The Sea-God’s Herb

In interview, and in her rare writings on her craft, Toni Morrison prefers the role of Black Woman novelist. That’s capital B, capital W, and a small, tertiary n. Her lone work of literary criticism, her collected Massey lectures from 1992, bears a title that insists on the same priorities: Playing in the Dark. Her book-length fiction always demonstrates considerable imaginative freedom, but when asked, the author herself speaks primarily of social freedoms. She claims to be concerned above all with the idea of “a black community”—what such a community once meant, how it has changed, and how despite those changes its opposition to the white power structure must be maintained. Morrison alters the argument according to the occasion, for instance in the essays of What Moves at the Margin or the lengthy interview with Robert Stepto. Nonetheless her allegiance remains with that outsider community, one she perceives as renegade. At the International PEN Congress of January, 1986, Morrison announced she’d never felt like an American. She defined herself as a voice for those outside our culture’s mainstream, not just black and female, but also Third-World, Carribean.

Critics have followed the artist’s lead. Frederick Karl, in his mammoth American Fictions 1940-1980 (1983), categorized the author as one whose whole purpose is social responsibility: “Morrison is attempting to gather in…politics, caste, class, sexism, [and] genealogy.” Barbara Christian offers a more thorough overview, in Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (1985); but she too emphasizes Morrison’s “tension between the natural order and the unnatural points of [social] discrimination—race, sex, money, class.”

Such readings have their merits. Morrison’s novels certainly demonstrate the damage that racial and social discrimination has done. Yet what refined, even exotic demonstrations she chooses! The opening page of her first, The Bluest Eye (1970), actually embodies the torment of living as an outsider typographically. The page contains three reprints of a passage from what is obviously a mainstream child’s reader:

Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy…

Each time these lines are repeated, they look more tortured: first the punctuation disappears, then the spaces between the words. Likewise the third novel, the award-winning Song of Solomon (1977), makes its points about African American identity and the struggle between the sexes by fantastic means, by rediscovering the myth that “the people could fly,” and finding disturbing, ambivalent truths in that myth. In other words, one of Morrison’s significant subjects for her longer stories is always storytelling itself. The shape that gossip, superstition, and telling tales give to experience matters enormously Morrison’s most famous and honored novel, Beloved (1987). Late-twentieth-century readers must track a few obscure and widely scattered clues in order to understand that the “ghost” in Beloved is only an abused African girl, driven mad by her recent abduction into slavery. In the minds of the novel’s mid-nineteenth-century characters, the young woman exists first and last as a long-rumored spirit at last come to life; it is as a ghost, a community fiction, that the poor girl engineers the major actions of the plot.

Morrison’s novels, in fact, depend on highly sophisticated literary techniques, structural and intertextual devices generally associated with Modernism and whatever has come since. An author more ordinarily concerned with “race, sex, money, class” would proceed by more ordinary means. An exemplary case is Sula, the second novel, published in 1974. Yet while I do wish to illuminate some of this writer’s more cunning aesthetic niceties—while I do think they’ve been overlooked—I want also to bring such niceties together with the author’s avowed commitment to social or historical responsibility. I believe Morrison knows what she’s about. I believe such commitment is in fact at the core of her work.

Sula covers fifty years, yet it has the brevity of a nightmare. It achieves microcosm: Morrison never leaves her imaginary Ohio community, “the Bottom,” for more than the occasional few pages, yet she overlooks none of the changes in black experience that occurred between the First World War and the mid-1960s. Part of this success is due to a striking hiatus in the novel’s plot. Between Parts 1 and 2, the book jumps some ten years, from 1927 to 1937. Of course the prologue (set, like the epilogue, in 1965) has established that the book will cover a lot of ground, and there are a number of plot concerns connecting the two Parts, in particular the twinned lives of Sula Peace and Nel Wright, the protagonists. The two women spend most of the first half as best friends, most of the second as worst enemies. Each eventually returns to spiritual sisterhood: Sula on her deathbed in 1940, Nel (an emotional circle, matching the chronological) in the 1965 epilogue.

But this thumbnail outline itself makes clear that the connections between the novel’s two sections are often subtle, in some cases detectable only after the book has been completed. Morrison’s plotting constitutes a considerable aesthetic risk. The interruption raises ideas over narrative—and not just ideas, but also more rarified unifying principles, such as metaphoric structure.

