Re-imagining agency: Toni Morrison's Paradise

African American Review, Winter, 2002 by Magali Cornier Michael

The novel carefully delineates the history of this town as one created by former slave men who had been discriminated against not only by whites but also by "Negro towns" (13) and who in response chose a separatism that became discrimination against all others. (4) The freedmen

became a tight band of wayfarers 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 [black] 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)

That this exclusion by other "Negroes" is grounded in skin color, in "light-skinned against black," is a revelation to the "8-rock males." They immediately understand the "serious consequences" of this racial "difference" in terms of patriarchal power: "Serious enough that their daughters would be shunned as brides; their sons chosen last" (194). (5) Their response to this insulting rebuff by "fair-skinned colored men. Blue-eyed, gray-eyed yellowmen" (195) is to found their own "all-black" (5) town, Haven (and later Ruby, after Haven withers), grounded in dogmatic racist and patriarchal terms that simply reverse the hierarchy of the racism they themselves suffered by excluding all who are not so dark as themselves.

In Haven and then Ruby, the "Fathers" (6) rule and the darkest "8-rock" (194), coal-black skin is privileged; others are driven away or marginalized. Holding onto the "logic of hierarchical opposition," the town must continually enforce its borders, given that defining "an identity, a closed totality, always depends on excluding some elements" (Young 303). As Pat Best recognizes, "People get chosen and ranked" based upon "skin color" in Ruby (216). For example, the community forces Menus to "return the woman he brought home to marry. The pretty sandy-haired girl from Virginia" (195) and marginalizes Roger Best's wife (Delia), daughter (Pat), and granddaughter (Billie Delia) for their "sunlight skin" (196), which marks them as other. Marginalization functions as a form of violence when Delia dies because no one will get her the medical help she needs. The "fastest girl in town" (59) label accentuates and casts a deprecatory shadow onto Billie Delia's racial otherness, and she eventually leaves Ruby. That thes e examples are all women is not surprising, given that the town patriarchs consolidate their power through an unspoken but extremely tight control over reproduction and thus over women. As Pat recognizes, "Everything that worries them must come from women," in that "the generations had to be not only racially untampered with but free of adultery too" (217) in order to ensure racial purity. Billie Delia recognizes that the rumors and verbal battles between the men that ensue when Arnette is found pregnant out of wedlock and then loses the baby have to do with "disobedience, which meant, of course, the stallions were fighting about who controlled the mares and their foals" (150).