STUDIES IN THE LITERARY IMAGINATION - Georgia State University

STUDIES IN THE LITERARY IMAGINATION
VOLUME XXXI, NUMBER 2, FALL 1998
TONI MORRISON AND THE AMERICAN SOUTH
INTRODUCTION
Carolyn Denard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i
BLACKS, MODERNISM, AND THE AMERICAN SOUTH:
AN INTERVIEW WITH TONI MORRISON
Carolyn Denard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
THE BOTTOM OF HEAVEN: MYTH, METAPHOR, AND
MEMORY IN TONI MORRISON’S RECONSTRUCTED SOUTH
Deborah Barnes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
SOUTHERN LANDSCAPE AS PSYCHIC LANDSCAPE
IN MORRISON’S FICTION
Carolyn Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
HISTORY, GENDER, AND THE SOUTH IN MORRISON’S JAZZ
Angelyn Mitchell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
THE POLITICS OF SPACE: SOUTHERNESS AND
MANHOOD IN THE FICTIONS OF TONI MORRISON
Herman Beavers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
SOUTHERN ETHOS / BLACK ETHICS IN MORRISON’S FICTION
Lucille Fultz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
TONI MORRISON AND THE SOUTHERN ORAL TRADITION
Yvonne Atkinson and Philip Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
INITIATION, SOUTH, AND HOME IN MORRISON’S
SONG OF SOLOMON
Catherine Carr Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
JAZZ—ON THE SITE OF MEMORY
Judylyn S. Ryan and Estella Conwill Majozo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
COPYRIGHT 1998
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY

Carolyn Denard
TONI MORRISON AND THE AMERICAN SOUTH
Introduction
Carolyn Denard
While scholarship devoted to the fiction of Toni Morrison is expanding,
until recently, critics have given little attention to the role of the American
South in Morrison’s novels. Criticism that focused on the South at all in
Morrison’s work had, up until 1995, addressed in a general way issues that we
may only consider relatedly Southern: slavery, folklore, community, or
Morrison’s literary world view—one that is often compared with that of William
Faulkner. With the publication of Jazz in 1992, the South that had informed
the background of most of her recently migrated Northern characters
moved to the foreground. The historical reality of the Great Migration 1 of
Blacks from the South to the North during the years surrounding World War I
and, that conflict’s effect on the migrants were clear in the central role given
the South in the development of Violet and Joe Trace in Jazz. This novel
seemed to point, retrospectively, to the powerful but unstated influence that
the South had on all of Morrison’s characters. As noted Morrison critic John
Leonard so aptly pointed out in his 1992 review of Jazz, “if we know anything
about the characters in Morrison’s novels, we know that sooner or later they’re
going to head South: if need be all, all the way back to antebellum, not only for
the servitude, the foreclosures, the lynchings and the mutilations but for those
ghostly waters and that bag of ancestral bones.” 2
After 1992, scholars began to ponder more openly the meaning of
the South in Morrison’s fiction. In April 1995, at Bellarmine College’s First
Toni Morrison Conference, in a session called “New Directions in Morrison
Scholarship,” I delivered a paper entitled “A Place of Memory: the American
South in Toni Morrison’s Fiction.” What became clear increasingly through
reading Morrison’s fiction, as was borne out by the life experience of many
Black Southerners who traveled to the North, is that there truly was a haunting
ambivalence about the South in these recently arrived Northerners; theirs truly
was a love-hate relationship with the South, and the farther and longer they
were away from the South, the more often those memories became ones of
love. As the daughter of Southern migrants, Morrison understood ambivalence
and with just the right subtlety in her fiction that kept the presence of the
South constant but always just beneath the surface of her Northern characters.
Looking back over the world of Morrison’s fiction, I realized that the meaning
of the South was, indeed, a major component of what you had to “figure in”
Studies in the Literary Imagination 31.2, i Fall 1998 © Georgia State University

Introduction
before you could appreciate the full range of meaning of character and conflict in
her novels. The paper at the Morrison conference at Bellarmine College was well
received. The session promised that there was much work to be done in this
area, that there was much uncharted territory in this area deserving further
exploration by Morrison scholars. The paper at the Bellarmine conference
became the genesis of both this issue’s focus and the focus of what would
become its programming complement: The Toni Morrison and the American
South Conference, the first biennial conference of the Toni Morrison Society,
held in September of this year at Georgia State University.
No doubt it was Morrison’s open engagement with the South in Jazz in 1992
that also encouraged Katherine Komis to begin work in 1994 on her M.A.
thesis on the South in Morrison’s Fiction at California State University,
Northridge. In June 1995, Komis completed the first Master’s Thesis on the
subject: “Toni Morrison’s Vision of the American South in Song of Solomon,
Beloved, and Jazz.” These early efforts of a conference paper and an M.A.
thesis—culminating most recently in the Toni Morrison and the American South
Conference where Komis, scholars included in this issue, and a host of
Morrison scholars gathered—were the first sustained explorations of the meaning
of the South in Morrison’s fiction. The publication of this issue records
and expands this dialogue and, thus, becomes a major contribution to this
recent direction in Morrison scholarship.
It is not surprising that few scholars had addressed the South as a theme in
Morrison work; she is, after all, not a Southerner but a Midwesterner who has
spent most of her adult life in the North. Owing to this, readers had not expected
to encounter the South as a theme in Morrison works; further, critics
did not feel the need to address Morrison’s treatment of the South in her novels.
In a sense, it is Morrison’s distanced perspective of what the South meant
to those who left the region that has made her treatment so valuable. Morrison
is keenly aware of the complex historical and cultural meanings that the South
holds for African Americans. Her parents both migrated to Lorain, Ohio from
the South, and she had first-hand knowledge of the enduring yet often contradictory
memories those who had left. “My father,” she says, “was born in
Cartersville, Georgia and he left when he was 14. He thought it was the worst
place in the world, but he always went back. My mother, was born in Greenville
Alabama, and she left when she was six.” Morrison adds that, when she talked
about the South, she talked about the South like it was Eden. But she never
went back.” The early knowledge of her parents’ contradictory relationship
with the South—”the always go back, the never go back”— taught her that the
South was a place “not wholly terrible nor wholly pleasant. And though she is
not a Southerner, she acknowledges that the South “legitimately informs” her
work because it informed the life her parents shared with her when she was a
child. 3
The experience of Morrison’s parents as Southern migrants was part of the
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Carolyn Denard
larger, collective experience of nearly four-million African Americans who left the
South between Reconstruction and World War II and migrated to the urban
North in what is historically referred to as “The Great Migration.” This massive
migration was without precedent in the United States, and was a singular historical
and cultural event in African American life. While its impact may have
been most intense during the World War I years and after, it is clearly a movement
that has touched the contours every facet of African American life—North
and South—from Reconstruction to the present. Thus, as a chronicler of the
personal, psychological and cultural dramas which emanate from that history,
Morrison would ultimately be engaged in the meaning of the South in the
African American psyche and in the development of African American culture
even if she were not a southerner. The dual role of the South as a site of early
family and community nurturance and societal racial restrictions and denials
would command Morrison’s attention. The South is both a point of departure
and a pivot for much of the action and conflict in all of her novels.
The South hovers in the nightdreams and daydreams of Morrison’s characters,
in their private, clarifying conversations; occasionally, a character actually
travels South. There is this cognitive, remembered, and sometimes physical
engagement with the South in Morrison’s fiction because in all of her novels
central characters are themselves or are the daughters and sons of southern
migrants. This North where they live and where most of the action of the novel
takes place is for most of her characters a recently arrived-at place; it is the
place they have come to after leaving the place they call home—and that home
for most of them—for better and for worse—was the South (Down Home,
New Orleans, Shalimar, Eloe, Sweet Home, or Vesper County). From Pauline
and Cholly Breedlove to Eva Peace and Helene Wright to Pilate and Macon
Dead, to Sidney and Ondine and the ever-roaming Son Green, to Sethe and the
wagon loads of slaves who fled from Kentucky to Violet and Joe Trace, and,
alas, to the founders of Ruby, Oklahoma, many of Morrison’s characters—if
not all the major ones—are southern migrants. They are characters whose formative
growth, even with its slavery and prejudice, occurred in the South. But
they are also characters who fled that South of their formative years for dire
and urgent reasons. They had no time to think fondly of the South. And as such,
the South conjures up intimate—both affectionate and hateful—memories.
Much of the time these migrants spend in the North becomes a way of working
out the cultural and psychological effects of their leaving.
Morrison does more than probe the meaning of the South in the cultural
and psychological lives of millions of Africans Americans who left the region
in the national drama of the Great Migration, she also offers an understanding
of the significance of the mythic meaning of the South in African American
life in ways that transcends it. In the expansive journey of the diaspora, the
South, as she explains in the interview for this issue, became a site of modernist
engagement in the New World. In this interview Morrison speaks profoundly

Introduction
about the mythical role of the South in the African diaspora: “Out of thrown
things,” she says, “they invented everything: a music that is the world’s music,
a style, a matter of speaking, a relationship with each other, and, more importantly,
psychological ways to deal with it. And no one gives us credit for the
intelligence it takes to be forced into another culture, be oppressed, and make
a third thing.” The idea that Morrison posits here of the South being the birthing
place of a “third thing”—a reality not wholly African nor wholly Southern but
something totally “new,” the improvisational result of the collision of those
two cultures on the site of the American South—points to the enormous potential
of a scholarly inquiry on the meaning of the region in African American
that may reach beyond even Morrison’s novels. We may come to understand
the South not only as a referenced site which embodied the conflicted longing
of Southern migrants in the North, but also as a site of nascent modernism in
the New World.
The focus, then, of scholarly inquiry into the uses and meanings of the South
in Morrison’s fiction can take various angles. In her interview for this volume,
Morrison gives a personal view of the familial, cultural, and mythic meanings
of the South in Black life and how the South has served as a backdrop in her
novels. Morrison also talks in this interview about going South for the first
time, herself; and about the Westward migration of Blacks from the South and
the historical backgrounds of her latest novel, Paradise. Morrison’s interview
sets the stage for the scholarly questions and analyses that follow in the next
seven essays. In, “Myth, Metaphor, and Memory in Toni Morrison’s Reconstructed
South,” Deborah Barnes challenges the alienated status Blacks in the
South and the U.S. with a historical analysis that validates their rightful sense
of belonging. Morrison sets the historical record straight, she claims, by “reconstructing”
the South in her fiction in a way that restores that Southern birthright
to African Americans. Barnes argues that Morrison “uses fictive narratives
to transfigure the old South—the bedrock of Black dehumanization, degradation,
and sorrow—into an archetypal Black homeland, a cultural womb
that lays a mother’s claim to history’s orphaned, defamed, and disclaimed African
children.”
The mythical and historical transformation of the South into affective home
place can be distinguished from understanding the meaning of what the daily
forced disengagement from the land that Southern Blacks had to endure. This
inquiry involves a more psychological approach that explores the personal
implications of an individual’s establishment—through work and spirit—of an
intimate attachment with the land, only to have that connection denied by forces
of law and economics. “It is this disjunction between the intimate and the alien,”
Carolyn Jones claims, “that Toni Morrison explores through the metaphor of
landscape in her fiction.” In her essay, “Southern Landscape as Psychic Landscape
in Toni Morrison’s Fiction,” Jones argues that “in the act of writing, of
reclaiming the landscape through memory and imagination, Morrison establishes
the South as a site for both disjunction and reunion with the self.”
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v
Carolyn Denard
In their essays, Angelyn Mitchell and Herman Beavers look at the impact
the migration to the North had on Black men and women. Mitchell argues in
“History, Gender, and the South in Toni Morrison’s Jazz,” that each of the major
women characters in the novel—Rose Dear, True Belle, and Violet—embodies
a representative Black female response to successive periods of history:
slavery, Reconstruction, and the Great Migration. In Jazz, Mitchell argues
“Morrison offers a discursive engagement with history in order to contest
the erasure and/or misrepresentation of southern Black women within the
historical discourse of hegemonic culture.” In his essay, “The Politics of Space:
Southernness and Manhood in the Fiction of Toni Morrison,” Beavers offers,
through both an examination of the letters from male migrants to the Chicago
Defender and an analysis of the men in Morrison’s novels, a provocative interpretation
of the meaning of the movement North for African American men.
Historically considered as a movement toward manhood, Beavers argues, instead,
that the migration North actually complicates notions of Black manhood
by associating manhood only with work and material pursuits—often
unrealized in the North. Morrison’s novels, he argues, “depict [Black men’s]
collisions with obstacles that endanger their ability to imagine alternatives
ways of performing their humanity.” Their challenge, as Black men faced with
this dilemma in the North, was to cast off the “vertical structures” and to find
alternate ways of defining their manhood.
In an analysis that offers specific validity to Beavers’s claim, Catherine Carr
Lee in “The South in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: Initiation, Healing
and Home,” argues that self knowledge for Milkman—even though he was
born in the North—and psychological healing for his family only comes when
he returns to the South. Lee claims that in directing Milkman’s journey southward
and locating wholeness in the Southern communities of his ancestors,
Morrison, “subverts the classic American initiation story” that has the protagonist
always moving out of the protection of the home community and into
an alienated individualized location of self-realization.
Lucille Fultz, Philip Page, and Yvonne Atkinson focus in their inquires on
the aspects of Black Southern culture that survived the migration and became,
by fusing past and present, ways of maintaining both a Southern and African
American identity. In “Southern Ethos/Black Ethics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction,”
Fultz first establishes the groundwork for the creation of a “Black ethic”
within a Southern ethos, then demonstrates the ways in which that Black ethic,
though created in the South and often challenged by the Northen-born second
generation, survived in the North and served as the basis for the development
of a distinctive Black culture which championed the collective over the individual
and civility over crass materialism. In “‘I Been Worried Sick About You
Too Macon’: Toni Morrison, the South, and the Oral Tradition,” Philip Page
and Yvonne Atkinson argue that the language of the African-American oral tradition
was one of the strong remnants of Southern culture that remained when
Blacks moved North and that the use of the rhetorical patterns of the oral

Introduction
language became a way to determine who of the Northern migrants still sought
and African American cultural sense of belonging. Page and Atkinson delineate
the language patterns and their contextual use in the novels and conclude
that “Morrison infuses her fiction with rhetorical tropes from the Southern
oral tradition of Black English in order to bring the rich, aural, Southern legacy
of storytelling, mythmaking, and communal participation to literary texts and
. . . to create a literary form that captures the cultural realities of African American
life.”
In the final essay of this volume, “Jazz . . . on the Site of Memory,” Judylyn
Ryan and Estella Mojozo move beyond the Southern-influence historical and
cultural ways of life in the novels and focus instead on the symbolic and artistic
possibilities of the South as a site of African American creative transformation.
Their essay is a meditation on the “third thing” that Morrison suggests
is the creative result of the cultural fusion of Africa and the South. While
Ryan and Mojozo point out that the American South is one of many sites of
such creation in the diaspora, they argue that the South was an important site
of cultural transformation for African Americans and that the South, itself,
was transformed from a site of “exile” to a site of “home” when Blacks migrated
North. The goal of Ryan and Mojozo in this essay, as it is in Morrison’s
fiction, is not just to name the resulting form created in this cultural fusion of
the diaspora but to explore the nature of the improvisation and the usefulness
of the artistic structure as a form of agency. While focusing specifically on
Jazz, Ryan and Mojozo trace “Morrison’s exploration of the philosophical and
epistemological potential of a diverse range of diaspora expressive arts . . .
and reveal how these . . . arts have functioned as a mode/institution of intervention,
and, therefore, as a blueprint and resource for re-creating a whole self.”
The essays in this volume constitute the first serious, documented exploration
of the uses and meanings of the South in Morrison’s fiction. There are
many questions answered in these analyses, but there are many more questions
raised. There are illuminations here, but there are also signs and traces
of other connections we might see. As a writer and intellectual who probes
such historical and cultural meanings in her work, Morrison willingness to
talk directly about the use of South in her fiction and its meaning in African
American life demonstrates that she is as engaged in this inquiry as the critics.
Her works are testaments to her deep understanding of the role of the South in
the psychic wholeness and the artistic creativity of African Americans. This
volume is a celebration of the legitimacy of this inquiry and of its “first fruits.”
It is also, and more so, a call to have others scholars join in the dialogue around
this and other questions about literature, culture, and meaning embedded in
the rich territory of Toni Morrison’s fiction.
vi

NOTES
vii
Carolyn Denard
1For an historical overview of the Great Migration see Geroge W. Growh’s The Black
Migration: The Journey to Urban America; also Florette Henre’s Black Migration Movement
North, 1900–1920.
2 See John Leonard’s Review of Jazz in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Amistad. 1993. 48.
3 Unpublished comments by Morrison made at the Toni Morrison Society Chartering Ceremony,
April 1995. Atlanta, Georgia.

Carolyn Denard
BLACKS, MODERNISM, AND THE AMERICAN SOUTH: AN
INTERVIEW WITH TONI MORRISON
DENARD: You are not a Southerner. You were born and grew up in Lorain,
Ohio. So your sense of the South and what African-Americans value and/or
hate about the South comes largely from your parents’ memories of the South—
the stories told to you when you were growing up. What was the perception,
the sense of the South that you gained from your parents?
MORRISON: They had diametrically opposed positions. My father was born
in Georgia. My mother was born in Alabama. Both were from very small towns
in those states. My father thought that the most racist state in the Union was
Georgia and that it would never change. My mother had much fonder memories.
She was very nostalgic about the South. But she never visited it—ever.
While my father went back every year. Quarreling and fussing all the way, he
went back to see his family—aunts, uncles—there. So I grew up with a complicated
notion of the South, neither sentimental nor wholly frightening. On
the one hand, with no encouragement, my mother was nostalgic about the Alabama
farm, yet she would talk in a language of fear about her family’s escape
from the South. On the other hand, my father recounted vividly the violence
that he had seen first-hand from White southerners, but he regularly returned.
DENARD: What about your own impressions of the South when you toured
with the Howard Players, or when you taught at Texas Southern University, or
when you’ve visited since then?
MORRISON: What impressed me when I first went to the South for a sustained
period of time (with a theater group from Howard) was the sight of so
many people like me, like my relatives. I think Ralph Ellison said something
elegant but similar when he was trying to answer Irving Howe. Howe had asked
why would he have any good feelings about the South, and Ellison said that the
South was full of Black people. Well that’s suddenly what I realized. When
you go there, while it was true that I was going into a white domain, what I was
aware of primarily are the Black people there, and they were like people in
Lorain, Ohio. And I didn’t have to change my language or my manners. The
accents were different but the language was not. I recognized and participated
in the culture. I mean the food, the music, the way in which you behaved in
other people’s houses, what you don’t do with strangers, what you do—they
were no different whatsoever from the way I had been reared in Lorain, Ohio.
Also, I had a sense of—I hate to use these over-taxed words—a sense of belonging
and community that was lifesaving. I used to tell my children about
how I felt when my sister and I as young girls were in the company of so-called
Studies in the Literary Imagination 31.2, Fall 1998 © Georgia State University

An Interview with Toni Morrison
vaguely criminal men in Lorain. Men who gambled, sold illegal liquor, or what
have you. But when we saw them on the street they were safety zones for us. If
we needed to get home, they took us. If we were someplace where we shouldn’t
be, they told us. If we needed protection, they gave it. So I always felt surrounded
by these Black men who were safe. I knew I was safe with them; the
people I ran from were not them. I felt the same thing traveling through the
South on trains. The porters—even when I was a grown woman traveling with
my children the porters were the praetorian guard. They were the ones who
gave me extra orange juice and didn’t charge me for it because I had a little boy
with me; they were the ones who gave me the pillow anyway whether I purchased
one or not. It was a kind of chivalry that I had come to expect from
Black men. You see a Black man, you know you’re safe. And that was precisely
the feeling I had in the South, of protection and care and solicitous, unflirtatious
behavior. This very recent notion of Black men as threats stuns me.
DENARD: Were there other people in Lorain, other family members or friends
or people you met at Howard, who had lived in the South and who expressed
the similar views of the South that your parents did?
MORRISON: Many.
DENARD: Tell me about those people.
MORRISON: Many of my father’s people lived in Chicago and most of my
mother’s people lived in areas around Ohio, Michigan and California, but all
of them had come from the South originally. My mother came north very young.
She was six. And she went to school in Ohio as did her sisters and brothers.
And her parents, along with many of the aunts and uncles in Cleveland and
Lorain, made up a culture that I didn’t identify by region but only as Black. I
learned later how pronounced the variations of culture—from state to state or
region to region—are. I’ve never felt that sense of familiarity within variety
anywhere else except in Brazil where you see evidence of intrinsic, even dominant,
Black cultures—each one of which is strikingly different in cuisine and
dress and music from the others, and they all speak different kinds of Portuguese.
But somehow, however, they relate to each other. When you are in that
company, you feel as though you are in exalted company.
There is another aspect of the South that I remember which exemplifies
that notion of community that we talked about earlier. When I first went South
with the theater group from Howard, we couldn’t count on living quarters. I
mean they made adequate reservations in advance, but we were traveling in
several cars, and sometimes we arrived too late and the rooms were taken. As
faculty members, they were all dedicated to making sure that we were all safe.
So they looked in the yellow pages of the telephone book and called up
churches. And invariably, the minister or his wife would answer, and the fac-
2

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Carolyn Denard
ulty would tell them who we were and where we were from and that we were on
our way to do a performance at some school or whatever and then ask where
we might find lodging. Invariably, the minister said “call me back” or “come.”
He would find three or four parishioners who were pleased to house us.
DENARD: This sounds very familiar. This kind of house-lodging continued
right up through my high school years in the late 60s. We would go to conferences
at other schools, and we stayed at people’s homes. That’s the way it
happened; they never tried to get hotels. Instead, they had a registration table
with a list of people’s homes and addresses. So they didn’t choose not to have
the conference because they didn’t have lodging. They just facilitated it with
the help of the members of the church or others who were willing to offer
their homes for the church.
MORRISON: Well when we went there, I thought that was fascinating, not
because I wasn’t accustomed to that kind of hospitality within the community,
but because these were emergency circumstances it was like an underground
railroad. This included places to eat. I remember when we were in Virginia and
there was no restaurant in this tiny little town where we could eat at all. But
one of the faculty members knew or had heard of a man who had been a chef in
New York who was retired now. He didn’t have a restaurant, but he cooked for
guests in his house. And that was easily one of the best meals I’ve ever had.
DENARD: I’m sure. When we travel now, we often look for these small mom
and pop kind of places in Black communities rather than the large restaurants
so we can we can have what we still consider the “better” food.
MORRISON: And it was. The preserves they had canned, the biscuits were
homemade. It was like eating at my grandmother’s table.
DENARD: In the novels, the ambivalence that the migrant characters feel about
the South rings so true. It rings true to the experiences that your parents had
and that I had with my family. The ambivalence echoes the feelings that migrants
expressed in letters to the Chicago Defender and ones collected by
Emmet Scott, where repeatedly they said things like “I miss the folks down
home, please send me vegetables and preserves,” but they also said “there’s no
Jim Crow car; I can sit anywhere I want,” or “here I can be a man or a woman
with a decent paying job.”
MORRISON: You give up a lot, you know, to take advantage or benefits of
urban or working life elsewhere. The problem is trying to balance those two
environments. Sidney doesn’t want to live in Baltimore. And Pauline could not
go back either. Some of the fault of the urban areas, it seems to me, was it took
a longer time to become part of that community. Urban Blacks were very much

An Interview with Toni Morrison
on the defensive. We used to joke about calling up relatives or friends in New
York and they’d greet you by saying “where are you staying?”
DENARD: (Laughter) They were trying hard NOT to be southern. I wonder
whether part of the tension of living in the North really was mediating between
the way you remember yourself versus the new way you wanted to be. In every
novel there is this tension, of course the saddest being Sethe’s re-memory of
Sweet Home in Beloved. There’s Pauline in The Bluest Eye and then there’s
Violet in Jazz who says it all—“I knew who I was before I came up here and got
my mind all messed up.” These instances point clearly to the tensions. No one
has articulated that tension in literature in the kind of sustained way that you
do in your fiction.
MORRISON: Maybe because they are mostly women who feel that tension
in my books. When men come to the city, perhaps they feel more urgency to
conquer and make their way out in the street, so to speak. For women, because
they are domestic, they remember domestic support—friends, exchange of
food, and so on—and they have difficulty trying to reproduce it in the urban
North. In a very large city you have to pick your clan very carefully. In a small
town like Lorain, it would just be easier to be near a city like Cleveland, but
not in it.
DENARD: John Leonard said in his review of Jazz, that if you read a Morrison
novel, “you know sooner or later she’s going to go South.” It may be, he says,
“all the way back to antebellum or sometimes it’s the trials and tribulations and
the horrors,” but it is also for what he calls “those ghostly waters and that bag
of ancestral bones.” When you start to write, in terms of character development,
and in trying to say something about the characters’ past and the impact
of African-American history, of African-American identity and psychology,
how important is the presence of the South in that development? Is it just
drawing an authentic character and that’s how they flesh out, or were you thinking
first of placing the South self-consciously in the development of the character?
MORRISON: It starts with characters. When I think about the context in which
to put a character, I think about the characters’ preceding generation. I didn’t
want to create an “atom”—a family just sort of sitting there in a vacuum—
which seemed to me to be at one time not just current in literature but demanded.
In the 50s and 60s in certain literature certain authors preferred to
create characters in isolation. Hemingway never writes about his character’s
families; Fitzgerald writes about family in terms of what a character is running
away from. But it’s all very much now—the woman they’re falling in love with;
the work they’re doing at the moment. When they describe a region—Michigan
or Paris—that’s enough to give the narrative its context. For me, in doing
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novels about African- Americans, I was trying very hard to move away from the
unstated but overwhelming and dominant context that was white history and to
move into another one. So in thinking about place and where these people
come from, I did the inevitable thing because what I knew most about were the
people I lived among and where they had come from and my own sense of what
the place was like. I was trying to do a very modern novel and comment on
what I thought were contemporary issues between Black men and women.
Nevertheless, even in dealing with an orphan like Jadine—and although she
despised being an orphan—at the same time she relished the freedom of not
having any familial or cultural weights. But the people who did feel responsible
for her—her aunt and her uncle—were themselves very much a product
of the South even though they lived in splendor in a sense—as servants they
lived a comfortable life.
DENARD: In Sula, there is less of a sense of an affective South. In most of
the novels, both sides are shown—Cholly Breedlove remembering his humiliation
with Darlene and his father on the one hand and Pauline remembering
blackberry vines and lemonade on the other. Or Sidney priding himself in being
a Philadelphia Negro while dreaming refreshing dreams of Baltimore. There
are always both sides of the memory. Sula, however, seems to be the only
novel where there is no affective memory of the South—except perhaps Nel
who realizes some sense of herself as separate when she returns from the
South when she say’s “I’m me, I’m me,” but it’s not an affective memory of
being in the South.
MORRISON: In that book—it was the second book I wrote—that culture was
intact for me. It was like a moveable feast—you could take it anywhere, and
you didn’t have to identify geographically with anything because it was all there.
DENARD: So it works thematically not to bring in this other history.
MORRISON: It’s almost as though it didn’t matter where Black people were
in the 20’s and 30’s. They were still operating under the aegis, or umbrella, of
a culture that had probably been reconfigured in the new world in the South.
Most of the major themes and threats I think had originated there.
DENARD: I often wonder whether this lack of an affective connection to the
land or the community is some of the difficulty with Sula—with her trying to
create and existential self and not really being able to do that. I think sometimes
because she does not have that tie to the land or to something larger than
her household, she flounders. There is the hint that she goes South to Nashville—although
she doesn’t seem to find anything there.

An Interview with Toni Morrison
MORRISON: The enterprise of being a complete individual, which is what
she wanted to be, is associated with—not necessarily bound to—the goals of
solitariness. I am complete by myself or maybe with my friend. When I lose
comfort in my solitude, I have nothing. She had few normal responses to collective
things—at all—not to her neighbors, her hometown, her friend, not to
her mother, not to anyone. I find her eccentric, but it was only by using a very
eccentric character—for her time—that I could talk about the relationship
between the two of them and give each of them something the other wanted a
little bit of.
DENARD: Sula was the first novel that I read and surprisingly Medallion—a
(northern) Ohio town—had great resonance for me. It was a lot like Black
community life in the small southern town I grew up in. I have always been
curious about that resonance, and I have wondered whether or not this is just
Black resonance or southern resonance, or small community resonance. What
do you think accounts for what I am calling the Black southern resonance that
Medallion has?
MORRISON: The problem even now is the question of what’s southern and
what’s Black, and as a writer I can’t always figure it out. I just place things once
I know where they ought to be. Even when I took Black people out of the
United States altogether in Tar Baby, the dynamic still operated. Here you had
Son who is a southern boy—who hadn’t been there in a long time, but that’s
where he’s from. All of his noble instincts about what women ought to be and
what people ought to be come from that milieu. He didn’t learn that in the
Navy or at sea.
DENARD: In addition to the sustaining aspects of southern community life,
there are also obviously aspects of the South that you think are repressive, or
are obstacles for a full self-awareness. I am thinking specifically here of the
women like Geraldine and Helene Wright in The Bluest Eye—those domestic
women from southern towns like Mobile, Baton Rouge, and Meridian, whom
you say are so prudish that they will not allow “the funk to erupt.” Tell me
about those women or those aspects of the South.
MORRISON: Well at that time I was thinking of the repression in the South
for nefarious purposes, for pleasing White people—not for the health of the
community. I meant those women who won’t dance—not for religious reasons,
but because they are afraid to express joy or sensual pleasure, because
both are associated, in White culture, with lack of discipline. Maybe they’ve
all died now. I remember a lot of them. They were very busy. The eye that
looked at them was not another Black person’s eye. It was a distant White eye
that looked at them that they were aspiring to emulate or correct.That was what
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Carolyn Denard
I thought was sad—not the Southern regions from which they came, but how
they absorbed the dominant culture. They could have come from Detroit.
DENARD: Most of the manifestations of the South in your work are of
memory—an historical consciousness of the South that exists in their minds.
Are there other places where or ways in which you are trying to bring in the
South in your work? I remember, for example, the passage in Jazz when Joe
Trace comes in to Felice’s apartment when the other women are there, and
there is that “pitch” in his voice that reminds them of people down South who
sat on the porch and wore their hats—a southern, rural metaphor.
MORRISON: There may be a different sense of the South for men and women.
I found Joe’s incorporation of the South in the city different from Violet’s.
Even though they met there, they fell in love there, they got married and they
left. Her memories are not good. He had terrible things happen to him as well
in the South, but he does not feel devastated by the South.
DENARD: What about the language? Many reviewers talked about the Harlem
community in Jazz as a place where women “quit” their husbands, as if “quit”
were a word they had not heard before. It seemed very southern to me. Is “quit”
one of those language hold overs from the South, or is it Black, or just old
fashioned?
MORRISON: That’s all I ever heard.
DENARD: It’s all I ever heard.
MORRISON: “Did she quit him?” “Did he quit her?” “Yeah, they quit.” That’s
just memory of the way we spoke. The only way you can hear it now is in song.
DENARD: As in “Please Don’t Quit Me Baby”
MORRISON: Or “Hit Me, But Don’t Quit Me.” (Laughter) Can you imagine?
DENARD: Exploring the specificity of the words like that, that have been
forgotten or gone out of use, is a good space for the criticism of your work.
MORRISON: I work at that, you know. To get the language that is particular,
very particular. And I know I use words that contemporary authors or critics
may not know, but I can’t help that. It’s hard to hear different varieties of English
now because everybody talks like people on television. Even when you
go to interview people, they sound like some version of themselves—the language
becomes mass produced—their choice of words, all the clichés, and so
on.

An Interview with Toni Morrison
DENARD: What about what we might call ‘southern ethics,’ manners, expectations?
You deal with this with some of your women characters—in Sula,
although not in a southern setting, but more specifically in Tar Baby, where
you have Jadine violate these ethics in a southern community.
MORRISON: Well there are some very interesting things happening with Black
women and they are risky and experimental and were not all of four or five
stereotypes. I’ve always thought that if Black women don’t know it, it’s not
known really in the collective because they’ve had to know. They’ve experimented
in existential ways, in collective ways, in urban sophisticated ways, in
Pilate-Dead ways—they’re always out there trying to figure out how to get it
done—how to walk on water. And sometimes they’re successful, sometimes
they’re not—more often not because that’s the nature of being out front—that
somebody’s going to knock you down—and I don’t want to say or even imply
that these ventures of theirs necessarily have heavy consequences. But any
explorer—spiritual explorer, geographic explorer, or somebody trying something
different—is going to put oneself in danger. Sula is in danger, Jadine is in
danger. It’s a different kind of danger from, say, the one that Eva is in, but
they’re all in danger. They are the people with the least power in the body
politic and at the same time with the most influence, and they are always searching
for small escapes. There’s a certain type of Black female adventurer that
has nothing to do with going to war—or the big male type adventures. In order
to function at the front lines you have to break rules, cross boundaries. Being
a working, single parent without the protection of an extended family would
require a shift in ethics. So would being a career woman on one’s own in a
foreign country.
DENARD: In the case of Jadine where she rejects those expectations of her,
what could we say? In order to do the adventurous thing you have to give up
something else, which you talk about with Sula—the Bessie Smiths, the bluessinging
kind of woman who has to leave the community. How do you mediate
those expectations of other generations or your small community as you go
out on your adventure? Are there some adventures that are so necessary that
we should no longer be held accountable to the expectations of the communities
from which we come?
MORRISON: We are all accountable. Jadine is definitely accountable. What
I’m trying to suggest is that she can be judged the way Ondine judges her. She
tells her, “You have to learn how to be this person, and I failed you if you don’t
know it.” While at the same time, an ideal person would have put those two
expectations together, but I don’t know who those people are. I don’t know
people who can be a success in the fashion world in Paris and come back and
be comfortable in their small community. I’m sure they exist. But the point of
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Carolyn Denard
the book is to show how painful and difficult that is. You separate these entities
so that you can look at them, then the reader has to figure out how he or
she would mediate. It’s not for me to solve that problem.
DENARD: But there is the implication that they need to be mediated.
MORRISON: Oh yes. You know I get a lot of flack about Jadine—why I seem
to sympathize with Son, or how I did her a disservice. The point of writing the
novel is to do everybody justice. But, she’s apolitical, and she’s very much in
love with him; still she doesn’t want to be like Ondine. She doesn’t want to be
a servant. She doesn’t want to be dependent on a man.
DENARD: And even with the validity of that independence, she still has to
negotiate.
MORRISON: Of course. She knows that.
DENARD: And she’s already tried to negotiate the two worlds and the different
expectations by going back to visit her aunt and uncle.
MORRISON: You’re on the side of the women of Eloe. Some readers are
furious with those Eloe women. That’s what I meant when I said these readers
think I have done her a disservice. They think that she should get out of there as
fast as she can, and “what kind of man is he hanging her out the window; she
should leave him alone.” Because they are clip-clopping in New York, they
don’t want to be bothered with the rules of the women of Eloe. They really
don’t. They’re into Louis Vuitton, and business, and security. You know, and I
can’t judge them, I can’t condemn those women—well I can, but that’s not my
work.
DENARD: You do get the sense that Jadine is at least wrestling with this issue—that
she is not callous.
MORRISON: Neither one of them is. They know what to do when it comes to
love; they don’t know what to do when it comes to cultural compromise. She’s
going back to zero, she says, when she goes back to Paris. “Let me start all
over again.” And he is trying to make a choice. I don’t know where he’s going—off
to the mystic past or back to that house with Sidney. The nature of the
metaphorical language suggests that he allows himself to stay in history—
embalmed in history. But they can’t make a life together until they straighten
out these problems.
DENARD: As they work them out, however, neither of them is in Eloe.

An Interview with Toni Morrison
MORRISON: No, no one is in Eloe.
DENARD: I want to go back to a point we talked about earlier—and that is the
difference in writing in the South versus about the South—or an experiential
South versus a reflective South. One of the interesting things about your work,
and to some degree the works of other northern Black writers whose characters
have moved North—John Wideman in Damballah, Rita Dove in Thomas
and Beluah—are their reflective quality. How important do you think distance
and memory are for being able to articulate—particularly an affective
memory of the South?
MORRISON: I think distance is important even if you’re in it. You need the
distance in order to see. Whether you’re not there or living in it, you establish
a certain kind of distance anyway. I guess there are some people who have to
be in it and write about it. But for me, I always find it necessary to have a kind
of third eye about things so that you aren’t overwhelmed by the details, so that
you can control them. And also, it really is about vision. I do see places better
when I’m not there. I don’t always know what I’m seeing if I’m in a place.
You’re doing things and thinking things, but not selecting things. But when I
leave it, it’s clearer to me. Because what surfaces are some things I did not
know that I was noticing at the time.
DENARD: That is the value, to me, of your novels, as a writer whose characters
are from the South but not in the South. In a sustained way, in nearly every
novel, there is some character who is remembering the South. So one gets this
articulation through memory that one would not get otherwise. Do you think
that Blacks who are still in the South, who never left, are as self-conscious
about the South as a cultural homeplace as Blacks who left and went North and
had to invoke their memories of it? Migrants often have a way of embellishing
things and making us see our surroundings in ways that I don’t think we would
have without their reflective, outsider’s vision. It seems to be the peculiar
vision of those who left, and I wonder if that generation prior to integration—
who did not leave and who were not part of the post-integration generation—
ever focused reflectively in this way?
MORRISON: They probably didn’t. They knew city ways versus country ways.
The city was understood in those days as being always wicked; the city is always
considered wicked no matter where you are, but also very modern. Now
it is understood as very retrograde, because we have accepted a contemporary
media version of what’s in an inner city. It can be wholly false, however.
DENARD: I also wonder whether there are some Blacks in the North, some
transplanted southerners, unlike your characters and unlike many of the migrants
who wrote letters to their relatives in the South, who both seem to have
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Carolyn Denard
understood the tension or at least were able to articulate it, who are still wrestling
with the tension of being a southern small-town person living in the urban
north. They don’t know the source of their tension, or perhaps they just can’t
name it?
MORRISON: Yes, but maybe less now. Some people pay lip service to it. And
age makes a difference, too. But it’s very scary for a lot of Black people—
women in particular who want a career, marriage, children, who want everything
we’ve always wanted, and sometimes they feel great pressure to leave
home to get these things. There are more Sulas out there—but they may not be
as mean as she is.
DENARD: What do you think that suggests for the future—where women are
not so conscious of the past and not as reflective?
MORRISON: I don’t know; I’m not sure. I have mixed feelings about it. I just
like for women to do interesting stuff. I think the trajectory of Black women
has been very different from the freed White women—in interesting ways.
But more important than those differences, are the similarities and I like it
although I know the risks; I know they’re going to be very lonely. I know they’re
going to die like Sula, maybe not that young, but that’s what happens.
DENARD: I know that there are many older couples who move back to the
South when they retire. It’s as though they’ve just being trying to live long
enough to retire and go back.
MORRISON: Oh sure. Oh I would. If I were from the South, I’d go back.
DENARD: Why?
MORRISON: Oh it’s nicer; it’s cheaper than most places.
DENARD: Tell me about the new novel. This time you have people leaving the
South traveling to the West. How does the South manifest itself in Paradise?
MORRISON: Well I’m not yet sure. They’re moving from Louisiana to Oklahoma.
Oklahoma is different; so much sky and the land is flat. I read a lot of
newspapers about the people who went to Oklahoma. About soliciting people
to settle Black towns all over Kansas and Oklahoma, particularly Oklahoma.
And I got interested in one little sentence, which was in a column in one of the
Black newspapers, encouraging people to move, work your own land, etc.; and
it had an ad that said “Come prepared or not at all.” It encouraged people to
come with a year or two or three of supplies or money, so that if things didn’t
go right they would be able to take care of themselves. And the newspaper

An Interview with Toni Morrison
articles indicated how many people came with fifteen thousand dollars and so
on, but there was a little paragraph about two caravans of Black people who got
to Boley or Langston, or one of those towns, and were turned away because
they did not come prepared; they didn’t have anything. So I thought about what
it must feel like to make that trek, and be turned away by some Black people—
maybe for good reasons but nevertheless turned away by Black people—because
they were too ragged and too poor to come into their town and homestead.
So I’ve taken that route—these people just go somewhere else. They’re
determined to make it, and they do. But it makes them very isolationist. They
don’t hurt anybody except themselves. It’s a closed town. The novel is somewhat
about that ‘run’ into Oklahoma, but it’s very “inter.” It’s about conflicts
within the race. Outside is whatever is out there. But this is a big story—I
mean it’s got a lot of people in it—but it’s a very interior terrain. What that one
town becomes after very revolutionary and hardworking activity to build it
with no help. They’re very separatist people.
DENARD: It sounds as though there are two moments that seem “unlike” the
culture—first Blacks being turned away by Blacks, then that turning away, breeding
more independence—more turning away.
MORRISON: That’s right. But we have some of those communities here.
Separatist movements of people who wanted a whole state for themselves or
wanted to return to Africa. Oklahoma was one of those states. But these people
don’t cultivate any romance about Africa. I also wanted to explore unpopular
ideas about the difference between liberation and conservation. The liberation
movement, the movement to free oneself to be completely independent—as a
community not as an individual—is marvelous. But how one moves from liberation
to conservation is what I explore. How you can make a liberationary
gesture and how it can make you end up as the world’s most static conservative.
These are also very religious people. They do not want to hear anything
from the outside. The outside is hell, is Babylon to them. They don’t want
anything stirring up, they don’t want any civil rights, they don’t want any of
that.
DENARD: Would you say that this is a 90’s book—a book we need for now.
Beloved, for example, was about slavery but written in 1987, and it spoke to
some really present issues. Many readers realized in reading Beloved that some
ghosts of the past had not been put to rest, had not been faced, and in many
ways the book was redemptive for the present generation. What will we mediate
on in Paradise, or are you ready to say yet?
MORRISON: Well, a number of things. It stops in 1975. There is conflict
between the sort of the 60’s and 70’s mentality, and an older mentality. These
days we say everybody loved Martin Luther King, but they didn’t. Right now,
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Carolyn Denard
other things have happened; he has survived as a man with a powerful message
and a powerful mind. While he was around, however, there were a lot of people
who thought he was a demagogue. The students from SNCC took issue with
him. I’m not trying to destroy what has survived, but its no good to paper over
these kind of Du Bois versus Washington splits. They just reconfigure themselves
in other ways, and they’re much more complicated now. And I just want
to talk about the inevitability of—well I want to suggest something about negotiation
that is applicable for the 90s. There are a lot of neo-cons, a lot of
activists, a lot of pacifists, people for integration, people against integration,
who are still out there. These are still current issues, and people change their
minds on them a lot. And part of that is seeded in, or many of these ideas are
seeded in, Paradise.
DENARD: How does religion function in Paradise?
MORRISON: There are lots of conflicts in the book, and religion is one. Not
religious believers versus non-believers so much as what turns out to be conflict
between politics and faith. What does a young minister go through who is
very political with other ministers who are not? The point is faith without politics
or politics without faith. They oppose one another—sometimes arguing—
sometimes they’re just wary of the person who is introducing new ideas.
Thurgood Marshall went to Norman, Oklahoma to do this case for the NAACP
in 1947. They were building separate rooms for the law students, for the Black
graduate students who could not go to the University of Oklahoma. The law
said separate but equal, and they were going to build a whole new section of
the law school for Blacks. You know people have forgotten. I don’t think this
generation knows at all what was going on in 1947 as far as Civil Rights are
concerned. They think it all began in the 60s. It’s interesting to me to re-examine
that period—50s, 60s, and 70s era. Black people made a lot of money in
this period right after the war. Yet, that was the moment of Emmett Till in
1955. When Blacks do well, Whites get very nervous.
DENARD: We don’t hear of the successes as much. We hear mostly the anger.
So we can’t appropriate anything but the anger.
MORRISON: So it’s hard going really. There’s a lot of research involved. And
I haven’t done it all. I’ve done some of the research enough to move through a
draft of the narrative, and I’ve been to Oklahoma, but the part I’m moving toward
in the novel is very different. You can see the sky from here, over to
there, so Oklahomans have a very fecund imagination.
DENARD: That’s going to be very different for you. You’ve had sycamore
trees, champion daisy trees, hills, robins—all very lush settings in the earlier
novels.

