Paradise

Christian Century, March 18, 1998 by Reggie Young

By Toni Morrison. Knopf, 318 pp., $25.00.

Toni Morrison's detractors complain that her novels focus too much on the victimization of blacks, especially women. Although victims often do people Morrison's novels, to ignore the rich and complex themes explored in her work and focus solely on such issues as black victimization is like saying water is the only ingredient of importance in Creole gumbo.

In her latest novel Morrison's opening sentence, "They shoot the white girl first," subverts any notion that she is simplistically writing about black female victimization. Since "they" refers to a group of black men--not white, linen-wearing hatemongers--who massacre a small group of women who have taken refuge in an abandoned convent near the all-black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, some have already labeled Paradise a work of anti-black male, pro-feminist propaganda. However, anyone who reads novels as literature, not as sociopolitical tracts, will see that the characters in this novel are both victims and victimizers. Morrison allows us to understand and sympathize even with those who are most disturbing, those we would most want to avoid in real life.

Morrison's narrative smoothly circles between the present and various past generations. Set in 1976, the story actually begins nearly a century earlier, when nine proud black families form the nucleus of a group traveling from Mississippi and Louisiana to the Oklahoma territories. They are looking for freedom and self-sufficiency in the years following Reconstruction. Their pilgrimage echoes the Exodus Story, the most treasured part of the Bible for slaves during the antebellum period and beyond. Like the Israelites who fled from their enslavement in Egypt, this group of sojourners left the South in search of their own Canaan. They sought to create their own small earthly paradise at a time when no one else was willing to include them in theirs.

At the heart of the novel is the "Disallowing." The founding families were excluded from a frontier settlement made up of light-skinned blacks, simply because of their darker complexions. The bitterness of being rejected by members of their own race has a permanent effect on the band of former slaves, who include among their members men who held office in state government during Reconstruction. In response, they build their own town, Ruby, and isolate themselves from the world that had once rejected them. They proclaim their town to be "the one black town worth the pain." But in 1976, when Ruby is on the verge of falling apart, its inhabitants try to keep the town's utopian veneer intact by themselves inflicting pain on a convenient group of female scapegoats.

More important than the issue of victimization in this novel is the danger inherent in attempting to create a paradise on earth, especially since any attempt to create such a paradise seems to demand exclusion. Is creating a paradise a worthy goal or one that can only lead to tragedy? The pious founders of the original settlement knew that God had warned the Israelites who crossed over into Canaan not to mix with the indigenous peoples and had given them the right to cleanse the land through the spilling of blood. In Ruby, nearly a full century after the Disallowing, the founders' descendants participate in the massacre depicted in both the opening and concluding sections of the novel. The men are convinced of the righteousness of their actions, seeing themselves as crusaders for moral purification. But Morrison's novel is just as much about the victims of this crusade, the women who occupy the convent. These fugitives, refugees and outcasts may have been creating an even stronger community than the town's. Each chapter bears the name of one of these women.

Morrison's first novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, Paradise is full of challenges and surprises. Though it does not quite come up to the standard of Morrison's masterwork, Beloved, this is one of the most important novels of the decade.

Reviewed by Reggie Young, professor of American and African-American literature at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, and a poet and fiction writer.