is, therefore, to emphasize the ways in
which the novels extend to readers one particular path into the entire semantic field of
Black metacultural systemics (Jazz 221). Thus, rather than undercutting the arguments I
have already raised, this seeming idiosyncrasy points to the larger lessons of this study.
For one, if Osun is but one of many paths or mnemonic devices to Black
metacultural systems, then critical inquiries into other such paths are needed to fill in the
"holes and spaces" that Morrison refers to in speaking of her own work (Tate 125).
Moreover, Morrison is far from alone among Black women writers—either in her concern to disinter the ways of the ancestors’ cultures,’ or in her achievement of artistically rendering that which is typically laid bare only through active participation in
Black metacultures. I am convinced that applying a Black metacultural interpretative
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model to a wide array of Black women’s literature would serve to elucidate the broader
cultural significance of these texts, a significance which, as I discussed in my
introductory chapter, is often acknowledged but not fully contextualized nor thoroughly
explored by critics of Black women’s literature. In fact, this continuing shortcoming with
regard to criticism of Black women’s literature, prompts me to re-issue Hortense Spillers’
1985 call for a “widened critical awareness of tradition as an active verb” in the African
American women’s literary tradition (“Conjuring” 260 ).
Such perspicacity would, for example, certainly serve the critical enterprise with
regard to the literature of Zora Neale Hurston, who is seen as something of a spiritual
foremother to contemporary Black women writers. In the mid-1920's-1940's, Hurston
penned novels, short stories, essays, and dramas, all of which shared the same aim of
Black cultural conservation as the anthropological texts she also published during this
time. Regardless of the exact genre or medium in which she worked, Hurston’s foremost
goal was to “tell the tales, sing the songs, do the dances, and repeat the raucous sayings
and doings of the negro farthest down” (Hurston 129). While Hurston identified many of
the “characteristics of Negro expression”1 with which she embedded her work, her
literature begs for careful, close readings that might distinguish these characteristics as
Black metacultural grammars and uncover more of those upon which she drew.
As I discussed in my introduction to this study, in the early 1990s, Karla F. C.
Holloway and Carol Boyce Davies are among those who first ventured into what was then the largely uncharted territory of studying the linkages of both gender and culture
1 Hurston’s essay, of the same name, was published in Nancy Cunard’s 1934 anthology, Negro. It was reprinted in Zora Neale Hurston, The Sanctified Church, edited by Toni Cade Bambara (Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1981).
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that obtain in the writings of African and African Diasporan women. Amy Levin has
made recent strides in this still-nascent area of inquiry. Levin reads select Morrison texts,
along with those of other African American women writers,2 within the context of
traditional West African women’s organizations, such as the Sande Society of the Mende
and the Gelede of the Yoruba. Still, there is much work to be done with regard to further,
in-depth explorations of the ways in which gendered metacultural grammars might serve to influence other texts by Black women writers. By specifying Black women writers, I mean to reiterate how metacultures necessarily exceed the (artificial) boundaries of
nation-states. Thus, my reference here is to African American writers as well as those
who hail from other sites in the African Diaspora, such as Edwidge Danticat, who is a
native of Haiti, as well as the Jamaican writer, Erna Brodber, Trinidad’s Merle Hodge,
and Ama Ata Aidoo of Ghana, among many possible others.
Another lesson that emerges from this study concerns Morrison’s affinity with
other Black female artists. There are many such ‘traditioners’ or artists who perform
Africa-informed structures of signification and modes of figuration in the service of
recovering, for contemporary African Diasporans, the vast array of knowledges, modes
and praxes that are implicit to gendered Black metacultures. My contention that such
artistry merits a gendered Black metacultural interpretative model is not based, simply,
on the similarity of thematic concerns which is quite apparent in the works of the visual
artists such as Bettye and Alison Saar, composers and musicians like Cassandra Wilson
2 Levin includes in her study chapter-long readings of Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, Morrison’s first seven novels, the novels of Jamaica Kincaid, Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy. The four other chapters are devoted to combined readings of Beloved, Sherley Anne William’s Dessa Rose, Jubilee by Margaret Walker, and J. California Cooper’s Family.