An Interview with Toni Morrison
MORRISON: Yes, very different. I’ve found a lot of subtle variety, but there
is that unremitting sky. It’s a great place for religion, too. There are churches
everywhere. You know you have liquor stores in Washington and banks in New
York—a bank on every corner in New York. Well in Oklahoma there are
churches—two or three in a block, or just a large parking lot in the middle of
no where and a nice church that people will go long distances to attend. In the
little town of the novel there are three churches: a Methodist, a Baptist, and a
Pentecostal.
DENARD: Is it based on Boley?
MORRISON: No, it’s not Boley. It’s a new town. The old town they remember
was a 1908-1950 town. But that one has collapsed. And these are just
some veterans who have gone off to do it again.
DENARD: Well, I have just two more questions and one of them has to do
with the place of the South in our understanding of the African diaspora. When
you reviewed Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place in 1972, you first
complimented him that he had found new avenues for exploring the Black sense
of belonging to the South—talking to Blacks and southern White liberals like
C. Vann Woodward, Robert Penn Warren, Hodding Carter—but you also criticized
the book because Murray stopped the connection to the South in the
“American South”—in his case, in Mobile Alabama. You suggested in the end
of that review that Blacks will never understand their history if they think that
it begins and ends in Mobile, Alabama—that there is a place older and ‘souther’
in Black American history than Mobile. Given that the South does operate in
some way in your novels as home, although it is in fact not the first or the
oldest home for African-Americans as your review points out, how would you
describe the place of the South in the African Diaspora? What does it mean,
should it mean, to us as African Americans?
MORRISON: Well for us it’s home, I guess, in the sense that it was the first
stop when we left the ancient home—and sure there was the Santa Domingo
and Caribbean thing—but it was. . . . You see my struggle with the South is to
keep it from being just the old place, and what I was trying to say, even in that
review, is that what Black people did in this country was brand new. Even if
they did it a long time ago. These people were very inventive, very creative,
and that was a very modern situation. It was, philosophically, probably the earliest
19th-century modernist existence. And out of thrown things they invented
everything: a music that is the world’s music, a style, a manner of speaking, a
relationship with each other, and more importantly, psychological ways to deal
with it. And no one gives us credit for the intelligence it takes to be forced into
another culture, be oppressed, and make a third thing. Other cultures who get
moved like that die or integrate; or because they’re White, they don’t even
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integrate, they disappear into the dominant culture. That never happened to us;
I think we would have wanted it because it was better than being isolated and so
on. But in view of that, in spite of that, they made something else. For me, jazz
was the moment when Blacks took the country over in terms of its tone—not
its money, not its business—but it was all in its blood by then, it was all there.
So what happened to African Americans is not what happened to Africans in
Africa—more like what happened to Africans in South Africa, but not even that
because that was their home. But this is a whole new experience—and it is a
modern experience. So that there is some modernity and some grasp on the
future that the South holds more than any other place. Although I understand
the nostalgia about it being everybody’s past, and the good old days, and ma and
pa and grandpa and so on. But for me the actual thing that was going on was this
wholly modern thing.
DENARD: So it was a starting point, the site of modernity for the Africans
who came as slaves. I don’t think many people have thought about it in quite
that way. That has been an essential question for me. What is the larger more
philosophical, metaphorical way even—to think about the South and its meaning
to African Americans than just as “down home?”
MORRISON: Yes, there is some way to make it down home but to also make
it this jet—it was a rocket too. You have to get rid of the look, the look of it—
I don’t mean the Atlanta look. I mean the look of the South in the eyes and
minds of certain folks is mansions and little houses, a slower pace, and all of
that, and I think that’s true in parts of Africa, as well as in the art.
DENARD: Do you think the South is where we claim our Americanness? Is
the South the native ground beginning for us in the same sense of where we
began the modern experiment?
MORRISON: It’s where the modern experiment begins, oh yes, there’s no
question about that. But I don’t think people understand that though. I think
when Black people think about the South, they think of it as down home.
DENARD: Where what is modern is not happening.
MORRISON: (Laughter) Yes, we started there, but we left to go where it is
happening.
DENARD: But starting there is very important, given what we were dealing
with when we arrived.
MORRISON: Yes. My mother always said something, and I’m sure it’s not
true, but I haven’t figured it out yet. She said “No Black leader would ever
appear who wasn’t from the South.” And I said, “I beg your pardon.” And she
said, “Who?”. I couldn’t think of any people. No northern Black had produced

An Interview with Toni Morrison
one Black leader—that activism and modernity begins in the South. Whatever
happens to it ultimately originates there.
DENARD: One of the things that has been so fruitful for me as a Black
southerner in this exploration has been the possibility that finally we can claim
the South on our own terms. Historically, it has been filled with the metaphors
of the Confederacy, and the signs of the White South. Whites have always
been in the subject position when it comes to the South.
MORRISON: Well Whites have been thinking about it exclusively as their
history. There was no history for Whites in the South other than the South.
Although some promoted and romanticized their connection to Scotland or
whatever. For Black people it was their past but not their history. Their history
was someplace else. What they did with their past is to create something brand
new. I think the South is now, finally, getting close to the edge of the modern
world because Black people are there. Once White people gave up the legal
claim to the things they were doing—killing Blacks, bullying them, and pushing
White supremacy, ideologically and personally—they stopped to see what
was in their best interest. Then and only then, did it become a modern part of
the world.
DENARD: What difference do you think it would make if we knew the cultural
and philosophical meaning of the South collectively? Do you think we’d
all move back to the South or would we all claim Americanness and stop gestures
of separatism?
MORRISON: We wouldn’t have to think about it in those tired old ways—as
your greens are better than any other greens—or like my mother and father.
My father wouldn’t have to go back there every year in order to refresh his
soul. My mother wouldn’t have to stay away because something was scaring
her even though she was talking about it as though it were paradise.
DENARD: And that’s what happens in Beloved and Jazz. The characters don’t
go back; Milkman goes back, but Violet and Joe Trace finally are able to negotiate
it right there in Harlem. And Sethe and Paul D say in Beloved that we have
more past than anybody, we need some kind of tomorrow.
MORRISON: And their daughter is going to Oberlin College. Denver, the last
person you’d think would ever leave the house.
DENARD: The clearest indication that the next generation will be alright.
MORRISON: I hope that’s right.
16

Deborah H. Barnes
MYTH, METAPHOR, AND MEMORY IN TONI MORRISON’S
RECONSTRUCTED SOUTH
It’s time to start all over make a new beginning
. . . We need to make new symbols Make new signs
Make a new language With these we’ll redefine
the world And start all over . . .
––Tracy Chapman
What’s the world for if you can’t make it up the way you want it?
—Violet Trace
Definitions belong to the definers . . .
—Beloved
Sula, Toni Morrison’s second novel, begins with a myth—or, as the residents
of Medallion call it, “a nigger joke”—that explains how Black people
ended up “in the Bottom.” The story goes this way:
A good white farmer promised freedom and a piece of bottom land to his
slave if he would perform some very difficult chores. When the slave completed
the work, he asked the farmer to keep his end of the bargain. Freedom
was easy—the farmer had no objection to that. But he didn’t want to give up
any land. So he told the slave that he was very sorry that he had to give him
valley land. He had hoped to give him a piece of the Bottom. The slave
blinked and said he thought valley land was bottom land. The master said,
“Oh, no! See those hills? That’s bottom land, rich and fertile.”
“But it’s high up in the hills,” said the slave.
“High up from us,” said the master, “but when God looks down, it’s the
bottom. That’s why we call it so. It’s the bottom of heaven—best land there
is.”
So the slave pressed his master to try to get him some. He preferred it to the
valley. And it was done. The nigger got the hilly land, where planting was
backbreaking, where the soil slid down and washed away the seeds, and
where the wind lingered all through the winter. (Sula 4)
As a “joke,” this legend relays the historical specifics of one slave’s dispossession;
as a myth, however, it inscribes emblematically the historical explanation
for real-life socio-economic outcomes of American Blacks after the
Civil War. Real life ex-slaves and their descendants, like Sula’s slave, were
also “swindled” out of their fair share of the promised land by Anglo-America’s
politics, greed and “semantic trickery.” Denied the rights and privileges of
authentic “American identity,” post-Bellum Blacks were encouraged to yearn
Studies in the Literary Imagination 31.2, Fall 1998 © Georgia State University

The Bottom of Heaven
for something other than power and the “rich and fertile” land Whites coveted
and possessed. Discourses of slavery and Reconstruction mythifying the North
(and Heaven) as the land of promise and equality for African Americans encouraged
Blacks to defer their desires to some other place and some other
time. Consequently, as identity is derived from land—even land with a “rocky”
past—African American national identity was also, like the promise of land,
deferred and circumscribed by these social and historical myths.
In addition to its allegorical significance, the Bottom myth reveals the convoluted
ways in which narrative use and interpretation are bound by (among
other factors) culture—depicted in this scenario simply as “race.” That
Medallionites, Black and White, consider the story to be a “joke” suggests not
only that they interpret social reality differently but also that they interpret
and employ (historic) narratives for different ends. Of the “nigger joke”
Morrison writes,
It was the kind of joke white folks tell when the mill closes down and they’re
looking for a little comfort somewhere. The kind colored folks tell on themselves
when the rain doesn’t come, or comes for weeks, and they’re looking
for a little comfort somehow. (Sula 4–5)
This myth then deconstructs traditional narratives of history that, by design,
inscribe and legitimize the Anglo-American’s hegemony and perspective. Black
Bottomites actuate a discourse of resistance that uses the historic narrative to
subvert and transcend their cultural domination—cultural domination that the
mainstream’s historic narratives are conceived to impose. For them, the
“joke”—a culturally specific interpretation of circumstance that allows them
not only to use humor to withstand “whitepeople” and misfortune but also to
achieve some measure of respite from the base condition to which they have
been relegated—is really a joke on their oppressors. In other words, they signify
on the white folks’ invented “joke” by employing their own semantic trickery
that assuages their imposed feelings of inferiority while encoding themselves
as culturally viable people, rather than as the downtrodden victims of
racism and its discourses. This form of signifying, a folk tradition in African
American culture, resonates throughout Morrison’s oeuvre.
Morrison’s fictions use a form of semantic trickery to constitute a discourse
of resistance. In the novels, she uses fictive narratives to transfigure
the old South—the bedrock of Black dehumanization, degradation, and sorrow—into
an archetypal Black homeland, a cultural womb that lays a mother’s
claim to history’s orphaned, defamed, and disclaimed African children. Son
Green’s memories of Eloe, Florida and its embracing hospitality best signify
the kind of South-as-home Morrison’s fictions employ. He recalls “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” (Tar Baby 6). Thus, memories of the South in the novels
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Deborah H. Barnes
are interchangeable with those of the African American’s ancestral home. The
South Morrison conceives is “new,” in that it encodes the vital roles Black
people have played in creating the American story—the roles mainstream discourses
have ignored or misrepresented, as she contends in her literary criticism
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. By employing
this signification either to describe or to imply a Southern sociocultural
reality peopled, constructed, and maintained by and for African Americans,
Morrison places Black people at the center of America’s historical record
of the South.
By positioning the Black South that she invents as the central cultural foundation
for and geographic backdrop to her fictions, Morrison subverts the authority
of history’s master narrative by asserting African-American subjectivity.
The narratives encode an important paradigm shift, as the Bottom myth
affirms. They seem to renegotiate the boundaries of time and place in accounting
for the African’s American identity. The novels are based upon (but
do not recount) a history that inches forward in time to the point just beyond
the African’s traumatic rupture with Africa caused by the Middle Passage. 1 For
Africans, as for other American immigrants, landing in America marks the
beginning of a new identity and the ending of an old one. Thus, by regarding
America (particularly the South) rather than Africa as the “home” in this land
for Black people—that is, their “homeland”—they automatically become rightful
heirs to America’s legacy in the same way other immigrants, including
indentured servants, have done. It is important to note that the first attempts to
settle this country were located in the area that would later be known as the
South. And, that American settlement—its nation building—was made possible,
to no small degree, by the work of African slaves. As a consequence,
therefore, America is now, as the novels imply, the indisputable “home” of
Americanized Africans—a nation they helped to build with their blood, sweat,
and tears. Morrison’s fictional historiographies reflect this inclusive paradigm
shift.
This paper examines how Morrison uses fictional narratives to inscribe the
cultural meaning that Blacks themselves gave to their American experiance—
a discursive necessity she examines in Playing in the Dark. Following the
lead of the old, blind, wise-woman in Morrison’s Nobel acceptance speech,
this interrogation “shift[s] attention away from assertions of power” to examine
“the instruments through which that power is exercised” (12)—narratives
which tell another version of the American story. I offer that Morrison, employing
language’s “nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties” (15), reinvents
the American South to supplant racist discourses of Black exclusion. The “new
South” she encodes provides a context for a discourse of inclusion—a discourse
that signifies on the African American’s cultural investments in and
contributions to this country—that acknowledges Black national identity. Ultimately,
her novels play their own “joke,” as this cultural critique will reveal,

The Bottom of Heaven
on the agents of Anglo-America’s discursive hegemony who presume words
and their definitions—specifically words like “home,” “homeland,” “the South,”
and “America”—belong to them, the definers.
In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison critiques mainstream fictions that
systematically erase and distort the African American’s presence in and contributions
to “the American saga.” Her novels subvert the cultural authority of
canonical dissimulations by reconstructing the received meaning of the American
South as myth, metaphor, and memory. Master narratives that mythify the
Anglo-American’s investments in building this country fail to acknowledge
similar African American contributions. These master narratives present Black
people (and various racial and cultural others) as virtual “aliens in residence.”
Even though the African’s roots were planted in this land during the sixteenth
century, canonical discourses contend that African Americans were (and continue
to be) merely “present” while “Americans” brought forth a new nation,
tamed a “wilderness,” and perfected “civilization.” Morrison redresses Black
exclusion from the national memory by divulging an American “history” the
mainstream disremembers. Her novels can be read as fictive cultural documentaries
that recall and record America’s past using African American historiography—cultural
“truths” heretofore encoded and preserved orally in personal
and communal recollections, rememories, fables, folktales, music, gossip,
humor, and lore. Morrison’s novels—narratives that place the Black past
at the center of the American chronicle—supplement or perhaps negate those
mainstream histories and fictions that marginalize, trivialize or exclude the
African American from their accounts.
In order to place Black people at the conceptual center of stories about the
American past, they must be depicted as subjects, that is, as generative and
creative change-agents, rather than as objects, or victims of hegemonic agency
and control, as master narratives have traditionally portrayed them. Even when
the mainstream’s narratives feature Black people, the characters are rarely
constructed (or understood) apart from their subordinate relationship to Anglo-
Americans. Their subject status is subverted, then, insofar as mainstream histories
and fictions gainsay and conceal Black agency and industry in American
myths.
For example, canonical histories rarely acknowledge that before the “American
Adam” began to carve a new “Eden” out of the “wilderness” Europeans
“discovered,” Black people had already explored and settled this land. Primary
historical documents show that Blacks, willingly and unwillingly, numbered
among the first discoverers, explorers, and settlers of this then unchartered
territory. Black sailors, for instance, accompanied New World explorers Columbus
in 1492 2 , Balboa in 1513 3 , and Cortez in 1519 4 , on their expeditions.
In 1619, a year before this country’s celebrated Pilgrim forefathers landed at
Plymouth Rock, twenty Negro indentured servants landed at Jamestown, Virginia.
When their terms of service ended, they were released and allowed to
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purchase land like any other European settler 5 . Earlier still, in 1526, less well
known Spanish explorer Lucas Vasquez de Ayllén, used the labor of one hundred
African slaves to establish a settlement of five hundred Spaniards in what
would later become South Carolina 6 . When the Blacks rebelled, killing many
of their masters, the remaining 150 Whites retreated to Haiti, leaving the slaves
behind. The Blacks were absorbed into tribes of indigenous peoples in the
interior, making them and their children more authentically “American,” it would
seem, than the settlers who would later adopt the moniker. In short, Americans
of African descent—be they enslaved, indentured, or free—have been an integral
but neglected part of the “American genesis.”
Enslavement, Morrison warns, is not the only way to deprive Black people
of their cultural reality, identity or history. She demonstrates in Playing in the
Dark 7 that America’s master narratives have historically purloined Black cultural
reality—past and present—by ignoring, misrepresenting, or worse, misunderstanding
the African American they seek to describe. Their misconceptions
may, in fact, be “disconceptions” since canonical discourses—both fictive
and non-fictive—do not recognize African Americans as equally human or
capable. Having at one point decreed Blacks to be “the white man’s burden”
because they were only three-fifths human, America’s master narratives are
unlikely even now to see or record the African American favorably or objectively.
Master narratives are designed to establish and to maintain a hegemonic
hierarchy that, tautologically, legitimizes its own power to define, in this case,
who is “American” (who is “human”) and who is not. In other words, these
hegemonic narratives are devised to deny Blacks (and “cultural others”) the
very privileges and powers they insure Whites.
It should come as no surprise then that traditional history disavows that slaves
and the descendants of slaves have contributed significantly to the making of
American culture. In this way, the Mainstream demonstrates its ethnocentrism:
Black “feats” are not important, only White ones are. Mainstream accounts of
African Americans (particularly those in the South) focus their narrative sights
on racist oppression and the interracial enmity, dissidence, and strife Blacks
experienced during Slavery, Reconstruction, the War years, and the Civil Rights
Era. These social and historical descriptions do not seem to consider that African
Americans also had personal and interior lives or communal concerns,
responsibilities, and relationships that existed apart from white people and
white domination. Morrison’s “myths” correct this misinterpretive vision.
Claiming to employ objectivity as a critical lens, master narratives obscure
historic “truth” by evoking the reader’s affect. In asking us to substitute pity
for homage or, in some instances, contempt for understanding, they objectify
and trivialize America’s Black past. Generally, master narratives mythify African
Americans as hapless pawns in or victims of Anglo-America’s industry,
while summarily ignoring their personal contributions to and investments in
these outcomes.

The Bottom of Heaven
Master narratives are important subjects of critical scrutiny not only for
what they say and do not say but also for why they say it. In his national bestseller
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got
Wrong, James W. Loewen offers two pieces of useful insight about canonical
history’s mythmaking that further illuminate this study. History, he says, “has
trouble acknowledging that anything might be wrong with white Americans or
with the United States as a whole.” And that, “anything bad in American history
happened anonymously. Everyone named in our history made a positive contribution”
(142–6). This explains why Blacks as a race and as individuals, excepting
a representative few, are omitted generally from affirmative historical
accounts. The same is true for fictive narratives as well. Loewen’s critique
holds that historical narratives are designed to create or reinforce a national
identity based on Anglo-America’s ethnocentrism. “Words are important,” he
contends, because “they can influence, and in some cases rationalize, policy”
(71). For narratives to reveal controversial, inconvenient, or stigmatizing
“facts”—like, for example, Black humanity, subjectivity, and cultural generation
among a people who are enslaved or oppressed because they lack these
qualities—is at counter purposes with their discursive mission: to legitimize
the subordination of “inferior” peoples and to affirm Anglo-America’s cultural
superiority and racist agenda. Loewen verifies Morrison’s theory that
hegemonic myths say more about the rationale of the people who invent them
than about the group they subject. He says,
It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to
exploit. Modifying one’s opinions to bring them into line with one’s actions or
planned actions is the most common outcome of the process known as “cognitive
dissonance,” according to social psychologist Leon Festinger. No one
likes to think of himself or herself as a bad person. To treat badly another
person whom we consider a reasonable human being creates a tension between
act and attitude that demands resolution. We cannot erase what we
have done, and to alter our future behavior may not be in our interest. To
change our attitude is easier. (68)
America’s “cognitive dissonance” may in fact be permanent because, Loewen
points out, canonical writers “still write history to comfort descendants of the
settlers” (99). Morrison reaches a similar conclusion in her critique of American
literature’s deconstruction of race, Playing in the Dark.
Morrison’s assessment of fiction and Loewen’s analysis of non-fiction concur:
master narratives often cloak discursive strategies that alienate and
disempower Blacks while they, simultaneously, empower and exonerate Whites
from guilt or association with subjugating processes. In other words, these
narratives make Black oppression seem “natural” and ordained on the basis of
Black inferiority. In Playing in the Dark Morrison contends mainstream narratives
“that [speak] for Africans and their descendants, or of them” rely on
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Deborah H. Barnes
“vocabulary designed to disguise the subject”(50). They use the same kind of
dissembling semantics employed by the farmer in Sula’s “nigger joke.” This
kind of strategy, for example, would denounce slavery as the culprit responsible
for disfranchising African Americans of their national identity rather than
hold institutional enslavers or individual slave holders responsible for Black
oppression. As a result, canonical discourses that decenter and objectify Black
reality do more than marginalize Blackness, the consign Black people to positions
of narrative silence, impotence or virtual invisibility within “American”
discourse.
The canon, Morrison finds, employs Black characters as glorified textual
props, positioned against the backdrop of an evolving American tableau. Designed
to embellish fictive (and nonfictive) texts with dimension and complexity,
Morrison argues they reflect Anglo-America’s self-perception instead.
According to her, “the subject of the dream is the dreamer” (Playing 17).
Black characters are the relative means by which canonical texts demonstrate
that Anglo-Americans are human and superior. Thus, mainstream discourses
use Black characters to signify meaning (or its absence) without the attending
complexity (or dignity) of providing them with “human” status or its depiction.
In her novels, Morrison humanizes Black characters in fictions that strive
to overcome and excavate enforced invisibility of the African American’s social
reality.
Consequently, Morrison’s novels offer a full range of African American realities
that define authentic Africentric interpretations of humanity, culture,
and history. Interestingly, the narratives neither dignify nor argue the
mainstream’s exclusive, often contradictory or inconsistent assertions of hegemony.
Morrison’s narrative vision is decisive: African Americans are undeniably
“human” and undeniably “American.” She casts them, therefore, as vital
subjects of and actors in the “American” stories that constitute her oeuvre.
Her fictions celebrate the authenticity of Black people’s “lived lives” by recording
their experiences in, perceptions of, and reactions to American daily
life against the backdrop of evolving history and culture.
Admittedly, Anglo-American hegemony effectively controls and defines
American social reality, its values, customs, and standards. Designed to create
an ideologically homogeneous society from heterogeneous peoples and, more
importantly, to perpetuate its own power, the cultural hegemony ignores or
invalidates what it considers to be “alternative” interpretations of social reality
by “cultural others.” Concomitantly, a fundamental premise of mainstream
ideology—one that is actualized by its discourses—is its binary projection of
white supremacy and domination/Black inferiority and submission as the natural
order. Morrison’s novels, in general, refute this hierarchal dichotomy by interpreting
social reality diunitally. Diunitalism, recognizing the “union of opposites,”
allows that good and evil, order and chaos, domination and submission,
or possession and dispossession, for instance, function on a continuum

The Bottom of Heaven
in tandem with each other, rather than oppositionally as dichotomous logic
suggests. Morrison’s assumption of this interpretive posture not only requires
us to read social discourses as cultural discourses but also to acknowledge the
subjectivity of cultural perception and response. Therefore, if we can agree
that one’s perception, that is, one’s understanding of reality is mediated by
cultural subjectivity—as Morrison’s novels show—then, tautologically, African
American cultural interpretations of reality are valid and valuable supplements
to Anglo-America’s prevailing hegemonic discourses. American discourse
is impoverished, therefore, by their omission. As do canonical discourses,
Morrison’s novels presume cultural authority.
Accordingly, the America Morrison imagines mirrors the archetypal Black
community, the provenance of African American culture. The African American
cultural ethos she evokes—rooted in its reverence for community over
the individual, its holistic attempt to live in concert with nature rather than to
achieve dominion over it, its belief in corporate responsibility and interdependence
and its practice of improvisational pragmatism rather than institutionalized
ideality—differs fundamentally from its Anglo-American analogue.
Anglocentrism is based on competition, individualism, and independence; its
domestic reality is designed to promote ideals of privacy, personal uniqueness,
and autonomy. While children are treasured members of the family unit,
their intended household tenure is limited usually to the age of majority. The
nuclear family obviates extended care; thus, future filial economic and physical
independence drives familial strategies for nurturance and socialization.
Privileging reason over affect, Anglocentrism relies primarily on rationalism
as an operative principle. Reason rewarded offers codified proof of the life
well lived: wealth, status, material possessions, leisure and, most importantly,
dominion.
On the other hand, Africentrism, buttressed by cultural imperatives of synergy,
interdependence, and collective responsibility, demystifies kinship as a
source of power and strength and committed responsibility as evidence of
“love.” Consequently, the extended family—that may include grandparents,
relatives, friends and/or boarders—rather than the nuclear family, is revered
as ideal. These “chitlin’ circuits,” as critic bell hooks calls them 8 , are less
concerned with overt displays of felicity and affection—privatized domestic
responses of inmates—and more concerned with the survival, perpetuation,
and socialization of its members. Domestic cohesion, often a matter of need
rather than desire, abets mutual support, child perpetuation, and resource sharing
in the Africentric home.
Contemporary African Americans, particularly those who are geographically
or socioeconomically mobile, and who, therefore, may live apart from authenticating
cultural communities, are, according to Morrison, at risk of losing
or forgetting their “true and ancient properties”—the Africentric culture,
conduct and cosmology the southern community also embodies. Because
mainstream cultural hegemonies and their discourses subordinate and invali-
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date African American culture—a culture African Americans, on the other hand,
interpret as viable and valid—Africentered Black people are compelled to
embrace an “invisible” (or, according to some, non-existent) culture that is
embedded within a vying culture that esteems itself to be singular, dominant,
and defining. Diunitalism allows African Americans to brook this kind of cosmological
dilemma by enabling them to respond to two very different cultures
simultaneously. On the other hand, diunitalism dictates that bicultural Blacks
are destined to have what can only be viewed as “bittersweet” experiences in
“bittersweet” environments. This matter is confirmed in Beloved when Denver
asks, “How come everybody run off from Sweet Home can’t stop talking
about it? Look like if it was so sweet you would have stayed.” Paul D muses,
“True, true. She’s right, Sethe. It wasn’t sweet and it sure wasn’t home.” It is
Sethe’s response, however, that decodes the African American’s “bittersweet”
relationship to the South—a relationship upon which Morrison’s novels are
founded. Her answer to Denver’s query is pragmatic: “. . . it’s where we were.
. . All together. Comes back whether we want it to or not” (Beloved 13–14).
Sethe’s and Paul D’s rememories show that Africentered Blacks understand
social reality as the community’s responses to an internal web of relationships,
phenomena, and exigencies that issue forth from a specific geographic
context. In other words, “home”—in this case the South—is wherever Blacks
work collectively to insure their mutual survival and subjective agency. Because
cultural conservation is primary among Morrison’s authorial concerns,
she uses the South as a trope—the avatar of Africentric communal culture.
Morrison’s Africentric narrative vision is transcendent; the novels provide
cultural interpretations of reality that are enabling and authenticating for
America’s otherwise despised and ignored Black children. Among other things,
her narrative permutations proscribe the use of “American” or “Southerner” as
signifiers of whiteness. Likewise, they deny that America or the South are
referents for geographical identity reserved only for Anglo-Americans. Like
the white farmer who jokes in Sula, Morrison employs linguistic tropes that
reflect culturally specific significations that in turn denote cultural hegemony.
For example, The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon call for the
Africentered home to be conceived as something more inclusive and egalitarian
than the domestic patriarchy venerated by the canonical Dick-and-Jane
reader. Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz ask that the South be esteemed as something
more intimate and meaningful than the region’s traditions of racial hostility,
violence, and dehumanization belie. Africentrism’s ideology of home
reasons: if “home” is construed spiritually, that is, as the embodiment and
wellspring of African American cosmology, epistemology, and culture, then,
it can never be lost, stolen, or left behind. Similarly, if the “South” can be
recalled holistically, that is, if the larger Black community can be considered
“kin” and the broad expanse of Nature can be considered “home,” then history’s
alleged “orphans”—African Americans dispossessed of Africa by slavery, and

The Bottom of Heaven
displaced from the South by Reconstruction, the great migration, and de jure
integration—can now (re)claim the South as the American “home” and “homeland”
of Black people.
Morrison’s mythic and symbolic revisioning of the South offers new and
useful insights into America’s national memory. Morrison’s works not only
reinvent the meaning of and significance of the African American’s cultural
“home” in America, particularly in the South, but also makes it accessible to
Black people everywhere. The novels themselves can be made to serve as a
kind of “mobile home”—that is, as sites for (re)enculturation and validation—
for those contemporary African Americans who, like Violet Trace, Macon Dead,
and Son Green, may have become estranged from their authenticating communities
or for those Blacks who may never have had access to them, like Jadine
Childs, Dorcas Manfred, and Pecola Breedlove. Thus, Morrison’s fictions
firmly invalidate the master narrative’s codified “truths” about Black inferiority
and obscurity by inscribing stories of African Americans who meet head on
and transcend hegemony’s dehumanizing and controlling strategies. Thus,
Morrison’s Africentric novels mitigate, if not reverse, canonical discourse’s
definitions of African American culture and history. These novels, then, connote
another [Black] revolution in American discourse; they confirm the African
American’s self-emancipation from the sovereignty of hegemonic “truth.”
To consider fully the significance of Morrison’s revisionary troping of the
South, one must first interrogate the why and how of Morrison’s imaginative
revision. It may seem odd that Morrison, a Midwesterner, who knows full well
the atrocities imposed upon Black people by a racist South would choose such
a place—one that has been historically inhospitable and pernicious to its Black
sons and daughters—to signify the physical, spiritual and geographic roots,
the memorial “home,” of many of her characters. But, welcoming or not, the
South was “home” to nine out of every ten Blacks prior to 1900, and eight out
of every ten by 1940. 9 Therefore, it would be foolish and impractical for Americans
of African descent—in reality or in memory, in fact or in fiction—to
forfeit their “home” and “homeland” once more, to the same cultural nemesis—Anglocentric
culture and its servicing discourses of mastery.
Seemingly, most of Morrison’s conceptual revisions take place before she
begins to write. The novels reflect a paradigm shift to the Africentric field of
vision and system of analysis from the traditional Anglo centered mode. Thus,
they do not declare incontrovertibly that the South is the domain of the African
American; instead, they simply record the stories of African Americans
who live in the South, who leave the South for destinations in the North and
Midwest, or their progeny, who were born after their parents migrated from
the South. Like Morrison herself, most of the novels’ characters can trace
family or cultural memories below the Mason Dixon line. Every text features
one or more unenculturated or misenculturated characters who “return” either
physically or spiritually to the South—the African American ancestor’s home—
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to become authentically (re)oriented and spiritually renewed. Significantly,
the South they find, like the real one, is neither heaven nor haven; indeed,
sometimes it seems to be hell. Morrison’s novels do not romanticize the South
or the experiences of Black people who live there; they simply record regional
phenomena from the African American’s perspective.
The South Morrison conjures is impartial; it hovers benignly at the edges of
the African American’s cultural memory. More longed for than real, Morrison’s
South, is, at its best, an idea, an image, a dream of “home” that nurtures and
sustains the spirit. The Bluest Eye’s Pauline Breedlove, for example, recalls
her Alabama home as the place where she could conceive herself as “whole,”
despite her crippled foot, cared for, despite her family’s grinding poverty, and
constituent, despite her feelings of “separateness” and “unworthiness.” At its
worst, and it is at its worst during Slavery and Reconstruction, the South is
also “home” to pain, sorrow, and loss. Consequently, Beloved’s Baby Suggs
must try to maintain her faith, even though “nobody stopped playing checkers
just because the pieces included her children” (23); Paul D must try to authenticate
himself in a place where a rooster can be a rooster but a man cannot be
a “man”; and Sethe must try to save her children’s milk from white boys who,
upon assigning her animal characteristics, would steal it. Recognizing “the
legitimacy of forces other than good ones” (Sula 90), holistic communities
do not deny the rightful presence of nor attempt to avert the creative expression
of negative human, natural, or supernatural forces. Africentrism’s natural
law assures the preservation of balance (over time) within the universe, despite
the machinations of humanity. Thus, “with an acceptance that border[s]
on welcome” (Sula 89), Africentered people—like those people living in the
environs near 124 Bluestone Road when Sethe murders her “crawling already?”
baby—allow natural justice to run its course. In other words, they simply wait
for what goes around to come back around. The only “defense” against evil
Africentrism provides is its strategy for wholeness and grace; it demands simply
that Black people learn to endure, master, and transcend the phenomenal
world if they are to survive physically, emotionally, or spiritually in it. Mirroring
these cultural imperatives, Morrison’s tropic conception of the South is
simple: the South is the source of authentic Africentric culture—the keeping
room for African America’s “true and ancient properties.”
In order not to miss Morrison’s “nuanced, complex, midwifery,” the reader
must sleuth for textual differences between traditional depictions of the “old
South” and Morrison’s “new” revisions. The primary difference is one of focus,
of centering. Simply put, Morrison’s novels inscribe Black people’s lives
and loci: what they do, where they do it, why, and how. As a result, Anglo-
America’s racist oppression and repression—principal issues ordinarily in texts
about African Americans—are not her Black characters only or, in many cases,
primary concern (even though racism engenders direful exigencies more often
than not). In Morrison’s textual world, African America’s fundamental
concerns usually derive from a cultural and geographic matrix. That is,

The Bottom of Heaven
Africentered people use space subjectively to define and articulate the Self.
Place does not define meaning; instead, the Africentered person derives meaning
from a subjective interpretation of and personal interaction with place and its
inhabitants. Thus, Paul D and Sethe are “happy” at Sweet Home, prior to the
advent of Schoolteacher’s regime, and think of it as a place of beauty and (relative)
peace. Of course, this changes once Schoolteacher takes control, ending
the Garner’s “special kind of slavery.” Sethe and Paul D realize that the plantation
itself does not change—what changes is their and Schoolteacher’s interpretation
of and interaction with it. Indeed, Morrison’s Africentric depiction
of the South is unique in that it differentiates between “place” and the evil
works of its inhabitants. Thus, Morrison relieves the region of the South—but
not Southerners or other cultural antagonists—from its historic “blame” for
and complicity in the African American’s degradation. On the whole, Morrison
seems unmotivated to assign blame. Her texts, employing a culturally prescribed
assessment of phenomena, ask the reader to examine instead the nexus
between cause and effect in understanding historical consequences. Accordingly,
she renders the natural or aesthetic beauty of Sweet Home apart from
the heinousness and atrocities of the institution it houses.
The novels inscribe the kind of sustaining and fructifying southern landscapes
not usually associated with African Americans in discourse. Pauline
Breedlove’s soothing remembrances of “down home” and Son Green’s homesick
reminiscences of Eloe, like Milkman Dead’s experiences in Shalimar,
recall the South as the anchor for African American culture. Even those home
places that are wracked by evil—like Sweet Home after Schoolteacher’s arrival—or
felled by violence—like Joe Trace’s Vienna—or lost to death—like
Cholly Breedlove’s Georgia home with Aunt Jimmy—foster spirit-shaping
memories. Realistically, Morrison’s nurturing southern enclaves, like their
real-life doubles, are vulnerable to social, political, and cultural influences
and oppression, as well as erasure from historical narratives. Since both culture
and place are, by their very natures, dynamic, evolving, responsive, it is
crucial for culturally-orienting and self-edifying memories of place, of home,
of kin to live on in the collective memory of its native culture, despite phenomenal
change or its attempted obliteration by the mainstream. Morrison’s
novels work to preserve these essential cultural myths.
Traditionally, African American cultural memories and their meanings are
passed down orally through the generations. This is how the children of
southerners, many of whom may never have been South themselves, can be
made conversant in the culture’s legacies. For example, when Macon Dead, Sr.
attempts to tell his son what it is to be a man, he offers the parable of his
daddy’s Pennsylvania farm, Lincoln’s Heaven. Even though the legendary farm
is not located in the South, its “southerness” is signified by the authenticity of
the peaches they grew—“real peaches like they had in Georgia”(Song of
Solomon 234). Much later, Milkman, who is born and raised in the North,
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Deborah H. Barnes
realizes that the lessons his grandfather Jake, a southerner, taught his father—
to work hard, to love and respect family, to belong to a supportive community,
and to be a responsible steward of nature—were rudimentary to Africentered
codes of conduct and cultural conceptions of a “good life.” The Dead family
parable, suggesting that one does not have to be in the South or from the South
to be “southern,” substantiates Morrison’s paradigm shift away from Anglo
centric codifications of identity.
Likewise, Morrison indulges in “semantic trickery” designed to counteract
the Anglo-America’s tradition of [extra]cultural erasure in her description of
the Edenic Lincoln’s Heaven—a plantation easily imagined as existing in the
South. Consider the ways in which Macon’s holistic memories of that place
and his father signify on “the nigger joke,”
He called our farm Lincoln’s Heaven. . . . Maybe a hundred and fifty acres.
We tilled fifty. About eighty of it was woods. Must of been a fortune in oak
and pine; maybe that’s what they wanted—the lumber, the oak and the
pine. We had a pond that was four acres. And a stream, full of fish. Right
down in the heart of a valley. Prettiest mountains you ever saw, Montour
Ridge. . . . We had a four stall hog pen. The big barn was forty feet by a
hundred and forty—hip-roofed too. And all around in the mountains was deer
and wild turkey. . . . And we had fruit trees. Apple, cherry. . . . Every detail
of that land was clear in his mind: the well, the apple orchard, President
Lincoln; her foal, Mary Todd; Ulysses S. Grant, their cow; General Lee, their
hog. That was the way he knew what history he remembered. [emphasis
mine] (Song 51–52)
Because his father “couldn’t read, couldn’t write: knew only what he saw and
heard tell of,” he, like Sula’s slave-turned-farmer, was “tricked” out of his
land, a victim of hegemonic discourse. “He signed something,” Macon recalls,
“I don’t know what. They told him they owned his property” (52). While
Jake’s rightful possession of Lincoln’s Heaven was erased by the physical and
discursive machinations of local Whites, his reputation as “the farmer [other
Blacks] wanted to be, the clever irrigator, the peach-tree grower, the hog
slaughterer, the wild-turkey roaster, the man who could plow forty in no time
flat and sang like an angel while he did it” lived on for generations in a myth
about the plantation “that colored their lives like a paintbrush and spoke to
them like a sermon” (234). Importantly, Morrison’s novels preserve and inscribe
Jake’s myth and others like it—“histories” the mainstream would pilfer,
debunk or erase.
The novels feature a cast of once-southern characters, like Jake, who remember
the South with differing and often mixed reactions. Some think of it
as their own kind of “heaven,” others do not; but, they all recognize the South
as culturally orienting: the wellspring for their notions of identity, community,
and nurturance. Whatever the degree of their affection, Morrison’s Southerners
usually head for the North or Midwest once a “spiteful” South has com-

The Bottom of Heaven
mitted “the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time”(Beloved
3)—like Hélène Wright, who is rendered an inanely smiling “custard” by a
demeaning porter on a Southbound train—or when they decide to search elsewhere
for opportunity, peace, and satiety—like Joe and Violet Trace do when
they move to “the City.” After leaving the South, emigrants’s memories of
“down home” become quite selective. Whenever possible, they repress recollections
of deprivation and life-altering horror in favor of more salubrious and
sustaining or abstract thoughts; otherwise—like Sethe, Paul D, and Macon
Dead—unless forced to do so, they refuse to remember at all. So, it is the
thrill of earning his “original dime” that Son Green later recalls but not the
stultifying poverty he leaves behind in Eloe. Likewise, Sethe remembers Sweet
Home’s “wonderful soughing trees,” and not the boys’ bodies that fruit them.
Specifically, the salutary memories that Southern emigrants inevitably recall
are of family and community, useful productivity, personal “power,” and autonomy,
spiritual connection and nature itself—empowering memories that
Morrison conserves and “passes on” in her fictive historiographies.
Only after migrants leave “home” do they tend to regard their place in the
South propitiously—a place where they were “whole” and part of a whole. For
example, before moving to Lorain, Ohio, The Bluest Eye’s Pauline Breedlove
hails from Alabama. Cholly is from Georgia. Geraldine is rumored to have
come from someplace like Mobile, Aiken, Newport News, Marietta, or Meridian.
Significantly, before moving north, each character is a member of a
nurturing, orienting community—a cultural community that teaches them what
and who is important and why. Despite this, they may not perceive their native
environment as positive or nurturing until later, as Pauline’s and Cholly’s recollections
show. From Pauline’s memories of “down home,” Morrison ferrets
out the cognitive dissonance often associated with the South that obscures a
vital connection between the South and Black identity. We are told Pauline
believes her “deformity”—”a crooked, archless foot that flopped when she
walked” (Bluest Eye 88)—estranges her from her family and community.
“Slight as it was,” the text confides, “this deformity explained for her many
things that would have been otherwise incomprehensible . . . . Her general
feelings of separateness and unworthiness she blamed on her foot”(88). The
story tells us, however, that the “end of her lovely beginning was probably the
cavity in one of her front teeth” (88). So, even though she loses the tooth in
Ohio, long after she has left Alabama and Kentucky, “she preferred. . . to think
always of her foot” [emphasis mine] (88). For many emigrants, the South is
remembered as disabling, as the place that crippled and then destroyed the
African American’s desire and agency. The text’s warning—“to find out the
truth about how dream die, one should never take the word of the
dreamer”(Bluest Eye 88)—is useful in discerning how many Blacks, like
Pauline, may have constructed their attitudes toward and memories of the South
heretofore. Morrison refutes the idea that the South itself might be blame-
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Deborah H. Barnes
worthy (any more than the foot) for the African American’s misfortunes.
Redemptively, she reclaims the South as the African American’s “home”—the
site of cultural wholeness and authenticity.
Generally, Morrison depicts the South (and African American culture) naturalistically
and holistically: humanity (or the Self) is construed as an extension
of, inseparable from, and interdependent with the natural universe. Sula
tells us, those characters will prosper who respect their connection to nature,
who believe that it is often “inconvenient” but never “askew,” who recognize
“the legitimacy of forces other than good ones,” who “[know] anger well but
not despair,” and who “are determined to survive” (Sula 90). On the other
hand, those who forget will suffer accordingly. Africentric culture found in
communities like Eloe, Rome, the Bottom, and Shalimar perceive nature as
dispassionate; it supports but does not favor any one constituent element over
another. Thus, good and evil, for example, have no inherent advantage over one
another as history clearly demonstrates.
To their credit, the novels do not simply invert traditional mainstream dichotomies
of White privilege and Black powerlessness, presenting Blacks as
“elect” and Whites as “the wretched of the earth.” The novels prefigure social
reality diunitally, characterizing nature, people, and circumstances as, simultaneously,
eleemosynary and callous. Thus, the rescuing white girl, Amy Denver,
does not save Sethe’s life and help to birth the baby Denver from the understanding
of forced labor, fugitive flight and whippings she shares with Sethe.
She does it simply because she is “good at sick things” and Sethe is there
(Beloved 83). Holistically, Amy’s motivation for helping Sethe is irrelevant;
Sethe benefits from her “disinterested kindness” and her “good hands.” In the
Morrisonian universe, those characters—Black or White—who best typify
holism’s values, appropriately, are allocated “grace,” however small or shortlived.
Morrison’s novels memorialize the South as the ”place” that gave rise to the
African American’s grace—adaptive, generative, and transcendent powers of
the spirit, the determination to survive and the will to “prosper,” even under the
worst circumstances. Thus, even though sharecropping in the South forced
Violet Trace to work like a man, she remembers it favorably as the time when
she had the “muscles and hips” she later loses and tries but fails to recover in
the city. In the South, the text tells us, that Violet at seventeen is autonomous,
productive, and “powerful.”
She moved in with a family of six in Tyrell and worked at anything . . .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. (Jazz 105)

The Bottom of Heaven
In the North, however, Violet “forgets” she is the “snappy determined girl and
. . . hardworking young woman” she once was (23).
Joe’s “power” in the South is also unequivocal; there, he even had the authority
to name himself. Abandoned by birth parents who “leave without a trace,”
Joe is taken in and raised by Rhoda and Frank Williams who considered him
“just like [their] own” (123). Similarly, it is there that he comes into manhood.
“Picked out and trained to be a man” along with Victory by “the best man in
Vesper County to go hunting with”—a hunter’s hunter—Joe learns to “live
independent and feed [him]self no matter what” (125). Social deficits and personal
deficiencies notwithstanding, Joe (like Violet) prospers in the South
because he responds to phenomena holistically. As they crisscross Vesper
County searching for work, Joe and Victory prove their cultural mettle when
they survive Vienna’s destruction. Even amid its chaos and ruin, the boys function
interdependently with and within the natural world.
They knew they had left Crossland far behind when they passed the walnut
tree where they used to sleep on nights when, hunting far from home, cool air
could be found high in its branches. . . . They found short work at a sawmill
in Bear, then an afternoon pulling stumps at Crossland, finally steady work in
Goshen. Then one spring the southern third of the county erupted in fat white
cotton balls, and Joe left Victory helping the smithy at Goshen for the lucrative
crop picking going on outside Palestine. (Jazz 174–75)
Within his natural realm—the Southern landscape—Joe responds with the kind
of cultural authenticity he finds difficult to assert in the North.
Ultimately, Joe and Violet are bought low because they ignore or forget to
maintain the fundamental cultural beliefs and practices that they learned in the
South. Moreover, they do not supplant the culture they lose with viable cultural
alternatives employed by African Americans who reacculturate themselves
after they abandon the land for the North’s urbanity. Predictably, the Traces
succumb to cognitive dissonance. Without the landscape to orient and inform
his choices, Joe forgets, for example, that it is wrong to kill the tender or the
female when he murders Dorcas; Violet forgets that she has the power and the
authority to make up her world her way. Thus, southern culture, in many ways,
is reflexive of African American culture in Morrison’s fictive world.
The novels attest that Africentered (southern) culture, like Anglo centered
culture, is a matter of choice. One can embrace one’s native culture or reject it
and assimilate another. This issue is particularly important in light of the African
American’s tendency toward migration. Morrison shows that Africentric
southern culture can (and does) exist beyond the South, because it is not subject
to or limited by the cultural mainstream’s correlates of space and identity.
Accordingly, characters like Eva Peace, Pilate Dead, and Baby Suggs, who
have lived in the South at some point in their lives, behave like “southerners”
even though they no longer live within the geographic region. On the other
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Deborah H. Barnes
hand, characters like Macon Dead, or Cholly and Pauline Breedlove reject
cultural prescriptions learned in the South to imitate culturally unauthentic
behaviors learned elsewhere from culturally different people. So, conversely,
one may hail from the South and, yet, not behave in a “southern” manner, like
the maligned Dumfrey women who refuse to acknowledge their history in
Cottown or their associations with (and, therefore, their responsibilities to)
other people who have migrated from there to the City. 10 Here, Morrison uses
the South as a metaphor that tropes African American culture to warn Black
people against the dangers of “disremembering” their cultural roots. Both
voluntary cultural misorientation and involuntary cultural erasure subsume
African American cultural viability and memory.
Morrison does not use the texts themselves to argue the necessity for or
rectitude of revising mainstream American discourse to include the African
American’s memories, interpretations, and perceptions; she merely writes the
novels from an Africentered perspective. For instance, while Beloved
chronicles the experience of slavery at Sweet Home, Morrison’s neo-slave
novel describes the interior lives of the plantation’s slaves—their hopes,
dreams, values, and fears. Significantly, the text relates, but does not center, as
traditional slave narratives do, the battery of physical and mental atrocities
visited upon them by the nefarious slave handler, Schoolteacher. The Sweet
Home slaves find his machinations baneful, vile, and life-altering; yet, he is
not their only concern. Ironically, their interests run the gamut of human desires;
they want love, need sex, treasure friendship, desire glamour, value trust,
have fun, require meaningful endeavor, and long for creative license as do people
who are free. Beloved reveals a relevant anomaly of human nature vis à vis
culture. It shows that people, in this case African American slaves, exist not
only within but also in spite of their historic moment and sociopolitical and
economic circumstances. Morrison’s depictions of the Sweet Home slaves
reflect Black subjectivity, a perspective master narratives disavow.
Consequently, the African American’s perceptions of, contributions to, and
investments in this nation are, in a Morrisonian universe, matters of fact—
facts that do not warrant defense or concession, only articulation. Morrison’s
[African] American narratives enable and ennoble their Black subjects (as well
as their readers) by recording historic moments and memories from an
Africentric cultural perspective. Consequently, they neither chronicle the timehonored
myth of Black helplessness and victimization—a tragic story of genocide,
enslavement, betrayal, dispossession, and oppression—nor do they venerate
the Euro-American’s reputed industry, bravery, idealism, and power. Instead,
the narratives celebrate Black agency and power in fables about African
Americans who survive, transcend, and create amidst environmental hostilities
and socially imposed liabilities.
To remake the myth of the South, to exorcize its historically inferiorizing,
disfranchising, self-negating power over American Blacks, Morrison reconceives
discursively the African American’s memory of, relationship with, and

The Bottom of Heaven
disposition toward this country and the South. If Blacks are to claim America
as their land, in the same way and for the same reason European immigrants
have done, they too must be able to perceive it propitiously and with hope.
America, like Wild’s cave, must be perceived, then, as—a “chamber of gold,
[a] ‘home’ in the rock” (Jazz 221)—a symbol of the African American’s protection,
potential, and choice. Morrison’s summoning of the “new” South yields
what the “nigger joke” denies: the African American’s actualization of choice,
the opportunity for creative and generative potential, and, as a result, their
protection from exclusion, dispossession, and trickery—their “piece of the
rock.” Thus, Morrison’s reconstruction of the South in myth, metaphor, and
memory transforms and subjectifies the meaning of the African American cultural
world her novels evoke.
If we can acknowledge that real power lies not in weapons and wealth but in
the ability to define “truth” for the masses; if it is the license to mandate the
nature and substance of “reality” and its memory—history—then it makes sense
for Toni Morrison to (re)claim the South as the African American’s ancestral
home. The simple act of naming—in this case, the South as the African
American’s “home” and “homeland”—certifies her discursive authority and
power. Similarly, if definitions do indeed “belong to the definers, not the defined”
(Beloved 190), then Morrison evinces discursive power also by supplanting
Anglo-America’s claims to sole proprietorship of the South, and of
America, as well as its “ownership” of the American story—history. A twentieth-century
metaphysician, shaman, griot, and wise-elder, Morrison wields the
discursive power her status provides to define authoritatively and subjectively
Africentered interpretations of reality, culture, history, and “home”—the South.
NOTES
1 Beloved acknowledges an African past but it is recalled only as incoherent bits and pieces of
memory from the Middle Passage.
2 According to Peter Bergman in The Chronological History of the Negro in America, Pedro Alonzo
Nino, a “Negro” crewmember accompanied Columbus on his first voyage to the West in 1492.
3 Bergman 4. When Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean, thirty Negroes, including Nuflo de Olano,
were with him. They assisted him in building the first ships made on the Pacific coast.
4 Bergman 5. Negroes marched into Mexico with Cortez: they harvested the first wheat crop in the
New World.
5 Bergman 5.
6 James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got
Wrong (New York: Touchstone, 1996) 138. Subsequent references are to this edition.
7 “Romancing the Shadow.” in Playing in the Dark 29–59.
8 bell hooks, “The Chitlin’ Circuit: On Black Community,” Yearning (Boston: South End, 1990) 33–
40.
9 Dernoral Davis, “Toward a Socio-Historical and Demographic Portrait of Twentieth-Century African-Americans.”
in Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South. Alferdteen
Harrison, ed. (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1991) 7.
10 Jazz 18–19.
34

WORKS CITED
35
Deborah H. Barnes
Bergman, Peter M. The Chronological History of the Negro in America. New York: Harper & Row,
1969.
Davis, Denoral. “Toward a Socio-Historical and Demographic Portrait of Twentieth-Century African-
Americans.” Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South. Ed. Alferdteen
Harrison. Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1991.
hooks, bell. “The Chitlin’ Circuit: On Black Community.” Yearning: Race Gender and Cultural
Politics. Boston: South End, 1990.
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got
Wrong. New York: Touchstone, 1996.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.
–––. The Bluest Eye. New York: Washington Square P, 1970.
–––. Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992.
–––. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP,
1992.
–––. The Nobel Lecture in Literature 1993. New York: Knopf, 1994.
–––. Song of Solomon. New York: Knopf, 1977.
–––. Sula. New York: Knopf, 1974.
–––. Tar Baby. New York: Knopf, 1981.

