Rajyashree Khushu-Lahiri

Politics of Race and Gender in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

The aim of this paper is to delineate the underpinnings of the politics of race and gender in Toni Morrison's novel Paradise. Her seventh novel, and the first to be published since she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, Paradise deals once again with the experience of the African-Americans living in a historically racialized society, and the victimization of women in a patriarchal society.

The novel opens starkly—"They shoot the white girl first."[Paradise] According to Gay Wachman, in Paradise Morrison "ridicules the stereotypes of exclusion by setting the overly race-conscious reader off on a wild goose chase right from the very first sen­tence. Which of the four young women at the Convent is the white girl the men shoot first? ... But we are never told which of the women is white."[2] Morrison herself has admitted that she purposely constructed her narrative so as not to answer that question. "I wanted the readers to wonder about the race of those girls until those readers understood that their race didn't matter. I want to dissuade people from reading literature in that way, [be­cause] race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing."[Qtd.Gray67] This assertion is apparently surprising as it comes from the writer who has been the most eloquent chronicler of the black experience during slavery and after, and who is almost solely re­sponsible for giving African-American women their rightful place in American literature. Moreover, in most of her critical essays, racial questions figure prominently. But as Paul Gray rightly points out, "there is really no contradiction between what she says now and what she has written in the past. She views her life and work as a struggle against racial categories, or any cate­gories, as a means of keeping groups of people powerless and excluded."[67]

In Paradise, Morrison problematizes the whole subject of racism by positing it as a divide between the light-skinned and the dark-skinned blacks, rather than the slave against the free man, and the white against the black. Thus, racial categories pre­sented here may be different, but they are nevertheless real as well as discriminatory, responsible for the great "Disallowing" on which the whole novel hinges. Further, Morrison makes it clear that the categories are a consequence of a historically racialized society in which blacks have been living for generations. The term racism refers to the unequal treatment of people on the basis of some biological and physical characteristics—especially skin colour, and shape of the face. The paradigm case is that of the black people, whose mistreatment by whites in the history of the American society has been so conspicuous, so enduring, so closely tied to biological ideas, and has affected so large a seg­ment of the population of the United States. Because of their skin colour and their history as slaves, African Americans have been regarded as "the depth below the depth." Commenting on Ha­ley's Roots, Ishmael Reed observed, "If Alex Haley had traced his father's bloodline, he would have travelled twelve genera­tions back to, not Gambia, but Ireland."[Qtd.Hollinger19] Yet the distinction Ha­ley made was driven by a historically racialized society insofar as the extent to which each American individual destiny has been determined by ancestrally derived distinctions. That any person now classified as black or African American might see his or her own life as more the product of African roots—however small or large a percent of one's actual, biological genealogy and cultural experience—than of European roots, reflects this history. Hence, Haley's choice was in effect a structured dilemma, or rather as David Hollinger points out: "Haley's choice is the Hobson's choice of ethno-racial identity in America because it is not a real choice at all."[8] Further, the persistence of the "one drop rule" deprives those with any hint of black skin of any choice in their ethno-racial affiliations, simultaneously placing them in a di­lemma. In Paradise, Patricia, reminiscing about her mother's light coloured skin observes: "The one drop law the whites made up was hard to live by if nobody could tell it was there. When we drove through a town, or a Sherrif’s car was near, Daddy told us to get down, to lie down on the floor of the car, because it would have been no use telling a stranger that you were colored and worse to say you were his wife." (200)

The brutal act described in the opening sentence of the novel occurs in 1976, but Morrison traces its genesis back to the 1870s, the time of the Reconstruction, when nine African-American pa­triarchs, ex-slaves in Mississippi and Louisiana, joined together and headed west to settle in the Oklahoma Territory. A number of historical factors were responsible for this westward migra­tion. Although Reconstruction was a time when black people, supported by Northern will, achieved a limited measure of politi­cal power in the South, it was not a time when the walls of col­our caste came tumbling down. The building and maintenance of those walls had been a primary concern of whites of all classes from the moment of the Emancipation. So far as the whites were concerned, their aim during Reconstruction was to maintain as much physical and social separation as necessary to impress upon the black man his inferiority. Thus, a number of states passed Jim Crow laws requiring separate schools and forbidding marriages between blacks and whites. The ideology underlying Jim Crow was racial proscription including disfranchisement, based on the belief in white supremacy. Consequently, the desire for separation was not confined to whites. A Georgia Negro spoke for many black people when he stated in January 1865 that they preferred to live by themselves because it would take years to eradicate the prejudice against them. They went to their own churches and sent their children to black schools.

