Rama Kant Sharma
Filial Crisis in Toni Morrison's Fiction
The lessons in survival should not have to be learned late in life as they are milkmade, one of the most unforgettable characters of Toni Morrison. They should come in childhood from -"a chorus of mamas, grand mamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, Sunday school teachers." (Song of Solomon 307) Perhaps Morrison takes a cue from her own childhood experience in Lorain, Ohio, where the entire village assumes responsibility for a child's life. At present, there is no room, no time for children. They have no apprenticeship. Children about do not work with adults as she used to, and there is this huge generation gap.
She remembers her own childhood. When her grandfather got senile in his nineties, he would walk off, not knowing where he was and get lost. Her job as a little girl was to find Papa and she would. Some adult told them to go and they would bring him back, settle him on the porch, and bring him walnuts or whatever they had. She had to read the Bible to her grandmother when she was dying and somebody assigned her to do that. Obviously her mother cared for her and she would do that for her. That is the cycle. It is important that her children participate in that. They have to take her mother her orange juice and she does not have to tell them, because that is their responsibility. That is the part of knowing who they are and where they came from. It enhances them in particular way. (Raus 228)
Cholly in The Bluest Eye, rapes his twelve year old daughter because he is overcome with pity and love for her. Pauline, the girl's mother refuses to love her she rather loves the white girl whose family employs her. By the time Pecola finds herself awkwardly standing in the fisher's kitchen, responsible for the spilled remains of a freshly baked pie at her feet, Pauline is incapable of mother's love and forgiveness. Her best response is knocking Pecola to the floor and running to console the crying Fisher child. Just as Cholly is not as reprehensible as he might be, Pauline is not sympathetic. In fact, Pauline in some sense is as culpable as Cholly for Pecola's suffering. Cholly's love is corrupt and tainted, but Pauline is unloving. After the rape Morrison subtly alludes to the differences-
"So when the child regained the consciousness, she was lying on the kitchen floor under a heavy quilt, trying to connect the pain between her legs with the face of her mother looming over her."(The Bluest Eye 129)
Is Pauline associated with the rape? She did not physically rape Pecola but she has ravaged the child's self-worth and left her vulnerable to assaults of various proportions. Like Pauline, Cholly is driven by personal demons which he attempts to purge in violence against his family. Cholly callously abandoned on garbage dumped by his mother, years later searches for his father who also discards him. His response to his father's angry denunciations-crying and soiling his pants-eclipses any opportunity for emotional maturity and returns him in a sense, to the helplessness of his abandonment in infancy. After the rejection-there is no innocence available to Cholly. His treatment of Pecola may be seen as a sad reminder to Cholly of not only his unhappiness but Pecola's as well. Such concern makes him a somewhat sympathetic character. His crime is tempered by author's compassion .Coming home drunk and full of self-pity, Cholly sees Pecola and is overcome with love and regret that he had nothing to relieve her helplessness. The awful irony of his position is overwhelming. In the end, Cholly's complexity dominates the moment. Having been rejected by parents and wife, "he has no idea how to raise children, having never watched any parent raise himself, he could not even comprehend what such a relationship should be."(126)
On a Sunday afternoon, Pecola washes dishes, and Cholly comes home reeling drunk. Sequence of his emotions is revulsion, guilt, pity then love. His revulsion was a reaction to her young, helpless, hopeless presence. Why did she have to look so whipped? She was a child-unburdened-why was not she happy? "Guilt and impotence rose in a bilious duet. What he could do for her-ever? What give her? What say to her? What could a burned-out black man say to the hunched back of his eleven-year-old daughter?"(127) His answer is rape-In rendering this incomprehensible instance; Morrison captures the curious mixture of hate and tenderness that consumes Cholly. When the violation is over, "The hatred would not let him pick her up; the tenderness forced him to cover her."(129)
Claudia and her sister Frieda traverse Morrison's landscape of black girlhood. For the most parts their parents Mr. and Mrs. Macteer save Claudia and Frieda from this sort of persecution, Mr. Macteer (unlike Cholly) saves them as a father should from a lecherous boarder. Mrs. Macteer's place is not in a white family's kitchen, but in her own where familiar smells hold sway and her singing about hard times proclaims that pain is endurable, even sweet. To her daughters she bequeaths a legacy of compassion for other and defiance in the face of opposition. Mrs. Macteer is not one of Morrison's ancestors-a person wise in the ways of life who transmits that wisdom and knowledge of self to the uninitiated. Claudia feels her love for them as Alga syrup, she remembers the feel of her mother's hand on her forehead and chest when she is sick. She says-