Carolyn M. Jones
SOUTHERN LANDSCAPE AS PSYCHIC LANDSCAPE IN TONI
MORRISON’S FICTION
I suspect that when modern Americans ask, “what is sacred?” That they are
really asking, “what place is mine? what community do I belong to?”
—Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography
Black Americans shaped the landscape of the American South. The houses
that were built, the human beings that were nurtured in them; the forests that
were cleared, and the crops that were planted and harvested were all tended by
Black hands and formed by African cultural practices, technologies, and sensibilities.
1 The landscape of the South, in the beginning so alien to African slaves,
became, for most part, neither legally nor economically their own, but became
spiritually their own through their own labor and under the most difficult
of circumstances. This intimacy with place was and is disrupted by not being
able to be fully at home in that place. Thus, despite their physical attachment
to the land, most Black men and women in the South did not have the ultimate
freedom of belonging (162): “a place where you could love anything you
chose” (163). Morrison puts it this way in a review of Albert Murray’s South
To A Very Old Place:
[The] return of any black born in the South takes on a special dimension.
Along with an intimacy with its people and ties to its land, there is a separateness
from both the people and the land—since some of the people are white
and the land is not really his. This feeling of tender familiarity and brutish
alienation provides tension and makes the trip down home delicate in its bitterness
and tough in its joy. (5)
It is this disjunction between the intimate and the alien that Toni Morrison
explores through the metaphor of landscape in her fiction. With the act of
writing, of reclaiming the landscape through memory and imagination, Morrison
suggests, in Beloved and in Song of Solomon, how the South functions both as
a site for disjunction and for reunion with the self.
For Paul D in Beloved, the journey through the South and for Milkman in
Song of Solomon the journey to the South are painful journeys into the past
and into the self, but from them these men forge reconnections and discover
freedom. Paul D’s quest to return home takes him across the southern landscape
and gives us a microcosmic view of its complexity and history. What he
internalizes as he moves prepares him not only for his reunion with Sethe but
also for reunion with self. Through Milkman, Morrison shows us how external
landscape becomes interior. The southern landscape encodes Milkman’s past
and future: his ancestors, his family history, and his identity. In the South,
Studies in the Literary Imagination 31.2, Fall 1998 © Georgia State University

Southern Landscape as Psychic Landscape
Milkman finds the kind of knowledge that is traditionally discredited in the
West. This knowledge saves him from modern anomie and teaches him to
love—which, for Morrison, is the primary human spiritual capacity and the
most radical expression of freedom.
David E. Sopher has stated that landscape cannot be separated from the nature
of the human relationships which occur there (136). Or, as the editors of
Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location put it, space becomes
place by being named,
as the flow of power and negotiations of social relations are rendered in the
concrete form of architecture: and also, of course, by embodying the symbolic
and imaginary investments of a population. . . . Place is space to which
meaning has been ascribed. (xii)
The American South has been that ascribed place for African Americans. The
human relationships that occured there hold the ultimate meaning the region
has for Blacks and they also inscribe the realities that have affected psychological
wholeness and self identity.
Speaking like the narrator of Jazz, Paul D tells us that to love is “[r]isky”
(Jazz 136). He cannot love the land of the South because the master narrative
denies that love. Consequently, he cannot love himself. His expulsion from
Sweet Home and his sentence to the Georgia prison camp for trying to kill
Brandywine (the man Schoolteacher sold him to [Beloved 106]), set Paul D
on his odyssey. His escape from the hell of the prison camp sets Paul D on his
journey that will teach him about the land and about himself. He has fought on
both sides of the Civil War and clearly sees the results: masses of grieving,
terrified, silent and homeless people (52–53). Once expelled from Sweet
Home, forbidden public transportation, and threatened by the Klan, he wanders
down trails and back roads, looking for home:
The War had been over four or five years then, but nobody white or Black
seemed to know it. Odd clusters and strays of Negroes wandered the back
roads and cow paths from Schenectady to Jackson. . . . Silent, except for
social courtesies, when they met one another they neither described nor asked
about the sorrow that drove them from one place to another. (52–53)
Like Beloved, these nameless people haunt the landscape unclaimed. Paul
D’s compassion, a quality that characterizes him, makes him recognize that
these silent, grieving, starving people are like himself—ex slaves who, dislocated
from their ‘Sweet Homes,’ become “trespassers from the human race”
(125).
During, before, and after the War he had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry,
or tired or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything. Who,
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Carolyn M. Jones
like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for food: who, like him, stole
from pigs: who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by night: who,
like him, had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators,
raiders, patrollers, veterans, hill men, posses and merrymakers. . . .
Move. Walk. Run. Hide. Steal and move on (emphasis mine). (66)
And like these slaves Paul D’s fate resides with coming to terms with the geography
of the South itself.
Ralph Ellison says that the slaves knew that geography—as a symbol of the
known and of the unknown—was fate. As Kenneth M. Stampp points out in The
Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, slave masters kept a
knowledge of geography from their slaves to “make them stand in fear.” “Not
only the slave’s fear of capture but his limited knowledge of geography, make
the prospect of successful escape seem discouragingly dim” (154). Freedom,
therefore, was both a gain and a loss: losing the only “homes” they had ever
known, freedom had to be reconstructed in places that had yet to be found. The
mystery and importance of geography are clearly expressed in Beloved. As
the Sweet Home slaves prepare to escape, only Halle, who has sold his labor,
and Sixo, who has walked to the Thirty Mile Woman, know anything of the
world outside (Beloved 223). Paul D also lacks this understanding and it symbolizes
both his loss of home and family. While “his co-convicts talk knowledgeably
of rivers and states, towns and territories” (112), Paul D only knows
the direction he must go: North. Possessing no particular geographical knowledge
of roads or boundaries, Paul D has to rely on his own understanding of
the land (111). The land itself and the changing seasons lead him home. The
Cherokee tell him to follow the “tree flowers, As they go, you go. You will be
where you want to be when they are gone” (112). And when they are gone, Paul
D has reunited with Sethe. The journey to Sethe, both physical and psychological,
has challenged and troubled Paul D, but it has also freed him to get to
know himself. The bitter news he learns from Sethe teaches him about the
horror of relationships in the region and it also allows him to define himself.
His retreat to the church basement, after he learns Sethe’s news, helps him to
forge a new identity.
Debra Sitter observes that after Paul D’s return from his second prison, the
church basement, Stamp Paid does not call him “Mr. Garner,” but Mr. D (25).
Stamp verifies that Paul D, too, is “stamp paid,”—that he has earned his identity.
Paul D redefines himself in terms of his own story; thus, he is not “Garner,”
the property of another, but “D” in possession of self. Now truly free,
Paul D can retrace his steps: “His coming is the reverse of his going” (Beloved
263). He can go forward through the past and go home to Sethe. This
time, however, he travels a mental as well as a physical landscape. He thinks of
the beautiful American landscape that he has traversed and endeavors not to
love it:

Southern Landscape as Psychic Landscape
[H]e could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not
his. He hid in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap
water and tried not to love it. On nights when the sky was personal, weak
with the weight of its own stars, he made himself not love it. Its graveyards
and low-lying rivers. Or just a house—solitary under a chinaberry tree: maybe
a mule tethered and the light hitting its hide just so. Anything could stir him
and he tried hard not to love it. (268)
Paul D, however, has loved: he has loved small. He is stirred by “anything”
in the landscape, and though he tries not to, he does love. Indeed, he must. The
flowers he finds in Sethe’s yard: a “riot of late-summer flowers . . . Sweet
William, morning glory, chrysanthemums” (270) symbolize his attachment.
Once again, blossoms lead him to Sethe, who, like Baby Suggs, has given up.
Paul D brings her a future, his rediscovered self: through Beloved, he discovers
the compassion, the will to endure, and the blessedness that were his all
along. When he finally moves into the house, his love of the beauty of the
landscape and his new-found self congeal. He has loved the land, followed its
guidance, and now he can tackle the memories associated with it. The memories
of slavery and loss are Sethe’s as well. For Sethe, Paul D becomes another
Amy Denver, bringing Sethe—and himself— back to life. While they differently
constitute a site of love, together they map the landscape of their wounded
hearts finding both a place and a future.
Like Paul D, Milkman, in Song of Solomon, looks for a place to belong. His
life in the North has given him a false sense of manhood. In imitation of his
flawed father, Macon Dead, Milkman controls his mother and sisters, and he
exploits the passionate and vulnerable Hagar. In the second part of the novel,
Milkman pursues gold, the gold that he thinks Pilate and his father lost. Without
his knowing it, however, he pursues what Macon and Pilate really lost: the
true gold of reconnecting to family and the past and, therefore, a located sense
of self. In his journey, he follows Pilate’s tracks and learns what Pilate learned
as she moved. Thus, their journey is as deep into the self as into the American
landscape.
Pilate asks the deepest questions of human life: How do I want to live?
What is valuable to me? What is true? She finds that what is eternal, good, and
true is love. Her deep concern for human relationships, with both the living
and the dead, her compassion for troubled people, and her knowledge make
her a person of the boundary, like a child or an outlaw (149). She becomes
Milkman’s “other mother,” and by following in her footsteps, Milkman grows
in his love for self and in his attachment to the land.
Hunting, a central motif in the novel, is a masculine activity that embodies
two kinds of relations. One either becomes one with the landscape and expresses
gratitude for its bounty, or one merely becomes a victimizer. Milkman
begins as a victimizer, but he finds the former type of knowledge in the woods
of Shalimar. His sister, Magdalene, sets Milkman on his journey. She tells him
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Carolyn M. Jones
that he has lived a selfish and stupid life; he has been “peeing on people” (Song
214), and tyrannizing and objectifying the women in his life. Having been given
“notice” (Song 214) by his sister that she will no longer tolerate his ways,
Milkman begins the search for gold that will lead him to his ancestral home.
Morrison constructs his journey in two parts: first, he enters an enchanted
landscape, occupied by Circe and his grandfather (227); and second, he enters
a landscape in which the history of his family is merged into the place itself.
Like Paul D’s search, Milkman’s is risky, for it may change him forever. The
stories that Milkman’s father and Pilate tell him become concrete: he is relocated
in time by the ancestors, Jake and Circe. He is located in space through
their direction. Sitting in Reverend Cooper’s house, he realizes that:
Without knowing it, he had walked right by the place where Pilate’s earring
had been fashioned, the earring that fascinated him when he was little, the
fixing of which informed the colored people here that the children of the
murdered man was alive. And this was the living room of the son of the man
who made the earring. (231)
The multi-valency of the earring, something that has seemed merely Pilate’s
eccentricity, comes home to Milkman as he finds himself in place.
He gains understanding of his past when again he hears the story of Lincoln’s
Heaven. Milkman realizes that, in the shadow of the plantation, his grandfather
had tried to make “a home in this rock” (235), that he had tried to claim a part
of the South as his own through the work of his hands on the wild landscape.
Like Pilate’s earring, the farm is a symbol of pride, for both the Deads and the
community, coloring their lives “like a paintbrush” and speaking to them “like
a sermon” (235). Although, the farm is, as Stephanie Demetrakopoulos helps
us see, too much of a repetition of what the plantation represents: “a
prelapsarian Garden of Eden, shaped out of the virgin American territory by a
godlike Black man” (91). Jake’s accomplishment is not to be undercut. It is
heroic—indeed, he becomes a folk hero, but he only temporarily creates a
Sweet Home. His is a false security found in the back yard of the plantation.
His body, guarding the boundary, is blown away. The complicated nature of
human relations in the lives of Black people in the South are brought home to
Milkman when he realizes that his father and Pilate were hidden in the house
of the very people who killed their father (Song 232), that everyone knew it,
and that justice had to come in other ways than that “eye-for-an-eye” revenge
in which Guitar believes.
In Shalimar, Milkman becomes a man. He redefines hunting, and comes into
sync with the land and realizes, as Paul D did, what it can teach him. He, like
Pilate, goes to the core of his existence, examines his “defect” and gains his
sense of entitlement (276). He realizes that Lena was right, that he has demanded
love but never gave love. Stripped of his personality and all the material
things that he thought constituted self, Milkman comes into contact with

Southern Landscape as Psychic Landscape
the impersonal nature that undergirds all reality. The quality of nature that demands
endurance (277). In weather, and in the landscape itself, he can move
into a new relationship with a greater reality. He learns the rhythm and the
language of creation. “It was all language. . . . No it was not language: it was
what there was before language. Before things were written down” (278). This
idea of primordial sounds communicating knowledge prepares us for the folk
song that leads Milkman to his ancestors. Gaining this knowledge saves his
life when Guitar attacks him, and it centers him: “he found himself exhilarated
by simply walking the earth. Walking it like he belonged on it” (281).
Morrison concretizes Milkman’s experience and struggle in a ritual and a
symbol: the dressing of the bobcat. As the men skin and disembowel the bobcat
that they have tortured and killed, Guitar undertakes an internal skinning
and disemboweling—that is, an examination of the three kinds of knowledge
that have been offered him by Guitar, his father, and Pilate. The bobcat symbolizes
the feminine: turned on its back with its legs spread apart, showing its
delicate ankles (281). Milkman contemplates Guitar’s “eye for an eye” knowledge
that strips one of the capacity to love, leaving only with the capacity to
dominate—“Mine.” The bobcat is aligned with the peacock in this scene: the
men who senselessly kill the bobcat (for they cannot eat it: it is a trophy) are
like Guitar who wants to catch and kill the peacock he and Milkman see. Their
ethic, like his father’s, is “Eat him!” (283, 179: see Duvall 105–106). This
world of victims and victimizers Milkman contrasts to Pilate’s transgressive
and radical sense of love (39). The men initiate Milkman into their fraternity
(Harris 102–103), but even as he is included, taking the heart, he remembers
Pilate, equating the heart and the egg yolk (Song 282). The heart— love—is
what Milkman contemplates as he participates in this male-coded scene. Echoing
Guitar’s words, he wonders “What else? What else? What else?” (282).
That is, what kind of love? Guitar’s or Pilate’s?
Milkman’s engagement in the natural world brings on continuing self-examination
and leads him to recognize his violation of Pilate and of Hagar.
Recognizing that his life has been one of leaving, he can hear the song that the
children sing: “O Solomon don’t leave me here” (301). Milkman realizes, he
is on the soil of his ancestors: “Solomon and Ryna. The woods. The hunt.
Solomon’s Leap and Ryna’s Gulch, places they went to or passed by the night
they shot the bobcat” (302). In this children’s song, Milkman finds his past:
“These children were singing a story about his people” (304). The story is
imbedded in the landscape. History is place. The place, Shalimar, is named
after Milkman’s own ancestors, and their story shapes the landscape, even as
Solomon’s actions have caused a disjunction in the family and in the selves of
the Deads.
Solomon’s journey is a story of freedom, movement, and loss. Solomon
was an African who flew away from home, in the midst of working the cotton.
The “big double-headed rock,” symbolizing both the glory and the damage of
his act, marks the action. He claims his freedom, but what his act meant to
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Carolyn M. Jones
those he left behind is symbolized in Ryna’s Gulch. Ryna, like Hagar, loved too
deeply, and when she lost her love, she lost her mind. The land and weather
remember her screams. As Calvin tells Milkman on the hunting trip, the crying
comes from “Ryna’s Gulch. . . . It makes that sound when the wind hits a certain
way” (274). Not only are Milkman’s people memorialized in song, they are
constitutive of place: who they were and what they did shapes the land itself.
The ambiguity as well as the glory of that shaping is encoded in the name of
the town and in the song itself. Charlemagne/Shalimar, derived, perhaps from
Solomon, pronounced Shallemone (261) and becoming, in Pilate’s song
Sugarman, suggests power, wisdom, and beauty. Charlemagne suggest the power
of the imperial west: Charlemagne, emperor of the Holy Roman empire from
768–814 AD, conquered land that is now modern Europe. Shalimar suggests
the non-West. Laid out in 1641, Shalimar is located in Lahore in Pakistan. It
has extensive terraced gardens, filled with fountains. Thus, one level, the name
suggests a paradise, but Lahore was a contended space and a crossroad of cultures,
having been controlled by Indians, Muslims, Sikhs, and the British.
Solomon was both a king and writer of wisdom literature and is associated
with wise choice. Shallemone reminds us of “Not Doctor Street”—the unofficial
name of the official place that Milkman finds through AAA. Person, place
and pure sound shift and weave. The place-name itself suggests a creolization.
In this regard Kimberly W. Benston comments on its larger implications in the
song:
Encompassing KiKongo and Greek, the Islamic and the Judaic West Africa
and Cuba, priestly exile and burning love within the mother’s home, biblical
fable and Morrison’s own family biography, the Song of Solomon clearly
eludes any completed reading, any certain “translation,” as in its active interweaving
of temporal, spatial, and discursive codes. Such partial legibility is
not an effect of insufficient data, for no encyclopedia of referents could
possibly exhaust the combinatory possibilities of the Song’s “cut across” the
fabric of discourse. Itself a ceaselessly productive process of translation, it
authorizes no relation of original (father) and copy (son): “faithful” translation
can legitimate only the act of reinscription per se. (Benston 104–105)
This combination of people and places, with the refrain, “Come konka yalle,
come konka tambee” (303), that Benston reconstructs from KiKongo as “to
strike My leg at him/her/it, to stick my footprint at myself” (108; n. 28), suggests
diaspora, the movement of peoples across landscape and the creolization
of cultures that happens as people move, name, collect, and recollect as well
as the complicated combinations of home, exile, and homelessness they creates.
Milkman’s engagement with the southern landscape and the history of his
ancestors used in that land opens him to a new understanding of himself, of his
people, and the nature of the spaces which affect and are affected by the human
life hived there.

Southern Landscape as Psychic Landscape
As he travels home, Milkman realizes that this is true for all places. Untold
stories, lost histories, and people reside in the American landscape:
How many dead lives and fading memories were buried in and beneath the
names of the places in this country. Under the recorded names were other
names, just as “Macon Dead,” recorded for all time in some dusty file, hid
from view the names of real people, places, and things. Names that had
meaning. No wonder Pilate put hers in her ear. When you know your name,
you should hand on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it well
die when you do. (329)
He realizes that the “unofficial” names of places and people buried within the
landscape are forms of knowledge. As Marianne Hirsch points out, knowing a
name is a different thing from naming or renaming, for it “reads within the
symbolic a connection to a literal which interrupts, disturbs, and challenges
its hegemony” (Hirsch 87). Names transgress against the naming done by White
men, preserve a past and a people from being forever lost, and reinforce the
truth that Black people belong to this place. The resistance to authoritative
naming affirms the reality of what happened in America and elsewhere and
opens the possibilities of geography as freedom and space as improvisational,
layered with and nuanced by presences and absences of those who have come
before. As he travels over the southern landscape and learns the history associated
with it, Milkman moves toward the knowledge and self realization that
frees him.
The final pages of Song of Solomon repeat and, potentially, redeem the
past. Solomon’s act of radical freedom is also an act of extreme rupture, leaving
in its wake men loved too much, but were unable to love. Milkman repeats
that pattern: thus, his triumphant discovery is countered by Hagar’s death. This
time, Milkman, like Pilate, claims the dead/Dead he kills (Song 208), taking
her hair like Pilate takes her father’s bones. Pilate’s burial of her father on
Solomon’s Leap, ends the repetition, and delivers, as Kimberly Benston argues,
“Pilate and Milkman from the father’s ghost, allowing his burial at last as
the singular authoritative voice of desire and law” (105). The burial locates the
father in place and makes him part of the land itself. With him, Pilate buries
her earring: as well as her name and his writing (335).
At first glance, the death of Pilate seems to negate all that has happened. It
is a tragic “mistake” (337), similar to Guitar’s missing Milkman and killing
Pilate instead. However, Pilate’s death begins another cycle. She forces Milkman
into her role: the one who remembers. She tells him, as her father told
her, to “Sing” (336), and he sings her song, remembering her and, in her, those
who have come before: “Sugargirl don’t leave me here” (336). His singing,
like Pilate’s and cry for “Mercy” at Hagar’s funeral, awaken the world around
him. Pilate does not die. She rides the air with the birds who, take her earring
and fly away. Pilate goes home. What she passes to Milkman is neither the
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Carolyn M. Jones
control that his father exercises nor the Old Testament vengeance that Guitar
practices, she leaves him a love that has already set her free: “Now he knew
why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly” (336).
The final passage clearly demonstrates Milkman’s reunion with landscape
and the freedom that results. Milkman stands up and shouts for Guitar. The call
of Guitar’s name is echoed and transformed by the hill: “Tar tar tar” (337). As
Morrison says of the pie ladies in Tar Baby, the tar suggests the “ability to
hold something together that otherwise would fall apart—which is what I mean
by the nurturing ability” (Conversations 131). Like Sethe at the end of Beloved,
once Milkman learns the importance of relationships from Pilate and
from what he has experienced, he can make a cry of identity: “Here I am”
(337). The “am” echoes four times, reminding us of Moses’ response to God’s
call in the Exodus. Finally, Milkman affirms the creation itself: “Life life life
life” (337). Then Guitar expresses their deep relation: “my man. . . . My main
man” (337). Identity (am), relativity (man and life) and community (tar) are
all on the line in this scene.
Recognizing their interconnectedness, Guitar puts down the gun and faces
Milkman with bare hands. Milkman, imitating Pilate, offers himself to Guitar:
“You want my life ? . . . You need it? Here” (337). This is a life as gift and
choice, Milkman, embracing death, transcends it and thereby affirms life.
Morrison maintains that she did not mean to suggest that Milkman and Guitar
kill each other, but “out of a commitment and love and selflessness they are
willing to risk the one thing that we have, life, and that is the positive nature of
the action” (Conversions 111). The risk is the thing; by stretching to the borders
of one’s being “some part of you does die” (110). Milkman, therefore,
transcends but does not escape. 2 He does not fly away, leaving the Dead/dead.
He lands. Milkman repeats and corrects and, thereby, makes a future. Milkman’s
act may transform Guitar, whose putting down the gun, the symbol of his masculine/hunting
power, is risky. Milkman’s leap is also risky. It is natural, like a
bird; he does not wipe his eyes, take a breath, or bend his knees. Love moves
spontaneously towards the arms of power, and in the embrace of the other,
what may emerge is not physical death, but death to a limited self. A new balance
and freedom are achieved.
Landscape, as place, is space that we have made into home. In “Secret Places,”
Jill McCorkle says that “Home is a creation and a permanent possession” (96)
and that the desire to go back home and to recreate is “not about being young
so much as it is about finding the people you have lost” (96). I began with
Kathleen Norris, who sees the search for community, identity, and the sacred
(Norris 129) as a search for place. The searches for place and for those we
have lost, therefore, are both difficult and necessary; they are tasks filled with
conflicting emotions: intimacy and separation, familiarity and alienation, and
“delicate bitterness and tough joy” (Morrison, “Going Home With Bitterness”
5).

Southern Landscape as Psychic Landscape
Home, we see, is a constructed and contended space. There, male and female,
love and power, self and other, African and American, and African and
European can become either irreconcilable opposites that seek to dominate
and destroy/de-story the “other,” to make home homogenous, or they can be
complementary forces that yield, caress, express, and enrich our creative possibilities
(38). Even when it works, however, home is not paradise. We see
paradise as perfect, unmarked, but as human beings, we mark our landscape
and define its landmarks. As Morrison’s address to the 1995 meeting of the
American Academy of Religion and her most recent novel Paradise suggest,
my Eden may require your exclusion, oppression, and enslavement. To demand
Eden, as the American dream does, is to “remain infantized and to regard
innocence as a virtue that is supposed to last forever” (Taylor-Guthrie 69).
This involves no real risk, and, therefore, no development of self. We must
give up the idea of paradise and live the paradox of recognizing we belong in
places that are not fully ours and that there is “an enormous amount of stuff
one cannot choose” (165). In terms of place, this means that we must accept
that those landscapes and marks on the landscape, especially in the American
South, are sites of struggle, saturated with blood, sweat and human emotion.
We shape and, finally, return to land, mark it with our work and our being, even
as the land marks us. Our acting on the land and its acting on us is enabled by
names—names that remains silent until we, like Milkman and Paul D, take the
risk and learn the proper language to speak them.
Ultimately, I think, Morrison does not want to suggest that landscape is
marked only by struggle, sorrow, and by disjunction. It is marked, too, by joy
and reunion. Her sense of landscape suggests cosmos. I take this term from
Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History. His
homeland, like Shalimar, has had many names, and his people, like Black Americans,
were the people on whom history was “made.” He sought a meaning, a
structure, within which the terror of history (138 ff) could not rob us of our
freedom, or force us into a “subhuman existence” (157). Eliade calls this structure
“cosmos.” Toni Morrison, I think, would agree with Eliade that within the
terror of history, we can endure, by subverting the master narrative while also
recognizing its power and opening ourselves to another power, one that moves
us beyond nostalgia, denunciation, violence, and passivity. This is the power of
cosmos expressed in the land and in our repetition and extension of the gestures
of the ancestors who shaped the land and ourselves. The power of cosmos
is to own the self so that “you can make some type of choices, take certain
kinds of risks” (165). It is to acknowledge the West within us and affirm
discredited knowledge and myth over history. As Ashis Nandy tells us myths
contain history while being open to invention (59). They widen human choices
and allow us “to remember in an anticipatory fashion” (59). They let us remake
the past (57). The power of cosmos is to embrace and heal suffering. And
finally, its power is in the rhythm of a dancer and the improvisational power of
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Carolyn M. Jones
a jazz man—the recognition that whatever exists in space, to have meaning,
must be timed.
This is, as Toni Morrison says in Jazz, “Risky,” but taking that risk is the
only way to achieve reconciliation—to move beyond the Sweet Home of slavery
and to find a sweet home we can create in a world we have not made,
where we have access to the power of creation itself, can repeat the gestures
and words of the ancestors in story, music, and dance, and where we can stand
located on and in the landscape.
NOTES
1 There are countless sources for examining what black people brought to and did in the American
south. Among them are some classics: Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the
Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); Eric Foner’s A Short History of Reconstruction
(San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990) which has four chapters on labor, economics and politics;
Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books,
1974); and Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I A Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New
York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1985). There are several others, and the exploration has only
begun as the differences between, for example, urban and rural slavery, free Black people, and slaves
are examined.
2 Wahneema Lubiano, in “The Postmodernist Rag: Political Identity and the Vernacular in Song of
Solomon” argues that Milkman never moves beyond personal need. His cry for Pilate is a cry of
personal desire: “Milkman remains very much the self-concerned individual whose realization of
himself as a human collage of history cannot undo his desire to be shown one ‘true’ path to power
and understanding” (New Essays on Song of Solomon 112).
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Carter, Erica, Donald, James, and Squires, Judith, Ed. Space and Place: Theories of Identity and
Location. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993.
Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie A. and Holloway, Karla F. C. New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial
and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison. New York: Greenwood P, 1987.
Duvall, John N. “Doe Hunting and Masculinity: Song of Solomon and Go Down, Moses.” Arizona
Quarterly 47:1 (1991): 95–115.
Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History. Trans. Willard R. Trask.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.
Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: The U of Tennessee
P, 1991.
Hirsch, Marianne. “Knowing Their Names: Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” New Essays on Song
of Solomon. Ed. Valerie Smith. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. 69–92.
Jones, Carolyn M. “Sula and Beloved: Images of Cain in the Novels of Toni Morrison.” African
American Review 27:4 (1993): 615–626.
Lubiano, Wahneema. “The Postmodernist Rag: Political Identity and the Vernacular in Song of
Solomon.” New Essays on Song of Solomon. Ed. Valerie Smith. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995.
93–116.
McCorkle, Jill. “Secret Places.” A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember. Ed. Mickey
Pearlman. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1996.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume Books, 1987.

Southern Landscape as Psychic Landscape
––—. “Going Home With Bitterness and Joy: South To a Very Old Place.” New York Times Book
Review. (January 1972): 5.
——. Jazz. New York: Plume Books, 1993.
——. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.
——. Song of Solomon. New York: Plume Books, 1987.
——. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan
Quarterly Review 28:1 (Winter 1989): 1–34.
Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford UP,
1983.
Norris, Kathleen. Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1983.
Sitter, Deborah Ayer. “The Making of a Man: Dialogic Meaning in Beloved.” African American
Review 26:1 (Spring 1992): 17–29.
Sopher, David E. “The Landscape of Home: Myth, Experience, Social Meaning.” Quoted in Daniel N.
Rolph, “Folklore, Symbolic Landscapes, and the Perception of Southern Culture.” Southern
Studies 1:2 (Summer 1990): 117–126.
Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Vintage
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and Row, 1988.
48

Angelyn Mitchell
‘STH, I KNOW THAT WOMAN’: HISTORY, GENDER, AND THE
SOUTH IN TONI MORRISON’S JAZZ
Historians must necessarily speak in generalities and must examine recorded
sources. . . . They habitually leave out life lived by everyday
people. History for them is what great men have done. But artists don’t
have any such limitation, and as the truest of historians they are obligated
not to.
—Toni Morrison
The South is an ancestral home of Black Americans. It is true, of course,
that slavery existed in the North and that Black people have lived from
the beginning in all sections of this country. But collectively it is the
South that is the nucleus of Black American culture. It is here that the
agony of chattel slavery created the history that is yet to be written. It is
the South that has dispersed its culture into the cities of the North. The
South is, in a sense, the mythic landscape of Black America.
—Eugenia Collier
In 1974, Toni Morrison wrote an article for Black World introducing its
readers to “a genuine Black history book” (“Behind the Making” 89). This
book, The Black Book (1974), is the collection of Black memorabilia she
edited while she was a senior editor at Random House. Discussing the
collection’s vitality, she offered what she believed should be the primary function
of Black history and art: the reinterpretation, re-evaluation, and rediscovery
of Black life as lived. Of her personal reasons for her involvement in this
compilation, she wrote, “I was scared that the world would fall away before
somebody put together a thing that got close to the way [African Americans]
really were” (“Behind the Making” 90). After centuries of being defined by
others, of intended and unintended misrepresentations and misinterpretations
of African American life, Morrison wanted to document history as lived by
African Americans in this country. Thus Morrison established early in her career
an interest in cultural and historical conservation. Accordingly, when one
looks across the spectrum of her novels, novels in which she encodes the
multiplicity and complexity of Black life, one sees that Morrison, in her novels,
continues her conservation as she reinterprets, re-evaluates, and rediscovers
Black life as lived, particularly but not exclusively as lived by Black women.
Fusing Black history and art in each of her seven novels, Morrison asserts,
interrogates, and critiques the social, political, and cultural interests of African
Americans. By so doing, she establishes, records, and preserves African
American history’s “usable past” as empirical event as well as subjective experience.
Morrison displays in her craft a keen sense of and a preoccupation
with history in writing about the “disremembered and unaccounted for” (Be-
Studies in the Literary Imagination 31.2, Fall 1998 © Georgia State University

History, Gender, and the South in Toni Morrison’s Jazz
loved 274). In addition to her interest in history and Black women, Morrison,
like Collier, also views the South as the “ancestral home of Black Americans”
as well as the “nucleus of Black American culture” as all of her novels are
peopled with southerners. While Morrison is not a southerner, each of her
novels engages some aspect of the southern Black experience, particularly in
relation to Morrison’s female characters. For example, in addition to interrogating
the ill-effects of Eurocentric acculturation on the developing Black
feminine psyche, The Bluest Eye (1970) also examines not only pre-World
War II African American urban life in Ohio, but also southern Black womanhood
through the migratory characters of Pauline and Geraldine. Sula (1973)
also explores African American northern life in Ohio, from years spanning
post-World War I to the Vietnam War era, by focusing on the Peace family and
its matriarch, Eva, a southern woman from Virginia. Set primarily in the years
before the Civil Rights Movement, Song of Solomon (1977) chronicles the
coming of age of Milkman Dead. During the climax of his journey, Milkman
meets the remarkable southern women of Shalimar, Virginia, who, significantly,
are psychically healthier than their northern sisters. In contrast to Jadine of
Tar Baby (1981), a work set in the post-integrationist 1970s, the admirable
women of Son’s all-black Eloe are welcoming and communal, self-reliant, and
rooted. Beloved (1987) offers a poetic meditation on nineteenth-century chattel
slavery and the devastating psychological effects on its female victims;
neither Baby Suggs nor Sethe can escape the haunting memories of their dehumanizing
experiences in the slaveholder’s South. Finally, in her most recent
novel, Paradise (1997), the men and women who found the all-Black town of
Ruby hail from the South. Spanning from post-Reconstruction America to postintegration
America, Paradise centers upon the construction of freedom and
its meaning. In addition to Morrison’s careful attention to historical moments,
one can also see that southern Black women are also significant in her rendering
of Black life.
In Jazz (1992), her novel which deals directly with Southerners who travel
north, Morrison provides the opportunity for a generational examination of
three southern Black women whose lives are shaped and complicated by their
racialized and genderized historical circumstances in the South. In Jazz
Morrison offers literary portraitures of southern Black women during three
significant historical moments of American history—American slavery, Reconstruction,
and the Great Migration. Eusebio Rodrigues observes in his article
“Experiencing Jazz” that the novel “jazzifies the history of a people . . .
by giving us rapid vivid glimpses of their life in the rural South after emancipation”
(742). As a cultural and historical conservator, Morrison inscribes her
three southern women characters—True Belle, Rose Dear, and Violet—as the
texts of their respective historical moment, American slavery, Reconstruction,
the Great Migration. By revealing how their particularized histories inform
their lives, Morrison augments her readers’s understanding so that they
too will “know that woman” (Jazz 1).
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History is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely,
or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history
comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously
controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that
we do.
—James Baldwin
In recent years, many African American women novelists have written historical
novels that dramatize the African American historical past. Black women
writers are ever mindful, it seems, that master narratives of history have not
always truthfully represented the African American experience. For example,
Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Barbara Chase-
Riboud’s Sally Hemings (1979), and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose
(1986) all revisit the Black woman’s story during slavery, and by doing so,
they examine the veiled, cloaked, and sometimes misrepresented interior lives
of nineteenth-century Black women in bondage. Both Alice Walker’s Meridian
(1976) and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1979) examine the
aftermath of the turbulent 1960s, while Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the
Widow (1982) and Naylor’s Linden Hills (1985) interrogate the effects of
upward social and economic mobility on African Americans during the 1960s
and 1970s. Historical fiction by Black women writers, as Justine Talley explains,
may function in the following ways: literature as recording history;
literature as recovering history; literature as writing/righting history; and literature
as shaping history (358). It is clear to see from these examples how
Black women writers employ literature to record, recover, write/right and shape
history. These writers seem to be in agreement with historian Hayden White
that the
distinction between fiction and history, in which fiction is conceived as the
representation of the imaginable and history as the representation of the actual,
must give place to the recognition that we can only know the actual by
contrasting it with or likening it to the imaginable. (Tropics of Discourse
99; emphasis in original)
Accordingly, contemporary Black women writers who engage history in their
representations augment the actual—history as written— through their
(re)presentations of the imaginable—history as imagined. In theorizing the
historical novel, Georg Lukacs posits that the historical novel reflects and
critiques realistically the historical and material conditions of society. For
Lukacs, “literature cannot just reflect what has been reached, the end-result,
without at the same time giving expression to [its] complicated path” (The
Historical Novel 272). One may surmise then that history, not only as context
but also as cultural phenomenon, is a significant trope for Black women novelists
as they portray historical moments of African American experience. In

History, Gender, and the South in Toni Morrison’s Jazz
Jazz, Morrison offers a discursive engagement with history in order to contest
the erasure and/or misrepresentation of southern Black women within the
historical discourse of the hegemonic culture. In other words, she redefines
the ways by which the history of nineteenth and early twentieth-century African
American southern women may be read by relating that history from the
subjective experiences of Black women.
The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.
—Harriet Jacobs, 1861
In Jazz, the matriarch of the family, True Belle, may be read as the Black
woman’s text of slavery. True Belle belongs to Colonel Wordsworth Gray, a
Virginia slave owner. Perhaps to highlight how very little was revealed about
the interior life of the Black slave woman in their narratives, Morrison’s narrator
renders True Belle’s story through a veil of uncertainty. One needs only
to recall the cloaked tale of Linda Brent in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861) for an example of such omissions
and silences. In an essay in which she discusses her craft and her literary
ancestors, Morrison writes, “In shaping the experience to make it palatable to
those who were in a position to alleviate it, [slave narrators] were silent about
many things, and they ‘forgot’ many other things” (“The Site of Memory” 110).
Likewise the narrator of Jazz offers a veil of “perhaps” and “maybes” in order
to reveal the perilous life of True Belle, the personal servant of her owner’s
daughter, Miss Vera Louise.
In her characterization of True Belle, Morrison craftfully rewrites the image
of the “mammy.” As the ideal female slave who holds a position of great
importance in caring for the slaveholders’ family, the mammy is rendered in
historical accounts as well as in literature as asexual. As historian Deborah
White explains, “Among Anglo-American Protestant middle and upper classes,
the Victorian maternal ideal was understood in terms of asexuality” (60). Historically,
the sexuality of black slave women was subject to alteration by
commodification, exploitation, or abuse. Numerous circumstances, for example,
alter Linda Brent’s sexuality in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl:
the sexual harassment by Dr. Flint; the inability to marry the man of her choice;
and the choosing of Mr. Sands as her lover as a tool of resistance against Dr.
Flint. The mammy’s sexuality, however, is altered in a different yet equally
damaging way. Her sexuality, like True Belle’s, is suppressed and subsumed by
her role as caregiver. As the mammy to Miss Vera Louise, True Belle’s sexual
desires are sublimated by her condition of bondage.
In Jazz, apart from revealing that she had a husband and two daughters, employment
or discussion of True Belle’s sexuality is absent from the text. Perhaps
this absence serves to highlight slavery’s maligning reach on its female
victims as well as to illuminate the sacrifices it extracted. Choiceless, as she
is described, True Belle, a twenty-seven year old wife and mother, must leave
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Virginia and her family with her fallen mistress, who is banished because of
her pregnancy by a Black man. True Belle’s familial and sexual agency are
thwarted not only by sexual desires of Miss Vera Louise but also by Vera
Louise’s personal desires: “True Belle was the one she wanted and the one she
took” (Jazz 141). So that the reader does not miss the personal effect of True
Belle’s removal from her family, the narrator comments,
I don’t know how hard it was for a slave woman to leave a husband that
work and distance kept her from seeing much of anyhow, and to leave two
daughters behind with an old aunt to take care of them. Rose Dear and May
were eight and ten years old then. Good help at that age for anybody who
owned them and no help at all to a mother who lived in Wordsworth, miles
away from her husband in a rich man’s house taking care of his daughter day
and night. Perhaps it wasn’t so hard to ask an older sister to look out for a
husband and the girls because she was bound for Baltimore. (Jazz 141–42)
In this passage, Morrison exposes not only the nullification of True Belle’s
sexuality by separation from her husband but also the fragmentation of Black
families endemic to slavery. “Work and distance” keep True Belle from her
husband and her daughters even before True Belle moves from one slave state
to another, from Virginia to Maryland. Although there is discussion of True
Belle’s role as mother later in Rose Dear’s life, significantly there is never
any discussion of True Belle’s sexuality.
Simultaneously, the Black slave woman must deal with the issue of her deferred
personal desires as well as with her subconscious hope of future fulfillment.
Continuing, the narrator speculates on True Belle’s reactions to her plight
and the possibilities therein:
More important Miss Vera Louise might help her buy them all out with paper
money. . . . Then again, maybe not. Maybe [True Belle] frowned as she sat
in the baggage car, rocking along with the boxes and trunks, unable to see the
land she was traveling through. Maybe she felt bad. Anyway, choiceless, she
went. (Jazz 142; emphasis added)
Morrison artfully encodes the physical condition of that servitude as she situates
True Belle, unable to see her future, in the baggage car with the other real
property of the White passengers, while probing True Belle’s psychological
response to her plight.
Depicting the resilience of the enslaved Black woman, Morrison does not
depict a bitter, broken, or vengeful True Belle. Not entirely selfless, True Belle
does note her opportunity to see “a great big city” as fortuitous (Jazz 142).
Thinking of her family, she also considers the possibility of freeing them
through her sacrifice—Vera Louise “might help her buy them all out” (Jazz
142). Additionally, True Belle exercises her volition in her emotional relationship
with Vera Louise’s son, Golden Gray, whose colorful name signifies

