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

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

Thus, the themes of innocence and knowledge, the images of Eden and the Promised Land provide an extended--albeit subtle--extended metaphoric background to both male and female characters in Beloved. The symbolic props of the Promised Land and Garden landscapes help the black protagonists preserve and bring to conscious awareness the painful reality of destructive forces. At the same time, however, these same tree images, alluding as they do to the fall, to both Christian and secular redemption, and to the power of words to create and destroy, allow the characters to exploit the power of symbol to reconstruct themselves. Indeed, the integrity of selfhood seems to require an "I am"--a realization of the Logos. Paul D, in fact, intuitively understands the power of words for creating and restoring. Recalling how Sethe had respected his manhood, Paul D, looking at the woman before him--Sethe depleted, her breasts "exhausted," her body beneath the "carnival" colored patchwork quilt--wants to put "his story next to hers." Christ-like, Paul D touches Sethe's face, and supplants the great "I am" with a logos reality especially for her: "You your best thing, Sethe. You are" (273, emphasis added).

The mythologies of Eden and Promised Land have indeed provided a mother lode of images for writers wanting to signify their protagonists' emergence to a richer identity and a better life. Certainly African American protagonists, whether factually or fictionally rendered, found in the myth of deliverance a belief system that represented power and stimulated change. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood that power and used it to point his followers toward a Promised Land of sacred fulfillment and civil rights. Tapping into the same mythology, Hurston and Morrison created some of the most enduring characters in black literary history. Profoundly inspired by trees of knowledge, these characters, especially Janie and Sethe, could painfully but productively "find out about livin' fuh theyselves," seek deliverance, and share those impulses and discoveries in the stories they inhabit (Hurston 183).

Works Cited

Andrews, William L., and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Casebook. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Awkward, Michael. Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women's Novels. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

--, ed. New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Bell, Bernard W. "Beloved: A Womanist Nee-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past." African American Review 29 (1992): 7-15.

Bond, Cynthia. "Language, Speech, and Difference in Their Eyes Were Watching God." Gates and Appiah 204-17.

Bonnet, Michele. " 'To Take the Sin out of Slicing Trees': The Law of the Tree in Beloved." African American Review 31 (1997): 41-55.

Brown, Lloyd. "Zora Neale Hurston and the Nature of Female Perception." Obsidian 4 (1978): 39-40.

Carby, Hazel. V. "The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston." Ed. Awkward 71-93.