339 and Sweet Honey in the Rock, as well as in the films of Julie Dash (Daughters of the
Dust, 1992) and Casey Lemmon (Eve’s Bayou, 1996). Even more compelling for me is the fact that such artists seem to draw on similar “grammars” in constructing not only the themes, but also the structures, and overall forms of their respective projects.
Just recently, for example, I had the opportunity of participating in an address by
Bernice Johnson Reagon, the scholar, singer, composer, and long-time activist who was a founding member of the original Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Freedom
Singers as well as the founder of the African American women’s a Capella ensemble,
Sweet Honey in the Rock. I say “participate” rather than “hear” because not only did
Reagon perform, rather than merely expound upon, her subject of “Slave Song Database and Oral Transmission: What Do We Know and How Do We Know it,” but this method functioned, moreover, as an invitation for knowing members of her audience to join in the very creation, delivery, and resolution of her performance/address.
That is, knowing members of the audience recognized as invitations Reagon’s lilting renditions of well-known spirituals as well as the notes she dispersed through her performance about the way song functions “within the cultural circle,” that spirituals are, in fact, “mnemonic devices to a place that can only be reached by singing.” Immediately, then, we responded to this insistent call, and functioned—in much the same way as did the community in response to Baby Suggs’ closing dance to her Clearing ritual—to carry this metacultural grammar into action. In this way, Reagon induced the audience to an exacting demonstration of “what we know” about the oral transmission of “slave songs” as well as “how we know it.”
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This example serves, as well, to demonstrate the penultimate implication of this
study. That is, in this brief example, in Morrison’s work and, I imagine, in many other
instances of Black women’s artistry, metacultural knowledge emerges as a process rather
than as product of the culture, itself. In other words, metacultural knowledges are, as
Reagon suggested of her own experience of somehow and simply knowing an entire
catalog of Spirituals, “learned ... without being taught.” I’ve made similar points
throughout this study. Here, however, in the context of what I am suggesting is a larger
tradition of Black women artists whose works have embedded within them the grammars
of a gendered Black metaculture, this point seems quite striking. Indeed, it seems to
point to the existence of yet another fundamental principle in Black grammatical
grammar, one that may suggest why it is that Black women’s artistry so often
“function[s] as both evidence of, and arguments for, cultural continuity” (Bambara xii).
As James Snead notes, “In black culture the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is
there for you to pick it up again when you come back to get it. If there is any goal in
such a culture, it is always deferred; it continually cuts back to the start, in the musical
meaning of cut, as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break ... with a series already in
progress and a willed return to a prior series”( 150). Indeed, this gesture of looking to the
past in order to recreate the future seems fundamental in Black metacultural systemics. I
would suggest that further critical attention is merited with regard to the ways this
grammar, informs the creative works of Black women. Initially, it seems to me that because Black women function overwhelmingly as the culture-bearers in Black cultures, this grammar serves in their art an implicitly didactic function of reinforcing Black
341 metacultural knowledges, values, and practices, with particular reference to the young, the uninitiated, and the ‘disremember-ers.’
As a final note, I would like to remark upon another aspect of Morrison’s achievement, which also carries implications for the case I have been making throughout this conclusion for bringing a gendered Black metacultural context to bear on the artistic works of Black women. That is, after locating and examining Morrison’s novels within a contextual continuum that includes both antecedent traditions and New World revisions of African cultural systemics, I believe that Morrison has contributed greatly to a growing critical understanding of the implicit grammatical principles that continue to generate similar cultural forms throughout the Black Diaspora. Moreover, I am convinced that, when joined to the tremendous quantity of cross-disciplinary research that now exists on multiple aspects of African cultural traditions, of various sites in the Black Diaspora, as well as studies of Africanisms, such literary perspectives have much to teach.
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Tiffany N. Hinton earned her B.A. in African American Studies at the University of
Cincinnati. She holds an M.A. from Florida State University. At the University of
Florida she served as a McKnight Doctoral Fellow.
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