History, Gender, and the South in Toni Morrison’s Jazz
the admixture of colors that are his heritage. In spite of little or no personal
freedom, True Belle chooses the recipient of her love: she chooses to give
Golden Gray the maternal attention and affection denied her own family. What
she could not give to her family, she laughingly gave, “every day for eighteen
years,” to Golden (Jazz 139).
When word of her daughter’s troubled life reaches her, True Belle asserts
her agency—an act surely complicated for a newly freed slave—by returning
to Virginia to help Rose Dear and her family. Although the chains of slavery
separated her from her family, True Belle’s identification as mother remained
intact as seen in True Belle’s reclamation of this identity. Morrison writes,
“Slowly but steadily, for about four years, True Belle got things organized. And
then Rose Dear jumped in the well and missed all the fun” (Jazz 99). Unable to
save her daughter due to circumstances beyond her control, she rescues her
grandchildren “from despair and teaches them the lessons of laughter and survival”
(Rodrigues 741).
Thus the denial of True Belle’s personal and physical freedom causes several
life altering events: it eliminates her physical and personal desires as a
wife, it denies her the opportunity to mother her own children, and it defers
her relationship with her grandchildren. True Belle, however, is not defeated
by her circumstances. Morrison’s depiction of True Belle, a southern Black
woman in bondage, illuminates the untoward damage inflicted by the institution
of slavery and its agents on the Black slave woman. This damage, however,
did not cease with slavery’s end as will be observed in the text of Rose Dear,
True Belle’s daughter, who was denied her mother’s example of survival.
The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position
in this country. In a period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status
seems one of the least ascertainable and definitive of all the forces which
make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a woman question
and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged
factor in both.
—Anna Julia Cooper, 1892
Rose Dear, the second woman in Morrison’s historical triptych and the quasimotherless
daughter of True Belle, may be read as the Black woman’s text of
Reconstruction. As a southern Black ex-slave woman, Rose Dear lives during
a period of tumultuous uncertainty. Of this period historian Deborah White
writes,
The victimization of black women continued for over seventy-five years after
emancipation. For African-Americans these years were not characterized
by optimism. They were marked by an uphill struggle for literacy, jobs,
and the franchise. Discrimination and terrorism made for a desperate, solitary
struggle, one which allowed black women few opportunities to assume
roles other than those they had assumed during slavery. (163)
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Through Rose’s story of spiritual defeat and economic despair, the reader comes
to understand what many African Americans came to understand during Reconstruction—that
freedom unempowered and unprotected is still bondage
and that legacies of slavery were great and far reaching. As historian Jacqueline
Jones explains,
[T]he failure of the federal government to institute a comprehensive land
confiscation and redistribution program, combined with southern whites’ systematic
refusal to sell property or extend credit to the former slaves, meant
that the majority of blacks would remain economically dependent upon the
group of people . . . whom they had served as slaves. (52)
During slavery, Rose Dear’s family was irreversibly destroyed. After slavery’s
end, she continued to suffer from racism’s oppressive discrimination.
Not only did slavery splinter her family when she was a child, its lingering
effects destroyed her family as an adult as well. Rose Dear and her five children
are abandoned by her husband, who “had been mixed in and up with the
Readjuster Party and when a verbal urging from landowners had not worked, a
physical one did the trick and he was persuaded to transfer hisself [sic] someplace,
anyplace, else” (Jazz 99). Rose Dear struggled with “a bone-clean cupboard
and exhausted soil” (Jazz 100). Unable to provide economically for her
family, Rose Dear is stripped of her possessions as well as her pride. Her
daughter Violet remembers this violation: “[M]en came, talking low as though
nobody was there but themselves, and picked around in our things, lifting out
what they wanted—what was theirs, they said, although we cooked in it, washed
sheets in it, sat on it, ate off of it” (Jazz 98). Ultimately “dispossessed of
house and land,” Rose Dear is unable to withstand this assault on herself and
her family (Jazz 138).
Morrison invites her readers to participate in the construction of the narrative
by considering the various reasons—social, political, and psychological—
for the actions and responses of her characters. To do so, she encodes the
historical particulars of Reconstruction which gave rise to migration—“the
wave of black people running from want and violence” (Jazz 33)—from the
South to the North during the late nineteenth-century and the early twentiethcentury:
Vienna burned to the ground. Red fire doing fast what white sheets took too
long to finish: canceling every deed; vacating each and every field; emptying
[the southern Blacks] out of our places so fast we went running from one
part of the country to another—or nowhere. (Jazz 126) Of this depiction,
Farah Griffin notes that “Morrison outlines both the political and interior pains
of being a black woman during the Nadir of black history” (186).
Although many migrated, many stayed. Rose Dear’s southern community had
rallied around her in her despair. They provide her basic needs such as housing,

History, Gender, and the South in Toni Morrison’s Jazz
bedding, and food. They also offer advice ranging from relying on her individual
stamina or her community to invoking maternal bonds or religious faith:
“‘Don’t let this whip you, Rose. You got us, Rose Dear. Think of the young
ones, Rose. He ain’t give you nothing you can’t bear, Rose” (Jazz 98–99).
Most importantly, they had sent word to True Belle by those traveling north of
Rose’s dire circumstance.
Four years after True Belle’s return in 1888, Rose Dear commits suicide by
jumping into a well, and as Violet laments, missing “all of the fun” (Jazz 99).
As an adult, Violet wonders what specific event provoked Rose Dear’s desperate
leap into the well. Was it simply the economic deprivation, symbolized by
the shirtwaist split so badly that it could not be mended? Or did racism’s wide
sweep motivate her? Morrison writes, “Perhaps word had reached her about
the four-day hangings in Rocky Mount. . . . Or had it been the news of the
young tenor in the choir mutilated and tied to a log” (Jazz 101). Or perhaps,
she questions, the reason was a very private and personal one: “Might it have
been the morning after the night when craving (which used to be hope) got out
of hand? When longing squeezed, then tossed her before running off promising
to return and bounce her again. . . .” (Jazz 101). Or was it indeed the “chair
they tipped her out of? Did she fall on the floor and lie there deciding right
then that she would do it. . . . Seeing bleak truth in an unbreakable china cup?”
(Jazz 101). In one of the most poignant scenes in the novel, Morrison depicts
how broken Rose Dear is by the time her table and chairs are repossessed.
Morrison brilliantly complicates the destruction of Rose in terms of racist
economic disempowerment so that the reader may grasp the overwhelming
futility and hopelessness surrounding Reconstruction.
Violet’s attempt to understand her mother’s life and death is a necessary
component to understanding her own life and to her emotional healing because
“the children of suicides are hard to please and quick to believe no one
loves them because they are not really here” (Jazz 4). As Violet leaves the
South with her husband Joe in search of new horizons, she is also in search of
herself. Her displacement from the South to the North at the turn of the twentieth-century
precipitates her evolution from her rural subject position to an
urban object position.
You decide that something is wrong with a world that stifles and chokes
that cuts off and stunts; hedging in, pressing down on eyes, ears, and
throat. Something all wrong.
—Marita Bonner
Violet, one of the novel’s chief protagonists, may be read as the text of the
Great Migration. Able to make choices (unlike her grandmother) and economically
empowered (unlike her mother), Violet has great difficulty understanding
herself and her world in her alien urban surroundings. Truly a “new
Negro,” Violet attempts to mediate her private rural self with her public urban
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self, her motherless rural self with her daughterless urban self. Primarily setting
her novel in the Jazz Age, Morrison reclaims this historical period of
African American history of which the Harlem Renaissance is traditionally
viewed as a disparate, unrelated phenomenon. Interrogating the modernist
mood, Morrison reveals through the migratory character of Violet that the
residual manifestations of African American modernity were culture shock
and alienation. bell hooks reminds us in Black Looks that while contemporary
writing by Black women brings into sharper focus the idea that Black females
must “invent” selves, the question—what kind of self—usually remains unanswered
(51). Violet struggles with this very question.
Through Violet, Morrison shows how self-definition may be further complicated
by one’s personal and social history. The text of Violet also provides
the reader with the opportunity to examine the Great Migration and its significance
in African American history. To this end, Morrison historicizes African
American turn-of-the-century life by relating the politics of many southern
cities that propelled many Blacks to the North: “One week of rumors, two
days of packing, and nine hundred Negroes, encouraged by guns and hemp, left
Vienna, rode out of town on wagons or walked on their feet to who knew (or
cared) where” (Jazz 173–74).
Violet’s urban life in Harlem is characterized by the alienation, isolation,
and fragmentation she feels in what should have been the promised land. Violet
very tellingly reveals, “Before I came North I made sense and so did the
world” (Jazz 207). The South becomes, in Violet’s memory, a metaphor for
wholeness. The crest of Violet’s fragmented psyche peaks after her husband
Joe Trace kills his young lover, Dorcas. Before the catalytic event, Violet had
revealed her fractured self in several ways: by sitting down in the street (disorientation),
by sleeping with a baby doll (regression), and by attempting to
steal a baby (displacement).
Concerning Violet’s split self, one thinks certainly of DuBois’s theory of
racial double consciousness: “this sense of always looking at one’s self through
the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on
in amused contempt and pity” (Souls 16–17). However, the nature of Violet’s
double consciousness encompasses not only issues of race but also issues of
gender as well as regional displacement. Morrison further reveals Violet’s
fragmentation—her double consciousness—by describing her alter ego in
terms of “that other Violet”:
Whenever she thought about that Violet [the one who was brave enough to
do anything] and what that Violet saw through her own eyes, she knew there
was no shame there, no disgust. That was hers alone. (Jazz 94)
In the South after meeting and marrying Joe, “that” Violet had been strong,
assertive, and resilient. Violet comes to recognize that her love for Joe—the
man she chose—engenders her sense of wholeness in the South. But this real-

History, Gender, and the South in Toni Morrison’s Jazz
ization is obscured by the dazzle of the City. Her fear of loss—of losing him
as she had her mother and her father—returns as she is faced with losing Joe
to the memory of his dead lover. Retreating into silence, a metonym perhaps
of the silent lives lived in urban apartment buildings like Violet’s, Violet thinks,
I got quiet because the things I couldn’t say were coming out of my mouth
anyway. . . . The business going on inside me I thought was none of my
business and none of Joe’s either because I just had to keep hold of him any
way I could and going crazy would make me lose him. (Jazz 97)
Significantly, Violet’s wholeness occurs after she establishes a sisterly bond
with Alice Manfred, Dorcas’s aunt, from whom she seeks motherly counsel.
As in many of Morrison’s novels, mothering is not always done by one’s biological
mother or by one who is generationally older. Interestingly, Alice and
the dead Dorcas are pivotal characters in Violet’s quest for wholeness as they
provide what she lacks in the North—family and community. Both represent
absent presences in that Dorcas becomes the daughter Violet never had and
Alice becomes the mother whose suicide haunts her. After Alice advises Violet,
“‘you got anything left to you to love, anything at all, do it. . . . Nobody’s
asking you to take it. I’m sayin make it, make it!’” (Jazz 112–113), they share
moments of liberating laughter, a gift of survival Violet had learned from True
Belle but had forgotten. Richard Hardack interprets their laughter as the moment
in which “the other becomes understandable, a mirror, no better or worse
than its reflection” (459). By returning to laughter, Violet may begin anew. As
a result, she sees herself anew—“Violet thought about how she must have looked
at [Dorcas’s] funeral. . . . she laughed until she coughed” (Jazz 114). After she
sees herself objectively as well as subjectively, Violet noticed, “at the same
time as that Violet did,” (Jazz 114) that the season was spring. This simultaneous
recognition of nature’s rebirth at her own rebirth symbolizes Violet’s
reconciled self.
Morrison carefully creates space for the possibility of hope at the novel’s
end by gesturing toward the future. Because her own path to self-discovery
was complicated by her lack of family and community, Violet now needs to
fulfill her communal obligation by transmitting to the next generation what
she has learned in reclaiming her life. As in Beloved with the character of
Denver, Felice (Dorcas’s friend who becomes the daughter Violet never had)
represents the future in Jazz. Violet cautions Felice that if she doesn’t make
the world the way she wants it, then the world will change her and it will be her
fault because she let it. Violet explains, “I just ran up and down the streets
wishing I was somebody else. . . . Now I want to be the woman my mother
didn’t stay around long enough to see. . . . The one she would have liked and the
one I used to like before” coming to the City (Jazz 108). Violet’s tale reiterates
how it is the denial or deferment of love due to historical circumstance—
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love of self, love of family, love of life—that violates the lives of True Belle,
Rose Dear, and Violet.
If my work is to be functional to the group (to the village, as it were)
then it must bear witness and identify that which is useful from the past
and that which ought to be discarded.
—Toni Morrison
By placing southern Black women’s experiences at the center of Jazz,
Morrison posits a Black feminist world view that enriches, extends, and elevates
our understanding of southern Black women and their historical circumstances.
We come to know how their historical identity, shaped in the
South, was affected by the historical realities of the South. Additionally, we
come to know how the self was suppressed, violated, alienated, and fractured.
But more importantly we come to know how they reconstruct themselves, in
the cases of True Belle and Violet.
Historical and cultural conservationists like Morrison illustrate that the reclamation
of African American history should not only maintain a connection
to the past, but also should nurture and sustain the cultural future. Thus they
provide both a useful and usable past: usefully connecting the past to the present
while usably nurturing and sustaining the future. As Morrison observes, “You
can’t really blame the conqueror for writing history his own way, [but] you can
certainly debate it” (“An Interview” 224). She continues:
It’s a serious responsibility. . . . You have to stake it out and identify those
who have preceded you—resummoning them, acknowledging them is just
one step in that process of reclamation—so that they are always there as the
confirmation and the affirmation of the life that I personally have not lived
but is the life of that organism to which I belong which is black people in this
country. (“An Interview” 225; emphasis in original)
In rendering the multifaceted interior lives and experiences of southern Black
women, Morrison offers not only a reflection of Black life as lived but also
confirms and affirms the useful and usable past of African America. 1
NOTE
1 A version of this essay was presented at the American Literature Association (ALA) Conference,
Baltimore, MD, May 28, 1995. The research for this essay was supported, in part, by a University
Research Grant, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Georgetown University.
WORKS CITED
DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Fawcett World Library, 1968.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The AfricanAmerican Migration Narrative. New
York: Oxford UP, 1995.

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Hardack, Richard. “‘A Music Seeking Its Words’ Double-Timing and Double Consciousness in Toni
Morrison’s Jazz.” Callaloo 18.2 (1995): 451–471.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End P, 1992.
Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1982.
Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, from
Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
Lukcas, Georg. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln: U of Nebraska
P, 1983.
Morrison, Toni. “Behind the Making of The Black Book.” BlackWorld 23 (February 1974): 86–90.
—–. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.
—–. “An Interview with Toni Morrison.” Conversations with Toni Morrison. Ed. Danille Taylor-
Guthrie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 194. 223–233.
—–. Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992.
—–. “The Site of Memory.” Inventing the Truth: The Art andCraft of Memoir. Ed. William Zinsser.
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. 103–124.
Rodriques, Eusebio L. “Experiencing Jazz.” Modern Fiction Studies 39.3&4 (1993): 733–754.
Talley, Justine. “History, Fiction, and Community in the Work of Black American Women Writers
from the Ends of Two Centuries.” The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American
Literature and Culture. Eds. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1994. 357–368.
White, Deborah. Ar’n’t I a Woman? New York: Norton, 1985.
White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1978.
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THE POLITICS OF SPACE: SOUTHERNNESS AND MANHOOD IN
THE FICTIONS OF TONI MORRISON
Here is why he leaves the South: Unjust treatment, failure to secure a square
deal in the courts, taxation without representation, denial of the right to vote
through subterfuge of the white primary, no representation in any form of
government, poor schools, unjust pay for and division of crops, insulting of
women without any redress, and public torture.
—C. Otis, N.Y. Tribune, 1923
For so many of Toni Morrison’s male characters, the South is a duality,
oscillating between a place of origin and a curse. As such, the South takes up
permanent residence in the memories of the men who people her fictions.
Morrison’s Southern men demonstrate the persistence of behaviors learned
in the South, which function as gifted insight and as spiritual ailment. But in
light of their experiences in the North, the South can also serve as the one
place these men can recall where they are not rendered faceless and anonymous.
As an experience, as a place, as a way of being, the South never leaves
them, creating and corrupting the integrity of their lives.
We begin to understand these characters, what they wish for, who they are,
and what they suffer by reading the letters written by Black migrants who came
North between 1916–1918, during World War I and collected in 1919 by
Emmett J. Scott. Directing their letters to The Chicago Defender, The New
York Age, and other prominent Black newspapers in the North, these writers
inscribed their eagerness and desire to leave the South into public discourse.
As faithful readers of the Northern press, many of the writers found advertisements
inviting them to bring their skills to the North and claiming that tickets
for the journey would come from their prospective employers. “I am a constant
reader of the Defender,” one man writes, “and am contemplating leaving
here for some point north” (sic) (291). Another writer, a woman, states, “Your
advertisement appearing in the Chicago Defender have influenced me to write
to you with no delay” (291).
These writers express, in a variety of prose styles, their belief in possibility,
asserting themselves as capable workers, as men anxious to prove their worth.
“I am a skilled machinist and longshoreman,”(293) one man writes. In labored
prose, another man claims, “I am A masster firman I cand handle oil or I cand
Burn Cole Keep up my pumps in Good orde and I is A no. 1 masheane helper I
cand doo moste eny thange around the mill. . . ”(sic) (299–300). And another
insists, “I am experieced in plumbing and all kinds of metal roofing and
compositeon roofing . . .”(sic) (300).
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The Politics of Space
Their claims of capability were tempered, however, by a high degree of flexibility,
a willingness to do whatever work is available until a better opportunity
presents itself. One man writes: “. . . [I]f I can’t get Brick Work now I will
consider any good job as I want to come right away. . .” (301). A man from
Natchez, Mississippi offers, “I am a college graduate and understand Bookkeeping.
But I am not above doing hard labor in a foundry or other industrial
establishment” (302). Another states, “ . . . would like Chicago or Philadelphia
But I dont Care where so long as I go where a man is a man” (298).
There is a sense of possibility animating these letters, as if the writers know
the North represents a reversal of fortune. Their under developed skills, acquired
and practiced under duress in the South, represent potential sources of
better pay and equal status. These letters construct the North as a site of opportunity,
where skill and determination result not only in commensurate pay,
but the chance for a solid, stable homelife and uncontested manhood. And so
throughout these letters, phrases like “good wages,” “steady work,” “stedy (sic)
employment,” “a good position,” “fair wages,” “better opportunities,” “better
advantages,” “a good town to stop in,” and “earn a good liveing(sic)” abound,
voicing the problems that inhere to the writers’ lives in the South (292–300).
Clearly, the level of expectation among these correspondents is high; they
write believing that life in the North offers them the opportunity for incalculable
prosperity and security; moreover, here is a chance to remake themselves,
even if they have to defer the benefits of middle class status.
These letters serve as excellent windows into the lives of men who were
willing to risk everything and travel North, and they anticipate the numerous
figures in African American fiction who leave the South to travel North. In
fictions by Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Rudolph Fisher, Richard
Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Gloria Naylor we find a number of
characters born and reared in the South, who try to navigate, with varying degrees
of success, the perils of the North. 1 The difficulties of Northern migration
as it is portrayed in African American fiction lead us to turn our attention
to the Southern men in Toni Morrison’s fiction. Appearing in the fictions
Morrison has set in the 20th-Century, Cholly Breedlove, Macon Dead, Sr.,
Son Green, Guitar Banes, and Joe Trace interest me as men who live lives
characterized by blasted aspiration or despair that assumes destructive forms.
Their demoralization leads them to engage in rituals of recovery that do not
rejuvenate them, but instead enable their spiritual defeat.
But such a reading of these men is complicated by their investment in the
idea of manhood, their struggles to embody a fixed definition of masculinity.
I want to insist, then, that Morrison’s novels allow us to engage in rumination
on issues of masculinity (and thus manhood) as much as they do issues of
womanhood and femininity. Morrison’s Southern men negotiate Northern settings
in sites located in both time and space; hence, her fictions depict their
collisions with obstacles that endanger their ability to imagine alternative ways
of performing their humanity.
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These obstructions occur at the intersection of spatial issues and the body.
Morrison uses her Southern men to illuminate the dialectic that inheres between
the geographical and the physical. As R. W. Connell has argued, through
“body-reflexive practices, bodies are addressed by social process and drawn
into history, without ceasing to be bodies.” 2 Because materiality of men’s bodies
“continues to matter,” Morrison’s fictions include representations of a plurality
of masculinities, where men utilize their bodies in a variety of ways in
order to manifest a coherent subjectivity. 3 But because she is often concerned
with her male characters’s involvement in the “gender project” that we often
refer to as “hegemonic masculinity,” her fictions most often reflect the ways
that gender, class, and race are discursive categories that structure the social
practice we know as manhood. Therefore, any discussion of the “politics of
space” in Morrison’s fictions must involve an awareness of the ways that power
relations, production relations, and cathexis interact and in their turn structure
the criteria Morrison’s characters use to locate themselves spatially. 4
Compromised in their respective bids for success, men in Morrison’s fiction
are left to assume a philosophical posture regarding what their lives might
have been, taking comfort in the knowledge of all those things they will never
enjoy as the natural outgrowth of hard work. In Song of Solomon, for example,
Railroad Tommy concludes that what Black men can expect, in lieu of
status and influence, is to have a broken heart and a “ . . . whole lot of folly”
(61) as their due in American society. From Scott’s letters, collected after the
first World War, it is a long distance to Railroad Tommy, who recounts the
relative impossibility of Black male success in 1943. In the barber shop he
runs with Hospital Tommy, a man who talks “like an encyclopedia” (58). Railroad
Tommy has culled out a life for himself which rests on the assumption
that to be Black and male in the North is to learn how to live with less.
Scott’s letters help us to begin to think about the intrinsic differences between
North and South and the ways which those differences were embedded
in the minds of Black folk headed North. Though none of the writers quoted
above state the matter in these terms, their central concern is access. In the
South, where Jim Crow laws and violence are used to keep them at bay, confined,
stigmatized, or just plain angry, Black men come to see the North as the
embodiment of access—the “Land of the Open Door.” But what this intimates
is the difficulty that inheres in resolving issues of space: mainly that the real
issue is one of place, a sense of location. Space, as the North represents it, is
a discursively neutral site onto which Black men from the South can impose
their presence, as if improving their prospects for negotiating geographical
space (as well as the conceptual space of manhood) rests on the conception
that the North is not already mapped out according to a set of discursive man-
II

The Politics of Space
dates. The relationship between their bodies and their subjectivity is shaped
by the move from rural space to urban space, where, in literal terms, they find
their bodies “transformed, ‘citified,’ urbanized as distinctively metropolitan”
(242). 5 Thus, we come to understand their preoccupation with developing
strategies for how to manoeuver in the built environment. As Morrison portrays
them, these men feel:
a hunger for property, for ownership. The firm possession of a yard, a porch,
a grape arbor. Propertied black people spent all their energies, all their love,
on their nests. Like frenzied, desperate birds, they over decorated everything;
fussed and fidgeted over their hard-won homes; canned, jellied, and
preserved all summer to fill cupboards and shelves; they painted, picked, and
poked at every corner of their houses. Renting blacks cast furtive glances at
these owned yards and porches and made firmer commitments to buy themselves
“some nice little old place.” In the meantime, they saved, and scratched,
and piled away what they could in the rented hovels, looking forward to the
day of property. (19)
Coming from the South, where so many Blacks lived as sharecroppers or
who had land taken from them by unscrupulous Whites, the impulse to acquire,
conserve, and manage material goods often leads those not yet able to
purchase a space of their own to manifest a complex set of responses.
Morrison’s fiction often explores the lives of characters who have become
obsessed with either erasing or masking the “stain” that coincides with the
lack of property.
But this sensibility achieves even greater complexity when we consider the
location of these characters in spaces either in urban—or urban-influenced—
space. As Elizabeth Grosz argues, the city:
provides the order and organization that automatically links otherwise unrelated
bodies. For example, it links the affluent lifestyle of the banker or professional
to the squalor of the vagrant, the homeless, or the impoverished
without necessarily positing a consciousness or intentional will-to-exploit. It
is the condition and milieu in which corporeality is socially, sexually, and discursively
produced. But if the city is a significant context and frame for the
body, the relations between bodies and cities are more complex than may
have been realized. (243)
Returning to Scott’s letters, the illusion of the North is that it represents a
space in which migrants can distinguish themselves as individuals via the avenue
of work. The belief that Northern life is radically different from Southern
life, that it represents liberation of such scope and breadth because Black
labor is valued and cherished by Northerners are deceptions. But interrogating
the silence embedded in the letters reveals a hint of trepidation just beneath
the surface of the discourse. Though the claim in many of the letters is the
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desire for good, well-paying jobs, commensurate with their skills, few of the
men articulate in any concrete detail the nature of their mistreatment. None of
the letters mentions lynching or disenfranchisement. Nor is there open discussion
of the sorts of political and social advantages to be had in Northern
life. Thus, it is difficult for the arrival to accept the disdain directed at them by
Northern-born Blacks. As Jimmie Lewis Franklin observes, it was “the
southernness of rural black migrants to the North that induced established
African Americans in cities such as Chicago to perceive the need to distance
themselves from, or to ‘guide’ and ‘control,’ their newly arrived counterparts
who continued to ‘sing, sell, eat, and dress as they had back home’” (211).
Franklin quotes a columnist from the Chicago Whip, an African American newspaper
from the 20s, who remarked, “It’s no difficult task to get the people out
of the South, but you have a job on your hands when you attempt to get the
South out of them” (211).
Considered alongside the ways that their bodies must adjust to urban life
after spending most of their lives in rural areas, where contact with Whites is
minimized—by custom and social edict—Northern versions of manhood prove
to be just as elusive for these men as they do in the South. Because the newly
arrived have to contend with the spite and meanness visited upon them by fellow
Blacks who were born in the North, they enter an environment as hostile
as it is foreign. In Jazz, Morrison describes urban space as a site which renders
the senses ineffectual through the use of its various props and mirages. “A
man seeing a woman,” she writes, “sitting on a stoop with a cool beer in her
hand, dangling her shoe from the toes of her foot,” comes to believe “it was
the woman he wanted, and not some combination of curved stone, and a swinging,
high heeled shoe moving in and out of sunlight” (34). What is lost is the
sensual specificity of their rural beginnings:
There is no air in the City, but there is breath, and every morning it races
through him like laughing gas brightening his eyes, his talk, and his expectations.
In no time at all he forgets little pebbly creeks and apple trees so old
they lay their branches along the ground and you have to reach down or
stoop to pick the fruit. He forgets a sun that used to slide up like the yolk of a
good country egg, thick and red-orange at the bottom of the sky, and he
doesn’t miss it, doesn’t even look up to see what happened to it or to stars
made irrelevant by the light of thrilling, wasteful street lamps. (34)
Thus, if aspiration in Morrison’s Southern men is compromised, the City offers
a space where attention can be averted, where failed aspiration can be
harnessed to other purposes, mainly the pursuit of bodily pleasure.
The City is smart at this: smelling and good and looking raunchy; sending
secret messages disguised as public signs: this way, open here, danger to let
colored only single men on sale women wanted private room stop dog on

The Politics of Space
premises absolutely no money down fresh chicken free delivery fast. And
good at opening locks, dimming stairways. Covering your moans with its
own. (64)
This represents the language of a newly constituted urban discourse whose
main intent is to generate desire, to create scenarios whose energies are focused
either on getting something for little to nothing or erecting barriers of
difference that draw distinctions between the have-nots and the have-littles.
This latter group are distinguished by their ability to generate goods for barter,
even if the only thing to sell is their bodies. With its ability to seduce and to
trick, the City in Morrison’s fiction is a death wish masquerading as a life
force. The ramifications of this urban discourse are also to be understood in
terms of interiority and exteriority; in making such distinctions, the migrant is
forced to adopt to the ways that interiority means more in the North than being
indoors. It also represents the ways imbalances of power are so historically
grounded that to be “inside” also has a great deal to do with the ability to control
how the body is read—and how it participates in the reading of others in
social space. 6 Thus, Joe Trace moves from being a man “more comfortable in
the woods than in a town,” a man “nervous if a fence or a rail was anywhere
around,” to a man seduced by the cityscape. But more than this, he moves from
being a man whose woodsmanship makes him synonymous with agency—as a
man who can find his way with little to nothing in the way of overt clues—to a
man who embodies depletion, searching for what remains of the man he was
prior to arriving in the North. We could just easily assert that Joe Trace goes
from subject to object, his name moving from verb, which suggests that in
rural space he is adept at “tracing,” reading signs, whereas in urban space his
subjectivity is obscured in just another narrative of Black-on-Black violence.
His reduction to “trace” in New York is driven, in part, by the fact that no one
saw him shoot Dorcas, but also because the bureaucracy of New York leads
Dorcas’s aunt to eschew bringing him to justice because the request would
merely serve to articulate her lack of redress, the inaccessibility of justice.
However, Morrison’s juxtaposition of urban and rural spaces, the different
ways one negotiates them, is subordinate to what seems to be a less tangible
issue. The attraction to the sensational, as it is represented by the narrator of
Jazz, is first evidenced by the apparently innocuous declaration that s/he knows
Violet Trace. But in making this observation, the narrator intimates the manner
in which Violet’s story is linked to the geographical space that is Harlem and
the ways that space is always beset by race ritual and myth. The narrative voice’s
authority is established because it can mold and shape Violet’s and Joe’s stories
to fit into a variety of storytelling vehicles. As the “informed” voice of the
novel, the narrator works to pull the reader into the interior of a narrative
whose power issues from the propensity to enact a certain kind of gaze in
urban space, an attraction to knowing what pain lies beneath the public personas
of the city’s inhabitants. 7
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What this suggests is that Morrison’s characters opt to endorse, or implement,
either hierarchical or egalitarian forms of community. This dialectical
pairing, which can be viewed as the intersection of two separate axes,
reconfigures the tension between modernist and pastoral energies alluded to
in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and thus suggests that no matter where
the individual settles in Morrison’s fictions, he or she must acknowledge the
importance of village values: a connection to the land—and here, land as it
takes the form of redemptive settings, where rituals of renewal and rebirth can
occur and thus challenge the dominant notion of linear time and progress as
well as systems of belonging which enforce hierarchies of difference in the
form or race, gender, or class.
Morrison’s Southern Black men often leave behind their ability to harness
imagination to the task of self-definition: the problems of which are difficult
to discern, the solutions arduous to execute. Morrison’s fiction might be
thought of as the act of excavating human tragedy with the aim of better understanding
her characters’ struggle to decode the systems underwriting the politics
of space.
With understanding the potential of the North to represent freedom from
degradation on the one hand and enslavement to a capitalist hierarchy of power
on the other, we begin to understand that Scott’s letters contain a silence that
is yet to be interrogated, namely that the journey Northward begins as a noble
project, often undertaken for selfless purposes. However, upon arriving in the
North and experiencing the new forms of degradation visited upon by their
presence in urban space, the intentions of Morrison’s Southern men becomes
subsumed by the cultural forces that construe the conventional household and
employment within the workings of capitalist and patriarchal ideology. Hence,
Black men aspiring to find good paying jobs in shops and factories in Northern
cities fail to recognize that they are merely the raw material for masculine
competition between White industrialists. As Michael Kimmel has argued,
here the house (and men’s place in it) undergoes a profound set of changes that
coincide with shifts in the public sphere where consumption replaces reproduction
as the signal of masculine prowess. As spectators of these contests,
Black men come to believe that their only possible chance to uplift themselves—and
thus the race—is to recapitulate this model of masculinity.
Morrison is not the first African American writer to explore this notion. Certainly,
one thinks of figures like Mr. Norton in Ellison’s Invisible Man and
Mr. Dalton in Wright’s Native Son as wealthy scions in the North who exploit
Black men for profit and whose actions occur in proximity to young Black
men who are at once attracted and terrified by such men.
Morrison explores how notions of power and masculinity, as it is defined
by White men, affect Black men in her novels. Remembering Susan Willis’s
assertion that Toni Morrison’s Southern women are driven to eradicate the
“funk” from their lives, her Southern men, by contrast, are driven to establish
themselves within the vertically arranged interiors that greet their arrival, to

The Politics of Space
become figures who can manifest not only physical, but spatial control. The
challenge for Morrison’s Southern men is to reimagine themselves as men
whose subjectivity is not bound up in the context of work or the concatenations
of the city scape. For though physical labor can provide them with the
necessities required for living in an urban setting, Morrison suggests that much
more is needed than economic license. At no point in her fiction does she
depict economic success as the engine of a viable selfhood. Morrison puts
little stock in the idea that wage labor imparts equal value in a White supremacist
culture or that it can affirm one’s rights as a citizen of the planet. If anything,
Morrison understands wage labor as an instance of exploitatory zeal and
thus it should be viewed with a high level of suspicion if only because it renders
life contingent on hierarchical arrangements of human endeavor.
Tar Baby’s Son Green represents the paradoxical relationship Black men
have with capitalism in the late twentieth century. As such, he is meant to challenge
definitions of success; but he also represents Morrison’s decision to
interrogate the myths that fix hegemonic masculinity into place. Son is a figure
of complete liminality, living in the interstices between modern convention
and ritual. As a man who is “undocumented,” Son does “not always know
who he [is], but he always knows what we he [is] like,” (165) as if identity is
secondary, as if, like Janie in the latter stages of Their Eyes Were Watching
God, he lives his life “by comparisons” but to very different effect. The events
in Tar Baby lead us to ponder on the vagaries of such an existence; Son is a
man who values originality, authenticity, but he does so at the expense of an
ability to ascertain life beyond the parameters of the “real.” Son’s resistance
to Jadine’s version of success is a product of his Southern upbringing: he does
not value money, eschews all “knowledge he [cannot] witness or feel in his
bones,” (167) and distrusts the rituals of modern life. And as an “undocumented
man,” he “is not counted” which means that he and men like him are:
distinguished them from other men [by] their refusal to equate work with life
and an inability to stay anywhere for long. Some were Huck Finns; some
Nigger Jims. Others were Calibans, Staggerlees, and John Henrys. Anarchic,
wandering, they read about their hometowns in the pages of out-oftown
newspapers. (166)
This passage is an effective rendering of the variety of men who ventured North
and it suggests that Scott’s letters paint a portrait that is at least partially complete.
Morrison’s decision to use figures from both American literature and
African American folk culture to describe these men insists that Son and men
like him are ill-suited for the literate, text-bound world of the North, if only
because—as figures like Caliban and Nigger Jim indicate—the interpretive
devices used to calculate their value beyond the context of serving as foils for
their White counterparts is faulty at best and non-existent at worst.
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Son is a figuration of anarchy, who lights out for the territory in order to
manifest a subversive form of outrageousness. While he is not irresponsible
in his behavior, what makes him anarchic is that he values mobility, which prevents
him from insinuating himself into a community, even as he embodies
village values that are markedly egalitarian. Unlike Macon Dead, Son Green
cannot invest in a notion of selfhood that requires materialist forms of verification,
even as he attempts to distinguish between that which is real and that
which is not.
This assessment holds true for Son because he has had to adopt a life outside
the realm of records and contemporaneity after he has murdered his wife
and her lover in a jealous rage by driving a car through his house. Again, even as
Son is able to understand that upward mobility involves a ruse synonymous
with orphanhood, he nullifies his connection to Eloe because he attempts to
retaliate against his wife’s infidelity by violent means. Morrison’s decision to
name him “Son” suggests that even as he possesses some of the features of an
Adamic figure, capable of living in—and enhancing—the paradise embodied
by Isle des Chevaliers, he is more correctly associated with the emotional
volatility of Adam’s son, Cain. As an “undocumented” man, Son bears the mark
of Cain because, like him, he becomes “a fugitive and a vagabond” because of
an act of violence inspired by jealousy. 8 Although his nostalgia for Eloe provides
him with ways to resist the seduction of Jadine’s lifestyle, ultimately,
like Paul D in the early and middle stages of Beloved, he fails to recognize
that Eloe is more memory than reality. Even as he contemplates the joy of
receiving his “original dime,” Son’s life is the product of his nostalgia, not his
resistance to a bourgeois sensibility.
But we can contrast Son’s lack of materialism to Macon Dead’s insatiable
quest for land. He comes to understand that undeveloped land has little intrinsic
value, especially after White men violently assume control of his father’s
farm. Macon does not see the value of land as natural resource, but as property.
As such, he is interested in land on which houses are, or can be, built, and
more importantly, leveraged so he can buy more houses. In Macon, we come
to see the ways that the gender project of Black hegemonic manhood is underpinned
by a spatial logic that can assume material form, here, in the form of a
structured relation to capital and the ways that it can be brought to bear on
physical space. The house (and later the gold he thinks Pilate is hiding in her
house) becomes the implement Macon utilizes to construct a paradigm for
negotiating urban space. That negotiation is rooted, as Elizabeth Grosz suggests,
in the ways the city “brings together economic and informational flows,
power networks, forms of displacement, management, and political organization,”
(244) which suggests that Macon desires to situate his performance of
masculinity at the interstitial point the city represents between the village and
the state. He hates his sister Pilate because her refusal to enact a conventional

The Politics of Space
femininity (he asks her “Why can’t you dress like a woman?”) endangers his
relationship to the White bankers “who [help] him buy and mortgage houses”
(20).
For Macon, it becomes important to control perception of his relation to
familial space. He does not want the bankers to discover that “the propertied
Negro who handled his business so well and who lived in a big house on Not
Doctor Street had a sister who had a daughter but no husband, and that daughter
had a daughter but no husband.” As a vertical structure, a house substantiates
the hierarchical forces arranged to privilege interiority. Further, because land
can supplement the ineffectual male body, serving as the embodiment of political
agency, Macon’s drive to wealth is depicted by Morrison through his
belly’s “sagging paunch,” which suggests both greed and sloth. His marriage to
Ruth is a matter of economic expediency, foregrounding patriarchy, caste politics,
and class consciousness. In his view, the “real” world is purely speculative,
he fails to recognize its discursive properties and the extent to which he
embodies a consciousness reminiscent of a slave owner, which leads him to
disregard the manner in which space can assume meaning when geography and
history intersect.
What makes this an important point to consider is that it is this very oversight
which his son, Milkman, will correct upon traveling to Shalimar. And
unlike Cholly Breedlove, whose relationship to patriarchy requires nothing in
the way of materialism, Macon’s investment in patriarchy is one which argues
that the relation between time and space can only be structured on a grid of
ownership, and it is this ideology he attempts to pass on to Milkman:
Boy, you got better things to do with your time. Besides, it’s time you started
learning how to work. You start Monday. After school come to my office;
work a couple of hours there and learn what’s real. Pilate can’t teach you a
thing you can use in this world. Maybe the next, but not this one. Let me tell
you right now the one important thing you’ll ever need to know: Own things.
And let the things you own own other things. Then you’ll own yourself and
other people too. (55, emphasis mine)
Here, Macon insists that Milkman can only verify his identity through the accumulation
of property. It also indicates that Macon has moved beyond the
idea of self-ownership, admirable in itself perhaps, to the more destructive
idea of human beings as representations of property. What he does not discern,
however, is that his relationship to the economy is a reproduction of that
which exists on the Southern plantation; he is much more feudal lord than
capitalist, with control over a small collection of dilapidated housing that he
can only rent to Blacks less financially endowed than he.
Macon remembers how his father, the first Macon Dead, was given a name
by a drunk Union soldier who, in making out his “free papers” mistakenly puts
“Macon” his father’s birthplace, in place of his name. Unfortunately, Macon
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the son has grown up with this legacy; in his view land and title are manifestations
of the self. Moreover, he comes to recapitulate the idea that people are
forms of property as well, an idea which can only have originated in the South,
which maintained a system based on feudalism well into the twentieth century.
Though he will never, as Railroad Tommy suggests, be a figure of wealth and
influence on the order of the industrialists of the early twentieth century like
Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, or Andrew Mellon, Macon is nonetheless
feared in Lorain’s Black community because he owns the deeds to the
homes in which Blacks reside and is unmoved by their hardship. He has become,
in the North, a newer, more insidious version of the “house nigger.” But
Macon Dead can sit down and do business because the Whites he deals with
have recognized that, in his quest for financial power, he will be effective as a
brake on other forms of Black progress, particularly of a political sort. Thus,
when he threatens Guitar’s grandmother with eviction, she can only conclude,
“A nigger in business is a terrible thing to see” (22).
III
Morrison uses her Southern male characters as cautionary devices, meant
to warn the reader of the inherent dangers of overstimulation. In a secular
world that no longer has the need for rituals whose sacred vessels include an
uncommodified earth and sky, Morrison’s characters fall victim to their appetites.
Because Southern life holds so little in the way of material remuneration,
Northern life is a setting made attractive because desire is an end in
itself. In the North, ownership of self can only be measured by one’s ability to
manifest wealth in the form of material goods or one’s ability to manipulate
the shape of human experience to include a boundary between inside and outside.
The North conjures itself as a benign setting by replacing the indignity
and finality of disenfranchisement and lynching with the cyclicality of
commodification, desire, and consumption. Hence, Morrison’s characters
embody a form of manhood that is contingent upon their ability to establish a
relationship to the world of capital and profit and thus maintain an allegiance
to forces yoked to the engine of their demise.
Rather than inculcating resistance, this leads men like Macon Dead, Guitar,
Joe Trace, and Cholly Breedlove to violence. Aware that who they are is measured
by what they have, the material resources they can bring to bear on the
project of manhood become all-important. The village values to be found in
the small and intimate communities in the South become perverted, whereby
affiliation remains an important circumstance, but only when the connection
is to individuals situated above, rather than below, one in the hierarchy. In lieu
of such associations, the men settle for stimulations of various sorts: commerce,
racial violence, jealous rage, alcohol. Since these forces are felt most
prominently in the body itself, each of Morrison’s characters must come up

The Politics of Space
with a way to reconstitute the body in its role as the primary medium of public
discourse. The strategies they often adopt, however, are grounded in systems
of verticality and interiority.
This points at the way violence functions in Morrison’s fiction as an essential
element of self-definition in the North. Her Southern men often turn the
vitriol of their inner struggles upon those whose circumstances most resemble
their own. When Cholly Breedlove is caught in the act of having sex with a girl
by several White hunters, he is forced to continue the act at gunpoint. Morrison
writes, “For some reason Cholly had not hated the white men; he hated, despised,
the girl. Even a half-remembrance of this episode, along with myriad
other humiliations, defeats, emasculations, could stir him into flights of depravity
that surprised himself—but only himself” (37). The episode with the
hunters strips Cholly of the ability to direct his anger at Whites, his acts of
self-denigration and scapegoating are directed instead at those who occupy
his own household.
However, prior to leaving the South, Cholly’s life is a remarkable combination
of self-loathing and license. In a provocative formulation, Morrison suggests
that Cholly’s subjectivity can only be contained within the blues, as if to
insist that it resists articulation in a critical sphere. Thus, Morrison writes:
Only a musician would sense, know, without even knowing that he knew that
Cholly was free. Dangerously free. Free to feel whatever he felt—fear,
guilt, shame, love, grief, pity. Free to be tender or violent, to whistle or weep.
Free to sleep in doorways or between the white sheets of a singing woman.
Free to take a job, free to leave it. He could go to jail and not feel imprisoned,
for he had already seen his furtiveness in the eyes of his jailer, free to say,
“No, suh,” and smile, for he had already killed three white men. Free to take
a woman’s insults, for his body had already conquered hers. Free even to
knock her in the head, for he had already cradled that head in his arms. (159)
As a man with nothing more to lose, Cholly’s life is arranged around the manifestation
of desire and its satisfaction. Which is to say that his is a life is
rendered contingent because his ultimate goal is to reenact, and thus complete,
his failed act of copulation. When he opts to settle into marriage with
Pauline, he does so because he imagines domestic space as that site where
desire, power, and perception exist in an unbroken relation. What disrupts this
unstable nexus is the appearance of children. Having been abandoned by his
mother and shunned by his father, Cholly cannot conceptualize domestic space
as a site of the kind of reciprocal inscription that parenting involves. His inability
to establish a relationship with his children ultimately compromises
his relation to domestic space. Because his life is locked into a provisional
mode, his relation to patriarchy is not nullified, his life in the North comes to
mirror his life in the South, where the license he experiences there resists
containment. Hence, Cholly’s body can relate to his daughter, Pecola, as both
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father and lover because he lacks the ability to distinguish between the two
roles, but more poignantly, his life in the South has never imbued him with the
necessary coordinates to map out a form of masculinity which links sexuality
and violence as the essential characteristics of Cholly’s subjectivity.
Cholly’s licentiousness needs to be contrasted to Guitar Banes, who as a
Southern migrant (from Florida), has come North and settled into a life rendered
coherent by violence. Where Cholly falls into an undisciplined life,
Guitar’s life is a model of spatial discipline. In Guitar’s view, Whiteness is the
ultimate form of Otherness, which means that to navigate he must eschew
imagination for a life characterized by its adherence to mimesis. Once he is
initiated into the Seven Days, Milkman’s life is structured according to the
calendar and methods of killing, which come to serve as points on his moral
compass. Thus, when he tells Milkman, “I do believe my whole life’s geography,”
(114) what he means is that his is a life consists of mapping his place in
the world, using the racial atrocities of Whites to guide him. As geographer
Mark Monmonier points out, however, maps “have three basic attributes: scale,
projection, and symbolization. Each element is a source of distortion” (5).
Guitar’s propensity to violence suggests that he over determines symbolization,
hence, his violent acts with the Seven Days, beyond their criminality, are
further problematized by his unwillingness to consider the possibilities arising
out of participation in a political system. Trapped in a symbolic matrix,
Guitar cannot embrace his rights as a citizen, where he concludes the electoral
process is a response lacking in scale. And feeling that is manhood is under
constant contestation, he cannot partake of the resources of the Southside
because he must reduce it, for expedience sake, to an ever-shrinking universe
where his values alone are ascendant. 9
When he and Milkman undertake a quest for gold, he does so because his
work with the Seven Days demands it. But we need to read the Days as the
embodiment of the rhetorical formation that argues the intersection of physicality
and Blackness is where maleness becomes authentic. In this formulation,
the Days have chosen violence as a way to negotiate political space. Believing
himself otherwise disenfranchised, Guitar’s participation in the Seven
Days is inextricably linked to his life in the South as a hunter. As he relates to
Milkman:
I used to hunt a lot. From the time I could walk almost and I was good at it.
Everybody said I was a natural. I could hear anything, smell anything, and
see like a cat. You know what I mean? A natural. And I was never scared—
not of the dark or shadows or funny sounds, and I never afraid to kill. Anything.
Rabbit, bird, snakes, squirrels, deer. And I was little. It never bothered
me. I’d take a shot at anything. The grown men used to laugh about it. Said
I was a natural-born hunter. After we moved up here with my grandmother,
that was the only thing about the South I missed. (85)

The Politics of Space
Though he expresses regret about killing a doe as a response to Milkman’s
story about hitting his father, we should not interpret this as a renunciation of
violence. Rather, Guitar is merely suggesting that violence is a discourse, and
as such, it requires substantiation and contextualization.
Ultimately, Guitar recalls Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin who is also a “naturalborn
hunter.” The comparison opens up further when we consider that both Ike
and Guitar excel because they are readers of signs. Indeed, violence can only
have meaning by its relationship to signs. As R.W. Connell has insisted, men
have historically used violence as a way to enact the transactions in a social
network of men, both to assert their dominance over women and as a way to fix
“authentic” forms of manhood in discursive space. The Seven Days, with their
coded language, exclusionary practices, and strict adherence to codes of conduct,
suggest the ways that violence allows the male body to assume material
importance in a system of unstable signs (in this instance, whether or not the
Black male body is “authentic” in the category of manhood). Hence, even as
Ike McCaslin renounces his ties to his family’s material wealth, he does not
renounce hunting, nor does he ever consent to relinquishing his privilege as a
White man.
Guitar likewise renounces life in the domestic sphere, choosing instead to
embrace violence as a surrogate for familial love and tenderness. This relation
breaks down, of course, because the Seven Days is built on the inherently
circumspect project of trying to flatten the criteria by which we assign value
to human bodies in social space. Their use of race as the poetics informing
this project leaves them room to shift the conditions because they render them
arbitrary. Therefore, Guitar can make Milkman the object of his violent retribution
because he assumes the right to delegitimize those forms of Black
manhood he deems inauthentic. Not only is this Morrison’s way of articulating
the weaknesses of 60s Black nationalism (particularly in its more radical
incarnations), it also begins to suggest that the Black community does not
embody a monolithic notion of what constitutes manhood. While Milkman’s
quest for his name leads him to discover a new relation between North and
South, violence serves this purpose for Guitar.
IV
Southernness and manhood are difficult to reconcile as discursive events. I
want to return to where I began in this essay, namely, with Emmett J. Scott’s
letters. Viewed in their complexity, the letters articulate more than just the
desire on the part of men and women in the South to find good paying jobs.
They represent the link between the act of writing and the power of daydreaming.
The men in Morrison’s fictions demonstrate her concern with the phenomenology
of oppression. Looked at in relation to Scott’s letters, we must
remember that Scott’s long-time role as Booker T. Washington’s secretary. It
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would seem that the letters he collected from Southern migrants reflect this
relationship if only because so many of the letters assert such a strong belief
in Washington’s program of uplift—we find the same adherence to the notion
that labor should precede political agency, the idea that it is through work that
Black men can demonstrate their worth.
However, if Black men from the South are violent, wedded to vertical structures
of power, driven to see themselves as insiders, this is so because they
reflect many of the anxieties held by their White counterparts. Washington’s
great achievement was his ability to harness White fears of Black competition
and turn them to his benefit. In Jazz Joe Trace observes, “Crackers in the South
mad because Negroes were leaving, crackers in the North mad because we
were coming” (128). What he suggests is that Morrison’s novel works out that
which we do not find in Scott’s letters: the assertion that White men view
Black men as a threat to their manhood.
Here, I do not mean to suggest that “manhood” is the product of an unhindered
racial self. Rather, “manhood” is always already a construction in crisis.
Given this fact, we can understand Morrison’s Southern men as a means for
her to pry open the more difficult conundrum: how the larger, gendered crisis
comes to effect everyone in proximity. Thus, we find her revising Faulkner’s
notion of the South as a cursed land. In his view, the curse was set in motion by
the mistaken notion that men could own land. But in Morrison’s revision, the
curse resides in the failed sense that acts of daydreaming are solitary events.
Her fiction gives us, repeatedly, men who seek to improve their lives, to cultivate
an inner landscape. They fail, Morrison suggests, because they buy into
the predicament of the individual, an idea driven in her fictions by modernist
notions of the individual talent. She invests importance in the idea of the neighborhood
because she argues for the importance of the collective talent, the
individual in the web of community.
In an essay describing the plight of Southern migrants, Scott talks about the
mistreatment visited upon them by Northern Blacks. What Morrison depicts
with such unfailing accuracy is not the realism of this conflict, but the phenomenology
of this predicament—the drive in the twentieth century to become
a thing apart, the Other as power. Structures of verticality and interiority
are often juxtaposed against configurations of horizontality and exteriority,
then, because Morrison argues for the importance of finding a reflection of
the individual struggle in the struggle of the group. Self-ownership comes, she
insists, when men give themselves up to those forces beyond their grasp. Though
this would seem a paradox, what we see in Morrison’s work is her resistance
to the idea that physicality is the self on display. As the suffering of her Southern
men informs us, the elusive daydream is best reached by collaborative
means.