"Love, thick and dark as Alga syrup, cased up in that cracked window.....It coated my chest, along with the salve, and when the flannel came undone in my sleep, the clear, sharp curves of air outlined its presence on my throat. And in the night, when my coughing was dry and tough, feet padded into the room, hands re-pinned the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands, who does not want me to die."(07)
Morrison thinks that children are in real danger. Nobody likes them, all children, but particularly black children. She feels that her generation has done a great disservice to the children. She is talking about the emotional part that is not available to them any more because adults are acting out their childhood. They are interested in self-aggrandizement. "Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth. There may be a whole lot of people, but particularly children. The teachers have jobs not missions. Even in the best schools, the disrespect for the children is unbelievable."(Raus 227)
Jadine in Tar Baby is such a product of Morrison's generation. In their own pride and arrogance, Sydney and Ondine have tacitly encouraged their nice's cultural disconnection as a sign of her and their success. They liked her living in Paris: they liked her acceptance by their employer. They could not teach her how to be a respectful daughter. Jadine has not been accultured and without a chorus of mamas and aunts tending her, a woman may easily loose her way. She too has moved far from her childhood and culture. The woman in the Paris market calls attention to something that is missing in Jadine. She is like the abused Michael, a cultural orphan. From Paris, she comes back to Sydney and Ondine to get emotional protection. They are her people, her family and she seeks them out to touch bases. But she has not really lived with them and she does not value their opinion. Without parents to point the way Jadine does not discover the path to black womanhood. She is a woman like Margaret who systematically tortures her young son Michael with pin pricks. Ondine tries to guide Jadine but it is too late and she can express only regrets-
"Jadine, a girl has to be a daughter first. She have to learn that. And if she never learns how to be a daughter, she can’t learn how to be a woman. I mean a real woman: a woman good enough for a child; good enough for a man - good enough even for the respect of other women. Now you didn’t have a mother long enough to learn much about it and I thought I was doing right by sending you to all them schools and so I never told you it and I should have."(Tar Baby 283)
Three years after Tar Baby, Beloved was published. This time, she was obsessed by two or three little fragments of stories of extraordinary women. She found the newspaper clipping in The Black Book about a fugitive slave in Ohio, who killed her own child rather than see her return to Bondage in the South. Morrison gets the Kernel of her novel from the news article which describes a visit to the slave mother who killed her child.
"She lived in little neighborhood just outside of Cincinnati and she had killed her children. She succeeded in killing one, she tried to kill two others.....In the inked pictures of her she seemed a very quiet, very serene woman..... And she had made up her mind that they would not suffer the way she had and it was better for them to die."(Naylor 583-584)
Morrison in Beloved is primarily concerned with a woman's extraordinary capacity for love and sacrifice. Sethe kills her two-year-old daughter and she attempts to kill the other three children because-
"I could not let all go back to where it was and I could not let her not any one of them live under School teacher.....where no one could hurt them. Over there outside this place where they would be safe." (Beloved 163)
This concept of love and safety as motivation for killing children is a familiar inversion of conventional thinking in Morrison's work. Sula's grandmother Eva Peace sets fire to her drug addicted son and walks away with tears on her face, from his burning body. As no one else can, Morrison renders the terrible moment with perfect reason and clarity. Practiced Morrison readers may phrase a note of sorrow for the painful inevitability of things but they never ask the question. The feeble questions, "What she go and do that for? On account of beating? Hell he'd been beat a million times and he was white.....what she go and do that for?" (Beloved 30), is left to the sadistic school master, slave master and his nephews. The same people take false comfort in easy explanation that Sethe lost her reason because she could not take a little mishandling.