What ideas? First things first: Morrison is indeed examining a lost community. The issue comes up at once; the opening is straightforward, though seductive:

In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood. It stood in the hills above the valley town of Medallion and spread all the way to the river. It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom.

The omniscient point of view is obvious; so too is an essential fondness. The authorial voice in Morrison is forever celebrational. Her omniscience is not that of a distant recording angel, but of a community spirit, and she comes to each character “in that place” with sympathy. Morrison’s first book gave us one of the most extraordinary examples of that sympathy, a compassionate portrait of a man who rapes his own daughter; her latest novel, like Sula, brings to life an entire black Ohio community. In Sula, as the many players take their turns—each in some way bent to extremity by poverty, oppression, or loneliness—this all-knowing, all-forgiving point of view allows for some complicated effects, as we shall see. But the immediate impression is trustworthy and humane: precisely the sort of thing that would make her purposes seem simple. The closest parallel to Morrison’s familiar omniscience occurs in the deceptively simple One Hundred Years of Solitude; Garcia Marquez is very nearly the only contemporary Morrison will mention when asked to name authors she admires.

She first tells the story of another sort of local spirit, poor Shadrack, so traumatized by combat in 1917 that he institutes the mad celebration called National Suicide Day. Comic yet gloomy, the date becomes a landmark at the beginning of each new year in the Bottom. Only after that ambiguity in the community self-definition is established does the principal storyline begin, and only then to digress again at once. Morrison makes her single extended excursion outside the Bottom, a 1920 visit to New Orleans by Helene and Nel Wright. On this African American home ground Nel at last meets her grandmother, a prostitute of impressive standing and self-possession, and so by the time she returns to Ohio the girl has gained “a new-found me-ness;” she has “the strength to cultivate a friend in spite of her mother,” and that friend is Sula. In short, Nel undergoes an ambiguous self-definition to match that of Suicide Day. Seeming digressions come together; the changes in particular people fit changes in the general fabric of life.

There are other devices set in place, in the thirty pages before Sula arrives on stage. Shadrack comes to function outside the rule of church and family, immune even to white control: in his madness he can insult the occasional visitors from Medallion. Helene is presented as just the opposite; her whorehouse raising has driven her to become a pillar of the community in the conventional sense, “a woman who won all social battles with presence and a conviction of the legitimacy of her authority.” The mad veteran’s single name recalls both the Old Testament believer who risked destruction in the fiery furnace and a common river fish known for living in dirty waters; Nel’s mother last name suggests both a maker and moral uprightness itself. Between them, the Bottom takes on definition. But more than that, another of the novel’s core structures is established, strongly enough to carry it through those places where simple narrative breaks down, namely, an intricate and continuous reliance on duality.

There’s hardly a character in the book that doesn’t need some other in order to feel complete, or an incident that isn’t eventually paired with some other in order to enhance the meaning of both. The essential twins are Nel and Sula. Just before the central event, the girls’ accidental drowning of a boy named Chicken Little, the two are presented in a description that exemplifies their complementary nature: “They lay in the grass, their foreheads almost touching, their bodies stretched away from each other at a 180-degree angle.” Sula Peace is one radius, Nel Wright the other; their two arcs encompass a book of wheels within wheels.

Their families and houses appear like mirror reversals of each other. Helene Wright has renounced her forebears’ whoring and has become instead the conservative backbone of the Bottom, creating a home in which a daughter’s wedding is “the culmination of all she had been, done or thought in this world.” This element of the community is run by the women, and sooner or later abandoned by their husbands. On the other hand, there’s Eva Peace, Sula’s grandmother, who literally bartered her flesh, sacrificing a leg in order to collect railroad insurance. Thanks to that inheritance, the Peace family lives in “a house of many rooms” where “manlove” is the rule—a whorehouse without prices or pimps, where Sula’s mother Hannah will “fuck practically anything” simply because she enjoys it.