The Politics of Space
NOTES
1 As Farah Griffin argues in, “Who Set You Flowin’?” the South, as geographical site and symbol,
progresses from a site of repression and lack of possibility in Wright’s fiction, where the adherence
to Southern folk culture brings about the character’s demise, to Ellison, Baldwin, and Hughes, who
see folk culture as an essential aspect of African American survival in the North, to Morrison, who
sees the South “as a site of racial redemption and identity [and] also the place where Africa is most
present” and thus a place to which African Americans must return, either by geographic means, or
symbolically. (11)
2 Connell notes that body-reflexive practices “form—and are formed by—structures which have
the same historical weight and solidity. The social has its own reality.” For him “practice never
occurs in a vacuum. It always responds to a situation, and situations are structured in ways that
admit certain possibilities and not others. Practice does not proceed into a vacuum either. Practice
makes a world.” See R. W. Connell. Masculinities (64–65).
3 There are several examples of men who utilize their bodies for purposes outside the conventional
notion of the masculine role. One thinks of Shadrack, the shell-shocked veteran of Sula, and Soaphead
Church in The Bluest Eye, as men who live at the periphery of the community. There is also the
example of the Deweys, and Ajax, as men who are suspended between manhood and childhood.
4 Connell, p. 74–75.
5 Elizabeth Grosz in “Bodies-Cities” from Sexuality and Space observes, “The city is one of the
crucial factors in the social production of (sexed) corporeality; the built environment provides the
context and coordinates for most contemporary Western, and today, Eastern forms of the body, even
for rural bodies insofar as the twentieth-century defines the countryside, ‘the rural,’ as the underside
of raw material of urban development” (242).
6 The significance of this as Grosz argues is that a high priority is placed on “making the body a
meaningful, ‘readable,’ depth-entity; and its production and development through various regimes
of discipline and training, including the coordination and integration of its bodily functions so that
not only can it undertake the general social tasks required of it, but so that it becomes an integral part
of or position within a social network linked to other bodies and objects. 7 But just as surely, we have
moments in Morrison’s fiction like that which occurs at the end of Beloved, where Paul D concludes
that he “wants to lay his story next to” Sethe’s. This impulse to eschew a narrative hierarchy based
on which story has the most power to titillate or trick, also insists that narrative complexity in the
form of multiple points of view are not only beneficial but essential if one is to navigate urban space
successfully. This is not to propose that multiple points of view can resist the potential of hostility
being manifest, rather it subscribes to the idea that narratives must be flexible if they are to have
value. This is a position Morrison articulates with great precision in her Nobel Prize lecture.
8 And it is also important to point out that Son is also not meant to be associated with the role of
savior. Though the impulse to associate him as such is evidenced in his name, Son is also Morrison’s
vehicle for challenging some of the assumptions to be found in the Black Power Movement of the
late 60s and early 70s. Though he would like to “rescue” Jadine from her plight, Son is, at root, just
as self-absorbed as Jadine. Though he is not as materialistic as Jadine, his behavior is often just as
reckless, if only because he worships folk culture as a kind of idol, in spite of the ways that it fails to
accomodate a plurality of viewpoints.
9 Guitar represents a figure the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay describes as “enslavement” to combat.
Like Achilles in the Iliad, Guitar cannot move beyond the Seven Days because he establishes an
unbreakable link between grief and violence. Though he claims that The Days are “as indifferent as
rain,” in truth, the group represents what Shay refers to as ‘the undoing of character,’ which suggests
that if Guitar uses racial violence to map out his life, his is a life that is about dissolution.
76

WORKS CITED
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Adero, Malaika, ed. Up South: Stories Studies and Letters of this Century’s African American
Migration. New York: The New P, 1994.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Boston: Beacon P, 1969.
Connell, R.W. Masculinities. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Who Set You Flowin?”: The African American Migration Narrative. New
York: Oxford UP, 1995.
Grosz, Elizabeth. “Bodies-Cities.” Beatriz Colomina, ed. Sexuality and Space. New York: Princeton
Architectural P, 1992: 241–253.
Lewis, Jimmie Franklin. “Black Southerners, A Shared Experience, and Place: A Reflection.” Larry J.
Griffin and Don H. Doyle, eds. The South: An American Problem. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995:
210–233.
Monmonier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. 1970. New York: Pocket Books, 1972.
–––. Sula. 1973. New York: Bantam Books, 1980.
–––. Song of Solomon. 1977. New York: Plume Books, 1987.
–––. Tar Baby. 1981. New York: Plume Books, 1982.
–––. Beloved. 1987. New York: Plume Books, 1988.
–––. Jazz. 1992.New York: Plume Books, 1993.
Scott, Emmett J. “Letters of Negro Migrants of 1916–1918.” The Journal of Negro History. July 1919:
290–348.
–––. “Additional Letters of Negro Migrants.” The Journal of Negro History. October 1919

Lucille P. Fultz
SOUTHERN ETHOS / BLACK ETHICS IN TONI MORRISON’S
FICTION
“You left out a s, ma’am,” the boy said. The North was new to him and he
had just begun to learn that he could speak up to white people.
—Song of Solomon
The South “symbolizes the worst that America has offered to blacks—racism,
poverty, and oppression. But it also represents the roots of Black culture,
history and ‘home.’ It is ‘down home’ (Bone xxii) to many Blacks not born
there; a ‘homeplace’ for people whose fathers and mothers left decades ago”
(Holt 137–138). 1 It is this mecca, so to speak, toward which many African
American writers turn in their search for a site that represents a home base for
certain characters seeking grounding and stability. In another sense, however,
the South—with a sense of the place of a White ethos that privileges Whiteness
as a site of supremacy and Blackness as the site of inferiority—is most
problematic for Blacks. Robert Bone has stated that Blacks’ ambivalence toward
the South is due to the fact that they are at once “deeply moved by the
natural beauty of the region” and “repelled by its moral ugliness” (xxi). Philip
Page is most eloquent on the role of the South in the composite African American
experience when he writes about Toni Morrison’s texts, noting that for her
the “past is both rural and South.” And “as characters in the urban North struggle
to create healthy identities, they must come to terms with their own or their
ancestors’ rural southern pasts by somehow fusing past and present.” Page
further states “that past is unavoidable because it is heavily value-laden and
emotionally burdened, both positively and negatively”(29). 2
Perhaps Denver most cogently formulates this contradictory notion of the
Southern past when she responds to her mother’s and Paul D’s fixations on
Sweet Home, Kentucky: “How come everybody run off from Sweet Home
can’t stop talking about it? Look like if it was so sweet you would have stayed”
(Beloved 13). But Denver can never know the “ultimate bittersweet” of Sweet
Home, “a place they cannot forget but can barely endure to remember” (29).
Clearly the Sweet Home Sethe and Paul D are thinking of at this moment is
redolent of the natural world, one that resonates with other Toni Morrison
characters, most notably Pauline Breedlove, Sethe, and Paul D, as noted above.
Despite this ambivalence, for those African Americans writers who have fictionalized
the South, it is an indispensable place because it is more than an
erstwhile home: it is an always already originary site of their African
Americanness, the place of rootedness and perdurability of the African American
spirit. For many African Americans the South remains a place of comfort
and contradictions—a place to turn toward and a place to turn from.
Studies in the Literary Imagination 31.2, Fall 1998 © Georgia State University

Southern Ethos/Black Ethics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction
For example, when Pauline Breedlove finds herself alienated from the African
American community in Lorain, Ohio, and emotionally abandoned by her
husband Cholly, she evokes idyllic memories of the South that stress the beauty
of the natural world which becomes a metaphor for her erotic memories of
her lost love for her Cholly. Her now famous evocation of that lost world
mirrors the memories of, perhaps, many African Americans who left the rural
South for the concrete and smog-polluted cities and factory towns of the North:
When all of us left from down home and was waiting down by the depot for
the truck, it was nighttime. June bugs was shooting everywhere. They lighted
up a tree leaf, and I seen a streak of green every now and again. That was
the last time I seen real june bugs. These things up here ain’t june bugs.
They’s something else. Folks here call them fireflies. Down home they was
different. But I recollect that streak of green. I recollect it well. (The Bluest
Eye 89)
Later she muses:
When I first seed Cholly, I want you to know it was like all the bits of color
from that time down home when all of us chil’ren went berry picking after a
funeral and I put some in the pocket of my Sunday dress, and they mashed up
and stained my hips. My whole dress was messed with purple, and it never
did wash out. Not the dress nor me. I could feel the purple deep inside me.
(91–92)
Pauline’s assertions that “[a]ll of them colors was in me” and that the “purple
never did wash,” (92) are reinforced by her associating them with her former
closeness to Cholly and her nostalgia for that natural beauty. These are homologous
to her memory of certain lost erotic moments with Cholly that she
will never forget. Pauline’s mingling of the southern past and the northern
present is evidence of the permanent hold the South has on her. Pauline, of
course, has highly romanticized the region that was the site of her birth and has
forgotten the pain and neglect associated with her crippled foot, “the complete
indifference with which a rusty nail was met when it pinched clear through
her foot,” (88) marking her difference and setting her apart from the rest of
her family. She becomes the “other” within the family because she is physically
different. This difference, Morrison implies, is a result of poverty and
racism that denied medical attention to Pauline’s injured foot. Hence, her selected
memory of the South does not include the painful experiences.
Similarly, in Beloved Morrison uses aspects of the natural world of the
South to represent memory and eroticism. Like Pauline’s memories of purple
succulent berries and lemonade and their resonance with her erotic moments
with Cholly, Sethe’s first two sexual encounters with Halle in the tiny cornfield
in Sweet Home, Kentucky, are redolent of sweet, ripe corn with silk and
succulent kernels. This moment is recalled some eighteen years later when
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Sethe and Paul D have their unsuccessful sexual encounter. In fact, it is the
failure of their lovemaking that mentally transports Paul D and Sethe back to
the cornfield:“looking at Paul D’s back, she remembered that some of the
cornstalks broke, folded down over Halle’s back and among the things her
fingers clutched were husk and cornsilk hair” (27). The eroticization of the
corn is for Sethe a way of reliving the moment with Halle: “How loose the
silk. How jailed up the juice” (27) and for Paul D the fact that he could only
watch them and find sexual gratification in the their act of love and the taste of
corn. Clearly, Morrison wants her readers to connect Paul D’s stripping away
the corn husks to free the kernels and the juices with the sexual act in which
Halle spreads Sethe’s pubic hairs and exposes her vaginal fluids. The conflation
of Paul D’s enjoyment of the fresh corn and the sexual act between Sethe and
Halle is redolent of the touch and taste of the natural world: “The pulling down
of the tight sheath [comparable to the outer skin, or shaft, of the penis], the
ripping [the breaking of her hymen, perhaps] sound always convinced her it
hurt” (27). But as soon as one strip of husk was down, the rest obeyed and the
ear yielded up to him its shy rows, exposed at last. How loose the silk. How
quick the jailed-up flavor ran free. . . . How loose the silk. How fine and loose
and free” (27). The foregoing passage intermingles two concupiscent moments:
Paul D’s joy in eating fresh corn and the joy of Sethe and Halle’s first sex.
Both Sethe and Pauline recall these moments when they are up North, where
they no longer are aroused by sexual love and must rely upon memories of
what was, for them, jouissance.
Besides the Southern landscape with its seductive, though insidious, beauty,
the Southern region is also equated with the pinnacle of manners and hospitality.
According to Charles R. Wilson, “Southerners have . . . traditionally equated
manners—the appropriate, customary, or proper way of doing things—with
morals, so that unmannerly behavior has been viewed as immoral behavior.”
By Southerners, Wilson, of course, means White Southerners. This notion of
behavior, according to Wilson, implies that “moral codes, laws, and manners
have been intertwined with the aim of curbing individual aggression and maintaining
social order through a combination of community pressures and internalized
individual motivation.” Some of the “rules” that govern behavior and
manifest respect for parents are expressed in a discourse of politeness (“yes,
Sir,” “no, Ma’am”); it also means that one must honor obligations to kin and
welcome neighbors and protect the weak and helpless” (Wilson 634). But we
also find a “deeply rooted code of etiquette [manners] among black families in
the South” as well. Wilson cites Frederick Douglass’s observation that “black
etiquette derived from similar African codes.” According to Douglass, “there
is not to be found, among any people, a more rigid enforcement of the law of
respect to elders, than they maintain. . . . There is no better material in the
world for making a gentleman, than in the African” (635).
This etiquette or respect for elders became “a double-edged tradition”: a
respect for one’s elders and a “foil to Southern racism” (Wilson 636). The

Southern Ethos/Black Ethics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction
traditional manners Southern Whites brought from Europe and enslaved Blacks
brought from Africa resulted in duplicitous behavior on both sides: an overt
attempt on the part of Whites to demonstrate their “respect” for Blacks who
behaved towards Whites according to White established rules, and overt and
covert gestures (masking their true feelings and puttin’ on ole Massa) that
Blacks adopted to show Whites that Blacks knew their “place” and were willing
to stay in that “place.” This duplicity on the part of Blacks sometimes
meant stealing to enhance their meager allotment of food and then lying or
dissembling about it. Consider, for example the following exchange between
Sixo and schoolteacher when schoolteacher accuses Sixo of stealing one of
his shoats:
‘You stole that shoat, didn’t you?’
‘No. Sir.’ said Sixo, but he had the decency to keep his eyes on the meat.
‘You telling me you didn’t steal it, and I’m looking right at you.’ Schoolteacher
smiled. ‘Did you kill it?’
‘Yes, sir.’ (190)
The interrogation continues until Sixo offers an explanation for what schoolteacher
terms “stealing.” If it is not stealing, then schoolteacher wants to know
“What is it then?” To which Sixo offers a brilliant and appropriate explanation
that indicates his knowledge of his position as chattel: “Improving your property,
sir” and as a way of “putting on” schoolteacher without ever forgetting
the obligatory “sir.”
“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” (190).
Schoolteacher inwardly sees the cleverness in Sixo’s explanation, but “beat
him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers—not the
defined” (Beloved 190). Put another way, schoolteacher beat Sixo because
Sixo had stepped out of his “place” as chattel and into the role of agent, a
clever, thinking human and must be put in his place. Duplicity like Sixo’s that
is countered with the lash served to crystallize the “daily sense of inferiority
among blacks,” (Wilson 636) despite the successful attempts by many Blacks
to fool Whites into thinking they believed in and accepted the “normative” and
prescriptive modes of conducting themselves in the presence of Whites. Wilson
goes on to argue that such a “requirement of racial manners in the South
meant that Blacks lived in an atmosphere of daily intimidation and frequent
anxiety”—a “life-and-death situation”(636). 4
This “caste etiquette,” de rigueur, was developed to ensure social distance
between the races. This system demanded a codified behavior between the
races. Such behavior was most apparent in the discourse of manners requiring
that Whites not address Blacks by the courtesy titles of “Mr.” or “Mrs.” nor
shake hands or tip a hat to them. Blacks, on the other hand, “should address all
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whites with respect, should not crowd whites on sidewalks, should enter the
home of a white person through the back door” (Wilson 636).
However, because the much-touted Southern hospitality associated with
White culture did not extend to them, Blacks developed a counterculture of
self-defense to ensure their survival in the face of discrimination and other
efforts toward diminishing their humanity. I am calling this counterculture a
“Black ethic”—one that operates within the Southern ethos but is not an ethic
grounded in morality. It is based upon necessity and expediency and, therefore,
constantly shifts in response to the complex and sometimes arbitrary
Southern mores. Blacks found themselves in positions much like a chameleon;
they had to adapt to shifting circumstances. I am using the term ethic
rather than morality, which for the purposes of my argument, is static and
“irremovable,” to borrow Geoffrey Harpham’s terminology. Morality “represents
a particular moment of ethics, when all but one of the available alternatives
are excluded, chosen against, regardless of their claims . . . it commands
us to act now and on the right principle” (Critical Terms for Literary Study
397).
The distinction I am making between morality and ethics can be illustrated
by the actions of the “Seven Days” in Song of Solomon. Their decision to
avenge Emmett Till’s death based upon an eye-for-an-eye philosophy is based
in morality, not ethics. For them to kill a White person in order to “even” the
score for every Black person killed by a White person evolves from a knowledge
of what is good and bad; while African Americans’ decision to establish
an alternative system of behavior to counter the cruelty they suffer because of
White oppression is an ethical decision—one based upon expediency and acceptance
of the reality of their powerlessness in some situations. Hence this
Black ethic is often spontaneous and is primarily oral and behavioral, often
expressed through signifying. 5 Whereas many Southern Whites used to address
most Black males as boy regardless of his age, Blacks substituted the
word man, which still has currency in the African American community. Black
males—even little boys—frequently address one another as man. In response
to Southern Whites addressing Black females as girl, gal, or Auntie, and older
Black males as Uncle or Preacher, Blacks placed a title or “handle” before the
name: “Ms. Mary,” “Mr. Louis,” if they were family friends and the generic
titles before last names. Consider, for example, the moment when Sethe introduces
Denver to Paul D, “Here is my Denver. This is Paul D, honey . . .”; to
which Denver replies, “Good morning Mr. D,” (Beloved 11). The automatic
“Mr. D” is Denver’s understanding that his last name is “D,” and that she has
been taught how to address African American adults. When Paul D corrects
her, “Garner, baby. Paul D Garner,” Denver’s response to his correction is a
polite, “Yes, sir” (11). Note also that the Black teacher in Cincinnati, because
of her position, is given a title of respectability and gentility—“Lady Jones.”
A Black Southern ethic is an ethic that evolved during slavery in the face of
an irrational, incomprehensible, and duplicitous White ethos. The Black ethic

Southern Ethos/Black Ethics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction
of survival—even after slavery and in the face of constrictions and a host of
other barriers—was formulated by Richard Wright as a modus vivendi and
modus operandi for living within a system to which some—himself being his
best example—could not adhere. A formulation such as a Black ethic may be
somewhat disconcerting for those of us who may wish to speak of a broader,
more comprehensive ethic. Yet a closer examination of what I am calling a
Black ethic reveals that it is one that enables survival not only within a dominant
hostile Southern community but one that also ensures stability and power
within the ethnic community. There was a price to pay for those Blacks willing
to abandon the Black community and assimilate within the White community.
This assimilation of hegemonic values was, and remains, often a price so high
that it meant not only abnegating the ethics of one’s own community but sometimes
sneering at that community’s expectations of loyalty to those principles
that not only enabled survival but encoded a message of difference. 6
Several African American writers of the twentieth century have demonstrated
through their formative years in the South just how complex and terrifying life
in this region can be—especially for a young Black male. Wright describes
how Blacks are assigned a “place” vis-à-vis Whites. Wright defines this “place”
as a way of being in the South for both Blacks and Whites. To underscore his
point, Wright rehearses an incident involving himself and two young White
men who resented his doing what they considered “a white man’s work” (“Ethics
. . . Jim Crow,” 291). According to Wright his family “called me a fool.
They told me that I must learn never again attempt to exceed my boundaries.
When you are working for White folks, they said, you got to ‘stay in your
place’ if you want to keep working” (Black Boy 8).
This admonishment from Wright’s family is a way of familiarizing him with
Southern White mores—a milieu that demanded strict and impenetrable boundaries
between Whites and Blacks: a set of principles established to guarantee
social distance and to maintain White economic and political power. From a
White perspective, this was not a problem so long as Blacks remained in their
“place” and Whites kept their clearly defined “distance.” But this was a onesided
arrangement since White males were forever breaching those putative
boundaries by raping and seducing Black women 7 by and denying many Black
men the right to work and provide for their families. The Southern ethos meant
total freedom for White males (they made the rules) and restrictive freedom
for Blacks. No Black person could expect to participate, except in a position
of subjugation and denial of most human rights.
Denial and subjugation, as inscribed in Morrison’s fiction, have an ethical
dimension for many Blacks: an ethics constructed not only by circumstances
of enslavement and Jim Crow but enlarged by a community of people determined
to maintain within their designated and mandated space a culture of
civility and intra-communal respect both for its endurance and perseverance.
This is a culture with an appreciation for its efforts toward attaining first class
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citizenship in political, social, and artistic endeavors. This Southern Black ethic
is intergenerational—sometimes challenged by those who have abandoned it
or never learned it, as well as by those who continue to subscribe to it. It
expects its posterity, regardless of its dispersions across this country and migrations
to other lands, to hold on to its tenets. It is an ethic that sees value in
learning and high achievement but neither accepts nor tolerates any conflict
between high achievement and the survivalist ethic. This Southern Black Ethic
goes beyond who has the right of way on a Southern sidewalk, or where the
sidewalk ends in terms of the Black/White neighborhoods, or what jobs are
closed to Blacks. 8 It is a demanding ethic that brooks no deviation from or
bending of the rules. It demands not merely a respect for one’s elders but a
sensitivity to the limitations of one’s ancestors and an appreciation for their
struggles and efforts to make a way out of no way. The ethic asks for a pride in
the achievement of those for whom a way was made; and gratitude from those
who made it on the backs of those left behind.
Toni Morrison creates diverse characters to articulate the multiple worlds
of fiction in which both aspects of this Southern Black ethic are encoded and
tested. Her novels, Song of Solomon and Sula, call into question the old ways
of those “down home” Blacks, the new ways of those offspring who were born
in the South, and of those who not only migrated to the North but crossed over
into that often elusive “promised land” of money and opportunity. Sula and
Song of Solomon rehearse such moments when Blacks, specifically Sula Peace
and Macon Dead, Jr., most often referred to as Milkman, breach this protocol:
Sula, out of rebellion; and Milkman, out of gross ignorance. Both Sula and
Milkman are second generation Northerners. What is most striking about
Milkman’s violation of the Black ethical code is that he, thanks to his father’s
wealth, has the advantages of bourgeois material comforts; but because his
father has abandoned those simple values that Southern Blacks view as fundamental
to familial and social interaction, Milkman has missed his Southern
rootedness. Therefore, when he violates the Black code of conduct toward
friends and neighbors, he is guilty of an unpardonable offense: he insults his
family, his neighbors, and his potential allies.
In the tale of Cholly and Darlene, Morrison reinscribes the long Black song
of the Southern past that has haunted African Americans. The view that characterizes
the South as a culture of gentility is also one that simultaneously
flaunts and hides the brutality that lurks just at the border separating Whites
from Blacks. Consider, for example, the meeting in the Kentucky woods between
the White fugitive Amy and the Black fugitive Sethe. Sethe’s fatigued
condition and near helplessness from days of running, do not blind her to Southern
protocol. Even though the similarities between herself and Amy should put
them on equal footing, the rules of racialized manners operate even here. Amy
asserts White privilege while Sethe responds from the knowledge of her “place.”
Sethe’s prone position beneath Amy might well serve as a metaphor for their
relationship in the woods. Neither needs to practice the code of racialized

Southern Ethos/Black Ethics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction
conduct, yet each falls instinctively into her socially prescribed role. For Amy
there is nothing to consider; she acts out of her habit of being. But for Sethe
the choices of behavior are far more complex, requiring caution and dissembling
because with Amy’s presence her survival and her freedom depend not
upon her ability to continue her journey to Ohio but upon Amy who, even as a
runaway indentured servant, has the legal responsibility and the potential for
profit to turn Sethe over to the nearest marshal. 9 The simultaneous awareness
of these facts emerge as the two play out their respective racialized roles. Not
only does Amy, whose insensitive words belie her kind behavior, refer to Sethe
in racist discourse but she also bestializes Sethe and her condition [“What you
gonna do, just lay there and foal?” (33)] Amy’s first question, once she realizes
Sethe is pregnant, is presumptive—“Whose baby that?” She presumes that
either Sethe does not know the child’s father, “You don’t even know” (78), or
that the child’s father just may have been fathered by any man on Garner’s
farm, including Garner himself. 10 At the same moment that she asks about the
child’s father, Amy rubs Sethe’s wounded feet or strokes her excoriated back.
Sethe is nineteen; Amy, a year younger. Their similarities in age and condition
of servitude, however, do not at first diminish their separation by the racial
codes. When Sethe drags herself into the open, Amy’s first words reflect
her learned behavior, “Look there. A nigger. . . . You ’bout the scariest looking
something I ever seen” (32). Denver, in recounting this narrative of her birth
recognizes that Amy has no social capital that would place her above Sethe—
only her Whiteness or racial difference: “The raggediest-looking trash you
ever saw saying, ’Look there. A nigger. Now don’t that beat all” (31–32). But
Sethe momentarily forgets herself and admits that she’s a runaway slave. However,
she does not forget the discourse of Southern etiquette: “I’m having a
baby, miss,” and “Where you on your way to, miss?” [emphasis added] (32).
And when Amy asks her name, Sethe’s knows that her freedom is contingent
upon a lie. She assumes a cognomen—“Lu.” And whereas Sethe refuses to
throw caution to the wind—“However far she was from Sweet Home, there
was no point in giving out her name to the first person she saw” (33)—Amy’s
compassion momentarily overrides her racial privilege. Terms like “nigger”
and “gal” are replaced by Sethe’s assumed name “Lu,” and Amy’s journey to
Boston is put on hold while she assists Sethe during the night by rubbing her
severely swollen feet and excoriated back. In the morning, she serves as midwife.
Once they have safely delivered the child and Sethe is able to complete her
journey across the Ohio River toward Cincinnati, Amy reasserts White privilege—even
though the narrator insists that they are similarly situated, “two
throw-away people, two lawless outlaws” (84). Still Amy expects some return
for her role as midwife: she admonishes Sethe to tell the child “who brought
her into this here world. . . . Say Miss [emphasis added] Amy Denver. Of Boston”
(85). Amy’s concern that the child know her name is both an assertion of
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privilege (“You better tell her. You hear?”) and an assertion of self as an important
individual outside the system of indenture: a future Boston “lady” (85).
Morrison’s depiction of this scene of birth demonstrates the cracks in the
Southern code. The chance encounter between Sethe and Amy, like a similar
meeting between Jim and Huck, in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, evolves from one of “master and slave” to one of equals, this so
long as they remain in the neutral and secluded space of the woods and the
river.
In response to this established “place” and in reaction to laws and common
practices established during slavery to govern the master/slave relationships,
10 a Black survivalist protocol developed that found articulation in lectures
from one’s elders or the signifying comments from the community. This is
most especially prevalent when Northern relatives or friends return “Home”
after residing up North or “Up South,” as Malaika Adero phrases it, or among
those who have been educated outside the community and/or beyond the social
level of the community. Consider for a moment Sula’s return to Medallion
after a ten-year hiatus which has taken her across the country. Her mental
and emotional distance from the town is evidenced by her language and her
tone of voice toward Eva, her grandmother. Her first remarks to Nel are about
the town, half of which, according to Sula “need killin’” and the other half
needs “A drawn-out disease” (96). In response to Nel’s query, “Is Medallion
that bad?” and her suggestion that Sula has been away “too long,” Sula replies,
“Not too long, but maybe too far.” Nel is confused by this response: “What’s
that suppose to mean?” (96). Sula pretends not to know what she herself means
by “too far.” But she clearly means that she has outgrown the town and feels
superior to those in it. Her remarks are simultaneously a commentary on her
physical and intellectual distance from the town and her view of the stagnation
of the town itself.
Sula’s iconoclastic attitude toward the town and her mental and emotional
distance from it are evidenced by her language and its tone when she addresses
her grandmother Eva. But it is a mutual challenge about the proper behavior
each owes the other. Eva asks about Sula’s intentions and if she plans to stay in
Medallion: “Where’s your coat?” while Sula immediately challenges Eva’s
“manners”: “Don’t you say hello to nobody when you ain’t seen them for ten
years?” Eva then calls the question on Sula, “If folks let somebody know where
they is and when they coming, then other folks can get ready for them. If they
don’t—if they just pop in all sudden like—then they got to take whatever mood
they find” (91–92). This exchange between Eva and Sula bears not just the
ethics of separation and education that produce a change in the behavior of
granddaughter toward grandmother but the seeds of the granddaughter’s questioning—through
her behavior—the old ways and her readiness to posit a new
ethic that will set the entire community in a whirlwind of disbelief and fear.
Sula’s behavior toward her grandmother and her real threat to the community’s
values arise when she conspires to have Eva committed to an asylum. What the

Southern Ethos/Black Ethics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction
narrative reinforces is the notion that those who leave the village and return
are changed by experiences outside the community and can no longer live by
the old rules. More importantly, however, those who leave and return often
feel the need not merely to challenge but to change the status quo. Sula’s behavior
engenders all kinds of responses and accusations—the worst of which
is not that she sleeps with her best friend’s husband and her neighbors’ husbands
but that she sleeps with White men. This indignity implicitly recalls for
the community the long night of enslaved African women who were forced
into sexual intimacy with White men. Thus, for Sula to have sex with a White
man—if indeed she does—is to fly in the face of Black women’s tragic history
and to thumb her nose at communal values. When the community imagines
the scene of coitus with Sula “underneath some white man,” they are
“filled with choking disgust” because for them “all unions between white men
and black women [should be regarded as] ‘rape.’” The narrator adds that for a
Black woman to “willing[ly]” consent to such a union “was literally unthinkable.
In that way, they regarded integration with precisely the same venom that
white people did” (113). In their disapproval of Sula, the community of Medallion
enforces the Black ethic of survival that governs actions outside and
power within the Black community. Sula violates both spaces when she challenges
the community’s values.
This brief reference to Sula is a prelude to more detailed analyses of the
kind of Black ethic in Song of Solomon that develops out of the Black Southern
experience: an ethic that is social, gendered, and familial. The scene alluded
to in the epigraph to this paper occurs quite early in Song of Solomon.
The second sentence of the epigraph says it all. Even though Guitar had not
been up North for long, “he had just begun to learn that he could speak up to
white people” (7). Guitar focuses upon the nurse’s orthography, while his grandmother
calls attention to the nurse’s “bad” manners. Further, Guitar is surprised
that a White woman can misspell a word: “Granny, she left out a s,” his
grandmother responds, “And a please” (7). The brief discussion of the White
nurse’s behavior ends with the grandmother’s remark, but the repartee establishes
immediately the differences between the authoritative attitudes of some
Whites toward Blacks and the fact that such behaviors do not go unnoticed by
Blacks. Mrs. Bains, Guitar’s grandmother, was already aware of the nurse’s
color and behavior before Guitar remarks the misspelling. When Mrs. Bains is
addressed as “You,” she puts the voice and the color together and responds in a
manner she had long been accustomed to: the “lowered . . . brows,” “veiled
eyes,” the title of respect “Ma’am,” and the concomitant order given by a White
person to a Black person (7). Guitar’s ingenuous response to the nurse is transformed
later into a bitter hatred of Whites as he recounts the terrible accidental
death of his father and the employer’s gesture of mollifying the family by
offering them candy. The gesture sickens the boy Guitar and most certainly
influences his decision to join the Seven Days in their commitment to an equivalent
vengeance against the White community for each Black person killed by a
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White. Philip Page observes that Guitar’s obsession with his father’s death
and “his bitterness toward it” lead him to embrace the “Days’ philosophy” in
order “to redress those perceived wrongs” (94). For Guitar, therefore, Emmett
Till’s death is just one more nail in the coffin of a White person who must be
sacrificed. But for Morrison, Till’s death is a complex act that in one respect
holds up to her readers the Black ethics of survival in the South. Till is not only
a teenage foil to the younger Guitar who tells a White woman that she cannot
spell but is also an example of what happens to a Black male who would dare to
whistle at a Southern White woman. The Southern White ethos demands his
castration and death. Both the Seven Days and the North provide an outlet—
albeit a warped ethic of equivalent revenge—a way for Guitar to get even.
However, the vigilante ethic espoused by the Seven Days resembles the Southern
White ethic whenever the issue involves the taboo against White/Black
social relationships and/or violence perpetrated by Blacks against Whites. This
real or perceived violation and penetration of the invisible, yet understood,
boarder between the Black world and the White calls for redress or lynching
of the perpetrator.
The manifest ethic of Black values designed to counter White disrespect is
played out when Milkman heads for Danville, Pennsylvania, in search of gold
in Hunters Cave. When the cave yields none, Milkman continues to Virginia,
where Pilate had once lived during her journeys across the country. In the
course of the journey, he learns from strangers (but people who knew his father
and grandparents) that wealth can be both a sign of success and an insult to
those who lack it. When, for instance, he meets Reverend Cooper and Circe in
Danville, they signal their displeasure with his flaunting his money and his
offering to pay them as his gesture of gratitude. They do not directly challenge
the insult, but Milkman senses from the shift in their tones of voice that he has
said something wrong. After all, he “had never had to make a pleasant impression
on a stranger before,” nor did he recall “ever asking anybody in the world
how they were” (229). Momentarily caught up in Milkman’s name and family,
Reverend Cooper apologizes for his own failure to follow the unwritten rules
of hospitality. “Oh, Lord,” he says to Milkman, “I’m forgetting myself. You
must be hungry” (229–30). Milkman, by contrast, seems to have no sense of
the “manners”/hospitality Reverend Cooper has in mind: Milkman assumes
that money will take care of everything or those things that symbolize money.
The shirt he gives to Reverend Cooper’s nephew, is an example: he “seemed
interested only in Milkman’s clothes, which he took every opportunity to examine”
(237).
Milkman’s habit of “paying” his way or helping someone else by offering
money leads eventually to a brutal awakening for him. When he offers Circe
money to move from the woods, she rebuffs his offer in a cold voice, “Put
your money back in your pocket” (246). Milkman gets a similar reaction from
Fred Garnett, who offers him a ride and a lesson in behavior towards his “people”
even though they may be strangers. To Milkman’s question, “What do I owe

Southern Ethos/Black Ethics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction
you? For the Coke and all?” Garnett replies with a look and a gesture that are
not lost on Milkman. “I ain’t got much, but I can afford a Coke and lift now and
then” (255). Garnett accentuates his disgust by shutting the door on Milkman’s
voice.
By the time Milkman reaches Virginia, he begins to focus on the fact that
people’s generosity has nothing to do with their fascination with his father’s
wealth nor with him; rather, it is part of their learned behavior. He is aware of
“his ability to get information and help from strangers,” their attraction to
him, and their generosity (Need a place to stay? Want a good place to eat?).
This momentary epiphany goes to the heart of the argument of this paper: “All
that business about southern hospitality was real” (260). At this juncture Milkman
observes that “there wasn’t a white face around, and the Negroes were as
pleasant, wide-spirited, and self-contained as could be” (260).
Morrison is clear on this point about the inculcation of civility among Blacks
in the South as a way of looking out for one another in the midst of racial
segregation, degradation, and limited resources. Their gestures of generosity
come out of a knowledge of the paucity of resources in the Black community
and the resourcefulness that makes it possible for one member or one family
to stretch what little they have to accommodate the needs of others. Milkman
“wondered why black people ever left the South” (260).
In spite of this awakening to the generosity of Black Southerners, Milkman
will have to unlearn or modify his behavior as a rich Northern Black in light of
his recognition that he earned the rewards he got here. Milkman’s conclusion
that this recognition is based entirely upon the force of his personal character
leads to the ultimate deflation of his ego and the knowledge that his self-absorption
must give way to the humanity of others. In other words, the process
of learning the ethics of interacting with other Blacks is slow, but deep and
lasting because his rudeness and incivility toward the Black community of
Shalimar must be literally beaten into his head. Circe tells him long before he
heads for Virginia, “You don’t listen to people. Your ear is on your head, but it’s
not connected to your brain” (247).
Milkman’s first misstep in Shalimar is to assume that the men of Shalimar
are ready to enter into sexual discourse with him or that his money can necessarily
purchase whatever he needs, including a woman. In both instances he
realizes from the men’s body language that his desiring Shalimar women and
flaunting his wealth (“I may have to buy a another car to get back home,” [266])
are not well received by the men at Solomon’s store. In fact, the men are “insulted”
by his swagger and banter. “They looked with hatred at the city Negro
who could buy a car as if it were a bottle of whiskey because the one he had
was broken” (269). Moreover, Milkman “hadn’t bothered to say his name, nor
ask theirs, had called them ‘them’”; nor had Milkman shown any appreciation
for their condition. He had demonstrated by “his manner, his clothes,” and by
his “thin shoes and suits with vests and smooth hands” that he was better than
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they. “They had seen him watching their women and rubbing his fly” and “lock
his car as soon as he got out of it.” Neither had he “found them fit enough to
want to know their names and believed himself too good to tell them his”
(269).
The most telling observation and interior commentary by the men of Shalimar
go directly to the core of Black Southern ethics: the “crime” of diminishing
one’s people by flaunting White values. “They looked at his skin and saw it was
as black as theirs, but they knew he had the heart of the white men who came to
pick them up in the trucks when they needed anonymous, faceless laborers”
(269). Insulted by Milkman’s depersonalization of them, the men in turn treat
him as the “Other,” “the Negro with the Virginia license and the northern accent”
(266). Thus, what begins for Milkman as an inflated ego and a conviction
that he had “earned” the admiration of the community turns out to be a bloody
and formidable test of his manhood by the men of Shalimar. They bait him by
bringing up the subject of money and women in the most vulgar terms until the
dialogue takes on the discussion of the size of one’s penis—the test by which
men evaluate their masculinity. Milkman’s use of a phallic symbol—a Coke
bottle—to defend himself is countered by his adversary’s use of another such
symbol—a knife. But this bloody scene is a mere prelude to what the Shalimar
men deem the “real” phallic symbol—the gun. “You pretty good with a bottle.
How you with a shotgun?” (267).
In this scene of masculine play, Morrison posits the notion that the men of
Shalimar must, like Milkman, prove their worth on their own terms and in their
own territory. They cannot live with themselves if they permit a stranger—
even though he is a successful Black man—to put them down or show them up.
They have endured such insults from Whites, but cannot countenance such
behavior from a Black man. Furthermore, they must punish him for his refusal
to see them as equals and to regain the self-worth they momentarily lose under
his gaze. Once Milkman admits his fear during the hunt and can laugh with
the others about that fear, he becomes one of them. He is the “butt of their
humor, but it was good-humored humor” (281).
The hunt results in Milkman’s examination of his behavior towards others
and the recognition that he is not the center of other people’s interests nor the
envy of all who see his conspicuous wealth. The scene of interior musing,
presented through free indirect discourse reveals Milkman’s struggle to understand
himself in relation to others:
Maybe the glow of hero worship (twice removed) that had bathed him in
Danville had also blinded him. Perhaps the eyes of the men in Roanoke,
Petersburg, Newport News, had not been bright with welcome and admiration.
Maybe they were just curious or amused. He hadn’t stayed any place
long enough to find out. (276)

Southern Ethos/Black Ethics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction
His sojourn in Shalimar affords him the opportunity to find out who he really
is and how he relates to other people. But he cannot see his self-absorption
(even though his sister Lena had pointed it out to him long before he reached
this juncture) or move beyond self-righteousness until he is willing to examine
his relationships with other people.
The darkness of the woods and the loss of most of his possessions or his
inability to use them provide an opportunity for him to look into his inner self
and emerge with less attention to his own needs and more recognition of and
concern for others. The hunters who seem like savages to Milkman are also, in
his view, “Suspicious. Hot-tempered. Eager to find fault and despise any outsider”
(276). He exonerates himself from any blame because “He had done
nothing to deserve their contempt. Nothing to deserve the explosive hostility
that engulfed him when he said he might have to buy a car” (277). Once he
moves beyond self-righteousness and listens, as Circe had warned him back in
Danville, to the sounds of the hunters and the woods, he can identify not just
with his friend Guitar but with the Shalimar men as well.
Milkman’s tactile response to the Southern woods is not unlike Pauline’s
and Sethe’s erotic responses discussed above. Consider, for example, Milkman’s
musings upon Guitar’s attachment to the Southern landscape:
Milkman rubbed the back of his head against the bark. This was what Guitar
had missed about the South—the woods, hunters, killing. But something had
maimed him, scarred him like Reverend Cooper’s knot, like Saul’s missing
teeth, and like his own father. He felt a sudden rush of affection for them all,
and out there under the gum tree, within the sounds of men tracking a bobcat,
he thought he understood Guitar now. Really understood him. (278)
After this reflection and Guitar’s attempt to strangle him, Milkman can enter
into the humor and self-deprecation because he has come to understand that
he did not need the trappings of wealth to be accepted by others, that when he
can admit that he has fears, that in the woods he was “scared to death” (280),
then the hunters can embrace him as one of them. He no longer limps (ostensibly
maimed by his warped notion inherited from his father that money and
the owning of things are what really matter) but has both feet firmly on the
ground, and like his Shalimar “brothers” he is: “. . . exhilarated by simply walking
the earth. Walking it like he belonged on it; his legs were stalks, tree trunks,
a part of his body that extended down into the rock and soil, and were comfortable
there—on the earth and on the place where he walked. And he did not
limp” (281). He does not limp because he has accepted the world in which the
men of Shalimar find pleasure and a measure of their manhood. Once they
prove their point and regain their self-worth by testing Milkman’s strength
against theirs, they are ready to receive him into their community.
Song of Solomon simultaneously plays out the notion of generosity and
gracious acceptance, revealing Milkman’s ancestry while the currency of his
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wealth seems to both fascinate and insult the people whose knowledge and
service he needs. In Shalimar, Virginia, Milkman gets the most brutal lesson in
the civility that Circe and Garnett implicitly allude to in their gestures. In
Shalimar, Milkman begins to understand that wealth and power are admirable
for those Blacks who “make it” in the North—after all, that is the hope of
those Southern Blacks who, for whatever reasons, remained in the South—but
there is little tolerance for those Northern Blacks or those educated Blacks
who look upon their Southern “brothers and sisters” with contempt and disdain.
Milkman as social pariah vis-à-vis the Shalimar community is integrated
into the community once he learns that in order to be a real part of the community
he must respect the community, however limited their material resources
may be. Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin observe that individuals like Sula
and Milkman, among others, “may be ostracized for violating social codes of
the community, but they are not expelled” (Harding and Martin 103). They are
tolerated, like Sula, or given a chance to redeem themselves, like Milkman.
Money and the concomitant fruits of money can, no doubt, be divisive elements
within the Black community, since many Blacks who acquire money,
recognition, education—some of the major consequences of wealth—feel that
the community is no longer relevant to them. But such individuals must learn,
as Harding and Martin argue, that “the only way to find individual fulfillment in
Morrison’s world is within the collective context,” (Harding and Martin 102),
one that insists upon a knowledge of a Southern past that engendered a Black
ethic rooted in slavery and harvested in a desire and a press for intra-racial and
universal respect.
NOTES
1 Bone says of the South in African American fiction: “Either the vast majority of Afro-Americans
still lived in the rural South, or the Southern migrant, transplanted to the city pavements from the
green fields of his youth, persisted in bestowing on the place of his nativity the affectionate epithet
of ‘down home’” (xxii). While Bone’s selected short fiction ends with the Harlem Renaissance, the
literary affinity with the Southern past does not stop at his arbitrary ending of 1935. Morrison,
writing some thirty-five years later, invents characters whose lives begin in the rural South or
Northern characters whose experiences take them to the South. For further examples of narratives by
Northern Black writers musing upon the South, see Adero.
2 Page notes that while Pauline and Cholly Breedlove lived in the South, they “were members of
viable families and communities, and their youthful identities were comparatively healthy. . . . But in
the infertile soil of the North, each is cut off from meaningful group well-being and so neither can
crate a stable adult identity” (46).
3 Holloway speaks to the issue of seeming unmotivated violence that erupts in the African American
community and the need to search for causes. Holloway’s cogent comments are applicable to
Morrison’s fictional landscape of Black male repressed violence born in the heat of Southern white
male abuse. Holloway writes, “Our effort has been to account only circumstantially for immorality of
the absence of ethical conduct, but we have not been willing to explore the reasons behind the
alternative ethics that operate when victims of racism become violent” (175). Clearly, Morrison, in
recounting Cholly Breedlove’s early life experiences, holds up to her readers the complex matrices of

Southern Ethos/Black Ethics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction
one Black male’s violent behavior engendered by his abandonment by his parents and his humiliation
by Southern White men.
4 Genovese offers a controversial description of Southern more when he describes the behavior of
White Southerners toward African Americans as one based not upon race but upon class. Genovese
writes: “Politically, southern conservatives . . . strongly prefer a society of orders based on a
hierarchy that recognizes human inequality—that is, inequality of human beings as individuals, not
as members of a race. Historically, their viewpoint has often accompanied racism, but is has no
necessary connection to it. Southern conservatives have always distrusted mass politics of liberalism
and social democracy and favored deference to duly constituted authority” (27).
5 For an extended definition of signifying and its various connotations, see Gates.
6 Consider Toni Morrison, Tar Baby (New York: Plume, 1983) where Jadine Childs chooses an
uncertain life in the Western world of European values. She looks down upon the achievements of
her African and African American ancestors, even the sacrifices her aunt and uncle have made to
guarantee her access to better opportunities than they had.
7 For writers other than Morrison who have written detailed accounts of African American women
in fiction fleeing the South or seeking other means to avoid rape and other crimes by Whites, see,
among others, but especially James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York: Doubleday,
1952), Zora Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Lippincott, 1937) where Janie
Crawford’s grandmother forces her to marry an older Black man to protect Janie from potential sexual
assault by White men.
8 In addition to Wright’s “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” and Black Boy, also see, among others,
Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones (New York: The Feminist Press, 1981), Praisesong for the
Widow (New York: Plume, 1983), and Ntozake Shange, Betsey Brown (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1985) for discussions of Black-White behavior in the North as well as the South.
9 The Fugitive Law of 1850 required that all Whites turn over to the nearest marshal or person of
authority any fugitive slave. Besides the law, there were monetary rewards posted for runaway
slaves.
10 I am not suggesting that Amy knows that Sethe is a fugitive from Garner’s place, rather that Amy,
as a White woman reared in the South knows how enslaved Black women are treated.
11 See, among others, James O. Breeden, Advice Among Masters: The Ideal in Slave Management
in the Old South (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); George M. Stroud, A Sketch of the Laws
Relating to Slavery in the Several Southern States of the United States of America, with Some
Alterations and Considerable Additions, 1856 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968); and
John A. Calhoun, “Management of Slaves,” DeBow’s Review 18 (1855): 713–719.
WORKS CITED
Adero, Malaika, ed. Up South: Stories, Studies and Letters of African American Migration. New
York: The New P, 1993.
Baldwin, James. Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Doubleday, 1952.
Bone, Robert. Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction from Its Beginnings to the
End of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Capricorn Books, 1975.
Boney, F. N. Southerners All. 1984; (rev. ed.) Macon, GA: Mercer UP, 1990.
Breeden, James O. Advice Among Masters: The Ideal in Slave Management in the Old South.
Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1980.
Calhoun, John A. “Management Among Slaves.” DeBow’s Review 18 (1855): 713–719.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New
York: Oxford UP, 1988.
Genovese, Eugene D. The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American
Conservatism. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994.
Harding, Wendy and Jacky Martin. A World of Difference An Inter-Cultural Study of Toni Morrison’s
Novels. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1994.
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Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Ethics.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. 2 nd ed. Eds. Frank Lentricchia
and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 387–405.
Holloway, Karla, F. C. Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995.
Holt, Thomas C. “Black Life: Creative Expression of the Black Experience.” Encyclopedia of Southern
Culture, ed. Wilson and Ferris. 135–232.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Lippincott, 1937.
Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. 2 nd ed. New York: The Feminist P, 1981.
–––. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Plume, 1983.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987.
–––. The Bluest Eye. New York: Washington Square P, 1970.
—–. Song of Solomon. New York: Plume, 1977.
—–. Sula. New York: Plume, 1973.
Page, Phillip. Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s Novels. Jackson,
MS: U of Mississippi P, 1995.
Shange, Ntozake. Betsey Brown. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1995.
Stroud, George M. A Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery in the Several Southern States of the
United States of America, with Considerable Alterations and Considerable Additions. 1856.
New York: Negro Universities P, 1968.
Wilson, Charles R. “Manners.” Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North
Carolina P, 1989. 634–637.
Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Harper & Row, 1937.
—–. “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch.” Black Voices: An Anthology of
Afro-American Literature. Ed. Abraham Chapman. New York: Mentor, 1968. 288–298.

