Biblical trees, biblical deliverance: literary landscapes of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Glenda B. Weathers

With language Janie has reordered her world, taken from Starks his puppet-string control of her, and seized control over her own story, which includes a relationship with Vergible Woods, a man called "Tea Cake for short" (93). (12) Early in their relationship Janie realizes that Tea Cake wants her to be a player in the game. As he sets up the checkerboard, the narrator tells us, Tea Cake thinks it "natural for [Janie] to play" (92). The most empowering move occurs when Tea Cake jumps Janie's king; she grabs his hand to prevent his seizing control; they wrestle in fun; and Tea Cake yields to her king. As the night winds down, Tea Cake tells Janie "good night" with the observation, "Look lak we done run our conversation from grass roots tuh pine trees." At this point in her narrative, Hurston once again presents a tree image against which Janie contemplates Tea Cake's potential. Hopes for the future blend with images of her past, for Janie thinks Tea Cake looks "like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom--a pear tree blossom in the spring" (101).

Janie's marriage to Tea Cake begins her personal journey toward a gratifying life. (13) She confides to him, "If you kin see the light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all. Ah wuz fumblin' round and God opened de door" (151). In the last chapters of the novel, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog and tries in his madness to shoot Janie, but instead she safeguards her right to live fruitfully and shoots him. In that salvation of sell Janie confronts death, transcends it, and learns a lesson that her grandmother never learned. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil standing in Nanny's garden could not be avoided if Janie were to ever experience a genuine life. Nanny's desire to protect Janie was doubtless prompted by the fear that Janie would fall by knowing too much. Yet it is only in the knowing that Janie can construct herself, can re-member the facts of her life, re-gather those markers of her life, and continually revision her life to make meaning of her past. And in the process of re-membering, re-gathering, and re-visioning, Janie finds her voice and exploits the power of language to create herself and secure deliverance. And what she gives Pheoby and those of us who read that narrative is her story.

Informed by Judeo-Christian mythologies of a Promised Land and an Eden, and also by its literary antecedent, Beloved participates in and contributes to the factual and fictional lives of African Americans seeking an escape from persecution. (14) An important site in Beloved presenting the multivalent symbolism inherent in the Eden myth is Sweet Home. This place that has seemed to the male slaves a virtual sanctuary--a prelapsarian world in contrast to other plantations--becomes, in Sethe's revisionist account, a lie, which they try to escape by crossing the Ohio River. Indeed, Sethe's system of symbols as she experiences "re-memory" challenges the notion that there was anything sweet about Sweet Home. In fact, the death-dealing trees on the Sweet Home plantation form her source of knowledge: most notably, the site where Sixo is "tied to a tree" and roasted (226), and the place where Sethe herself suffers carnal knowledge at the hands of the sexual serpent. Early in her narrative, as Sethe stumbles across memories, "suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty." Sweet Home grows "the most beautiful sycamores in the world" (6). Like Eden's tree of knowledge of good and evil, Sweet Home's trees read ambiguously, for Sethe recalls these beautiful "lacy groves" at the same time that she re-memories the white boys in the groves who forcefully suck the milk from her breasts. After she reports the mammary rape, Sethe, at schoolteacher's command, will be lashed with cowhide by the same boys who raped her. They leave her not only with a bitter memory, but also with scars on her back in the shape of a "chokecherry tree. Trunk, branches, and even leaves. Tiny little chokecherry leaves" (16). (15)