These motifs recur and ramify. Sula goes to college on the insurance money from her dead uncle and mother, more flesh-peddling, and when she returns to the Bottom she rules her house and her life, as Nel points out, “like a man.” After her return she becomes the Bottom’s pariah, a “roach” who sleeps with white men. In the meantime, Nel defines herself ever more firmly as a woman, a pillar in the same sense as her mother. When Sula seduces Nel’s husband, Jude, Nel reprises her mother’s holier-than-thou manipulations, lapsing into a silence that drives Jude away. Indeed, in the pages after Nel discovers Sula and Jude, hand-me-down roleplaying proves stronger than any love between husband and wife. This part of the narrative is from the point of view of the betrayed wife and friend and brilliantly evokes a spirit in the grip of unconscious promptings. Nel is silenced as much by memories of her mother as by what is taking place before her eyes; she manipulates unintentionally. Thereafter, Nel retreats into the smarmy embrace of general opinion. Falling back on her position as the injured party, she joins the rest of the women in the Bottom in adopting an increased moral strictness, defined specifically against Sula.

Nel adopts the role of Good Woman, in other words; Sula’s function is Bad Man. So at least their fellow townswomen see them, and the authorial familiarity keeps the reader with the public perception. But each of the novel’s central twins is also representative of another rich symbol system, a system known to author and reader but not to the uneducated inhabitants of the Bottom. Each woman embodies one of the four elements. Sula’s identification is easier to trace. Her uncle and mother both burn to death, and she herself suffers, in her last illness, “a kind of burning.” She and Shadrack are described as “two devils,” and her death plunges the Bottom into a terrible cold snap. Nel’s element however must be deduced from her contrast to Sula—yet another way in which the novel depends on duality. At the story’s end Nel recalls for the first time in years Chicken Little’s drowning, the secret which began the inevitable separation from her soulmate. Sula had been whirling the boy around at arm’s length, and he’d slipped and flown into the river. Nel, standing beside them, did nothing either to save the boy at the time or to reveal the truth of what happened later. In her stunted perception, the guilt was entirely Sula’s. Now however, in the novel’s epilogue, she meditates:

All these years she had been secretly proud of her calm, controlled behavior when Sula was uncontrollable… Now it seemed that what she had thought was maturity, serenity and compassion was only the tranquillity that follows a joyful stimulation. Just as the water closed peacefully over the turbulence of Chicken Little’s body, so had contentment washed over her enjoyment.

Moreover, the circle of elemental symbolism is rounded out by the two most important men in Nel and Sula’s lives. Nel’s husband Jude Green is driven to marry her out of a feeling that “the two of them together would make one Jude;” the whites of Medallion won’t let him do the roadwork he loves, and so he feels cut off from his true self. “He wanted to swing the pick or…shovel the gravel.” Jude is of the earth, his very name is Green, and he marries in order to find something like the satisfactions of earthwork. As for Ajax, the man Sula falls in love with, his dream is of flying, airplanes, the air itself. Sula’s crucial mistake concerning him is that, in the beautiful passage on their lovemaking, she mistakes him for earth. She imagines rubbing away his color to discover “gold leaf,” then scraping away the gold to find “alabaster,” then at last cracking the alabaster to “see the loam, fertile, free of pebbles and twigs.” This mistaken identity is underscored after he leaves for an “air show in Dayton,” when she discovers his driver’s license bears the name Albert Jacks. What Sula took for a Greek demigod in alabaster proves instead something brief and flighty as cards or a child’s game.

That ambiguity about a person’s essential self suggests something still more aesthetically complex, still another way Morrison manages the interplay of elements and dualities. Sula may generally function as Fire, but in her childhood intimacy with Nel and in the adult act of love she finds “my water:…the postcoital privateness in which she met herself, welcomed herself, and joined herself in matchless harmony.” Likewise at her death she finds joy, joy she wants most to share with Nel, in “the sleep of water.” As for Nel, Sula of course is the one who provides her joyful stimulation, releasing otherwise dammed-up elements. “[Nel’s] parents had succeeded in rubbing down to a dull glow any sparkle or splutter she had. Only with Sula did that quality have free rein.” As each woman finds herself briefly in a male lover, so each was always and truly completed by the more perfect, Platonic opposite of her childhood friend. Nel and Sula initially meet in their dreams; their first conversation occurs while “facing each other through the ropes of the one vacant swing.” There, each tells the other to go on: mirror-creatures unwilling to rupture the unearthly balance they share.

Now what has all this to do with community? Perpetual cycles, pairs of emotions and elements—such stuff sounds like art for art’s sake. The formal rigor recalls the devices of Vladimir Nabokov. What of Morrison’s avowed commitment to the renegade, to serving as a voice for the voiceless?