Yvonne Atkinson and Philip Page
“I BEEN WORRIED SICK ABOUT YOU TOO, MACON”:
TONI MORRISON, THE SOUTH, AND THE ORAL TRADITION
Since the diaspora, African Americans have been on the move, seeking a
place within the American geographic and cultural space. As opposed to the
seemingly limitless geographical potential of America for Whites, as Houston
A. Baker observes, Blacks were consigned to holes on slave ships, then to
rural cabins and later to urban kitchenettes—not truly their own places because
such places were imposed upon them (108). 1 America also seemed to
promise unlimited cultural space for European immigrants, but African Americans
were denied such space because their African heritage and later their
Southern slave pasts were repudiated by the larger culture. In response to such
displacements, African Americans embraced and deepened their seperate cultural
traditions as a means of survival and as a chosen seperation from mainstream
American culture.
Over time, as historical events—emancipation, migration, integration—expanded
the limits of the physical and cultural space which African Americans
inhabit, they have had constantly to negotiate their relationships with their
cultural pasts and the separate cultural traditions such seperate cultural spaces
embodied. An inner/outer tension has accompanied these movements and has
characterized much of the cultural growth of individuals in the community and
the development of characters in African American fiction. Unlike White characters
who typically want to escape their communities to find freedom, Black
characters seek redemption in the return to community and the ensuing resolution
of their inner/outer fragmentation.
In African American culture, and in Toni Morrison’s fiction, the American
South is often the locus—directly or indirectly—of this tension. In Morrison’s
fiction, the present is the North, whereas the past is the South, and characters
journey from South to North or vice versa are weighted with deep social and
psychological significance. The action often takes place in Ohio, because of
Ohio’s “curious juxtaposition” between North and South (Tate 119) and its
leading role in the underground railroad. 2 As characters in the North struggle
to create healthy identities, they must come to terms with their own or their
ancestors’ Southern pasts by somehow fusing past and present. The characters
must also come to terms with abandoning the trappings of their past. In the
North, despite their efforts to discard their slave past, traces—names, language,
rituals, and traditions—remain.
The Southern communities in the characters past however, are remembered
with both joy and shame. In his former, rural, Southern life, Cholly Breedlove
had a viable family and community. Despite his lack of parents, he had the
comforts of Aunt Jimmy and her friends as well as the surrogate fathering of
Blue Jack. Yet, in that same peaceful locale, he is abandoned by his mother,
Studies in the Literary Imagination 31.2, Fall 1998 © Georgia State University

Toni Morrison and the Southern Oral Tradition
father, and—through death—his aunt; and it is there that he learns alienation
and self hate. For Nel, the past is in New Orleans where she briefly finds her
extended family and a sense of her identity, but that past is also marred by her
great grandmother’s death and her mother’s shame. Similarly, Shalimar provides
Milkman with a sense of belonging, but it is also where he suffers his
most severe trials and where Pilate dies. Eloe is Son’s only community, yet it
is where he causes his wife’s death and where his displacement begins. For
Sethe and Paul D, Sweet Home is the ultimate bittersweet—a memory which
almost destroys them. Vesper County, despite the violence of dispossession
and other acts of blatant discrimination, remains the place where he and Violet
were happy and strong. For the founders of Ruby Oklahoma, the South is where
they find the strength to band together as an extended family, but also where
they are exiled and forced to travel West.
The dialectic between present North (or West) and past South provides
meaning and structure to Morrison’s novels. Characters must negotiate between
the poles, but the gaps are formidable. They must “make a place for fear
as a way of controlling it” (Sula 14). In some cases, this mediation involves
physical journeys from South to North or vice versa, journeys that become
defining moments, (Nel, Golden Grey) mythic quests, (Milkman, Pilate) failed
returns, (Son, Jadine) or heroic accomplishments (Sethe). This mediation often
means re-imersion in the oral tradition, as for Milkman and Sethe. In all
cases, the transaction is psychological, occuring primarily through memory.
Not only do individual characters conduct such negotiations, but through the
entwined relationships of multiple characters’ stories, each novel documents
a collective negotiation between present North and past South. For example,
whereas neither Pecola nor Claudia have a South to remember, The Bluest Eye
as a whole recalls their cultural, Southern past through the embedded stories
of Cholly, Polly, Geraldine, and Soaphead Church.
Milkman Dead, in Song of Solomon, best illustrates the successful renegotiation
of North and South and the consequent re-integration of self and
community. Living a spiritual death in the North, he begins to “put it all together”
(307) by reconnecting with his history through language—community
and family stories as well as the words of Solomon’s song. Fittingly, he seeks
his past in a journey to the South, thereby extending Nel’s truncated self-exploration
in New Orleans. Milkman is able to revisit the sites where his ancestors’
pasts took place and thereby to identify himself with these ancestors. As
his knowledge of the past increases, through the stories told to him and his
own travels, his geographical journey expands Southward, duplicating Pilate’s
geographical collection of rocks from the places she has visited. The stories
Milkman collects are like Pilate’s rocks—both are reminders of their personal
pasts and their cultural pasts. Just as the rocks provide the pleasure of
connectedness to Pilate, the stories give Milkman self-knowledge, empathy, a
sense of place in the African American culture, and a sense of belonging in the
natural world. Through the oral discourse and especially the words of Solomon’s
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song, Milkman solves the African American dilemmas of place, past, and identity.
3
That Milkman’s success is couched in verbal terms is not accidental. Not
only are words the key to his individual, familial, communal, and racial integration,
but the words are emphatically oral rather than written. He hears the
testimony of Reverend Cooper and the fragments of the past provided by Circe
and Susan Byrd, and he finally listens to the children singing Solomon’s song.
To decipher their cryptic words, he first wants to write them down, but, lacking
pencil and paper, he is forced to memorize them. Just before Pilate dies, he
demonstrates his full participation in the African-American oral tradition by
singing the song of Solomon, adapting it appropriately for her: “Sugargirl don’t
leave me here” (340, emphasis added). As a participant, he reverses his earlier
inability to share others’ sorrow (“share your happiness with me but not your
unhappiness” [280]) in his empathy for Pilate and in his identification with the
abandoned child of the myth of the flying Africans.
The correlation between Milkman’s successful quest and his movement from
a position outside the oral word-play of the Black community in Southside to
his role as an active oral participant in his larger racial community suggests
why the South has such power in Morrison’s fiction. 4 African Americans, having
created—in the South—a culture, including Black English and the oral
tradition, took with them their music, their religion, and their language when
they migrated. Even as they tried to succeed in the White-dominated North,
they retained the cultural forms of their Southern past because, as Bakhtin
points out, “forms of language and forms of world view [are] inseparable from
each other” (Bakhtin 155). In the North, enduring African American issues
such as place, past, identity, and culture were inseparable from participation in
the African American oral tradition. In Morrison’s fiction, the degree of characters’
immersion in that tradition becomes a useful yardstick for measuring
their psychic wholeness.
One of the last remnants of the South to be shed was, and is, the African
American oral tradition. The language of this tradition, or Black English, has
unique rituals, codes of conduct, pedagogy and rhetoric that shape and define
those who speak it and their place in the world. According to Geneva
Smitherman, Black English is defined as
an Africanized form of English reflecting black America’s linguistic-cultural
African heritage and the conditions of servitude, oppression and life in America.
Black Language is Euro-American speech with an Afro-American meaning,
nuance, tone, and gesture. (Talkin 2)
It includes the oral “stories, old sayings, songs, jokes, proverbs, and other
cultural products that have not been written down or recorded” (Smitherman,
Black 30). In the oral tradition, being able to speak well is important, but listening
well is pre-eminent. Audience as well as speakers are equally involved

Toni Morrison and the Southern Oral Tradition
participants, and the balance between the two reflects balance in the community.
The rules of oral discourse are taught by example, by children watching
the conduct of adults, and by observation and practice.
As part of the African culture brought to the South, the oral tradition survived
slavery and became part of African American culture. Even though most
African Americans who migrated North gave up their Southern, rural ways to
become the “New Negro,” they brought the Southern oral tradition with them
in their language systems.
Morrison infuses her fiction with rhetorical tropes from the Southern oral
tradition of Black English: signifying, call and response, and witnessing and
testifying. Signifying is the art of verbal battle that defines community and
those who are in it. Signifying in the oral tradition was and is, according to
Clarence Major, “‘performance’ talk; to berate someone; to censure . . . speaking
ironically” (416). Signifying is an in-group activity in which “[i]ndividual
participation is necessary for community survival” (Smitherman, Talkin 75).
It is thus an act of delineation. Those who cannot signify, or are not signified
on or with, are outside the group. It is also a marker of delineation because one
must have access to communal knowledge in order to understand its indirect
meanings, for it is “a way of encoding messages or meanings which involves,
in most cases, an element of indirection” (Mitchell-Kernan 311).
In The Bluest Eye, the survival of this language system as a way to talk indirectly
about a difficult situation and mark Mrs. MacTeer as an “in-group” member
who continues to perform the language in the tradition of her Southern and
African ancestors is evident in her three-quarts of milk soliloquy:
Three quarts of milk. That’s what was in that icebox yesterday. Three whole
quarts. Now they ain’t none. Not a drop. I don’t mind folks coming in and
getting what they want, but three quarts of milk! What the devil does anybody
need with three quarts of milk? . . . I don’t know what I’m supposed to
be running here, a charity ward, I guess. Time for me to get out of the giving
line and get in the getting line. (22–23)
Her speech is directed, indirectly, at Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola, but it is also
directed at the reader. The reader is given the opportunity to participate in the
signifying act by recognizing the signifying and relating it to knowledge of
others who have also participated in the ritual. Mrs. MacTeer is teaching her
audience about waste, but she is also teaching them life lessons: one must be
ever vigilant against poverty because it is always waiting to consume the unaware,
there are limits to things, too much of anything is bad, and family takes
care of family.
In Song of Solomon, Morrison uses a signifying conversation between Macon
and Pilate to show again the way in which the language pattern continued
in the oral discourse of the migrants but also to demonstrate the love that
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remains between a brother and sister whose migration to the urban North seems
to have distanced them from each other. The signifying here is perhaps the
best example of the power of indirection of the signifying act.
‘Why can’t you dress like a woman?’ He was standing by the stove.
‘What’s that Sailor’s cap doing on your head? Don’t you have stockings?
What are you trying to make me look like in this town?’
Pilate had sat there listening to him, her wondering eyes resting on his
face. Then she said, ‘I been worried sick about you too, Macon.’ (20)
There is a gap between Macon’s questions and Pilate’s complex response. She
demonstrates her understanding that her brother’s complaining questions indirectly
indicate his concern for her well-being. Through the act of signifying,
Pilate also shows Macon and the reader that she has not given up on him. By
signifying, she is giving him a chance to participate in a communal activity.
Although Pilate, like Pecola, is a person apart—born without a navel and having
invented herself—she is still a part of her culture, for she participates in
communal rituals of her Southern, oral, African American heritage. In contrast,
Macon seems to have relinquished all ties to his roots. Having lost his
heritage, his history, and even his name, he has assimilated the dominant culture
of the North. Through Pilate’s signifying and through her interpretation of
his language, we come to realize that Macon is not as far removed from his
cuture of his sister as even he thinks he is. When she gives the pointed, indirect
response of “I’ve been worried sick about you, too,” (emphasis added)
Pilate points out to the reader and to Macon that his complaints about her are
rooted in his concen for her (20). The language restores Macon—shows that
he is part of the culture even as he tries self-consciously to reject it. His love
for their singing, like his indirect demonstration of his love in his language,
demonstrates the ways in which language and the oral tradition served as an
anchor and an echo of cultural belonging for migrants who traveled North.
Like signifying, call and response and witnessing and testifying are also
prominent features of the Black oral tradition. Call and response involves “stating
and counter stating; acting and reacting” (Smitherman, Talkin 118). It is
“spontaneous verbal and non-verbal interaction between speaker and listener
in which all of the speaker’s statements (‘calls’) are punctuated by expressions
(‘responses’) from the listener” (104).
Call and response is an outward expression of the group, indicating a connection,
a shared history and culture, and unifying the listener and the speaker.
Call and response is immediate validation. Call and response helps to lessen
the distancing nature of written discourse by allowing the reader to make connections
with the characters:

Toni Morrison and the Southern Oral Tradition
Because they are close to an oral culture . . . black writers bring a dimension
of immediacy to the struggle with the written word. They adapt call and
response to fiction from the participatory forms of oral culture. (Callahan 14)
In Song of Solomon, there are layers of call and response when Macon sits
outside Pilate’s house listening to the women inside singing: “Macon walked
on, resisting as best he could the sound of the voices that followed him” (28).
Pilate, Reba, and Hagar are calling and responding to each other, and their song
is calling for Macon to respond:
They were singing some melody that Pilate was leading. A phrase that the
other two were taking up and building on. Her powerful contralto, Reba’s
piercing soprano in counterpoint, and the soft voice of the girl, Hagar . . .
pulled him like a carpet tack under the influence of a magnet. (29)
The acapella singing of his sister and nieces reconnects Macon to the nurturing,
oral culture that he left behind when he moved North. Their continuation
of the singing ritual reminds Macon of what he has given up by disassociating
himself with the traditions of his past. This passage also pulls the reader, calling
the reader to empathize with Macon’s isolation and inability to participate.
African American writers have also combined the rhetoric of call and response
with witnessing and testifying, another aspect of the southern oral tradition
in the African American community that is, though modified for their
new circumstances, maintained in the North. Like signifying and call and response,
witnessing and testifying uses the act of communication as a metaphor
for unity. It is a testament—tangible proof that validates one’s existence
as part of the group. To witness is to affirm, attest, certify, validate, and observe.
Smitherman defines testifying as a “concept referring to a ritualized
form of black communication in which the speaker gives verbal witness to the
efficacy, truth, and power of some experience in which all blacks have shared”
(Talkin 58). In the oral tradition, witnessing and testifying go hand in hand; one
who witnesses has an obligation to testify. For example, when Baby Suggs in
Beloved leads the testimony in the meetings at the Clearing, the reader becomes
both a witness (we are allowed to see and hear this testimony through
the written word) and a testifier (we are called to respond). The meeting in the
Clearing and the people who participate summon communal memory, the
memory of other testimonies—in store-front churches, on street corners, radio
shows, on the phone, with friends and/or family—that connect Baby Suggs,
the people in the Clearing, and the reader (87).
One of Morrison’s most powerful scenes that incorporates the oral tradition,
Hagar’s funeral in Song of Solomon, uses call and response and witnessing
and testifying to stir emotions, recall memories, and unite the newcomers.
Morrison begins to build the emotional tension by having a female quartet
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sing “Abide with Me” (320). If the reader has cultural knowledge, this song is
familiar. Based on Luke 24:29, the song begins:
Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens;
Lord, with me abide! When other helpers fail and comforts flee;
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.
The scripture is about the mercy and comfort that Christ gives to his disciples
after he has risen from the dead. Following this song, Pilate bursts into the
church and shouts, “‘Mercy!’ as though it were a command” (320). Pilate’s
mercy is about comfort for the helpless: for her family, for anyone who has
lost someone, for her community, and for Hagar. When Pilate says “Mercy?”
she is questioning herself, the people at the funeral, and the reader. This question
cuts to the heart of humanity. This is a wail of such pain and sorrow that it
becomes more than sound, more than a question; it becomes a unifying point:
The people turned around. Reba has entered and was singing too. [Pilate]
simply repeated the word ‘Mercy’, and Reba replied. The daughter standing
in the back of the chapel, and the mother up front, they sang.
In the night time.
Mercy
In the Darkness.
Mercy
In the morning.
Mercy
On my knees now.
Mercy. Mercy. Mercy. Mercy. (321)
Pilate and Reba’s song becomes a universal cry for mercy. The call and response
that is the basis of the song evokes an emotional response from the
listeners. The reader and the characters of the story become witnesses to Pilate
and Reba’s testimony of love and their cry of mercy.
Although the blending of call and response and witnessing and testifying
lends this moment much of its power, the reader has already witnessed a trio
of women—Pilate, Reba and Hagar—singing a call and response song that
draws like a magnet (29). The reader has also already witnessed the lack of
mercy in this time and in this town: “the charity hospital at the northern end
[was called] No Mercy Hospital” (4). The layered connections of this witnessing
are compelling and forceful, but this is only one half of the trope, for after
witnessing one must testify. The characters testify by retelling this story in
their community, the narrator testifies by telling the story to the reader, and
the reader is left with the obligation to testify and thereby to become a participant
in the discourse of the community.
In many of her novels, Morrison also probes the scarring effects of characters’
dissociation from the oral tradition and their efforts to re-immerse them-

Toni Morrison and the Southern Oral Tradition
selves in it. In Tar Baby relations among the inhabitants of L’Arbe de la Croix
are tense because feelings and power relationships are largely unspoken. Communication
between Son and Jadine, while on the island and between them
after they leave, repeatedly degenerates into egotistic power struggles. Their
orality is confrontational whereas the oral tradition of the southern community
of Eloe is nurturing and that of the Black community on the island is
therapeutic and informative. Symbolically, Son befriends a waif named Nommo,
but the meaning of nommo—the power of the word to give life and meaning to
reality—elude the novel’s characters. 5
In Beloved the principal characters must work through the arduous and dangerous
processes of rebirth before they can risk telling and hearing their agonizing
stories and thereby re-enter the oral tradition. Healing words surround
Sethe, Paul D, and Denver in Baby Suggs’ sermons, in Amy Denver’s ministering
chatter, in Stamp Paid’s testimony, and in Ella’s holler. But instead of being
healed, the inhabitants of 124 Bluestone are usually confounded by words—
by their fear of telling or hearing the stories of their pasts and by the inadequacies
of words to express what they feel. They must step back to their beginnings,
must find within the oral tradition “[t]he key, the code, the sound that
broke the back of words” (261), and then they can be “baptized in its wash”
(261).
Paul D and Sethe must learn to witness and testify before they can be healed.
They must learn how to tell and listen to each other’s stories and how to pass
down their history by word of mouth to the next generation. They must thereby
learn to reconnect with the oral tradition from which they had by necessity
distanced themselves in their escapes from Sweet Home to Cincinnati. Erroneously,
they assumed that everything about their rural Southern pasts had to
be forgotten, so they must rediscover the intimate connections between the
oral tradition, their cultural heritage, and their identities.
Paul D and Sethe fought hard to survive, to escape the South and slavery, but
in the process they relinquished their heritage, their oral tradition. As a result,
they are locked in silence, imprisoned in repression, and therefore cut off
from the oral community around them. They have inadvertently left their community,
their language, their stories at Sweet Home. Their task is to re-member,
to re-call, to re-tell, to re-hear, but also to re-constitute their pasts and
therefore themselves.
Beloved becomes the conduit that allows Paul D and Sethe to access their
past, to return metaphorically to the South and relearn “the values and beliefs
of the[ir] people, the things they hold to be true, and lessons about life and how
to live it” (Smitherman, Black 29–30). The process of “remembering something
[they] had forgotten [they] knew” is painful but necessary for wholeness
(Beloved 61). Eventually, Paul D does open his tin box of repressed memories,
and Sethe realizes that she is her own “best thing” (273). Only then can
Sethe and Paul D compare their stories; only then can they regain the cultural
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heritage they left behind in the South to become healed within the African
American, oral-based community and culture.
The process of their relearning allows the next generation—represented by
Denver—to access memories and to remember how to speak and listen. She
learns that the word—nommo—makes the reality; she learns to “step into the
told story” (29). When Denver recreates the myth of her birth, Beloved’s active
listening enables the two of them to bring the story to life: “The monologue
became, in fact, a duet as they lay down together” (78). Just as Sethe
begins to recapture her oral tradition, so does Denver:
Now, watching Beloved’s alert and hungry face, how she took in every word,
asking questions about the color of things and their size, her downright craving
to know, Denver began to see what she was saying and not just to hear it.
(77)
Because Denver learns the discourse of her Southern heritage, she “step[s] out
the door, ask[s] for the help she need[s]” (256). At the end of the book, Denver
has completely returned to her oral tradition: when “Paul D saw her the next
morning, . . . she was the first to smile. ‘Good morning, Mr. D’” (266).
In Jazz, the reader is a witness for Violet, Joe, and the narrator. The reader is
also a witness to the story that is being told, and through discussion of the
story the reader testifies. The narrator of Jazz is participating in the act of call
and response because she is a reminder, a call to remember, all those people,
both in fiction and in life, who have sat on front porches, on stoops, at windows,
and witnessed the world pass by. This narrator follows a tradition of
sentries who witness and tell. The watchers on the porch in Zora Neal Hurston’s
Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mrs. Hedges in Ann Petry’s The Street
piece together their worlds from the scraps of information they glean from
the lives of people around them. Morrison witnessed these sentries in Hurston’s
and Petry’s stories and she in turn was called to respond through testimony—
retelling, rewriting them, bringing them to life in her work. In Jazz, as in all of
her novels, Morrison is mirroring the oral tradition of passing on history, stories,
and cultural mores through call and response and witnessing and testifying.
Morrison uses the rhetoric of call/response and witness/testify to “remember
remembering,” to bring back a time before the Civil War and a place in the
rural South when and where the community kept its history in its oral tales
(Beloved 39). Morrison’s use of call/response and witness/testify is a signification
through which she is censuring the community for abandoning their
culture in the pursuit of an unattainable assimilation.
The rhetorical tropes from the Black English oral tradition—Signifying,
Call/Response, and Witnessing/Testifying—bring the rich, aural, Southern
legacy of storytelling, mythmaking, and communal participation to literary
texts and help to create a literary form that captures the cultural realities of

Toni Morrison and the Southern Oral Tradition
African Americans’ life. Like many other African American texts, 6 Morrison’s
novels are contemporary examples of “immersion narratives” (x), Robert
Stepto’s term for slave narratives in which the main character absorbs and is
re-absorbed into his or her past. Morrison’s characters who retain or re-acquire
a healthy sense of their cultural pasts regenerate their immersion in the
oral tradition, whereas characters who are morally and spiritually adrift are cut
off from the tradition. At the same time, Morrison and other African American
novelists push their written texts toward orality: “In twentieth-century African-American
fiction the pursuit of narrative form often becomes the pursuit
of voice, . . . the writer’s attempt to conjure the spoken word into symbolic
existence on the page” (Callahan 14). As that happens, the reader is also immersed
in the oral tradition, becomes an active participant, joins the community,
and makes the connection to replenish his or her soul. The reader metaphorically
crosses the threshold into the text in union with its community,
joining the loving embrace of characters and narrator. At the end of Jazz,
Morrison celebrates this participation of the readers, suggesting that their participation
not only transforms but heals: “Say make me, remake me. You are
free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your
hands are. Now” (229). Morrison’s use of the Southern oral tradition then
becomes, not only a historical way of showing how Southern migrants recreated
their culture in the North, but also a way to bring the reader into the style,
meaning, and function of the African Americans’ literary texts.
NOTES
1 For Melvin Dixon, the geographical dislocations of history led to African American writers’ emphasis
on issues of shelter, home, and identity and on images of journeys, conquered spaces, and
imagined havens (2). Charles Scruggs’s apocalyptic theory posits the dialectic in African American
literature between dystopia and utopia, between the city as ash heap and the city as the Beloved
Community, civilization, and home (2–7).
2 Both Dixon (141–143) and Rigney (62) comment on the symbolic significance of Ohio in Morrison’s
geography.
3 Milkman thereby completes Saussure’s circle: “Language at any given time . . . is an institution in
the present and a product of the past. There is no way out of the circle” (3).
4 Ironically, although Milkman resides in the North, he lives in the Southside, which symbolizes his
psychic need to re-discover his Southern roots and genuine identity. In a further ironic twist, Robert
Smith, employed by the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, escapes from the South—
the Southside—to the Northern side of Lake Superior by re-enacting the Southern, oral myth of
flight, but he is mute and his escape is only achievable through death.
5 Janheinz Jahn defines the African concept of the spoken word, nommo, as “a unity of spiritualphysical
fluidity, giving life to everything, penetrating everything, causing everything” (124).
6 In Chapter Seven of The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois theorizes his ideas about the deep
South as he “recounts a mythical journey deep into the recesses of the Black Belt” (Adell 21). Other
classic African American texts, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, Cane, Black Boy, and
Invisible Man, as well as such recent texts as Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, David Bradley’s
The Chaneysville Incident, Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose, and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day are
premised on the protagonists’ struggles with their simultaneous immersion in and escape from their
Southern past and the oral tradition associated with it.
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WORKS CITED
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Yvonne Atkinson and Philip Page
Adell, Sandra. Double-Consciousness/Double Bind: Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black
Literature. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1994.
Allen, Ray. “Back Home: Southern Identity and African American Gospel Quartet Performance.”
Mapping American Culture. Ed. Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner. Iowa City: Iowa UP,
1992. 112–35.
Baker, Houston A., Jr. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing.
Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse.” Modern Criticism and Theory. Ed. David
Lodge. New York: Longman, 1988. 124–56.
Barthold, Bonnie J. Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. New
Haven: Yale UP, 1981.
Bradley, David. The Chaneysville Incident. New York: Avon, 1981.
Callahan, John F. In the African-American Grain. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1988.
Dixon, Melvin. Ride Out the Wilderness. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1987.
DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin, 1989.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952.
Hurston, Zora Neal. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1937.
Jahn, Janheinz. Muntu: An Outline of the New African Culture. Trans. Marjorie Grene. New York:
Grove, 1961.
Johnson, Charles. Middle Passage. New York: Plume, 1990.
Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia. “Signifying.” Mother Wit From the Laughing Barrel. Ed. Alan Dundes.
New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973. 310–328.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.
____. The Bluest Eye. New York: Pocket Books, 1972.
____. Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992.
____. Song of Solomon. New York: Signet, 1978.
____. Sula. New York: Bantam, 1975.
____. Tar Baby. New York: Signet, 1981.
Naylor, Gloria. Mama Day. New York: Vintage, 1989.
Otten, Terry. The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Columbia: Missouri UP, 1989.
Petry, Ann. The Street. 1946. Reprint. New York: Pyramid, 1961.
Rigney, Barbara Hill. The Voices of Toni Morrison. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1991.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. “The Object of Study.” Modern Criticism and Theory. Ed. David Lodge.
New York: Longman, 1988. 2–14.
Scruggs, Charles. Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1993.
Smitherman, Geneva. Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
____. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1986.
Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: Illinois UP,
1979.
Tate, Claudia. “Toni Morrison.” Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1989. 117–
131.
Toomer, Jean. Cane. 1923. Reprint. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.
Williams, Sherley Anne. Dessa Rose. New York: William Morrow, 1986.
Willis, Susan. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: Wisconsin
UP, 1987. 83–109.
Wright, Richard. Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper & Row, 1945.

Catherine Carr Lee
THE SOUTH IN TONI MORRISON’S SONG OF SOLOMON:
INITIATION, HEALING, AND HOME
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison’s third novel in an increasingly varied and
rich body of work, is a remarkable narrative. The novel’s power lies not only in
its recovery and representation of African American experience in the midtwentieth
century but also in Morrison’s insistence on the necessity of healing
her broken, alienated protagonist, Milkman Dead. Central to both his maturation
and his healing is Milkman’s recognition that the cultural past of the African
American South continues to create his twentieth-century present in ways
that are not constraining but liberating. Critics have typically understood
Milkman’s growth and his healing in the context of the mythic quest or the
classic initiation story. 1 To be sure, Morrison’s novel reflects archetypal initiation
patterns found throughout western literature, as Milkman follows a quest,
first for gold, then for knowledge about his ancestors. Like his predecessors
in the bildungsroman, Milkman moves from a selfish and juvenile immaturity
to a complex knowledge of adulthood. 2 Yet, Morrison does not merely
reinscribe the initiation motif. Rather, the novel subverts the dominant model
of initiation found both in American fiction in general and in African American
literature in particular, as Morrison rewrites the classic American initiation
story.
In stories as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major
Molineaux” and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the American protagonist usually
moves from a rural to an urban area, from the protection and identity of
the nurturing family and friends to the isolation and alienation of western individualism.
Such a movement allows the youth to escape the confines of the
past in order to create himself as an individual acting outside of time and convention.
This freedom comes with a price, however: such an initiation typically
brings separation, restriction, and a knowledge of evil. 3 This trope is
problematized in many African American works, such as Frederick Douglass’s
Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s Incident in the Life of a Slave Girl, in which
the protagonist moves from an oppressive, enslaving, agrarian South to an enabling,
industrial North. For the authors of these slave narratives, leaving behind
family, friends, and even names was often essential for escape. For the
African American community in the twentieth century, however, Morrison suggests
that the isolating individualism that erases the memory of the South destroys
spiritual and moral identity.
Thus, the trip to the South is central to Morrison’s subversion of the classic
American initiation story. For the conventionally poor, naive, sensitive youth
from the provinces, Morrison substitutes Macon Dead III, nicknamed Milkman,
an emotionally isolated, alienated black man who has grown up in the
Studies in the Literary Imagination 31.2, Fall 1998 © Georgia State University

Initiation, South, and Home in Song of Solomon
industrial northern midwest, in a Michigan city on the shores of Lake Superior.
4 As the protagonist, he is youthful only because he has “stretched his
carefree boyhood out for thirty-one years” (Morrison 98). Still living in his
parents’ home, collecting rents for his father, Milkman has yet to reach emotional
and social maturity. His poverty is spiritual, not material; his sensitivity
is that of adolescent self-centeredness. His initiation takes him physically
from the urban North through a progressively rural and southern landscape to
the home of his ancestors in Shalimar, Virginia. What begins as a selfish quest
for gold, for material success and escape, becomes a quest for knowledge of
his family history and an identity based on that history. Song of Solomon is,
finally, the story not just of one man’s individualization but of the potential for
healing of a community.
Milkman is indeed naive about himself, his family, and his community, but
the very nature of the knowledge he acquires marks Song of Solomon as a
different kind of initiation story. The initiate’s knowledge is typically defined
as a loss of innocence and a recognition of restriction. Milkman begins, however,
at the point of restriction that comes from separation, from the hyperindividualization
that grows out of the American culture of competition, capitalism,
and racism. Like the traditional American initiate, he must recognize
his own capacity for evil, but the knowledge of his family’s past and his place
in a community that evolved from that past enables Milkman to ascend rather
than, conventionally, to “fall through knowledge” (Fiedler 22). His journey
into an African American South strips him of superficial external moorings
and submerges him in the communal and spiritual culture of his larger family.
With his initiation, Milkman moves from a passive, irresponsible ignorance to
an active, authentic, and liberating participation in the corporate life of black
community.
The American South is crucial to this narrative of healing, because the problem
for Milkman and his family concerns not just the relationship to the past,
but to a past that is specifically caught up with the history of slavery in the
South. Morrison signals the importance of the South with the very name of the
section of town where Milkman’s aunt Pilate lives. Just as “Southside” serves
as a reminder of the southern origins of the Black people who populate the
novel, so Pilate offers Milkman an emotional connection to his southern ancestors.
Less directly, the novel predicts the necessity of Milkman’s journey
to the South with his strange, dream-like walk down Not Doctor Street, in the
wake of a disturbing conversation with his father about his mother. As he tries
to make his way down the street, on his way to Southside, he keeps running
into people, “all going the direction he was coming from” (78). Milkman will
have to move against the tide of Black migration north in order to transcend
his aimlessness, to live for something other than superficial satiation and pleasure.
Deeply connected to Milkman’s aimlessness is his namelessness. Morrison
uses knowing one’s name as a metaphor for knowing one’s past, and it is the
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South that holds the secret of Milkman’s family name and family past. The
novel’s epigraph beckons to the power of the ancestral name: “The fathers may
soar, and the children may know their names.” It is a kind of blessing that
Morrison bestows on her fictional black community, and, as Linda Krumholz
has argued, it captures “the tension between black men’s mobility . . . and familial
and communal responsibilities” (555). Milkman’s family has lost its
ancestral name, achieving mobility at the cost of intimacy and identity. The
original Macon Dead, Milkman’s grandfather, received his name from a drunken
Yankee at the Freedman’s Bureau. According to Milkman’s father, the first
Macon kept the name because his wife insisted on it, because “it was new and
would wipe out the past” (53). Yet losing the name of the ancestor causes the
Dead family to lose history, community, and tradition as well; the past becomes
“dead,” and the loss of name damages the present an understanding of
that past.
Names in Song of Solomon are, of course, fraught with significance. The
novel points, on the one hand, to the importance of names in traditional societies
of West Africa—the origin of most Africans enslaved in North America—
where names are identified with the individual’s essence, with the core of one’s
being. 5 For American slaves, names provided a link with the African past; in the
new world slaves conducted secret naming ceremonies and used their African
names when they could avoid the presence of Whites. Yet the novel also points
to the complicated status of surnames for African Americans in the United
States. The denial of a family name, like the denial of marital legitimacy and
the breaking apart of families, prevented stable family identities for enslaved
Americans. As historian Leon Litwack points out, many slave holders did not
want Blacks, be it before or after the Civil War, to take their own last name,
and former slaves in turn rejected the surnames of their White owners as signs
of illegitimate claims to ownership. But upon emancipation, when to be a citizen
meant possessing both a first and a last name, freedmen sometimes took
their most recent master’s name; more often, they claimed the name of the
earliest master they could recall, in order to retain a sense of family and identity.
6 Others wanted to choose their own names, rejecting suggestions from
Freedman’s Bureau officials and choosing instead names that, although they
were of European derivation, allowed them a sense of self-determination.
The healing of Milkman’s own brokenness—not only as an individual but as
a representative of an entire Black generation—requires Milkman’s restoration
to the community of his ancestors, and that requires, literally, the discovery
of their names. Because Milkman has lost his name—and his heritage—he
can not establish meaningful connections with his family and his community.
He grows up feeling excluded and alone. The first of several symbolic markers
of Milkman’s separation and his brokenness comes when he is the first
Black infant born in the all-White Mercy Hospital. His prolonged nursing also
sets him apart. At the age of four, having discovered that he cannot fly, Milkman
loses “all interest in himself” and likewise has no interest in those around

Initiation, South, and Home in Song of Solomon
him (9). His older sisters display only “casual malice” (10), while other children
exclude him from neighborhood singing games—the kind of game, ironically,
that will provide the answer to the mystery of his great-grandfather’s life
and identity.
As he grows older, Milkman’s failures come from his sense of alienation.
This alienation originates, in part, in his lack of awareness and insight and his
inability to empathize with others. At the age of 22, he is still trapped emotionally
in the symbiotic state of the infant; for, as Morrison writes, he had
never “thought of his mother as a person, a separate individual, with a life apart
from allowing or interfering with his own” (75). Limited as they are, his efforts
to connect with his family end only in failure. He tries to forge a bond
with his mother, by hitting his father in her defense, but he realizes that “there
was no one to thank him—or abuse him. His action was his alone” (68). In
turn, he resists his father’s invitation to a shared understanding. Macon tries to
explain his abuse by telling Milkman about Ruth’s incestuous love for her father.
Milkman responds with a sense of disassociation: it was “as though a
stranger that he’d sat next to on a park bench had turned toward him and begun
to relate some intimacy. . . . he himself was not involved or in any way threatened
by the stranger’s story” (74–75). He is blind to his selfishness in his
relationship with his cousin, Hagar, who is Pilate’s granddaughter. Morrison
conveys both Milkman’s self-perception and the inaccuracy of that perception
in four taught sentences that follow the assault on his father: “Sleeping with
Hagar had made him generous. Or so he thought. Wide-spirited. Or so he imagined”
(69). When he tires of Hagar, he contemplates writing a note that demonstrates
his utter self-absorption: he will tell her that he is leaving her for her
own good, in order not to be selfish.
Even Milkman’s dreams and aspirations show his lack of imagination and
engagement. Until his father offers him the prospect of finding Pilate’s gold,
Milkman has virtually no idea of what he wants to do with his adult life. He
wants the gold to enable his escape from Not Doctor Street, yet he can “not
visualize a life that much different from the one he had,” writes Morrison
(180). “New people. New places. Command. That was what he wanted in his
life” (180). This litany of desires is curiously without detail. Later in the paragraph,
ironically juxtaposed to his dreams of escape, Milkman thinks that “he
wanted to know as little as possible” (180).
Milkman’s alienation stems as well from his refusal to take responsibility.
He exploits Hagar for twelve years, long after she has become “the third beer.
. . . the one you drink because it’s there” (91). His failure to accept commitment
is evident in the “dream” he relates to Guitar, in which the plants in the
garden grow rapidly over his mother, finally strangling her. Guitar wants to
know why he did not try to help her, but Milkman insists that his mother enjoyed
it; besides, it was a dream, he says, so he cannot be held accountable. Yet
his own logic incriminates him, since he is not actually sure that it was only a
dream. To his sister, “Magadelene called Lena,” he insists that he has never
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interfered with the family, that “I live and let live,” but that deliberate isolation
is precisely his offense (216). He has never taken any notice of the conditions
of their lives; he has lived with the members of his family as if they were
strangers. As Lena tells him, he has been “peeing on” the family all of his life.
The news from Mississippi of Emmett Till’s murder for whistling at a white
girl illuminates the narrowness of Milkman’s involvement with his community.
The other men at Tommy’s Barbershop react with “tales of atrocities,
first stories they had heard, then those they’d witnessed, and finally the things
that had happened to themselves,” as they link the events of their own lives
with those of the larger world (83). But Milkman’s response is “Yeah, well,
fuck Till. I’m the one in trouble” (88). Not only can he not engage with the
larger world, Milkman cannot recognize that his alienation has its roots in the
very white racism that allowed for the lynching of Emmett Till.
At the age of thirty-one, then, Milkman is still a narcissist; his life is stagnant
and his growth suspended. Throughout, however, he has encountered a
series of teachers who, in the tradition of the initiation story, push him forward
to commitment even as they draw him inexorably to the South. He cannot
respond immediately to their lessons, often feeling puzzled and confused, but
he stores these experiences until the night of the Shalimar bobcat hunt, when
he undergoes a metamorphosis. The lessons begin when Milkman is twelve,
with his introduction to Pilate, the aunt who functions as a benevolent sorceress
or a witch figure in his life. She helps his mother conceive him, then gives
him a place where he can be “surrounded by women who seemed to enjoy him
and who laughed out loud” (47). As “Mama” to her granddaughter, Hagar, as
well as to her own daughter, Reba, Pilate is the primal earth mother, with her
“berry-black lips,” surrounded by oranges and peaches (37-38). She is united
with the nature with which Milkman must reconcile in order to survive his
initiation. Pilate begins by instructing Milkman in practical, everyday knowledge:
to say what you mean, how to cook a perfect egg. Because she values
nothing but human relationships, Pilate refers to Milkman as Hagar’s brother,
because, she says, “you treat them both the same” (44). She intersperses this
instruction with information about the Dead family’s past. Milkman learns that
his father grew up on a farm and saw his own father shot from behind, blown
five feet in the air by the white men who resented his success. The Macon
Dead that Pilate tells him about is a different man than the father Milkman has
known. Milkman would have liked the man his father once was, says Pilate: “he
would have been a real good friend to you, too, like he was to me” (39).
Meeting Pilate makes Milkman feel for the first time that his name is important,
that it joins him with someone to whom he wants to belong. When
Pilate tells young Milkman that there “ain’t but three Deads alive,” Milkman
screams that he, too, is a Dead. He misses, of course, Pilate’s unintentional—
or Morrison’s deliberate—irony, for he is one of the Deads who is spiritually
dead, and he will insist on his “deadness” for years to come. But Pilate is the
only person to provide Milkman with what feels emotionally like a home, so