But Morrison's queries in Beloved are not about what Sethe does and why. Morrison asks who is the woman capable of making such a choice? Sethe is the kind of woman who "loved something other than herself so much, she has placed all value of life in something outside herself in her children."(Naylor 584) Morrison renders Sethe, then almost completely as a mother-whose love for her children has absolutely no limits in spite of slavery, which subverts all relations and kinship. Sethe, like many children born in to slavery, had not known her own mother. Raised communally by the plantations nurse, she had no rights to the scared woman who had briefly and surreptitiously identified herself as Sethe's mother and who was later hanged. At Sweet Home, Sethe's children had fared better; they had a mother and a father. Through diligence and persistence, Sethe managed to mother her children and protect them from environmental dangers-fire, the well, animals. When Garner dies and School teacher takes over, Sethe is forced to a brutal reality of slavery; her children do not belong to her. They are property, subject to be sold, traded raped, beaten, disposed of. In order to make them safe, she and they would have to escape. And they do. First the children run, and later she, pregnant with a baby that she delivers on route to freedom.
Escape is Sethe's emphatic rejection of slavery's power to circumscribe her motherhood. Barefoot, bleeding, hungry exhausted and tired Sethe struggles to reach Ohio, not so much to save her own life but the life of her children's mother. Only she had milk enough in her breast for her two-year-old and for her new born. Sethe suffers with the knowledge that-
"Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my children.....They held me down and got it.....The little white babies got it first and I got what was left or none.....I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and holler for it and to have so little left." (Beloved 200)
In Ohio under the expert care of her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, Sethe begins to claim herself and her children. She nurses the baby girls and kisses the boys from the top of their heads to their tight round bellies. For twenty eight days-the cycle of preparation a woman's body needs to begin a new life-Sethe's mother-love is unrestrained. She remembers-
"When I stretched my arms, all my children could get in between. I was that wide. Look like I loved them more after I got here. Or may be I could not love them proper in Kentucky because they was not mine to love." (Beloved 162)
When School teacher, his nephew and the sheriff enter Baby Sugg's yard to reclaim Sethe and worse to take her children back into slavery, Sethe revolts. In an instant, she is transported back to the brutal beating she endures in the hours before her escape and to her deepest violation being sucked by School-teacher's nephews, being robbed of the milk that belonged to her babies. Stirred by memories, Sethe resolves that nobody will ever get her milk except her own children. Threatened by School teacher's arrival, she collects every bit of life she had made, all parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful and carries them to the woodshed. Finally, they would all be over there outside this place, where they would be safe.
Sethe's reaction places her outside the Ohio community of former slaves. She becomes one of Morrison's outlaw characters-much like Pilate and Sula in conflict with communal values. Baby Suggs too had outlived an intolerable life. She neither condones nor condemns Sethe but unlike her daughter-in-law, she has learned not to mourn her eight children she had borne but not allowed to keep. Like the others, she understood the nastiness of life. Slavery made love risky. All of eight children have been separated from her. She tells Sethe that she should feel lucky in retaining her three children away from slavery.
"You lucky. You got three left. Three pulling your skirts.....Be thankful, why don't you. I had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased...." (Beloved 5)
"Sethe, however, does not love so timidly. She is without any compromise of her maternity." (Furman 71) She had birthed them, got them out and it felt good. She would not see them return to slavery. The best thing was her children. Whites may dirty all her right but not her best thing. Sethe is prototypical mother, she being first of Morrison's women to demand the privilege of defining a woman and a mother. Contemporary women like Jadine are expected to make these demands, but Morrison demonstrates that these recent combatants owe much to their predecessors. The particular demands have changed-Jadine sees motherhood as inhibiting but Sethe sees it as necessary. Sethe resists all non-human suborder by providing herself capable of thinking for herself and by insisting upon the right to determine her own and her children's fates in life and in death. Sethe acts alone, sending her children along the underground a week before she escapes. Morrison calls attention to the magnitude of Sethe's defiance by accenting her aloneness. All the men at Sweet Home who were supposed to run away together and take Sethe and her children are either dead or in chains. Some were burned alive. One Paul had been sold, two killed and Paul D. was locked in the barn with a bit in her mouth. Halle, Sethe's husband, unable to rescue his wife from the vile nephews who take her milk, cracks under the strain. Sethe takes no refuge in insanity. For Sethe, the duties of motherhood are not dissolved by mental disarrangements-
"I did it. I got us all out. Without Halle too...each and every one of my babies and me too. I birthed them and I got them out and it was not on accident. I did that.”(Beloved 162)
Paul D. comes to her second time. This time, however, his presence is conditioned by feminine principles of compassion, nurturance and patience. This time, she can tell him every bit of her experience and feelings. She can transcend the bound of her rebellion against school teacher and cry for the absent sons and her dead daughter, who was her best thing.
