The American Century: Literature since 1945 669narrator, finds herself directed outward, to anger against white society: finding a
convenient scapegoat, a focus for anger, for instance, in the “white baby dolls” she
cuts up and destroys. The Bluest Eye deconstructs the image of the white community
as the site of normality and perfection. It also exposes the realities of life in an
impoverished African-American community, whose abject socioeconomic status is
exacerbated by the politics of race. Those politics point, in particular, to internalized
racism, manacles that are mind-forged as well as devastatingly material. As Morrison
has put it in an afterword to a recent edition of the novel: “the trauma of racism is,
for the racist and victim, the severe fragmentation of the self.”
Coextensive with Morrison’s concern with the psychosocial consequences of
racism is her interest in what she calls “silence and evasion:” the shadows and
absences, the gaps and omissions in American history. In her second novel, Sula
(1973), for example, she shows how a black community evolves and shapes itself,
with its own cultural resources and elaborate social structure. She rescues it from a
kind of historical anonymity. Through the lives of the two main characters, Sula
Peace and Nel Wright, in turn, she opens up the area of intimate friendship between
African-American women. Also, through a poignant account of the rifts and disputes
between Sula and Nel, she charts differences, the diverse paths and possibilities
available to females as part of or apart from communal tradition. Morrison’s third
novel, Song of Solomon (1977), sustains her commitment to what is called here
“names that had a meaning:” the evolution of a distinctive black identity and
community through the habit of language. A complex tapestry of memory and
myth, Song of Solomon tells the story of a young man, Milkman Dead, who comes to
know himself through a return to origins. He is captivated by the legends surrounding
his family, from slave times. He learns, in particular, from the stories of men who
flew to freedom and the realities of women who remained to foster and to nurture.
Just as the novel does, he returns to the past and, through that, discovers how to live in
the present. Tar Baby (1981) also pursues themes of ancestry and identity, how
African-Americans come to name and know themselves. It does this primarily through
the contrast between two characters, Jadine Childs, a model, and William (Son) Green,
an outcast and wanderer. Jadine, brought up with the help of white patrons, has
been assimilated into white culture; Son remains outside it, in resistance to it.
Drawn to each other, they seem to be trying to “rescue” each other, the one from
assimilation, the other from separation. “One had a past, the other a future and each
bore the culture to save the race in his hands,” the reader is told. “Mama-spoiled
black man, will you mature with me? Culture-bearing black woman, whose culture
are you bearing?” The love affair between them is aborted. Neither fundamentally
changes. And, although the perspective on Jadine is less than sympathetic (“she has
forgotten her ancient properties,” one oracular black character observes of her),
the identity crisis posed by the conflict between her and Son is never really resolved.
Morrison adopts her usual strategy, of leaving the narrative debate open.
With her fifth and most important novel so far, Beloved (1987), Morrison took the
core of a real story she had encountered while working as a senior editor at Random
House. It was recorded in The Black Book (1974), an eclectic collection of materialGGray_c05.indd 669ray_c 05 .indd 669 8 8/1/2011 7:31:38 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 38 PM