Initiation, South, and Home in Song of Solomon
he hesitates to steal the bag hanging in her house that he thinks contains her
gold. Guitar tells him that “this ain’t no burglary. This is Pilate. . . . They’re
your people” (182). But Milkman has a vague understanding that Guitar misses:
that in robbing his family, his community, he diminishes his own dignity and
humanity. Milkman begins to make this connection when he and Guitar are
arrested and Pilate must do her “Aunt Jemima act” to get them released (211).
What humiliates Milkman is not just her act, “but the fact that she was both
adept at it and willing to do it—for him” (211). He recognizes, briefly, that his
actions affect other people, and he also realizes that by hurting Pilate, he has
hurt himself. Pilate is also Milkman’s closest link with the sustaining power
of the past. She has misunderstood the message from her father’s ghost, that
“you just can’t fly on off and leave a body” (209). Pilate thinks he meant that
“if you take a life, then you own it. You responsible for it. You can’t rid of
nobody by killing them [sic]. They still there and they yours now” (209). So
she continues to carry what she thinks are the bones of the man that Macon
killed years before. As Milkman discovers later, the first Macon referred to
his father, Solomon, who abandoned his wife and twenty-one children, but
Pilate’s interpretation points to the responsibility that Milkman must take.
Milkman’s family members are his teachers too, although it takes years for
him to realize it. Macon’s knowledge is of a very different sort than Pilate’s, as
he erroneously tells Milkman: “Pilate can’t teach you a thing you can use in
this world. Maybe the next, but not this one” (55). Macon’s world is the material
one, but he provides additional links to the past. Macon tells his son about
Circe, the black woman servant whose employer, Butler, killed his father; about
the farm in Danville, Pennsylvania; and about the misnaming of the original
Macon Dead. Macon also says that he “worked right alongside” his father,
which Milkman later realizes is an expression of the love and respect his father
shared with the first Macon Dead (51). Perhaps most important, though,
Milkman understands the kind of man his father once was; as he hears his
father’s voice changing, becoming “less hard, and his speech was different.
More southern and comfortable and soft” (52). For a moment Milkman glimpses
what it is like to feel “close and confidential” with his father (54). Milkman’s
mother, Ruth, also provides information that he will understand only much
later. She tells Milkman about his conception, about Pilate’s early devotion to
him, and about the sexual deprivation that Milkman eventually sees, and how it
“would affect her, hurt her in precisely the way it would affect and hurt him”
(303). His sister Lena is another teacher, confronting him with his irresponsibility
and selfishness, reminding him that he has been “using us, judging us:
how we cook your food: how we keep your house” (216). Her final condemnation,
that he is a “sad, pitiful, stupid, selfish, hateful man,” will serve him later
when he realizes that “hating his parents, his sisters, seemed silly” (218, 304).
As Milkman’s best friend, Guitar plays a complex role. He functions as a
teacher as well as an enemy. 7 As a teacher, Guitar pushes Milkman to recognize
his weaknesses, his flawed priorities, and finally his identity. Guitar re-
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peatedly reminds Milkman of his alienation and aimlessness, of his failure to
commit himself to person or place, and he forces Milkman to acknowledge
his boredom and inability to risk himself. Guitar knows that one must take
chances, and when Milkman hesitates to steal the bag from Pilate’s house,
Guitar prods him on with “You got a life? Live it! Live the motherfuckin life!”
(184). In this case Milkman’s reluctance is well founded; he does not want to
steal from the woman who first gave him a home. But Guitar aptly defines the
problem of Milkman’s emotionally unlived life.
With Part II, Milkman begins his journey south ostensibly to retrieve the
gold that his father and Pilate found years ago in a cave in Pennsylvania, gold
which Macon believes Pilate stole from him. Critics tend to focus on the quest
elements in Part II, at the expense of the preparation for the quest in Part I. 8
Still, Morrison introduces something of the magic of fairy tale when in the
opening paragraph she compares Milkman with Hansel and Gretel and thereby
signals that the usual limits of realistic representation no longer operate.
Milkman’s lust for the gold is also paired with Hansel and Gretel’s hunger for
candy, and in the world of Song of Solomon, the search for gold, as for candy,
is corrupt. 9 It is the “shit that weighs you down,” and is symbolized by the
peacock that vainly spreads its tail just as Milkman and Guitar confirm their
plans to steal the gold. For Milkman to fly, to transcend his alienation, he has
to shed his inauthenticity.
The journey south introduces the first of Milkman’s new set of teachers and
helpers. Milkman perceives these teachers as instruments to bring him closer
to the gold, but as the quest for gold becomes a quest for identity, their meanings
change. In Danville, Pennsylvania, Milkman meets the Reverend Cooper,
who provides important information about his ancestry and at the same time
gives Milkman a sense that he is included in the larger Dead family. He greets
Milkman with “I know your people!” and tells him the stories of his grandfather’s
murder and of Circe’s caring for Pilate and Macon in the days to follow (231).
During the next four days the old survivors come to visit, the ones who knew
his father and grandfather—a chorus of teachers reciting a litany of the earlier
days—and Milkman learns something new about the relationship between the
two men for whom he is named. Milkman cannot “recognize that stern, greedy,
unloving man in the boy they talked about, but he loved the boy they described
and loved that boy’s father” (237). As the past becomes vivid in the words of
the old men, Milkman sees the patterns of his father’s life emerge, and he
understands that the past he hears about shaped the present he knows. But the
drive to own property that meant liberation to the first Macon Dead has been
perverted into selfishness and endless acquisition by the second. It is a sign of
Milkman’s continuing corruption that the talk about his father’s current financial
success makes him long even more for Pilate’s gold. To the other black
men in Montour County, Macon Dead’s farm symbolized the richness and possibility
of the community. If Macon Dead could have a home, then “you got

Initiation, South, and Home in Song of Solomon
one too!” (237). And the message was “pass it on!” (238). This is what the
second Macon Dead has forgotten; it is what Milkman must learn.
Circe, Milkman’s second helper in Part II, tells Milkman how to find the
cave where Macon thinks the gold still lies, but she also provides information
about Milkman’s ancestors that he will later use in deciphering the Solomon
song, chanted by the children in Shalimar. Circe tells him that his grandmother,
an Indian named Sing, came with his grandfather, the first Macon, to Pennsylvania
from Virginia, and she tells him the town’s name, Charlemagne, a corruption
of Shalimar. She also knows that Old Macon’s body was dumped in the
very cave in which the gold was discovered, and later Milkman will realize that
it was her father’s bones that Pilate found when she returned to the cave. Finally,
she reveals his grandfather’s real name, Jake. But Circe serves as more
than just a teacher; she is a living relic of the past that Milkman has previously
only heard about. Circe mistakes Milkman for the Macon Dead she knew,
Milkman’s father. Although Morrison never indicates that Milkman and Macon
resemble each other, Circe’s mistake makes it clear that Milkman looks
exactly like his father. With Circe, the past reaches out and intrudes on
Milkman’s present as surely as Circe reaches out to embrace him.
Milkman’s trips through the woods to the Butler house and to the cave are
part of his initiation as well, and they anticipate the bobcat hunt in Shalimar
that will bring the shedding of his old, inauthentic self. Going into the Pennsylvania
woods, Milkman is “oblivious to the universe of wood life,” just as he
has been oblivious to the emotions and experiences of the people around him
(221). To find the house he must make “a mile-long walk over moist leaves,”
dodging branches of overhead trees (240). To find the cave he has to go deeper
into the woods, crossing and falling into a creek, then climbing the rocky hillside.
His watch and cigarettes, those emblems of distraction and city life, are
smashed and soaked; his thin-soled shoes are of little help. Once inside the
cave, he has only his hands, feet, and instincts to guide him. His lighter sputters
only long enough to show that the gold is gone. In this confrontation with
a nature much wilder than the “tended woods” he knew back home, Milkman
finds that some genuine feeling begins to emerge, experienced as a ravenous
hunger unlike any he has known before (252). Afterwards, Milkman sees the
landscape with new eyes. As he travels to Virginia, the hills ahead of him are
“no longer scenery. . . . They were real places that could split your thirty-dollar
shoes” (259).
Milkman still has much to learn when he reaches Shalimar. He begins to
take southern hospitality for granted, to feel at home in the South—especially
so when his car breaks down in front of Solomon’s Country Store. In Shalimar,
Milkman hears the local children singing “a kind of ring-around-the-rosy or
Little Sally Walker game” (266). This is the Solomon song, which Milkman
later realizes holds the key to the mystery of his ancestry. At this point this
feeling of being at home is an extension of his sense of entitlement, and the
mistakes he makes in Shalimar reflect his separateness. Milkman’s first mis-
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take underscores the power of naming and the importance of community. He
calls the men in the store “them,” and by failing to ask their names, Milkman
denies their personhood and revels his distrust. When he locks his car and then
suggests that he would like one of their women, this serves only to isolate him
further. In the ensuing fight Milkman defends himself with a broken bottle
before Mr. Solomon rescues him. Although Milkman is obviously marked as
an outsider, he is beginning to lose the inadequate trappings of his old, superficial
self. In Shalimar his money cannot save him; his daddy cannot bail him
out of trouble. All he has to fight with is what he finds immediately at hand.
In the community of Shalimar, the home of his ancestors, Milkman is still
the ignorant, irresponsible, passive adolescent. To gain the knowledge of responsible
adulthood, he must leave behind the fixed boundaries of his old,
immature self and experience the chaotic, liminal, near-death experience of
initiation. Like the quest-hero, Milkman is, in the words of Vladimir Propp,
“tested, interrogated, [and] attacked” (39), but the bobcat hunt that the older
men invite him to join is more accurately a male initiation rite at the hands of
the elders and wise men of African tribal cultures. As they usher the initiate
into the ways and wisdom of the community, the men enact a ritual dressing of
Milkman before the hunt; his city clothes are not adequate for the night ahead,
just as his city self cannot serve him during the changes he will undergo. 10
Calvin Breakstone takes Milkman under his wing as a protogé, and Milkman’s
next step toward shedding his old self comes when he realizes that Calvin’s
lamp, prevents his eyes from adjusting to the dark. In order to see what the
night holds, he must “look at what it was possible to see” (276). Finally,
Milkman’s gaze now penetrates. At the moment he hears the wailing from Ryna’s
Gulch, and Calvin tells Milkman about the old legend that “a woman named
Ryna is cryin’ down there”—the Ryna who was abandoned by his great-grandfather,
Solomon (277). By letting go of the secure but superficial mooring of
artificial light, Milkman begins to gain access to the mysteries of his ancestry.
Milkman must still come to terms with a physical nature from which he has
long stood apart and he must do so without his teachers’ help. In order to heal
his spiritual brokenness he must confront his physical limitations as he tries
to keep up with the older men. After several hours of following the dogs, he
gives up and reclines against a tree, only to find that he cannot avoid thinking
about what has happened to him in Shalimar. He recognizes that he may have
offended the men in Solomon’s store, but he does not think he deserved their
hostility. With all of its implications of privilege,”deserve” is the key word
that triggers Milkman’s recognition. The turning point in his journey of self
comes when Milkman realizes that:
he thought he deserved only to be loved—from a distance though—and given
what he wanted. And in return he would be . . . what? Pleasant? Generous?
Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share
your happiness with me but not your unhappiness (280).

Initiation, South, and Home in Song of Solomon
At this point, Milkman is still convinced that he has come to Shalimar either to
find the gold or to be convinced that it has disappeared. As he sits in the silent
darkness, he experiences a metaphorical death that releases him from an alienating
self-centeredness, and provides for the concomitant acceptance of his
responsibility for sharing both the joys and the sorrows of his family and
friends. 11
In this state of separation—apart from all safety and security, all external
makers and markers of identity—Milkman realizes that all he has is “what he
was born with, or had learned to use. And endurance” (280). As he listens to
the dogs and men signaling each other, he begins to draw upon the sixth sense
he did not know he possessed: “an ability to separate out, of all the things there
were to sense, the one that life itself might depend on” (280–81). He learns
that the men and dogs can talk to each other, and Milkman himself realizes that
these are the tribal elders with all the wisdom of the world, “because if they
could talk to animals, and the animals could talk to them, what didn’t they
know about human beings? Or the earth itself, for that matter” (281). Milkman
is an initiate to the community of hunters. He tries to “listen with his fingertips,”
and that sixth sense warns him of Guitar’s approach (282).
Like the hero of the archetypal folktale, Milkman must engage in combat
with the villain—who in this novel is his best friend—and receive a brand or
wound. 12 His throat and fingers are cut, and as he succumbs to the sorrow he
feels at dying, he relaxes his throat muscles. The last vestiges of his former
self perish. With Milkman’s spiritual rebirth into the community of the hunters,
he can locate the baying dogs. His sixth sense is with him now: “He didn’t
miss; his sense of direction was accurate” (283). The men give Milkman a
good-natured ribbing about tripping over his gun, but they offer no meanness
this time, as they ask “Was you scared?” (284). Milkman’s response reflects
his new sense of confidence and belonging, as well as an almost literal truth:
he was “scared to death” (284). When he leaves the woods with the hunters the
next morning, Milkman is no longer alienated from the earth nor from his
fellow human beings; he is “walking [the earth] like he belonged on it” (284).
The men reward him with the heart of the bobcat, then send him to Sweet, “a
nice lady up the road a ways. She’d be proud to take you in” (288). The encounter
with Sweet is a healing experience for Milkman and signals Milkman’s
integration. In the course of the novel, Milkman has never volunteered to do
anything for another person, but his love-making with Sweet is mutual and
redemptive.
Milkman cannot uncover the mystery of his great-grandfather, however, nor
can he enter the community that will complete his new identity, until he admits
just how much he wants to “find” his “people” (295). And he cannot make that
admission until he realizes that “his people” include the very ones he was so
eager to escape. Vernell, the wife of one of the hunters, sends Milkman to a
local Indian woman, Susan Byrd, but she suggests that these are not his family
after all. Ready to abandon the search for both gold and ancestors, he makes
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the connection of past and present when he realizes that “there was something
he felt now—here in Shalimar, and earlier in Danville—that reminded him of
how he used to feel in Pilate’s house” (296). Pilate is the link, for having first
experienced “home” with Pilate, Milkman can recognize it again. It is Pilate
he misses most; he becomes “homesick . . . for the very people he had been
hell-bent to leave” (303). Paradoxically, the closer Milkman comes to discovering
the legend of Solomon and the key to his ancestry, the better he can
understand the lives of his mother and father. He does not yet know about
Hagar’s death, but as he admits his responsibility for degrading her, he again
hears the children sing the Solomon song. This time he recognizes it as a version
of “Sugarman done fly away” (5), a song he has heard Pilate sing all of his
life. The names of Solomon, Jake, Ryna, and the others now make sense. He
realizes Susan Byrd is his grandmother’s niece. She confirms this and tells
him the secret of Solomon: he was a flying African, and he tried to carry his
youngest child, Jake, with him, but had to let him fall. Jake was Milkman’s
grandfather, the man who changed his name to Macon Dead. By learning his
ancestors’ names, Milkman has learned who he is. As he says to Sweet about
the Solomon song and the circle game played by the children in Shalimar, “I
can play it now. It’s my game now” (331).
Milkman’s trip south to Shalimar, to the liberating discovery of family and
past, parallels Solomon’s return to Africa, to origins, and to freedom. 13 Even
so, Solomon abandoned his community, and though he tried to carry his youngest
child, he flew to Africa and freedom fully intending to leave his wife and twenty
other children behind. With a recognition of his responsibility for Hagar’s
death Milkman, carries the knowledge of his family’s southern past back to his
community in Michigan, along with a new understanding of his parents, his
sisters, and Pilate. He has learned that, in the words of his grandfather’s ghost,
“you just can’t fly on off and leave a body” (336). He understands, too, that
“names had meaning. . . . When you know your name, you should hang on to it,
for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do” (333).
Gone is his failure to attach to place. Now he has roots in every place that
Pilate, his father, and his grandparents have lived. He shares that heritage.
In a conclusion that is problematic for many readers, Milkman and Pilate
return to the cave in Pennsylvania so that Pilate can properly bury what she
now knows are her father’s bones. They are tracked down by Guitar who believes
Milkman has found the gold and betrayed him by cutting him out of his
share. As Milkman and Pilate stand on a plateau at the mouth of the cave, Guitar
fells Pilate with a bullet meant for Milkman. With the final realization of
his love for Pilate, who could fly “without ever leaving the ground,” Milkman
prepares to make the ultimate sacrifice of love for Guitar (340). He stands up,
fully expecting to be killed instantly, and calls to Guitar, shouting “Over here,
brother man! Can you see me? . . . Here I am!” (341). Guitar is still his “brother,”
and if Guitar needs his life, Milkman can give it:

Initiation, South, and Home in Song of Solomon
Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his
knees—he leaped. As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar
and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the
killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you
surrendered to the air, you could ride it. (341)
This conclusion raises the question of whether Milkman really flies in the
triumph of individual will, or if he plummets to his death in a statement of
existential despair, by what Susan Blake calls a “solitary leap into the void”
(79). Both possibilities, however, invite mistakenly individualistic readings.
Milkman does offer his life to Guitar, but Morrison writes that “it does not
matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his
brother” (341) Milkman’s flight, the final parallel with Solomon, is not away
from something but to his “brother” Guitar, a member of his present community.
Milkman, who by his initiation into community now embodies that community,
leaps not into the void but to the “arms of his brother” 14 Such a death
would be a healing sacrifice of love for Guitar.
Yet this leap may not bring Milkman’s death at all. Many critics have failed
to note that just before Milkman leaps off the plateau, Guitar sets his rifle
aside. Perhaps, then, Guitar no longer wants to kill Milkman, and the “arms of
his brother” may not be killing at all (341). 15 In this conclusion, Morrison
continues to overturn the conventional initiation story that previous generations
of literary scholars have described. Northrop Frye, for example, claims
that the “central form of romance is dialectical: everything is focused on a
conflict between the hero and his enemy, and all the reader’s values are bound
up with the hero” (81). Morrison, however, transcends this dialectic. It does
“not matter,” she writes, “which one of them would give up his ghost in the
killing arms of his brother” (341). Significantly, the pronoun “his” refers not
to Milkman or Guitar alone, but to both.
Thus, where the classic American initiation story takes the youthful initiate
from the bosom of hearth and family, leaving him isolated and alone, Morrison
begins with a twentieth-century modern man, alienated and fragmented, and
ends with that man’s successful connection with a people. Through his initiation
into the Southern community of his ancestors, Milkman gains not the
typical knowledge of limitations, or the knowledge that comes through the fall
into evil, but rather the understanding that the past continues to constitute the
present in ways that are not constraining but liberating. He discovers both the
fact and the meaning of his African American heritage. Morrison reverses not
only the structural pattern found in the typical American initiation story but
the ontological pattern as well. Song of Solomon addresses the need for the
contemporary African American psyche to embrace community, the community
that comes from a shared culture and history, and so she denies historical
discontinuity and transcends the postmodernist impulse toward despair. 16 The
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novel ends with the triumphant hope of continuation for an interconnected
African American culture and heritage.
NOTES
1 For discussions of Song of Solomon as a quest or initiation story, see Barthold, Blake, Bruck,
Campbell, Fabre, Harris, Lee, Royster, and Smith. Classic descriptions of the archetypal initiation
theme and the heroic quest motif appear in Eliade, Frye, and Propp.
2 For a discussion of the bildungsroman, see C. Hugh Holman, Windows on the World.
3 West writes that initiation brings “a knowledge of the limitations of existence—the limitations of
both nature (the present) and the myth (the past).” To come to terms with the “problem of existence,”
he suggests, the protagonist has “to recognize that there is a problem,” and then “understand [that]
the problem is capable of only a limited solution” (96–97). Fiedler argues that the initiate, like Adam
and Eve in the Christian originary myth, must “fall through knowledge” (22).
4 On the classic story of the “Young Man from the Provinces,” see Lionel Trilling, The Liberal
Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society.
5 According to Byerman in Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black
Fiction, Milkman’s discovery of his family name carries connotations of “certain magical qualities
connected with black folklore.” Byerman suggests that naming for Morrison “has associations with
African cultures in which the name is the expression of the soul” (201). For a discussion of names in
African culture, see Janheinz Jahn, Muntu: An Outline of Neo-African Culture and Sterling Stuckey,
Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. As Jahn explains, childnaming
in some areas has been ritualized for years: “the new-born child becomes a muntu [a person]
only when the father or the ‘sorcerer’ gives him a name and pronounces it. Before this the little body
is a kintu, a thing; if it dies, it is not even mourned” (125). Stuckey points out that, in Africa, “a man’s
name is often identified with his very soul, and often with the souls of ancestors” (195).
6 Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery suggests that such a choice
was made from “a sense of historical identity, continuity, and family pride. . . . not to honor a
previous master but to sustain some identification with the freedman’s family of origin” (250).
7 Dorothy Lee and Peter Bruck discuss Guitar in their considerations of the novel as quest. According
to Lee, “Guitar operates in the tradition of the trickster and other ambivalent archetypal figures
who, by challenging the hero, push him to his destination” (66). Bruck calls Guitar an “alter ego” and
suggests that “Milkman and Guitar represent two sides of one aspect: the alienation of the black man
from himself and his people.” As Bruck puts it, the philosophies of both individuals “turn out to be
inadequate within the context of the action” (300).
8 See Bruck, “Returning to One’s Roots,” and Krumholz, “Dead Teachers.” Bruck notes that
Milkman’s departure “introduces several elements which clearly place Song of Solomon in the
tradition of the novel of initiation” (14), while Krumholz points out that the events in chapter 11 (the
second chapter of Part II, beginning with Milkman’s arrival in Shalimar and ending with his lovemaking
with Sweet) “enact most clearly the form and function of an initiation ritual” (558).
9 See Barthold, Black Time, for her comments on “the association of sweetness with death” in the
novel (176).
10 See Byerman, Fingering the Jagged Grain; Bruck, “Returning to One’s Roots”; and Lee, “Song
of Solomon: To Ride the Air.” Byerman calls the hunt “the male initiation rite that Milkman has never
had” ( 205); Bruck describes it as “a traditional action in which man unites himself through shared
activities and a reverence for the wilderness with both his ancestors and his fellow men” (295–96).
Dorothy Lee suggests that with names like Omar, King Walker, Calvin, Luther, and Small Boy, the old
men on the hunt are “the circle of village elders, of poets, kings, and men of God” (69).
11 Krumholz turns to anthropologist Victor Turner to explain the separation and reincorporation
that Milkman as quest-hero must undergo. Turner, she says, “divides the ritual process into three
stages: rites of separation, rites of limen or margin, and rites of reaggregation. . . . Turner theorizes

Initiation, South, and Home in Song of Solomon
‘marginality’ or ‘liminality’ as a space and time within ritual in which social classifications break
down and social relations are transformed. . . . Within the limen all participants, having temporarily
put off their status, will see the world differently” (“Dead Teachers” 558).
12 See Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 51–52.
13 Susan Blake points out that Morrison uses a highly individualistic variant of a folktale about
flying Africans. She suggests that “in making Milkman’s flying ancestor a single individual and
focusing his story on the wife and children he left behind, Morrison refers not to a community united
by its political experience, but to a conflict of identification between political and personal communities”
(“Folklore and Community” 80). This folktale was collected from a number of people by the
Georgia Writers’ Project in Drums and Shadows (see index for “Africans, flying”), and by Langston
Hughes and Arna Bontemps in The Book of Negro Folklore (62, 64).
14 Samuels notes that, in traditional African societies, the initiate must be “carefully tutored in the
art of communal living” (63). The individual then exists “only as a representative of the whole” (63).
15 Wahneema Lubiano, “The Postmodern Rag: Political Identity and the Vernacular in Song of
Solomon,” in New Essays on Song of Solomon,notes “that Guitar places his rifle on the ground does
not make him any less deadly” (111). Lubiano overlooks, however, the fact that Milkman has already
provided Guitar with another chance to kill him. Morrison writes that Milkman “knew there wouldn’t
be another mistake; that the minute he stood up Guitar would try to blow his head off. He stood up.”
Milkman proceeds to shout: “Guitar! . . . Over here, brother man! Can you see me?” He waves his
hand over his head, then continues to call out: “Here I am! . . . You want me? Huh? You want my life?”
(340–41). Guitar has ample opportunity to shoot Milkman before he finally sets aside the rifle.
20 See Lubiano,”The Postmodern Rag.” Lubiano describes Song of Solomon as “a postmodernist
text” and argues that the novel “dramatizes the deconstruction of narrative convention, the complications
of race, and the struggles over identification in ways that bring to narrative life the nexus of
the personal and the political” (93, 95). While her discussion of the novel’s postmodernist use of
“black American vernacular Signifying” is illuminating (93), I disagree with her conclusion that the
novel’s ending is not unifying and transcendent.
WORKS CITED
Barthold, Bonnie J. Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. New
Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1981.
Blake, Susan L. “Folklore and Community in Song of Solomon.” MELUS 7.3 (1980): 77–82.
Bruck, Peter. “Returning to One’s Roots: The Motif of Searching and Flying in Toni Morrison’s Song
of Solomon.” The Afro-American Novel Since 1960. Ed. Peter Bruck and Wolfgang Karrer.
Amsterdam: Gruner, 1982. 289–305.
Byerman, Keith. Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Atens:
U of Georgia P, 1985.
Campbell, Jane. Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P,
1986.
Cooper, Barbara E. “Milkman’s Search for Family in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” CLA Journal
33 (1989): 145–56.
Eliade, Mircea. Rites and Symbols of Initiation. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper Torchbooks,
1965.
Fabre, Genevieve. “Genealogical Archaeology or the Quest for Legacy in Toni Morrison’s Song of
Sololmon.” Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Ed. Nellie Y. McKay. Boston: G..K. Hall, 1988.
105–14.
Fiedler, Leslie. “From Redemption to Initiation.” The New Leader. 26 May 1958: 20–23.
Frye, Northrup. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957.
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Harris, A. Leslie. “Myth as Structure in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” MELUS 7.3 (1980): 69–
76.
Holman, C. Hugh. Windows on the World. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1979.
Jahn, Janheinz. Muntu: An Outline of Neo-African Culture. Trans. Marjorie Grene. London: Faber
and Faber, 1961.
Krumholz, Linda. “Dead Teachers: Rituals of Manhood and Rituals of Reading in Song of Solomon.”
Modern Fiction Studies 39 (1993): 551–74.
Lee, Dorothy. “The Quest for Self: Triumph and Failure in the Works of Toni Morrison.” Black
Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans. New York: Doubleday,
1984. 337–70.
——. “Song of Solomon: To Ride the Air.” Black American Literature Forum 16 (1982): 66.
Litwack, Leon. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Knopf, 1979.
Lubiano, Wahneema. “The Postmodern Rag: Political Identity and the Vernacular in Song of Solomon.”
New Essays on Song of Solomon. Ed. Valerie Smith. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. 93–116.
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: New American Library, 1977.
Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale. Trans. Laurence Scott. 2 nd ed. Austin: U of Texas P,
1968.
Royster, Philip M. “Milkman’s Flying: The Scapegoat Transcended in Toni Morrison’s Song of
Solomon.” CLA Journal 24 (1981): 419–40.
Samuels, Wilfred. “Liminality and the Search for Self in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” Minority
Voices. 5.1–2 (1983).
Smith, Valerie. “The Quest for and Discovery of Identity in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.”
Southern Review 21 (1985): 721–32.
Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalistic Theory and the Foundations of Black America.
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West, Ray B. The Short Story in America: 1900–1950. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951.