Part of the answer is that this book is a remembrance, an elegy. “We was girls together,” Nel cries to her dead friend at novel’s end. With that, too, she finally acknowledges her complicity in the death of Chicken Little, the original sin of separation from her other half. The Bottom is gone, we know from the novel’s first line, and with it the perfect symmetries of our childhoods. Isn’t the whole notion of community an attempt to provide again the security of Mamma at crib side? Eva Peace here sets fire to her son Plum, not simply because the War has made him a junkie, but because she understands his addiction is the first step in becoming a baby again: “He wanted to crawl back in my womb.” Eva’s reasoning of course also implies a familiar criticism of the modern black male (expressed more directly by authors as different as W.E.B. DuBois and Malcolm X), namely, that beneath a young black’s cock-of-the-walk act lies a ruinous immaturity. Many of Sula’s poetic flourishes bear a similar specific pertinence to, as the author puts it in her later title, what moves at the American margins. Yet the point about seeking childhood comfort in neighbors and a way of life resonates beyond specifics of place and race. Seen this way, community is always elsewhere. The idea is an ancient one, and some of its most famous expressions seem to apply: the prophet’s glimpse from the mountaintop, the Wonderland beyond the looking-glass. At Sula’s end, Nel meditates on how her former brothers and sisters are fleeing the Bottom:

The black people, for all their new look, seemed awfully anxious to get to the valley, or leave town. It was sad, because the Bottom had been a real place. These young ones kept talking about the community, but they left the hills to the poor, the old, the stubborn—and the rich white folks. Maybe it hadn’t been a community, but it had been a place.

But there is another way in which the subtle dualistic play of Sula’s characters and events fit this author’s social commitment, her desire to forge a conscience for her race. One must understand that, above all, the drama here is one of misperception. The events aren’t caused by trespassing beyond some moral absolute dictated by the author, but by how the people of the Bottom wrongly perceive some things as absolute, and how they then act on this misapprehension. Other critics have noted the importance of such wrongheaded perception, in particular Barbara Lounsberry and Grace Ann Hovet in an essay for Black American Literature Forum, but they too don’t connect the social issue of community consensus to the literary strategies of symbolism and structure. Morrison herself says something about those strategies in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, back in 1980: “I was writing [in Sula] about good and evil and the purposes to which they are frequently put, the way in which the community uses them [my italics].”

The great tool for manipulating perception is of course Morrison’s familiar omniscience, her fond angel’s point of view. That manipulation, it must be said, is enhanced at every juncture by the boldness and intimacy of her style. Sula manages repetitions that are intricate and yet incantatory; each scene has the effect of tour de force, whether the subject be joshing, muscular sexuality or austere, self-sacrificial posing. Even sorrow can be celebrated, like a funeral march in New Orleans. The best contemporary analogy would be, again, the Garcia Marquez of One Hundred Years. Still, the rhetoric never rises simply for its own sake. It serves to create a drama where any viciousness may be viewed sympathetically (even doing nothing to save a drowning child), and any innocence may be taken as malicious (even the simple horseplay that precedes a child’s drowning). So every character sees some different animal or weed in the distinctive birthmark over Sula’s eye: everyone has their own reading. There is tragedy in such misperception, but the author never corrects it. About as close as she will come to making judgments occurs in her discussion of the gossip about Sula’s sleeping with white men:

There was nothing lower she could do, nothing filthier. The fact that their own skin color was proof that it had happened in their own families was no deterrent to their bile. Nor was the willingness of black men to lie in the beds of white women a consideration that might lead them toward tolerance. They insisted that all unions between white men and black women be rape; for a black woman to be willing was literally unthinkable. In that way, they regarded integration with precisely the same venom that white people did.

And if it seems unlikely that a capital B, capital W writer would take her own people to task for their racism, consider that when Sula makes love with Ajax she is trying to dig under his skin to the “loam.” The writing is so lovely that at first we may not notice it is an image for getting past differences of surface color.

The community pariah is in fact a greater subversive than anyone else in the Bottom, because she challenges comfortable perceptions, particularly those of white oppression. Just before seducing Nel’s Jude, Sula laughs at the husband’s easy, “whiney” declaration that “a Negro man had a hard row to hoe in the world.” When she dies, too, the community is robbed of the “devil” which made their placid acceptance of white control appear heroic. “[M]others who had defended their children from Sula’s malevolence (or who had defended their positions as mothers from Sula’s scorn for the role) now had nothing to rub up against.”