Seen in this context, the westward migration of the nine black families in search of a haven, a refuge, a paradise—at any rate a more bearable future, has underlying political implica­tions—it is clearly the outcome of racial politics. Of course, the haven they seek is an all black town. A proud community of freedmen, of gunsmiths, seamstresses, cobblers, ironmongers and masons, they were extraordinary people. They had served, picked, ploughed, and traded in Louisiana Territory since the time of the French. And when it was divided into states, they had helped govern it till 1875, after which they were reduced to field labour. And so, “armed with advertisements of cheap land for homesteading, they took that history, each other, and their incor­ruptible worthiness” (194) and walked to Oklahoma. On their way to the Promised Land they were turned away by rich Choctaw and poor whites, chased by yard dogs, camp prostitutes and their children, they were nevertheless unprepared for the aggressive discouragement they received from Negro towns already being built. The headline of a feature in the Herald, "Come Prepared or Not at All," could not mean them, could it? ... It stung them into confusion to learn they did not have enough money to satisfy the restrictions the 'self-supporting* Negroes required. In short, they were too poor, too bedraggled-looking to enter, let alone reside in, the communities that were soliciting Negro homesteaders." (13-14)

This was a humiliation that more than rankled, that threat­ened to crack open their bones, that reverberated through the next hundred years of their collective memory as the "Disallow­ing." For generations they had believed that the division they had fought to close was the free against the slave, the rich against the poor, and the white against the black.

Now they saw a new separation, light-skinned against black ... the sign of racial purity they had taken for granted had become a stain. The scattering that alarmed Zechariah because he believed it would deplete them was now an even more dangerous level of evil, for if they broke apart and were disvalued by the impure, then, certain as death, those ten generations would disturb their children's peace throughout eternity. (194)

They had been "Disallowed" by fair-skinned coloured men," "shooed away" by "blue-eyed gray-eyed yellowmen in good suits," because they were too black (8—rock after the deep, deep level in coal mines)—so black that they must be trashy. And so they were "bound by the enormity of what had happened to them. Their horror of whites was convulsive but abstract. They saved the clarity of their hatred for the men who had insulted them in ways too confounding for language: first by excluding them, then by offering them staples to exist in that very exclu­sion." (189)

The band of the Disallowed eventually established Haven, where they installed a communal oven in the centre of the town, then lived in willed isolation from the outside world. Haven prospered for decades until World War II after which it atrophied with the residents moving out seeking work in cities, looking for a share in post war prosperity. So, the male descendants of the founding fathers decided to repeat the past. They dismantled the oven, loaded it on a truck, and moved it and their families farther west to start up, from scratch, another Oklahoma town. This town they named Ruby, to honour the woman in their clan who died after the journey having been denied medical attention, as was the custom those days. Morrison gives a poignant account of her death and the shattering effect it has on her two brothers— Deek and Steward Morgan.

“When it became clear she needed serious medical help, there was no way to provide it.
No colored people were allowed in the wards. No regular doctor would attend them....
She died on the waiting room bench while the nurse tried to find a doctor to examine her. When the brothers learned the nurse had been trying to reach a veterinarian, they gathered their dead sister in their arms, their shoulders shook all the way home. . . . After that they understood the terms and conditions of the deal better.” (113)

What this meant for the settlers of Haven and Ruby, those "Blue- eyed black people, tall and graceful, whose clear, wide eyes gave no sign of what they really felt about those who weren't 8—rock like them" (193) was that everyone marrying outside the coal black 8—rock bloodlines, "tampering with the gene pool was an outcast. Such a person was no longer welcome in a community as tight as wax, "no longer even represented in a Christmas schoolroom enactment of the Nativity that somehow hybridized the birth of Christ with the trek story and the creation myth of the 8—rock forefathers. And so, willfully isolated, hoping to in­sulate themselves from "Out There where every cluster of white men looked like a posse," the proud and intolerant 8—rock set­tlers ironically embrace the values of colourism and racial cate­gories they had tried to escape. At the end of the novel Richard Misner the pastor, reflecting on the brutal attack on the defence­less women of the Convent remarks:

Whether they be the first or the last, representing the oldest black families or the newest, the best of the tradition or the most pathetic, they had ended up betraying it all. They think they have outfoxed the whiteman when in fact they imitate him.... Born out of an old hatred, one that began when one kind of    black man scorned an­other kind and that kind took the hatred to another level, their self­ishness had trashed two hundred years of suffering and triumph in a moment of such pomposity and error and callousness it froze the mind. (306)