In Jazz, Joe and Violet are two lonely people whose love for each other cannot penetrate the dense walls of disappointment and pain. When he cannot turn to his wife for companionship and intimacy, Joe looks for someone else and finds Dorcas. In a way, Violet also finds her. After the shooting, Violet obtains a photograph of the girl and places it on the living room mantle, where she and Joe take turn alternately admiring it and being moved to tears by it. For each the picture is a reminder of lost opportunities for living and loving. "Dorcas is the mother, Joe was never able to love and protect and she is the daughter Violet never bore."(Furman 86) In a peculiar way, Dorcas is the bridge that links their paths back to each other.
This relationship is not so easy to trace out but lies in the psyche of Joe and Violet. These are not the ordinary passions of violence, rage, fury, malice and anger. Joe loves Dorcas before and he loves her after. He tracks her to help her realise that he is a mild man, who knows "how to treat a woman. I never could have, never would mistreat one. Never would make a woman live like dog in a cave."(Jazz 182) He needs her acknowledgement that he belongs to her. But like Joe's mother the naked woman who lived wild in the caves and woods of Virginia while he was growing up, Dorcas abandones him. The trial across the street of New York becomes, in Joe's mind, the Viney treacherous Virginia woods where he hunted the woman who was said to be his mother, in order to be granted a glimmer of recognition. Joe never finds his mother. After the third abortive search his hurt feelings complete with the feelings of anger and humiliation that his mother would choose a cave not him. He does, however, finds Dorcas. But she, too has chosen not to give or receive his love. Perhaps shooting Dorcas discharges the pent up misery and humiliation of his past.
Joe does not want babies. So all those miscarriages are more inconvenience than loss. They like children. Love them even. But neither wants the trouble. Years later, however, when Violet is forty, she is already staring at infants, quick to anger when a sharp word is flung at a child. By and by longing became heavier. Then Violet buys a doll and begins to imagine how old that last miscarried child would be now. "Mother hunger hits her like a hammer-When she wakes up, her husband has shot a girl young enough to be that daughter who fled her womb."(Jazz 109)
As Joe mourns for Dorcas, Violet wants to know more and more about the girl she hates so much. She goes out in search of Dorcas's past. As Violet starts her journey into the past, as she learns more and more about Dorcas's past she also learns to associate herself with her. She recognises that Dorcas could have been the daughter she never had, a rather miscarries, a daughter whose hair, she as a hairdresser, would have liked to dress.
Violet not only helps Alice, but also Felice, Dorcas's girl friend to review her life. Felice arrives at Trace household not only to retrieve her lost ring, stays back not only to discover her own self, but also to understand her relation with her mother. Just as Denver and other black women in the community help Beloved to realise that her mother's act of killing was necessitated by love, by not wanting her daughter to be a slave, Violet makes Felice realise that her mother stole a ring from the shop only out of spite. Felice's arrival re-establishes harmony in Trace household. Fortunately, Felice gets in Violet a 'mama' just in time. Violet's mother commits suicide, Dorcas's mother is killed and Felice's mother is absent. That is why in times of crisis, Violet, Alice and Dorcas each utters the word 'mama'. Actually in nurturing each other, each becomes a 'mama' for the other. Mbalia rightly points out the needs of parental or maternal nurturing when she says-
"What Violet, Alice, Dorcas and Felice have in common is the need for 'mamas'."(634)
One can go back to Song of Solomon, where Morrison points out that without a chorus of mamas and aunts one can easily lose one's way and parental nurturing may provide happiness and real meaning of life to the children when they grow up and set on the critical journey of life.
Works Cited
Furman, Jon. ‘Remembering the Disremembered’, Toni Morrison*s Fiction, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. London:Pan, 1978.
………………..The Bluest Eye. London:Pan, 1978.
………………..Tar Baby. London:Pan, 1978.
………………..Beloved. London:Pan, 1978.
………………..Jazz. London:Pan, 1978.
Mbalia, Dorothea Drummond. ‘Women Who Run With Wild: The Need for Sisterhood in Jazz’, Modern Fiction Studies, 39, Fall/Winter, 1993.
Naylor, Gloria and Toni Morrison. ‘A Conversation’, Southern Review, 21, Summer, 1985.
Raus, Charles. Toni Morrison, Conversation With American Writers, New York : Alfred A. Knoff; 1985.