Years before, when Hannah Peace had asked her mother if she’d loved her children, Eva could hardly understand the question: “What you talkin’ about did I love you girl I stayed alive for you.” But Hannah’s daughter went to the big city; she came back with all “those lovely college words like aesthetic or rapport.” In short Sula was a one-woman urban migration, and she returned with a new means of regarding the world. To her, loving can no longer be defined simply as staying alive. It has to do instead with living to full human capacity, with “craving the other half” of one’s personal “equation,” and with “the creation of a special kind of joy.” Sula upsets the others in town not because she’s vicious, but because she’s visionary. The book’s epigraph is from Tennessee Williams (not just a white Southerner, it’s worth noting, but one inextricably linked to New Orleans). The Williams title that Morrison selects from, The Rose Tattoo, recalls Sula’s birthmark, and the words could easily be hers too: “I had too much glory. They don’t want glory like that in nobody’s heart.”

Thus, without Sula, without her glory misperceived as evil, the other families no longer can justify how they scrape along. “A rain fell and froze;…Christmas…haggled everybody’s nerves like a dull axe.” On the next National Suicide Day the inhabitants of the Bottom erupt in their first genuine act of revolt.

This eruption is pitiable, a mass panic at the river’s edge. It anticipates the cataclysm at the end of Beloved, another sorry mix of the seditious and the self-destructive. Sula’s riot, in a piercing irony, takes place on the first Suicide Day when old Shadrack no longer cares. Ever the town’s dark mirror, the madman lost his faith when he heard of Sula’s death. Yet even the drownings recall Sula’s last visions: “They found themselves in a chamber of water…[Y]oung boys strangled when the oxygen left them to join the water.” In this apocalyptic “sleep of water,” the pariah’s deathbed prophecy perversely comes true. Sula had claimed that one day people would love her: “After all the old women have lain with the teenagers; when all the young girls have slept with all their drunken uncles…” In the collapsed river tunnel, just such an orgy takes place. So at great cost—without sacrificing the ambiguity inherent in “lovely college words like aesthetic”— the people of the Bottom are rid of their pious and largely pointless abnegations. Turn the page, and it’s 1965.

Finally, Morrison underscores her drama of misperception by a series of literary or Biblical allusions, evident especially in her choice of names. Like Sula, she isn’t so concerned with surface; our entire culture is her loam.

Biblical references abound, to be sure. They don’t follow the chronology of the Scriptures strictly (one point on which Sula and One Hundred Years differ), but in general the movement is Old Testament to New. Shadrack figures mostly in Book I, and the apocalypse ends Book II. Eva the first mother in Book I, Jude the Judas in Book II. And just before she throws Chicken Little in the river, Sula leads him up a tree that allows him to see farther than ever before: a Tree of Knowledge to presage the book’s original sin. Indeed, isn’t Sula’s very name a feminine reconstruction of Lucifer, whose province has always called right and wrong into ambiguity? The community’s name derives after all from a “nigger joke” about “the Bottom of Heaven.” The Queen of this Inferno, however, lives at an address recalling the Prince of Paradise: number 7, Carpenter Lane. The contradiction in the address perhaps mirrors the way “Sula” is actually an inversion of “Lucifer.” If only the community could perceive her rightly, she might prove just the opposite of a devil, she might serve instead as their avenging angel. After all, her name and those of her forebears (Eva, Hannah, Sula) contains the joyful “ah” of real living, of better than mere staying alive. If anyone’s name suggests death and damnation, it is Nel’s, Nel’s and Helene’s and even the grandmother Rochelle’s. The knell tolls down the generations of the Wrights, and it tolls for the Bottom. No community that prefers one-dimensional right-ness over living at peace with all the divergent elements of its nature deserves to last forever. Its children must look elsewhere.

In the book’s closing sentences, Nel comes at last to this complex and humbling perception. The truth provokes a howl: “It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.” A reader may see Dante in that description, and see as well the ever-turning, ever-renewing wheel of the elements. He or she may see Heaven and Hell, and the whole question of top and bottom, pillars and pariahs. Yet it would be terrible narrow-mindedness to think such metaphoric reinforcement in any way betrays the essential impulses of the book: toward a greater humanity, and toward a braver sense of community purpose. Morrison’s sympathies for the renegade are perfectly appropriate. A renegade wants nothing better than to break out of those sorrowful circles. Or at least, a renegade will erupt in a “fine cry” like Sula, imposing its genius on a devious and discouraging world.