With the passage of years, Ruby is fissured by ancestral feuds and financial squabbles, not to mention the political fer­ment of the era, which has managed to pierce the town's isola­tion. In the wake of "the desolation that rose after King's mur­der/' Ruby succumbs to militancy, and a Black Power Fist is painted on the oven. In view of its leading citizens, these trou­bles call for a scapegoat. And one readily exists: the Convent, an abandoned mansion about seventeen miles away from the town—or more precisely the four women who occupy it, and whose unattached and unconventional status makes them the per­fect targets for patriarchal ire. The animosity that the patriarchs of Ruby harbour towards the inmates of the Convent, is a clear illustration of Simone de Beauvoir's classic thesis that woman has been made to represent all of man's ambivalent feelings about his own inability to control his own physical existence, his own birth and death. As the’ Other’, the woman comes to repre­sent the contingency of life, life that is made to be destroyed. In addition, as Karen Homey and Dorothy Dinnerstein9 have shown, the male dread of women has historically objectified it- self in the vilification of women, male ambivalence of female charms underlies the traditional images of such terrible sorcer­ess—Goddesses as the sphinx, Circe, Kali, Delilah and Salome, all of whom possess duplicitous arts that allow them both to se­duce and to steal male generative energy.

Paradise established the two locales—the place where men rule and the one where women try to escape that rule—in a com­plex and nuanced manner. By the late 1960s the Convent is oc­cupied only by an elderly dying nun and Consolata, her devoted servant .and helper of thirty years. And the Convent becomes with Consolata's diffident acquiescence, a sanctuary for young women orphaned or broken on history's wheel, a safe house for the castaway female children, on the road and trying to hide from angry fathers, abusive husbands, dead babies, treacherous boy­friends and rapists. For example, Mavis had accidentally killed her infant twins by leaving them in a car while she shopped for groceries. Terrified of her abusive husband, she stole his Cadil­lac and lit out for the territory. Next came Grace, wanting to be called Gigi, looking for a man, but good-hearted under a tough exterior. She is followed by Seneca who is heart wrenching with the little gashes she carves into her body. The last to arrive is Pallas, the youngest, unbelieving that her mother and her lover could betray so cruelly. And she is not the only victim of be­trayal. Consolata, who has had a passionate affair with Deacon Morgan is also cruelly betrayed by him as he could not endure "a woman bent on eating him like a meal." After the crime he con­fesses to the pastor that he needed to expunge his "shame," and that he had to "erase both the shame and the kind of woman he believed was its source. An uncontrollable, gnawing woman who had bitten his lip just to lap the blood it shed ... a Salome from whom he had escaped just in time." (279-80) Deacon and his kind think of the women as bloodsuckers and they must erase the shame of their dependence on such women. These women, who are cultish and strange, seem to be witches to the patriarchs of the town. They were "not women locked safely away from men; but worse, women who chose themselves for company, which is to say not a convent but a coven" (276). They possessed uncanny and supernatural powers of healing and second sight, and of raising the dead powers that were particularly threatening to the patriarchs of Ruby. The women, for their part, "felt perme­ated by a blessed malelessness, like a protected domain," a sanctuary in which they were renewed and reinvigorated to face life with courage and fortitude. Throughout the novel, Morrison juxtaposes the values represented by the patriarchs of Ruby against those of the women in the Convent—exclusion versus inclusion, rejection versus acceptance, destruction versus regen­eration and healing. And there is no doubt as to where Morri­son's sympathies lie.

The violence that men inflict on women and the painful irony of an "all-black town" whose citizens succumb to those very values they have tried to oppose in the past, themselves be­coming oppressors, are the central concerns of Paradise. Morri­son is certainly suggesting that a Paradise is not established so easily, but in critiquing the underlying politics of race and gen­der in the American society, she is perhaps, by implication pos­iting the kind of paradise that may be possible. The novel ends on an optimistic note with the Convent women escaping the wrath of the men and carving out secure futures for themselves. And Billie Delia, who grew up as a pariah in Ruby itself as she was not an 8-rock, waits for them to return:

When will they reappear, with blazing eyes, war paint and huge hands to rip up and stomp down this prison calling itself a town?  A backward noplace ruled by men whose power to control was out of control and who had the nerve to say who could live and who not and where; who had seen in lively, free, unarmed females the mutiny of the mares and so got rid of them. She hoped with all her heart that the women were out there . . . biding their time . . . but out there. Which is to say she hoped for a miracle. (308)

Perhaps Morrison is implying that only a miracle can save people and cleanse society of the spurious categories formed on the basis of gender, race and colour

 

Works Cited

Morrison,Toni. Paradise .New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. All subsequent references to the novel will be incorporated in the text.

…………….Quoted in Paul Gray, "Paradise Found," Time, January 19, 1998

Reed Ishmael.Quoted in David Hollinger, Postethnic America .New York: Basic Books, 1995.

Wachman,Gay.’Pride and Prejudice’,Women’s Rewiew of Books, Vol.15,No.7,April,1998