Fools’

Paradise a novel by Toni Morrison.  Vintage.  318 pp.  $16.00

I can agree that Beloved is Toni Morrison’s masterpiece, but in some ways I found Paradise a more inventive and intricate novel.  It’s the story of a fictional town in Oklahoma that was settled in the mid-twentieth century by African Americans who had been turned away everywhere else, not only by white communities, but also by lighter-skinned African Americans.  The town of Ruby takes pride not only in its blackness, but its deep blackness, what African Americans sometimes call blue black, or what the town’s self-styled historian calls eight rock, “a deep deep level in the coal mines.”

The founding families are pure in that way, pure black, and as a family’s blood line is diluted, it becomes less a part of the community.  The town also has a certain moral probity, and belief in self-reliance; when a new preacher comes to town and starts interesting young people in the new black militancy—in the Sixties and Seventies—the Founding Father’s don’t appreciate that.  They want to be isolated—not related to or dependent on white people at all—and pure.

In the documentary The Pieces I Am, Morrison spoke in a couple of places about the issue of colorism in the African American community.  She had hardly run into it as she grew up on Lorrain, Ohio, a place where all the races and ethnic groups seemed to get along, and where people helped each other out (that sounds like paradise to me), but there was an occasion when an aunt came to visit her family and said something to the effect of, “Somebody’s been messing with these children.”  She meant they weren’t as dark-skinned as the rest of the family.

And when Morrison went off to Howard University—the first time she occupied a strictly black community—the sororities were more or less based on skin color.  People didn’t necessarily talk about it, but the women in the better sororities all had lighter skin.  There is a chapter in the second half of Paradise in which the town historian goes on a long rant about skin colors in Ruby.  It’s fascinating in a way.  But in the midst of this novel, it was the least interesting subject for me.

That’s because, seventeen miles outside of Ruby, there is a house that is a blemish on their perfect paradise.  It once belonged to a wealthy embezzler, but was taken over by Catholic nuns who educated the local Indian girls.  In recent years its population has dwindled, but it’s still known to town residents as the Convent.  It’s a place where people come who do not fit in elsewhere, a battered wife, a woman who seems too loose, a woman pregnant with a baby she doesn’t want.  Everyone is welcome, and welcome just the way they are, which means there are all kinds of problems in people getting along, and living day to day.  But there is a central woman—aptly named Consolata—who, though far from perfect herself (she lives in the wine cellar, and makes liberal use of the wine) helps the women learn to face their demons, and grow from the experience.

There is the town of Ruby, where everything is kept under wraps by the founding fathers, and where things are starting to fray because of the new preacher in town and the young people, and there’s the Convent, where the wild women go, and where the mistakes—like the baby of that unwed mother, or a secret affair of one of the founding fathers of Ruby—take place.  There’s even a white woman who lives there, though we’re not sure which one she is.

Which place is Paradise?  And which is more likely to last?[1]

We know—in the way that Morrison often gives away her plots—that the men of Ruby will eventually attack the women of the Convent.  It seems obvious in the whole situation, but also shows up in the novel’s famous first lines.  “They shoot the white girl first.  With the rest they can take their time.”  We know as we’re reading that the attack will take place.  We don’t see it in detail until near the end.

All of Morrison’s novels throw everything in together, the psychological, political, spiritual, religious; there are undertones of religion in everything she has done.  But religion seems central to Paradise, especially because, dead center in the novel, there is a sermon by Ruby’s conservative preacher that expresses the theology of a whole town, and a people.  I found the sermon as infuriating as the town’s newer, and more liberal preacher did (especially because it was delivered as remarks at a wedding, and a wedding where the liberal preacher is the officiant), but it does have a certain fascination, true in some places and deeply wrong in others.  I won’t quote the whole thing, just enough so you can get the drift.

“Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something . . .

“Love is none of that.  There is nothing in nature like it. . . . Love is divine only and difficult always.  If you think it is easy you are a fool.  If you think it is natural you are blind.  It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God.

“You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. . . . You can only earn—by practice and careful contemplation—the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it.  Which is to say you have to earn God.  You have to practice God.  You have to think God—carefully.  And if you are a good a diligent student you may secure the right to show love.  Love is not a gift.  It is a diploma.”

How’s that for a hardheaded—and hardhearted—theology?

The novel is constructed around the names of women, the first one being Ruby, which is the name of the town, the others largely the women who show up at the Convent, or have something to do with it, Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, Pallas (as in every Morrison novel, the names are fascinating, and never arbitrary).  The women are by far the most interesting characters in this novel, though they’re not necessarily the most successful or most powerful, and there is a mammoth cast of characters; I must say that, by the end, I was losing track of a number of the names (if there was ever a Morrison novel that could have used a list of characters, this is it).

There is also, at the end, an element of the supernatural, the spiritual, the mystical, I don’t know what to call this quality, which is most evident in Beloved but shows up in some way in every Morrison novel.  There is the realistic fact of what’s going on, and there is something else, which seems just as real in the narrative but is logically impossible and inexplicable.  People rise from the dead in Morrison’s novels; it’s as if we’re reading the Gospels.  Except that what she’s writing is not entirely Good News.

[1] Actually, I read somewhere that Paradise is the title her publishers chose.  She wanted to call the book War.  That seems in many ways a more apt title.