Judylyn S. Ryan and Estella Conwill Májozo
JAZZ . . . ON “THE SITE OF MEMORY” 1
. . . on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you
journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct
the world that these remains imply.
—Toni Morrison 2
In Jazz, Toni Morrison identifies and explores the mechanisms by which
Black people have been able to re-make themselves again and again on the site
of exile—in the American South, in the American North, and elsewhere in the
“New World.” This essay examines the philosophy of form, the improvisation
of possibilities, the sounding of transformation, and finally, the re-sounding
of purpose, in Jazz. Specifically, it traces Morrison’s exploration of the philosophical
and epistemological potential of a diverse range of African diaspora
expressive arts, all informed by the principles of improvisation and “truth in
timbre” that perhaps achieve their greatest articulation in jazz. It demonstrates
that through this exploration Morrison reveals how these expressive arts have
functioned as a mode and institution of intervention and, therefore, as a blueprint
and resource for re-creating a whole self.
I. ART AS AGENCY: THE PHILOSOPHY OF FORM
Literature, accordingly, is the verbal organization of experience into
beautiful forms, but what is meant by “beautiful” and by “forms” is to a
significant degree dependent upon a people’s way of life, their needs,
their aspirations, their history—in short, their culture.
—Stephen Henderson 3
The artistic goals informing Toni Morrison’s fiction have been amply described
by her in numerous works. In “Memory, Creation, and Writing,”
Morrison explains:
If my work is faithfully to reflect the aesthetic tradition of Afro-American
culture, it must make conscious use of the characteristics of its art forms and
translate them into print: antiphony, the group nature of art, its functionality,
its improvisational nature, its relationship to audience performance, the critical
voice which upholds tradition and communal values and which also provides
occasion for an individual to transcend and/or defy group restriction.
(388–389)
In “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” Morrison identifies the function
that these aesthetic characteristics serve in advancing her goal to draft the
reader into the role of collaborator in the creation of the text. She explains,
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Jazz . . . On “The Site of Memory”
“to have the reader work with the author in the construction of the book—is
what’s important. What is left out is as important as what is there” (341). According
to Morrison, the goal and the aesthetic characteristics which assist it
are both native to African diaspora oral traditions which generate a performance
dynamic that assigns creative agency to the teller and the listener by
deliberately positioning the latter as participant, not outside observer. This
performance dynamic is commonly referred to as call-and-response:
Call-and-response structures, inherent in spirituals, the blues, sermons, folktales,
and so on, anticipate and require a response that may extend, challenge,
revise, clarify, or transform any previous utterance; and they outline a generative
sequence in which the response becomes the new call. (Ryan, Approaches
154)
In making demands on the listener, the performance dynamic prompts her/him
to become self-conscious about what and how s/he knows, and how s/he remakes
this knowledge. As a writer, Morrison’s objective is to re-construct this
opportunity in literature: “having at my disposal only the letters of the alphabet
and some punctuation, I have to provide the places and spaces so that the
reader can participate” (341). Building on the foundation established by African
oral traditions re-made in the American South, Morrison’s primary concern
is to transform what she calls the reader’s “traditional comfort” into a
mode of engagement whose endpoint is not simply the transfer of knowledge
but the disclosure of how the reader herself/himself knows, and how s/he decides
what knowledge is important, and for what purposes.
Morrison’s analysis identifies the philosophical concerns that have shaped
the design of African diaspora expressive arts. 4 While several scholarly studies
have named the structural and formal features of Black music, sermons,
orature, and literature, little has been said about the philosophical objectives
these structures were crafted to accomplish. 5 However, as both Morrison’s
non-fiction and fiction suggest, African diaspora expressive arts are defined
as much by formal/structural elements as they are by a philosophy of form.
The primary goal of African oral traditions is to teach the habit of exercising
interpretive agency. Several elements contribute to and encode this philosophy.
For example, call-and-response structures express the view that art has
agency and that the work of art can and must position the participant listener,
viewer, reader to claim or increase their own creative, interpretive, and epistemological
agency. In the context of oral traditions, the listener’s collaboration
with, and response to, the storyteller, musician, or preacher manifests in
both simultaneous recognition and expression, and in the subsequent proliferation
of variations on the first utterance, the call. Hence the phenomena of
collective authorship and of a cultural repertoire of identifiable variants of
popular sermons, folktales, blues, folksongs, etc. In the context of literature,
the reader’s collaboration with, and responses to, the text can take the form of
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musical, oral, literary (and cinematic) variations on the call, as well as scholarly
expression.
Since call-and-response structures encourage variations on the call and anticipate
the listener’s development into the role of caller, they provide an opportunity
to observe how the listener constructs his/her own knowing in the
design of the response that re-configures and extends the call. In addition to
facilitating the listener’s/reader’s progression from participant to collaborator,
call-and-response dynamics generate a mode of epistemology that interprets
words, gestures, tone, and timbre. Morrison first introduced this epistemology
in The Bluest Eye. There, Claudia, the co-narrator, confessed, “We do
not, cannot know the meanings of all their words, for we are nine and ten years
old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in
timbre” (16). This attention to gestures, tone, and timbre is not simply a compensatory
mechanism for discovering what is being said in words that are beyond
a child’s comprehension. Rather, Morrison suggests that since words do
not solely conduct the meaning in any communication event, an epistemology
equally attentive to words, gestures, tone, and timbre is more comprehensive
and effectual. 6 Indeed, for enslaved Africans living in exile, the need to develop
non-verbal modes of communication was particularly urgent since a reliance
on words alone would have jeopardized their survival. Claudia’s command
of the epistemology generated by these modes of communication qualifies
her for the role of accompanist to the narrator. In his “Preface” to God’s
Trombones (1927), James Weldon Johnson corroborates the efficacy of this
epistemology modelled on the principle of “truth in timbre” when he says of
sermons in Southern Black churches, “I have witnessed congregations moved
to ecstasy by the rhythmic intoning of sheer incoherencies” (5).
The primary locus for observing the philosophical objectives that give rise
to the formal and structural components of the oral tradition is the continental
African epic, re-made in the American South in the sermon tradition. While
there are no traditional African epics in the African American oral repertoire,
the sermon tradition retains and recreates prominent epic features, in its performance
dynamic, in its multigeneric composition, in its multifunctionality,
and in its improvisational aspect. 7 The African epic and the African American
sermon share a common commitment to re-making and re-mapping the existential
point-of-departure for the cultural/spiritual community. The African
epic equips the oral artist-cum-historian with a framework within which to
perform the ritualized re-making of a people’s history and identity with almost
limitless improvisations. In the African American sermon tradition, the Bible
provides the oral artist-cum-theologian with a framework for doing the same.
By acknowledging the ways in which the sermon enabled the antebellum Southern
Black preacher to fulfill one of the epic’s primary functions, Johnson identifies
the line of continuity between the two genres: “It was through him that
the people of diverse languages and customs who were brought here from
diverse parts of Africa and thrown into slavery were given their first sense of
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unity and solidarity” (2). In the performance dynamic of the sermon, the preacher
re-mapped an affirming collective identity, and thus enabled the collective to
simultaneously resound the passion of an outlawed self-love. 8 As such, the
antebellum African American sermon tradition which took root in the South
represents one of the first attempts to negotiate dispersion by improvising
possibilities from traditional African cultural forms.
While the Southern Black preacher held the social status of priest-cumpolitical
leader, and not of performer, the griot was nevertheless his oratory
model. First, the griot’s variation of prominent details within the epic established
a precedent for the preacher. The existence of several versions of any
given epic, as well as the fact that any detail could be varied, illustrate this
improvisational trend. (For example, in variants of the Sundiata epic the hero’s
gestation in the womb may last eighteen months or eight years; he may take his
first steps at age seven or seventeen.) Johnson observes a similar propensity
to improvise in the Southern preacher, noting that “A text served mainly as a
starting point and often had no relation to the development of the sermon” (4).
Second, the griot was the model for the preacher’s characteristically explicit
declaration of narrative subjectivity, of his own human interpretive agency
shaping the performance. In the version of that epic collected by D.T. Niane
and published as Sundiata: an epic of old Mali, for example, the griot repeatedly
uses self-identifying pronouns, and readily acknowledges his control of
the historical narrative. He opens with the declaration, “I am a griot. It is I,
Djeli Mamoudou Kouyaté, son of Bintou Kouyaté and Djeli Kedian Kouyaté,
master in the art of eloquence” (1). With each subsequent statement, he emphasizes
his own creative and interpretive agency:
[W]e teach to the vulgar just as much as we want to teach them, for it is we
who keep the keys to the twelve doors of Mali. . . . I teach kings the history
of their ancestors so that the lives of the ancients might serve them as an
example, for the world is old, but the future springs from the past. . . . Listen
to my word, you who want to know; by my mouth you will learn the history of
Mali. By my mouth you will get to know the story of the ancestor of great
Mali. (1)
Johnson identifies a similar tendency to emphasize human interpretive agency
on the part of the Southern preacher:
There is the story of one who after reading a rather cryptic passage took off
his spectacles, closed the Bible with a bang and by way of preface said,
“Brothers and sisters, this morning—I intend to explain the unexplainable—
find out the undefinable—ponder over the imponderable—and unscrew the
inscrutable.”(4–5)
It is important to note that this self-confessed narrative subjectivity and these
improvised variations do not undermine the epic’s historicity or the sermon’s
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truthfulness. Rather, they attest to a fundamental concern with underscoring
and promoting the exercise of human agency—creative, interpretive, and epistemological.
The fact that the African epic tradition does not assign history
and storytelling to competing epistemological categories, and that the African
American sermon tradition combines theology and storytelling in a single epistemological
category (by consciously saturating the text with highly imaginative
dramatic details) suggests that inventiveness is central to the operation of
an epistemology based on “truth in timbre,” not on facts. In “The Site of
Memory,” Morrison makes a similar observation in describing the craft that
she calls “literary archeology.” This observation points to the connections
among the African epic, the African American sermon, and Morrison’s craft:
Fiction, by definition, is distinct from fact. Presumably it’s the product of the
imagination—invention—and it claims the freedom to dispense with “what
really happened,” or where it really happened, or when it really happened,
and nothing in it needs to be publicly verifiable, although much in it can be
verified. . . . The work that I do frequently falls, in the minds of most people,
into the realm of fiction called fantastic, or mythic, or magical, or unbelievable.
I’m not comfortable with these labels. I consider that my single gravest
responsibility (in spite of that magic) is not to lie. . . Therefore the crucial
distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction
between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence,
but truth cannot. (112–113)
Morrison’s insistence that the epistemological function and value of her fiction
are not diminished by the incorporation of “fantastic,” “mythic,” or “magical”
details coincides with the philosophy embedded in the epic and sermon
traditions. Given Morrison’s commitment to extending the philosophical goals
governing the structure and form of African diaspora expressive arts, it is no
surprise then that Jazz is more improvisational, has more “places and spaces”
than any of Morrison’s previous works, and opens with a prominent declaration
of narrative subjectivity: “Sth. I know that woman.” More than words, or
tone, the novel directs the reader to measure “truth in timbre,” the character
of sound.
Logically, therefore, sound is the first character the reader encounters in
Jazz. The novel begins with “Sth,” the sound that announces the character, jazz,
who is the participant-narrator. Through the construction of this character’s
self-revealing presence and self-interrogating consciousness, Morrison remakes
the overt narrative subjectivity that typifies both the African epic and
the Southern Black sermon. As she describes herself, jazz is “curious, inventive
and well-informed” (137). Indeed the opening sound is in part an expression
of the extensiveness of her knowledge. Her success, she says, depends on
“making sure no one 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” (8). As the composition develops, however, she is forced
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to reveal the striving involved in the construction of her knowledge. Reflecting
on her version of Golden Gray’s demeanor on discovering his father’s
cabin, she confesses:
What was I thinking of? How could I have imagined him so poorly? Not
noticed the hurt that was not linked to the color of his skin, 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)
Acknowledging her failure to discern the new pattern into which Violet and
Joe were re-making their lives, she declares:
I thought I knew them and wasn’t worried that they didn’t really know about
me. Now it’s clear why they contradicted me at every turn: they knew me all
along. Out of the corner of their eyes they watched me. And when I was
feeling most invisible, being tight-lipped, silent and unobservable, they were
whispering about me to each other. They knew how little I could be counted
on; how poorly, how shabbily my know-it-all self covered helplessness. That
when I invented stories about them—and doing it seemed so fine—I was
completely in their hands, managed without mercy. I thought I’d hidden myself
so well as I watched them through windows and doors, took every opportunity
I had to follow them, to gossip about and fill in their lives, and all the
while they were watching me. . . . It never occurred to me that they were
thinking other thoughts, feeling other feelings, putting their lives together in
ways I never dreamed of. (220–221)
The positioning chosen by the narrator to ensure accuracy and authority—not
being seen, observed, and known—and her belief in its necessity are both countered
by jazz dynamics. As Langston Hughes explains in “Jazz as Communication,”
“it’s a circle, and you yourself are the dot in the middle” (492). The
narrator’s embarrassment at the discovery of her “helplessness,” and at having
Joe and Violet assist the work of invention, marks the trauma and transition
from being outside the circle to being the dot in the middle. At the end of the
novel, she celebrates the new way of knowing she—like Violet and Joe—finds
within the circle: “Something is missing here. Something rogue. Something
else you have to figure in before you can figure it out” (228).
In Jazz, Morrison achieves the philosophical goals of her tradition by denying
the narrator the authority, invisibility, and security of the outside observer,
and by prompting the reader to see through and beyond her vision.
II. DISPERSION AS NEGOTIATION:
THE IMPROVISATION OF POSSIBILITIES
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Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of
thinking. I think that the Negro in America is jazz. Everything he does—
the slang he uses, the way he talks, his jargon, the new inventive phrases
we make up to describe things—all that to me is jazz as much as the
music we play. Jazz is not just music. It’s the definition of the Afro-
American black.
—Nina Simone 9
Jazz depicts a series of negotiations—between dispersion and rootedness,
dislocation and relocation, trauma and triumph, South and North, village values
and urban attitudes, rupture and continuity, independence and interdependence,
silence and sounding—which define the experience of diaspora for
African Americans. As was true of the South to which enslaved Africans were
“commercially deported,” 10 the City—Harlem—is initially a site of exile. What
defines this as a site of exile is the psychological condition of the arrivants—
their longing for a resting place, their need to release painful memories, and,
most importantly, their lack of self recognition. Like their ancestors dispersed
by the forces of Slavery, Violet, Joe, Alice Manfred, “the ones who had escaped
from Springfield Ohio, Springfield Indiana, Greensburg Indiana,
Wilmington Delaware, New Orleans Louisiana, after raving Whites had foamed
all over the lanes and yards of home” (33), “the droves and droves of colored
people flocking to paychecks and streets full of themselves” (58), the entire
“wave of black people running from want and violence” (33), are part of a
continuing cycle of dispersion that began—but did not end!—with the Middle
Passage.
Beginning with the trans-Atlantic slave trade that “commercially deported”
millions of Africans from central, west, and south-western Africa to Europe,
the Americas, and the Caribbean, this cycle of dispersion includes the flight of
refugees via the underground railroad to points “North,” the early nineteenth
century deportation of free African Americans to Liberia under the aegis of
the American Colonization Society; the “Scramble for Africa” that distributed
African peoples and lands among European colonizers and fragmented cultural
nationalities among different imperialist administrations; the Great Migration
in the post-Reconstruction era that took hundreds of thousands of Africans
from Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, the Carolinas and elsewhere,
north and west to Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kansas and
Oklahoma; the internal migration of Africans among the various Caribbean
countries in the post-Emancipation period, and to Panama and Costa Rica to
work on the construction of the Canal and in the U.S. American-owned fruitexporting
industries; twentieth-century migrations to European and North
American metropolises—Paris, London, Lisbon, New York, Miami, Toronto—
from the Caribbean, the Americas and Africa; and the continuing migrations
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from the village to the city, and from the city to the suburbs in pursuit of an
ever more hazardous “ascent.” 11
The American South functions as “home” for the men and women in the City
in the 1920s. The history of its evolution from a site of exile underscores the
improvisations being generated in the novel. The patterns of improvisation
that developed in the antebellum South, the first site of exile, constitute a
motif of transformation that served as a blueprint for subsequent re-constructions
of “home” in the diaspora. These improvisations encompassed religion,
ethics, folklore, music, dance, games, food, language, naming practices, etc.
The development of African diaspora religions—especially Afro-Christianity—provides
one of the clearest examples of the pattern of improvisation
underlying the many transformations which took place on the first site of exile.
In Slave Religion, Albert Raboteau confirms that “African beliefs and customs
persisted and were transmitted by slaves to their descendants. Shaped
and modified by a new environment, elements of African folklore, music, language,
and religion were transplanted in the New World by the African diaspora”
(4). Ethicist Peter Paris explains, in The Spirituality of African Peoples,
that:
Due to the circumstances of their departure from Africa, Africans had no
choice but to leave their cultural artifacts on the continent. Yet they did not
arrive on these shores as a tabula rasa. Rather, different groups brought
their respective cosmological understandings with them and gradually shaped
a new world of spiritual and moral meaning by appropriating and interpreting
various elements in their new environment in accord with their African
cosmologies. (35)
Paris emphasizes the improvisational impulse behind the development of new
religious systems noting that “The preservation of their spirituality under the
conditions of slavery was an astounding accomplishment, due principally to
their creative genius in making the Euro-American cultural forms and practices
serve as vehicles for the transmission of African cultural elements” (35).
Looking specifically at patterns of improvisation among African Americans in
the South Carolina Sea Islands, historian Margaret Washington Creel corroborates
Paris’s analysis noting that they,
. . . converted Christianity to their African world view, using the new religion
to justify combating objective forces, to collectively perpetuate communityculture,
and as an ideology of freedom. Thus it was less a case of Christianity
instilling a sense of resignation because of beliefs in future rewards than of
an African philosophical tradition being asserted in the slave quarters. (Creel
74)
Two factors influenced the pattern of improvisation informing the preservation
of continental African concepts in the antebellum South. First, as
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Lawrence Levine notes, it coincided with the ideological objectives of White
enslavers:
Whites had an unconscious vested interest in seeing their slaves maintain
much of their cultural distinctiveness, since it was far more difficult to justify
the enslavement of a kindred folk than of a people whose behavior patterns
were sufficiently different to allow one to apply such commonly used epithets
as “primitive,” “barbaric,” “childlike.”(100)
Second, it served the ideological objectives of enslaved Africans. They, however,
were not eager to reveal the cultural autonomy of their lives “within the
veil.” 12
In the absence of the living environments of memory on the continent—
what Pierre Nora calls “milieux de mémoire”— enslaved Africans used the
knowledge they brought into exile to psychologically journey to the “site of
memory,” and improvise on it to re-construct a home in the American South. 13
In the essay from which the term is borrowed, Morrison describes the “site of
memory” as a tool, mechanism, and mode of analysis employed in her craft,
“literary archeology.” 14 Before this literary deployment, the “site of memory,”
functioned as a vehicle for transforming the site of exile. Successfully improvising
on the “remains” from their ancestral homes, enslaved Africans were
able to re-make themselves on the site of exile, transforming the antebellum
South into what city dwellers would later call “down home.” The configuration
of diaspora communities maps a progressive expansion in which sites of exile
have been transformed into the new milieux de mémoire, the living, interactive
environments of memory. The relationships between “home in Africa” and
the several “homes in the diaspora” conform to the pattern of call-and-response
dynamics in which the response necessarily varies the original call/
home, and itself becomes the new call/home. A call-and-response principle
and pattern of transformation propelled the many negotiations which collectively
converted the site of exile into the new milieu de mémoire. Because of
this ubiquitous pattern, Vévé Clark insists that the analysis of African diaspora
cultures must move beyond the expectation of stasis inherent in the quest for
“survivals,” toward an expectation and exploration of variations and transformations.
15
In Jazz, the American South is the milieu de mémoire newly jeopardized by
the racist backlash of the post-Reconstruction era, and whose “remains” survivors
in the North must access through memory in order to re-create themselves
in the City. While the standard narrative of the 1920s depicts Black
people—painters, writers, musicians—thriving under the liberal patronage of
Whites in the “Roaring Twenties,” the “Harlem Renaissance Era,” in Jazz,
Morrison explores the twin aspect of the “Jazz Age,” the “Jim Crow Age.”
Acutely aware of the many lacunae in the national historical consciousness,
Morrison reminded us, in Beloved, that the Age of Enlightenment had a “twin,
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born at the same time, the Age of Scientific Racism.” 16 Twinning the lenses
again in Jazz, she focuses on both the art that accompanied the living, and the
living that required the art. In so doing, Morrison reveals how African diaspora
expressive arts conferred the agency necessary for gaining access to the “site
of memory,” and thereby, the transformation of the City into a new milieu de
mémoire, “Harlem, USA.”
The background to the novel is saturated with details about the violence
prompting a new exile from the South to the City in the second phase of dispersion.
Like the violence of slavery, the violence of the post-Reconstruction
period was orchestrated, and no less intense. This violence created an unspoken
rage and unacknowledged sorrow that knocked the survivors down and out.
In Jazz, the Black people flocking into the City in the 1870s through the 1920s
have lost their bearing. By and large, they are emotionally depleted by the
traumas which triggered their involuntary exile. Their initial instinct as survivors
is to bury the past in order to build a new future. Consequently, they do
not talk about the loss of parents, spouses, siblings, dolls, home, dignity that
preceded their flight. More than anything else, the characters are driven by the
need to find a resting place in which to touch, name, express the complex
emotions within. While the narrator comments on the characters’ longing for
“rest,” she concludes that it would exacerbate rather than resolve the crisis:
This notion of rest, it’s attractive to her, but I don’t think she would like it.
They are all like that, these women. Waiting for the ease, the space that need
not be filled with anything other than the drift of their own thoughts. But they
wouldn’t like it. . . . because what is waiting for them, in a suddenly idle
moment, is the seep of rage. . . . Or else, into a beat of time, and sideways
under their breasts, slips a sorrow they don’t know where from. (16)
Instead of a state of “rest,” the novel depicts the characters searching for—
and sometimes finding—a place of rest in which to cope with “the seep of
rage . . . and . . . sorrow.” Like the “site of memory,” this “resting place”
functions as a vehicle for transforming trauma into triumph, silence into sound.
The most prominent “resting place” depicted in Jazz is music. Like their
ancestors who constructed a mode of analysis and articulation first, in the
spirituals, and later, in the blues, survivors in the City have created a “resting
place” in jazz. Describing the “tide of cold black faces” marching down Fifth
Avenue following the Chicago riots in which hundreds of Black people were
killed, the narrator states “what they meant to say but did not trust themselves
to say the drums said for them, and what they had seen with their own eyes and
through the eyes of others the drums described to a T” (54). 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). For Alice Manfred, the drums help to put in focus the con-
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nection between her own grief and that of the people with “frozen black faces.”
While she is able to decipher in the drums an articulation of “fellowship, discipline
and transcendence” (60), she is unable—and perhaps unwilling—to
interpret the full complexity of its message. Deciphering the music’s full
message would require her to confront the one emotion to which she feels
unentitled—anger. Her suppression of this emotion leads to a futile struggle
to keep “the Fifth Avenue drums separate from the belt-buckle tunes vibrating
from pianos and spinning on every Victrola”:
She knew from sermons and editorials that it wasn’t real music—just colored
folks’ stuff: harmful, certainly; embarrassing, of course; but not real, not serious.
Yet Alice Manfred swore she heard a complicated anger in it; something
hostile that disguised itself as flourish and roaring seduction. But the
part she hated most was its appetite. Its longing for the bash, the slit; a kind of
careless hunger for a fight or a red ruby stickpin for a tie—either would do.
It faked happiness, faked welcome, but it did not make her feel generous, this
juke joint, barrel hooch, tonk house, music. It 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. Better to close
the windows and the shutters, sweat in the summer heat of a silent Clifton
Place apartment than to risk a broken window or a yelping that might not
know where or how to stop. (59)
Unwilling to attend to the other statements in the music, Alice Manfred is
unable to move beyond the crisis in her own life and in Dorcas’s life; she is
unable as well to help Dorcas to negotiate the destructive and creative potentials
in this new environment. Violet’s appearance in her life is a symbolic
entry of that mediational and liberating capacity of the music. The narrator
notes that “When Violet came to visit (and Alice never knew when that might
be) something opened up” (83).
The thing was how Alice felt and talked in her company. Not like she did with
other people. With Violent she was impolite. Sudden. Frugal. No apology or
courtesy seemed required or necessary between them. But something else
was—clarity, perhaps. The kind of clarity crazy people demand from the notcrazy.
(83)
Their conversations function as a “site of memory,” a resting place in which
the two women recall and re-make an enabling identity and purpose. In its
depiction of Violet’s and Alice’s journeying to the “site of memory,” the novel
suggests that the re-construction of home, identity, and purpose are complementary
acts.
In addition to the crisis of homelessness, this new phase of dispersion also
produces the crisis of parentlessness exposed by Dorcas’s death. The retro-
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spective movement of the narrative shows that the immediate “absence” of
missing parents has a considerable impact on this flock of orphans. These
characters have lost mother and father to the tide of racist violence rising with
the abandonment of Reconstruction in the 1870s. Violet loses first her father,
then her mother to the backlash that followed. Her father “had been mixed in
and up with the Readjuster Party, and when a verbal urging from landowners
had not worked, a physical one did the trick and he was persuaded to transfer
hisself someplace, anyplace, else” (99–100). Crushed by the burden of caring
singlehandedly for their five children, her mother, Rose Dear, suffers a mental
breakdown, and eventually commits suicide. In 1888, after her daughter’s breakdown,
the grandmother, True Belle, returns to care for the grandchildren and
fills their heads with stories of the boy, Golden Gray, whose unmarried and
pregnant White mother she had accompanied to Baltimore as a “slave” thirtythree
years earlier. Like Violet, Joe is also an orphan. Told that his parents
“disappeared without a trace” (124), he gives himself the last name “Trace”
because “The way I heard it I understood her to mean the ‘trace’ they disappeared
without was me” (124). A generation younger than Violet and Joe, Dorcas
lost her parents in the Chicago riots of 1917: “Both of her parents died in a
very bad way and she saw them after they died and before the funeral men fixed
them up” (200). Deeply traumatized by her parents’ deaths, “She went to two
funerals in five days, and never said a word” (57). Although Felice’s parents
are both alive, the absence occasioned by their live-in jobs in Tuxedo Junction
leaves her feeling just as orphaned. By her own reckoning, their visits home on
days off add up, annually, to “Thirty-four days. I’m seventeen now and that
works out to less than six hundred days. Less than two years out of seventeen”
(200). Given the prevalence of fatherlessness and motherlessness, the novel
asks, in the words of Violet, “Where the grown people? Is it us?” (110).
The “grown people” capable of responding to the characters’ need for direction
and recognition are the people whom Morrison calls “ancestors.” Extending
its theological usage in African religion/culture to designate the community
of deceased elders who continue to fulfill sustaining roles in the lives of
their descendants, Morrison uses the term “ancestors” to designate living elders
with a similar responsibility and capacity. In “City Limits, Village Values:
Concepts of Neighborhoods in Black Fiction,” Morrison describes them as
“advising, benevolent, protective, wise” (39). In that essay, Morrison observes
that “The worst thing that can happen in a city is that the ancestor becomes
merely a parent or an adult and is thereby seen as a betrayer—one who had
abandoned his traditional role of advisor with a strong connection to the past”
(40). Dorcas’s death is a direct result of such “betrayal.” Indeed, Dorcas is
implicated in several instances of betrayal. Alice Manfred’s reliance on the
newspaper for “information,” and her decision to imprison rather than arm
Dorcas. Joe’s attempt to use her to compensate for the “inside nothing he
traveled with” since experiencing his mother’s rejection. Violet’s refusal to
recognize in her rival a “mishandled child.” Their actions demonstrate that the
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adults in the novel all lack the knowledge of how to respond to their own need,
a knowledge that, the novel suggests, comes from knowing “what the old folks
did to keep on going” (137). The narrator says—and his actions indicate—that
Joe didn’t know. Neither do Violet and Alice Manfred. Having buried the remains,
and wiped out the traces—the resonating memories of True Belle, Hunters
Hunter, and other ancestors—they are unable to recall and reclaim this
sustaining capacity, including the capacity to make wholesome choices on their
own behalf.
The various betrayals of Dorcas suggest that the erasure of memory impairs
the process of improvisation. This is most convincingly demonstrated by Alice
Manfred’s parenting. Reflecting on her own upbringing and her parents’ “heated
control,” Alice recalls that she “swore she wouldn’t, but she did, pass it on. She
passed it on to her baby sister’s only child” (77). Without the “remains” available
to them through the “site of memory,” these adults all strike the wrong
“key” in their interactions with Dorcas. And while the process of improvisation
clearly depends on the deployment of the mechanism of memory, searching
for the right “note” requires a willingness to embrace the enabling parts
and to dispose of the disabling parts of the uncovered “remains.” Consequently,
when Violet recalls and examines the memories of her grandmother’s parenting,
her rejection of the parts connected to the transference of the image of whiteness
(via the stories of Golden Gray) which had destabilized her self-image is
as vital as her recollection of True Belle’s laughter (and the knowledge of its
complexity and its transformative capacity). As she explains to Felice,
“Now I want to be the woman my mother didn’t stay around long enough to
see. That one. The one she would have liked and the one I used to like
before. . . . My grandmother fed me stories about a little blond child. He was
a boy, but I thought of him as a girl sometimes, as a brother sometimes,
sometimes as a boyfriend. He lived inside my mind. Quiet as a mole. But I
didn’t know it till I got here. The two of us. Had to get rid of it.” (208)
By confronting their own (experience of) betrayal, Violet and Alice are able
to reclaim their creative potential. Violet’s ability to formulate this critical
question indicates an already present recognition of missing ancestors and of
their own capacity and responsibility for attaining that role and demeanor:
“Where the grown people? Is it us?” (110). Their recovery marks the beginning
of transformations that extend outward to include Joe, Felice, and others.
This pattern of transformation conforms to call-and-response dynamics in
which the lead singer or speaker prompts a collective articulation that echoes
and extends the direction of the call. So that, after examining the “remains” of
her own childhood, Violet “calls” Joe to do the same. The narrator tells us that
“Meaning to or not meaning to, she got him to go through it again . . .” (119).
For Joe, as for Violet and Alice, transformation requires journeying to the
“site of memory,” and going through it again. This transformation prepares
them for the responsibility of parenting Felice, a resurrected Dorcas.
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Observing the arrival of “another true-as-life Dorcas, four marcelled waves
and all,” the narrator erroneously predicts “What turned out different was who
shot whom” (6). As she later explains, “I saw the three of them, Felice, Joe and
Violet, and they looked to me like a mirror image of Dorcas, Joe and Violet”
(221). This threesome constructs a different dynamic because Violet and Joe
have consciously reclaimed the ancestor role with the responsibility and capacity
for being “advising, benevolent, protective, wise.” The improvised outcome
of them nurturing Felice, and Felice enlivening them, confirms that the
three have successfully negotiated another phase of dispersion by reclaiming
the capacity for “putting their lives together in ways . . . never dreamed of”
(221).
III. MUSIC AS NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE: THE SOUNDING OF
TRANSFORMATION
You can start anywhere—Jazz as Communication—since it’s a circle,
and you yourself are the dot in the middle. You, me. For example, I’ll
start with the Blues. . . . Now, to wind it all up, with you in the middle—
jazz is only what you yourself get out of it.
—Langston Hughes 17
Morrison’s Jazz strikes a liberation chord. This chord contains retentions
of, and the basis for, three musical motifs: the spirituals, which express the
longing for, and assurance of, a home, a resting place in the wilderness; the
blues, which wail through pain and turmoil to a release; and jazz, which echoes
familiar themes toward a new re-cognition. In titling the work Jazz, however,
Morrison acknowledges that it deliberately follows a jazz motif which, because
it is part of a generative sequence, also contains elements of the blues
and of the spirituals. The spirituals are referenced in Joe’s “deepdown, spooky”
love, a description which defines spirit as both a “deepdown,” intrinsic attribute,
and as a “spooky,” otherworldly aspect. The presence of the blues,
what Ralph Ellison calls its “tragi-comic lyricism,” is signaled in the narrator’s
observation that Joe’s love for Dorcas “made him so sad and happy he shot her
just to keep the feeling going” (3). Like Violet/Violent, the blues was thrown
“to the floor and out of the church” (3). But jazz is the musical motif at the
heart of the first paragraph. It informs the tone, timbre, and technique of the
narrative. The references to birds, here and throughout the novel, symbolize
that motif. And contrary to Alice Manfred’s fear that this music will unleash “a
yelping that might not know where or how to stop” (59), jazz/Jazz has its own
internal duration, direction, and destination.
The theme of exile/homelessness corresponds with the spirituals in its
emphasis on the need for a home, a resting place in the wilderness. The theme
of transcendence, of moving through pain and longing to a release, matches
the blues impulse that propels the novel in its depiction of human relation-
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ships, including the relationship between individuals and their past selves. It is
the narrative technique, however, that most deeply expresses a jazz motif. The
narrative structure conforms to a jazz ensemble of diverse voices/instruments
doing solo variations on the dominant theme(s): orphanhood and exile. Logically,
therefore, the novel’s first paragraph gives away (introduces) the plot,
which is subsequently retold, but amplified and varied in the re-telling. And
like the notes of a jazz composition which create spaces in their becoming,
every utterance is full of potential. For example, although the novel reveals
that Joe’s mother, Wild, and Golden Gray had some sort of relationship, that
story is just another space created in the development of the novel.
The key to understanding Morrison’s implementation of jazz techniques in
this novel lies in the speaking potential of musical instruments. African cultures
readily acknowledge this potential since percussive instruments can
“speak” tonal languages, as exemplified by the talking drums. In a parallel vein,
African American expressive traditions similarly abridge the gap between
musical instruments and human voices. Musical instruments are seen less as
accompaniments and more as autonomous voices, and human voices as instruments.
The evolution of jazz as a musical form in which even the human voice—
vis-à-vis Ella Fitzgerald—can articulate without words exemplifies this concept.
In fact, jazz legend John Coltrane describes his signature composition,
“A Love Supreme,” as “a musical narration.” If jazz instruments do indeed narrate
then they evoke and depend on a hearing or interpretive capacity on the
part of the listener that is not informed by words, but by timbre. In describing
the expressive range of the “old-time Negro preacher,” Johnson observed that,
he brought into play the full gamut of his wonderful voice, a voice—what
shall I say?—not of an organ or a trumpet, but rather of a trombone, the
instrument possessing above all others the power to express the wide and
varied range of emotions encompassed by the human voice. (7–8)
Like the preacher, the musician and literary artist, strive to extend their instruments
to sound a broad range of emotions.
Jazz narrates a resurrection ritual of people called to make a home on the
site of exile, called to lift themselves from the pain of loss and longing, and
called to know themselves again differently. The novel riffs on and reworks
the New Testament narrative of a young woman, Dorcas, an early Christian and
a seamstress, who dies suddenly and is resurrected by the apostle, Peter. 18 As
in Beloved where she depicts a Black female Christ-figure, Baby Suggs, holy,
in Jazz, Morrison assigns inspiriting agency to another Black woman, Violet,
the primary instrument through whom the novel resurrects Dorcas. The opening
description of the dead girl in the casket whose face Violet cuts symbolizes
and highlights the many types of remains surviving through the flight from
home, and which must be resurrected in order to transform the site of exile.
On Violet’s part, the decision to resurrect Dorcas is a last-ditched effort to
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cope with the crisis precipitated by the news of the murder and the love affair.
Violet’s response to the crisis exemplifies the pattern of improvisation in the
novel. Only partially successful in her effort to avenge herself by stabbing the
dead girl’s corpse, she decides to “punish Joe by getting herself a boyfriend”
(4). Lacking the interest to sustain this relationship, she decides next “to fall
back in love with her husband” (5). When this too fails, “she decided to love—
well, find out about—the eighteen-year-old” (5). Her “careful investigations”
take her to the legally licensed beauticians Dorcas had frequented, the elementary
and middle schools she had attended, and eventually to conversations with
Dorcas’s aunt, Alice Manfred. Although she goes looking for information about
Dorcas, she confesses her own underlying need for a “home,” a resting place
in telling Alice Manfred, “I had to sit down somewhere. I thought I could do it
here” (82). Through her resurrection of Dorcas, Violet re-makes a home, releases
her pain, and re-claims her own creative capacity. In tracing these three
movements, she adds a fourth by reviving a livable future for herself, Alice
Manfred, her husband, Joe, Dorcas’s friend, Felice, and others.
In addition to incorporating elements of the spirituals, the blues, and jazz,
the narrative technique in Jazz makes extensive use of sampling. Morrison
introduces the trope of sampling in a jazz-like signification on the name “Trace”
which riffs on and recalls the remains from which a new whole must be reconstructed,
and on Joe’s profession as cosmetics salesman, equipped with a sample
case from which the women select. As a call-and-response technique, sampling
involves the conscious repetition of the theme, lyrics, beat or any other
identifiable segment of a specific prior work in a new composition. Morrison’s
sampling of a diverse selection of African diaspora expressive forms—including
the slave narratives, photographs, and Black musical forms—invigorates
the motifs of resurrection and reconstruction at the heart of the novel. It
also underscores the novel’s cultural genealogy. Jazz samples James
VanDerZee’s photograph, in The Harlem Book of the Dead, of a young girl
lying in a casket and the poem by Owen Dodson that accompanies it. It also
samples The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Nina Simone’s “Four Women,” and
John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” 19
In the “Foreword” to the posthumously published collection of James
VanDerZee’s photographs, The Harlem Book of the Dead, Morrison writes
that the subjects—one of whom is the inspiration for Dorcas—are “So living,
so ‘undead,’ that the prestigious writer, Owen Dodson, is stirred to poetry in
which life trembles in every metaphor.” Looking specifically at the poem that
accompanies the photo of a teenage girl lying in a casket, it is easy to recognize
the “life trembling” in it. Contrary to the assumption implicit in the poem’s
question “Who deathed you who,” (52), the subject announces her continuing
lifefulness, “I’m safe in here, Tootsie” (52). In this poem, Dodson articulates
the concept derived from the text which The Harlem Book of the Dead invokes—The
Egyptian Book of the Dead. This ancient text contains the funerary
rites and rituals developed and performed by Egyptians of antiquity in accor-
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dance with their understanding of a life beyond the flesh. Among other things,
the book describes the ritual cutting of the corpse which must be performed in
order to release and begin the new life. This practice confirms the motif of
resurrection developing in Jazz, and illuminates the narrative significance of
Violet’s cutting of Dorcas’s remains. According to the narrator, the knife
“bounced off, making a little dent under her earlobe, like a fold in the skin that
was hardly a disfigurement at all” (91). For Alice Manfred, the cutting “ruined
the service, changed the whole point and meaning of it” (75). In terms of the
narrative design, however, this event is the symbolic act that releases a new
life, changes the narrative direction and meaning from burial toward resurrection.
This death-as-resurrection accords with the portrait of Dorcas that emerges
from the text; her life, we learn, had been a living-death.
In addition to its sampling of the two texts, Jazz samples two musical works,
Nina Simone’s 1969 ballad “Four Women,” and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”
Coltrane’s description of his instrumental work as a “musical narration,”
reminds us that, in jazz, narration need not rely on words. Consequently,
an analysis of the sampling dynamic between Morrison’s novel and the two
musical works must consider structural and thematic, as well as lyrical, elements.
For, more than words, the novel samples the structure and consciousness
expressed in the lyrics of Simone’s “Four Women.” Through this technique,
Morrison accentuates the predicament and potential of the women in
Jazz. In the song, each of the “Four Women” describes her physical features,
psychological disposition, and then names herself. There’s the first woman,
whose “back is strong; strong enough to take the pain inflicted again and again.”
Her name is Aunt Sarah. The second woman reveals that her rich White father
“forced my mother one night.” Double-conscious, she declares, “Between two
worlds do I belong.” Her name is Saphronia. The third woman is the lover
whose dark-skinned beauty is self-defining. Her name is Sweet Thing. Then,
there’s the fourth woman whose “manner is tough.” She attributes her cleareyed
disposition to an informed historical consciousness: “I’m awfully bitter
these days because my parents were slaves.” Her name is . . . Peaches. The
progression of the “Four Women” from resilience, to the conflict of doubleconsciousness,
to a sexualized self-definition, to a full historical consciousness
in Simone’s work reflects the stages of character development and consciousness
for each of Morrison’s four women. Violet isn’t simply two-dimensional—Violet
and Violent. She is “Four Women.” She is the woman-child
whose resilience enables her to survive “the pain inflicted again and again” by
the loss of home, father, and mother, and who learns from this “The important
thing, the biggest thing . . . was to never never have children. Whatever happened,
no small dark foot would rest on another while a hungry mouth said,
Mama?” (102). She is also the woman whose double-consciousness appears
in her double-eyed view of Dorcas as both the “scheming bitch,” “the woman
who took the man,” and “the daughter who fled her womb,” “mama’s dumpling
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girl,” who, “had she braved mammymade poisons and mammy’s urgent fists,
she could have had the best-dressed hair in the City” (109). She is the rejected
lover determined first, to “punish” Joe, then, to become who “he’d rather me
be” (82). And she is the woman who sisters Alice through the months of grief
and anger, the woman who reclaims her historical consciousness, and who
“got [Joe] to go through it again” (119), assisting him in doing the same.
“Four Women” also shapes Alice Manfred’s character. She is the resilient
woman who, having been raised under her parents’ “heated control,” “swore
she wouldn’t pass it on, but did . . . passed it on to her baby sister’s only child
. . . and made Dorcas her own prisoner of war” (77). She is the dignified
seamstress whose double-consciousness manifests in her disdain of jazz, “colored
folks’ stuff,” and in her simultaneous recognition of the “complicated
anger” (59) within it. She is the rejected lover, enraged by her husband’s other
choice, whose “favorite” revenge,
the dream that plumped her pillow at night, was seeing herself mount a horse,
then ride it and find the woman alone on a road and gallop till she ran her
down under her four iron hooves; then back again, and again until there was
nothing left but tormented dirt signaling where the hussy had been. (86)
She is also the woman whose historical consciousness enables her to recognize
“a real thing”—”You got anything left to you to love, anything at all, do it”
(112)—and who reclaims the creative capacity that allows her return to Springfield
to “the dedicated care of an old friend,” to provide “cheerful company
and the necessary things for the night” (11, 222).
Dorcas, too, is “Four Women.” She is the resilient woman-child who survives
the pain of losing both parents, who “went to two funerals in five days,
and never said a word” (57). She is the woman caught between the hunger for a
mother’s/father’s love and a lover’s touch. She is the lover whose orphan-grief
surfaces in her relationship with Joe, and who “in her sixteenth year . . . stood
in her body and offered it to either of the brothers for a dance” (64). “Dorcas
[had] been acknowledged, appraised and dismissed in the time it takes for a
needle to finds its opening groove” (67). And she is the woman whose “tough
manner” and historical consciousness appear in her closing testimony, “I don’t
know who is that woman singing but I know the words by heart” (193).
Felice’s development is also modeled after “Four Women.” She is the womanchild
whose resilience enables her to survive the loneliness caused by her
parents’ absence. Her double-consciousness appears in her confusion over the
ring given to her by her mother: “I love it, but there’s a trick in it, and I have to
agree to the trick to say it’s mine. . . . A present taken from whitefolks, given to
me when I was too young to say No thank you” (211). She is the self-possessed
lover who is “nobody’s alibi or hammer or toy” (222). Her newly developed
historical consciousness gives her the resolve to tell her mother “I
know about it, and that it’s what she did, not the ring, that I really love” (215).
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As it does with Simone’s “Four Women,” Jazz samples the pattern, tone and
timbre of Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” so as to illuminate the narrative progression
toward transformation. The composition is in four parts titled Acknowledgment,
Resolution, Pursuance, and Psalm. These four parts parallel
the four stages of plot development in the slave narrative, which Morrison and
others have identified as the “the print origins of black literature (as distinguished
from oral origins).” 20 As defined by Frances Smith Foster, these four
stages are the recognition of one’s condition, the determination to be free,
escape/flight, and the attainment of a new condition. 21 Superimposing Coltrane’s
four parts onto Morrison’s Jazz, Part 1, Acknowledgment, would be the novel’s
opening declaration of the crisis in Violet’s and Joe’s lives, the lenses through
which the novel provides a more comprehensive view of the collective crisis
of motherlessness/fatherlessness and homelessness/homesickness—orphanhood
and exile. For the pair, the conviction that Joe’s constant crying “is as bad
as jail” (4) is an acknowledgment of the crisis confronting them. Part 2, the
Resolution, begins with Violet’s determination to respond to this crisis. The
narrator notes that although Violet’s name came up “at the January meeting of
the Salem Women’s Club as someone needing assistance,” “The Club mobilized
itself to come to the burnt-out family’s aid and left Violet to figure out
on her own what the matter was and how to fix it” (4). Part 3, Pursuance, takes
up the longest part of the novel—as it does in Coltrane’s composition. It begins
with and extends through the months of conversation with Alice Manfred.
We learn that “for a long time she pestered the girl’s aunt, a dignified lady who
did fine work off and on in the garment district, until the aunt broke down and
began to look forward to Violet’s visits” for what the narrator misleadingly
calls “a chat about youth and misbehavior” (6). Part 4, Psalm, begins a new
season of re-making: “Joe found work at Paydirt, a speakeasy night job that
lets him see the City do its unbelievable sky and run around with Violet in
afternoon daylight” (222).
To name the four parts of this composition strictly in relation to Violet’s
transformation is to identify only one instrument. For each of the characters
in the ensemble—Violet, Joe, Alice, Dorcas, Felice, the participant-narrator,
jazz herself—(and for the ensemble as a whole), Acknowledgment, Resolution,
Pursuance, and Psalm have distinct sounds. The recognition of crisis she
had fought to deny hearing in the music engulfs Alice Manfred with the death
of her niece: “Idle and withdrawn in her grief and shame, she whittled away the
days making lace for nothing, reading her newspapers, tossing them on the
floor, picking them up again. She read them differently now” (75). Her encounter
with Violet gives her the resolution to confront what the narrator calls
her “war thoughts.” In Violet’s company, she pursues these thoughts to a point
of self-discovery. The clarity demanded of her in her conversations with Violet
gradually extends beyond these conversations to illuminate her private
meditations. For example, the narrator mentions that “Every week since Dorcas’
death, during the whole of January and February, a paper laid bare the bones of
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some broken woman” (74). By March, however, the text calls attention to Alice’s
new way of reading/knowing, one that is less concerned with facts and more
with truth in timbre:
Defenseless as ducks, she thought. Or were they? Read carefully the
news accounts revealed that most of these women, subdued and broken, had
not been defenseless. Or, like Dorcas, easy prey. All over the country, black
women were armed.
Natural prey? Easy pickings? “I don’t think so.” Aloud she said it. “I
don’t think so. . . .
Black women were armed; black women were dangerous and the
less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose.
Who were the unarmed one? Those who found protection in church
and the judging, angry God whose wrath in their behalf was too terrible to
bear contemplation. . . .
Who else were the unarmed ones? The ones who thought they did not
need folded blades, packets of lye, shards of glass taped to their hands. Those
who bought houses and hoarded money as protection and the means to purchase
it. Those attached to armed men. Those who did not carry pistols
because they became pistols; did not carry switchblades because they were
switchblades cutting through gatherings, shooting down statutes and pointing
out the blood and abused flesh. Those who swelled their little unarmed strength
into the reckoning one of leagues, clubs, societies, sisterhoods designed to
hold or withhold, move or stay put, make a way, solicit, comfort or ease. Bail
out, dress the dead, pay the rent, find new rooms, start a school, storm an
office, take up collections, rout the block and keep their eyes on all the children.
Any other kind of unarmed black woman in 1926 was silent or crazy or
dead. (77–78)
Her new ability to wrest truth out of facts prevents her from dismissing Violet
as merely “embarrassing,” “unappealing,” “dangerous.” Instead, the narrator
tells us, “Alice waited this time, in the month of March, for the woman with
the knife. . . . But Alice was not frightened of her now as she had been in
January and as she was in February, the first time she let her in” (79). As her
ability to interpret her own and other people’s actions increases, Alice begins
to map a more complex course for herself and for Violet. Her expanded interpretive
capacity increases her moral and creative capacity. She takes responsibility
for having “mishandled” Dorcas, and musters the courage to “move away
from the tree-lined street back to Springfield” (222).
Through their conversations and inner reflections Alice and Violet come to
a clear recognition of the what Morrison calls the “buried stimuli” in their
childhood and youth that generated the present configuration of their lives. Of
their relationship, the narrator says, “By this time, the women had become so
easy with each other talk wasn’t always necessary. Alice ironed and Violet
watched. From time to time one murmured something—to herself or to the
other” (112).
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The jazz pattern of solo and ensemble variation resonates in the intersecting
notes of transformation playing throughout the novel. Morrison uses the language
of women’s domestic tasks—sewing, ironing, hairdressing—to announce
this call-and-response pattern of assistance. Violet and Alice form a symbolic
Dorcas Society committed to the task of restoring and re-clothing their own
wounded psyches. While Violet inspires and supports Alice’s self-interrogation
and self-discovery, the reciprocal dimension of the exchange between the
two women is suggested by the references to Alice’s mending of Violet’s torn
sleeve and coat lining. “Her stitches,” the narrator comments, “were invisible
to the eye” (111). At the end of the novel, when Felice’s appearance gives Joe
and Violet the opportunity to re-make themselves as parents, the novel emphasizes
the reciprocal dimension of this re-making when Violet offers, “I want to
do your hair for you anyway. Free. Your ends need clipping” (214). Our final
glimpse of Felice indicates that she has become very much like Violet,
“nobody’s alibi or hammer or toy” (222).
In addition to underscoring this reciprocal pattern of assistance, Morrison
points to the world of thought that winds through women’s tasks in acknowledging—here,
as in Beloved—the “eternal, private conversations that take place
between women and their tasks” (Beloved 172). The routine involved in the
performance of the task is often a map for the mind. Figuring in, and figuring
out is what’s important; not just finishing. Consistent with her initially simplistic
mode of interrogation, Alice Manfred takes the linear route—ironing
first one part, then another, without repetition. Violet, by contrast, takes the
route that circles back to the beginning, requiring her to re-do the sleeve with
which she started. Significantly, the women do not seek access to another realm
in which to rest; the work itself provides a context for “rest”—thought and
analysis. Morrison suggests that women’s individual “conversations” with their
tasks—conversations articulated through motion—are indicators of a world
of inquiry, of thoughts being unfolded, re-folded, mended, stitched, pressed.
In composing this ensemble of multiple and intersecting self-explorations,
Morrison critiques the assumption that a single agent can make, un-make, or
re-make any circumstance. While Joe is clearly responsible for the murder of
Dorcas, the novel reveals that many more people were responsible for her
death. If several agents contribute to a particular crisis, how then can or does
one resolve it?
The acknowledgment and simultaneous dismissal of the “resolution” authorized
by the dominant culture provides the opportunity for a larger interrogation
of blame/causality, punishment/responsibility, and resolution/forgiveness:
“the dead girl’s aunt didn’t want to throw money to helpless lawyers or laughing
cops when she knew the expense wouldn’t improve anything. Besides she
found out that the man who killed her niece cried all day and for him and for
Violet that is as bad as jail” (4). While the aunt and the author both reject
“helpless lawyers,” and “laughing cops,” neither abandons the pursuit of justice.
Instead of jail, he (Joe) and they (Violet and Alice) all get what Albert
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Murray calls “the blues as such.” 22 While Joe, Violet, Alice, and Felice all
have “the blues as such,” it is the blues as release that propels the characters
toward a liberating recognition. Here, Morrison summons the institution to
which African American traditionally have resorted. According to Murray, acknowledgment
through confrontation is a key aspect of the strategy by which
the blues dispels “the blues as such”:
Sometimes, since it is assumed that to know a name is also to be onto the
game, the merest threat of revealing their diabolical identities and intentions
through full-scale description is even more effective. Nor is bold and blatant
misdefinition any less. Moreover when descriptions and definitions involve
numbers of any kind nothing less than instant terror is the most likely response,
even when the numbers are patently phony (perhaps because the
inevitable effect of enumeration and measurement is to reduce the infinity of
the invisible to the finite and hence to modality, which after all is not only
discernible but also controllable, and thus to mortality!). (9)
The novel identifies the blues as not simply an art form, but as a mode/institution
of intervention. Consistent with this “blues ideology,” Violet, Alice, Joe,
and Felice assist each other in naming essential areas of their lives in order to
regain control and resound a new purpose. The completion of the pattern of
transformation is announced with the arrival of a new season of re-making:
Sweetheart. That’s what that weather was called. Sweetheart weather, the
prettiest day of the year. And that’s when it started. . . . Young men on the
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 everything
had been forgiven the way they played. (195–196)
IV. LOVE AS DISSONANCE: THE RE-SOUNDING OF PURPOSE
All about love . . . people do all sorts of things, under its name, under its
guise. The violence is a distortion of what, perhaps, we want to do.
—Toni Morrison 23
According to Morrison, Jazz is the second component of a trilogy that begins
with Beloved and ends with Paradise. Among other things, a common
narrative focus holds the three works together. In each, Morrison explores the
burden and blessing of what—in the words of John Coltrane—might be called
“A Love Supreme.” A mother’s “too thick” love for her child in Beloved, a
grown man’s “deepdown, spooky” love for an eighteen-year old girl in Jazz,
and a community’s love “that passeth all understanding” for God in Paradise.
In discussing Paradise, Morrison explained, “I wanted to show how that kind
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of love can also go awry. Can be like the others.” 24 Long before this trilogy,
however, Morrison had intimated—in each of her prior works—that love can
go awry. Its capacity to make both the lover and the beloved run amuck forces
Porter to cry out, in Song of Solomon,
I’ll take hate any day. But don’t give me love. I can’t take no more love,
Lord. I can’t carry it. . . . It’s too heavy. Jesus, you know. You know all about
it. Ain’t it heavy? Jesus? Ain’t love heavy? Don’t you see, Lord? You own
son couldn’t carry it. If it killed Him, what You think it’s gonna do to me? (26)
While love ostensibly goes awry in this and other novels, these texts all reveal
a complex network of circumstances and psychological motivations which
curtail more wholesome choices, or else inhibit consciousness of those
choices. Morrison’s suggestion that the “violence is a distortion of what, perhaps,
we want to do” prompts much different responses to events that would
otherwise be dismissed as “crime.” Given that there was perhaps some sound
purpose preceding the violence, how—the novel asks—might we re-sound that
purpose, unmake and remake the act? The narrative goal, therefore, usually
involves a careful interrogation of how, if not why, loves goes awry, so as to
disclose what Morrison calls “buried stimuli.” 25 In re-tracing the path leading
to this “choice,” Morrison uncovers “both the stimulus and its galaxy” so that
other options become available to both the characters and the reader.
While Joe’s off-key love for Dorcas is the most blatant example of love
that goes awry, it is not the only sign of dissonance in Jazz. Dissonance rings
through True Belle’s parenting of her grandchildren, whose heads she filled
with “stories about a little blond child” (208), overwhelming, undermining,
almost erasing their self-image. It echoes through the story of the ring given
to Felice by her mother, “A present taken from whitefolks, given to me when I
was too young to say No thank you” (211). It reverberates as well in Alice’s
determination to maintain “heated control” of Dorcas in order to prevent “unmarried
and unmarriageable pregnancy . . . the end and close of livable life”
(76–77).
Alice Manfred’s effort to comprehend her dissonant parenting of Dorcas
exemplifies the ways in which the discovery of “both the buried stimulus and
its galaxy” enables the characters to imagine and re-make new possibilities,
and re-sound a wholesome purpose. For Alice, the process begins with a focussed
examination of the “remains”:
At fifty-eight with no children of her own, and the one she had access to and
responsibility for dead, she wondered about the hysteria, the violence, the
damnation of pregnancy without marriageability. It had occupied her own
parents’ mind completely for as long as she could remember them. They
spoke to her firmly but carefully about her body . . . The moment she got
breasts they were bound and resented, a resentment that increased to out-
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right hatred of her pregnant possibilities and never stopped until she married
Louis Manfred, when suddenly it was the opposite. (76)
Like her parents before her, Alice’s primary concern was to protect her niece
from predatory White males, and from Black folklife symbolized for her in
the “dirty, get-in-down music the women sang and the men played and both
danced to, close and shameless or apart and wild” (58). “Alice had been reraising
her, correcting her, since the summer of 1917” (60). Convinced of her own
“defenseless” because of “salesmen [who] touched her and only her as though
she were part of the goods they had condescended to sell her,” “she hid [Dorcas’]
hair in braids tucked under, lest whitemen see it raining round her shoulders
and push dollar-wrapped fingers toward her” (54). Instead of “arming” Dorcas
with the knowledge of her right to self-possession and self-defense as a way
of negotiating this hostile environment,
She instructed her about deafness and blindness . . . Taught her how to crawl
along the walls of buildings, disappear into doorways, cut across corners in
choked traffic—how to do anything, move anywhere to avoid a whiteboy
over the age of eleven. Much of this she could effect with her dress, but as
the girl grew older, more elaborate specifications had to be put in place.
High-heeled shoes with the graceful straps across the arch, the vampy hats
closed on the head with saucy brims framing the face, makeup of any kind—
all of that was outlawed in Alice Manfred’s house. (54–55)
This dissonant expression of love take its toll: “By the time she was seventeen
[Dorcas’s] whole life was unbearable” (63).
In exploring the galaxy of buried stimuli shaping her treatment of Dorcas,
Alice recalls her earlier consciousness of the suffocating effect of parental
love consumed by fear:
Growing up under that heated control, Alice swore she wouldn’t, but she did,
pass it on. She passed it on to her baby sister’s only child. And wondered
now would she have done so had her husband lived or stayed or if she had
had children of her own. If he had been there, by her side, helping her make
decisions, maybe she would not be sitting there waiting for a woman called
Violent and thinking war thoughts. Although war was what it was. Which is
why she had chosen surrender and made Dorcas her own prisoner of war.
(77)
Alice’s reflections lead to the recognition that Black women were not, as she
had assumed, powerless. “Other women, however, had not surrendered. All
over the country they were armed” (77). She recognizes that in failing to instill
an awareness of her right to an inviolate self-possession, she had unwittingly
allied herself with those forces opposed to her own and Dorcas’s survival.
Alice’s decision to return to Springfield—the place in which she lost her
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husband, baby sister, brother-in-law, and much more—indicates the degree to
which the exposure of “buried stimuli” provides access to other choices and
generates new possibilities. Her new recognition—“You got anything left to
you to love, anything at all, do it” (112)—matches her determination not to
surrender, but to reclaim her own life.
Like Alice, Joe has a galaxy of buried stimuli that triggers his dissonant love
for Dorcas. The primary stimulus underlying Joe’s “deepdown, spooky love”
is “the inside nothing he traveled with” (36) ever since the woman he believed
was his mother completed his unbelonging by failing to give him a sign. The
importance of this world of longing and nothing within him is signaled by the
fact that he shares it with Dorcas, “who knew better than people his own age
what that inside nothing was like. And who filled it for him, just as he filled it
for her, because she had it too” (37–38). With Dorcas he re-enacts the pattern
of self-invention that epitomizes his orphan identity:
I couldn’t talk to anybody but Dorcas and I told her things I hadn’t told
myself. With her I was fresh, new again. Before I met her I’d changed into
new seven times. The first time was when I named my own self, since
nobody did it for me, since nobody knew what it could or should have been.
(123)
Although he traces the origin of his “inside nothing” to the moment when his
mother failed to give him a sign of acknowledgment, Joe’s habit of self-invention
suggests a much earlier beginning to this psychological condition. In fact,
his admission, “I’ve been a new Negro all my life” (129), indicates that he
never possessed a conscious core personality or a conscious past. While he
views the habit of self-invention as a survival strategy fashioned to cope with
the many crises in his life, it is both an incomplete strategy and a sign of his
incomplete maturity—what Hunters Hunter calls his “unmothering” (167).
Since he has no core personality and no conscious past, he is “free” to become
whatever/whomever opportunity or necessity dictates. Even his marriage, we
learn, reflects this lack of a core personality: “Like me saying, ‘All right, Violet,
I’ll marry you,’ just because I couldn’t see whether a wildwoman put out
her hand or not” (181). In re-living and examining his past, Joe realizes that for
the “old people,” the ancestors, the key to survival was not change but improvisation—the
duality of newness and sameness. As he recalls, “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” (135). This understanding facilitates a necessary
and healing engagement with his own past: “A lot of the time, they stay
home figuring things out, telling each other those little personal stories they
like to hear again and again” (223).
In the configuration of patterns of repetition and resolution in the novel,
Morrison demonstrates that within the blues is a commitment to affirming and
increasing the human capacity for transformation through self-analysis, self-
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understanding, and self-correction. Governing the blues is an ethic that insists
on a declaration (sounding) of wrongdoing. In composition after composition,
the stance is unfailingly one of boldly acknowledging the “weakness” that drove
the person to the particular wrong. The singer admits his/her responsibility for
a variety of wrongful actions ranging from infidelity to extravagant spending.
In other compositions, the singer describes a state of passivity or depression,
but counters with the declaration of a plan of action soon to be implemented.
Blame or responsibility is never displaced. Instead, the singer takes responsibility
for what has happened and for what must happen. In Morrison’s earlier
novel, Tar Baby, the protagonist, Son, invokes this ethic in explaining his
flight from a prison sentence: “I didn’t want their punishment. I wanted my
own” (147). Consistent with this blues ethic, Joe is unaffected by the possibility
of prosecution, and unwilling to deny his own culpability. He is devastated
by what he has done and bewildered by his inability to figure out what he must
do: “All of it’s mine. All of it. I’ll never get over what I did to that girl. Never”
(129).
While the patterns of betrayal in the novel are quite conventional, the concept
of social ethics in Jazz is striking. Morrison takes great pains to imagine
and depict the re-fashioned social relationship resulting from the characters’
expanded interpretive capacity. For Violet, Alice, Joe, and Felice moral agency
increases with interpretive agency. As the characters learn to interpret their
own motivations and actions, they are able to construct more wholesome patterns
of interacting. For example, instead of the limited view of her rival as a
“hussy,” Alice comes to a new understanding of this woman’s life and challenges
Violet,
Or maybe you want to stomp somebody with three kids and one pair of
shoes. Somebody in a raggedy dress, the hem dragging in the mud. Somebody
wanting arms just like you do and you want to go over there and hold
her but her dress is muddy at the hem and the people standing around wouldn’t
understand how could anybody’s eyes go so flat, how could they? (113)
Morrison’s objective in Jazz is not simply to uncover the galaxy of buried
stimuli motivating the actions of a handful of Black people or to reveal the
means by which this “handful” reclaims and re-sounds a wholesome purpose.
Rather, the novel’s most important contribution is in providing a mechanism
for uncovering the many galaxies that constitute our entire social universe,
and, thereby, a blueprint for constructing more fully human relationships. Indeed,
Jazz re-sounds the purpose identified by James Baldwin fully three decades
earlier, in 1962:
One is not attempting to save twenty million people. One is attempting to
save an entire country and that means an entire civilization, and the price for
that is high. The price for that is to understand one’s self. 26
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NOTES
1 For the students in my Spring 1998 senior seminar, African Epic and the Diaspora Novel, at
Rutgers University-New Brunswick. (JSR) And for the students in my Fall 1997 Multicultural American
Literature and Spring 1998 Black Narrative courses at Hunter College-CUNY. (ECM)
2 Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” p.112.
3 Stephen Henderson, Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech & Black Music as
Poetic References (4).
4 In her folklore writings collected in The Sanctified Church, Zora Neale Hurston began a preliminary
exploration of these aspects. Hurston’s discussion of the “Characteristics of Negro Expression”
(circa 1930s) is particularly noteworthy.
5 Among the works which have addressed this philosophical content are Houston Baker’s Blues,
Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of
African-American Literary Criticism, LeRoi Jones’s Blues People, Geneva Smitherman’s Talkin
and Testifyin, Isidore Okpewho’s African Oral Narratives, and James Cone’s The Spirituals and the
Blues, in which he writes “there is a complex world of thought underlying the slave songs that has
so far escaped analysis” (19).
6 For further discussion of epistemology in Black women’s writing, see Judylyn S. Ryan, “Spirituality
and/as Ideology in Black Women’s Literature: The Preaching of Maria W. Stewart and Baby
Suggs, Holy” in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity (267–287).
7 For an analysis of the structural components of African epic, see John William Johnson, “Yes,
Virginia, There is an Epic in Africa,” and Isidore Okpewho, The Epic in Africa.
8 In its psychological, spiritual, and physical violence, the institution of Slavery demanded that
Black people acquiesce to a death-wish. Every opposing act necessarily constituted an expression
of self-love.
9 See Arthur Taylor (Ed.), Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews (156).
10 As defined by Houston Baker, “commercial deportation” “signifies an involuntary transport of
human beings as opposed to the export and import of will-less merchandise.” See Blues, Ideology,
and Afro-American Literature 24.
11 See Robert Stepto’s From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative for a discussion
of what Stepto calls the journey of “ascent,” prompted by “confining social structures” (67–68).
12 By way of explaining this continuing reticence, Zora Neale Hurston wrote, in the 1935 “Introduction”
to Mules and Men, that Black people “are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul
lives by” (2). In a social environment demonstrably hostile to their well-being, a healthy survival
instinct would—naturally—have generated a “reluctance” to disclose information about such a
vital resource.
13 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” 284.
14 This term is borrowed from the title of Toni Morrison’s essay, “The Site of Memory,” in which the
writer describes her fiction as “literary archeology” designed to “reconstruct the world that these
remains[—memories—]imply” (112).
15 In his essay “African Culture and Slavery in the United States,” Lawrence Levine cites Clark’s
observations at a “public lecture, Berkeley, Calif., Fall 1973” (107). In the essay, Levine underscores
the importance of Clark’s observation for scholarly methodology. Levine notes that the “preoccupation
with the problem of origins” is based on a “methodological fallacy” (103). “The question, as
Vévé Clark has put it so well, is not one of survivals but of transformations” (104).
16 “The Site of Memory,” (108).
17 Langston Hughes, “Jazz as Communication” in The Langston Hughes Reader (492–494).
18 See Acts 10:36–41 NRSV.
19 The novel also “samples” The Black Book (1974), a project conceptualized as the “scrapbook”
of an imagined “three-hundred-year-old black man” for which Morrison served as editor.
20 See Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Antebellum Slave Narrative,
85.
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21 Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (3–6).
22 “The Seams Can’t Show: An Interview with Toni Morrison,” Jane Bakerman, Black American
Literature Forum 12 (1978) (59).
23 Interview with Toni Morrison, on “Charlie Rose,” January 19, 1998.
24 “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” 385.
25 James Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.”
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