The Story Must Go On and On: The Fantastic, Narration, and Intertextuality in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Jazz - Critical Essay

African American Review, Spring, 2000 by Martha J. Cutter

So Wild is real, and physical. Yet the narrative also insists that Wild is, in some sense, Beloved. Like Beloved, Wild drives men to distraction, causing them to go "soft in the head" or leave "their beds in the shank of the night" (167). Like Beloved, Wild appears to possess an uncontainable hunger, a desire that is lavished on sweet things. In Beloved Sethe and Denver learn that Beloved's hunger can be satiated by sweet things," "honey as well as the wax it came in, sugar sandwiches.[ldot] She gnawed a cane stick to flax and kept the strings in her mouth long after the syrup had been sucked away" (55). These traces are re-manifested in Wild, who also appears to love sweet things, judging by the trail of ruined honeycombs she leaves behind, and by the fact that she is associated with the canefield where she is believed to reside (175), where she "creeps about and hides and touches and laughs a low sweet babygirl laugh" (37).

These "signs" function as injunctions to the attentive reader to try to trace and retrace Beloved's presence in Wild, and Wild's presence in Beloved. Like Joe, however, the attentive reader follows these traces but never finds definitive answers. Three times Joe attempts to penetrate the secret of Wild, to receive an acknowledgment that she is his mother. What he finds on his third visit does not so much confirm this story as tell a new story--the story of Golden Gray and Wild. When Joe finally discovers Wild's underground cave of light, he smells "no odor of dung or fur" but instead "a domestic smell--oil, ashes" (183). This seems to indicate that Wild is no longer wild but has, to some extent, become "civilized," as do the other signs of her absent presence: "A green dress. A rocking chair without an arm. A circle of stones for cooking. Jars, baskets, pots; a doll, a spindle, earrings, a photograph, a stack of sticks, a set of silver brushes and a silver cigar case" (184). Perhaps these items--some of whic h (the silver brushes and case) clearly belong to Golden Gray--are stolen. Yet they also seem to mark a connection to the prior text (the earrings, for example) as well as the possible signs of a domestic union between Wild, the "coal black" woman, and Golden Gray, the light-skinned "white man" who turns out to be the son of a very "black" man, Hunters Hunter. For in addition to the spindle (used perhaps to generate thread), Joe sees "a pair of man's trousers with buttons of bone. Carefully folded, a silk shirt, faded pale and creamy--except at the seams. There, both thread and fabric were a fresh and sunny yellow" (184). These clothes clearly belong to Golden Gray (see 158), but what do we make of the fact that they have been repaired at the seams with thread that is "a fresh and sunny yellow"? Who sews these seams, these stitches?

Morrison may be encouraging us, here, to write what Umberto Eco calls a "ghost chapter" (214) about the possible union of Wild/Beloved and Golden Gray. Clues to this ghost chapter are scattered throughout the text, like Wild's leavings of half-eaten victuals. We are told, for example, that, although Wild fears Henry Lestory and will not nurse her own son, she does develop a kind of liking for Golden Gray; individuals remember "when she came, what she looked like, why she stayed and that queer boy [Golden Gray] she set so much store by" (168). Golden Gray himself feels emotions of both attraction and repulsion for Wild; he fears she will "explode in his arms, or worse, that he will, in hers" (153). The narrative suggests, however, that Golden Gray overcomes his repulsion to accept--and perhaps love--Wild: