"I been worried sick about you, too, Macon": Toni Morrison, the South, and the oral tradition

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 1998 by Atkinson, Yvonne, Page, Philip

Since the diaspora, African Americans have been on the move, seeking a place within the American geographic and cultural space. As opposed to the seemingly limitless geographical potential of America for Whites, as Houston A. Baker observes, Blacks were consigned to holes on slave ships, then to rural cabins and later to urban kitchenettes-not truly their own places because such places were imposed upon them (108).' America also seemed to promise unlimited cultural space for European immigrants, but African Americans were denied such space because their African heritage and later their Southern slave pasts were repudiated by the larger culture. In response to such displacements, African Americans embraced and deepened their seperate cultural traditions as a means of survival and as a chosen seperation from mainstream American culture.

Over time, as historical events-emancipation, migration, integration-expanded the limits of the physical and cultural space which African Americans inhabit, they have had constantly to negotiate their relationships with their cultural pasts and the separate cultural traditions such seperate cultural spaces embodied. An inner/outer tension has accompanied these movements and has characterized much of the cultural growth of individuals in the community and the development of characters in African American fiction. Unlike White characters who typically want to escape their communities to find freedom, Black characters seek redemption in the return to community and the ensuing resolution of their inner/outer fragmentation.

In African American culture, and in Toni Morrison's fiction, the American South is often the locus-directly or indirectly-of this tension. In Morrison's fiction, the present is the North, whereas the past is the South, and characters journey from South to North or vice versa are weighted with deep social and psychological significance. The action often takes place in Ohio, because of Ohio's "curious juxtaposition" between North and South (Tate 119) and its leading role in the underground railroad.2 As characters in the North struggle to create healthy identities, they must come to terms with their own or their ancestors' Southern pasts by somehow fusing past and present. The characters must also come to terms with abandoning the trappings of their past. In the North, despite their efforts to discard their slave past, traces-names, language, rituals, and traditions-remain.

The Southern communities in the characters past however, are remembered with both joy and shame. In his former, rural, Southern life, Cholly Breedlove had a viable family and community. Despite his lack of parents, he had the comforts of Aunt Jimmy and her friends as well as the surrogate fathering of Blue Jack. Yet, in that same peaceful locale, he is abandoned by his mother, father, and-through death-his aunt; and it is there that he learns alienation and self hate. For Nel, the past is in New Orleans where she briefly finds her extended family and a sense of her identity, but that past is also marred by her great grandmother's death and her mother's shame. Similarly, Shalimar provides Milkman with a sense of belonging, but it is also where he suffers his most severe trials and where Pilate dies. Eloe is Son's only community, yet it is where he causes his wife's death and where his displacement begins. For Sethe and Paul D, Sweet Home is the ultimate bittersweet-a memory which almost destroys them. Vesper County, despite the violence of dispossession and other acts of blatant discrimination, remains the place where he and Violet were happy and strong. For the founders of Ruby Oklahoma, the South is where they find the strength to band together as an extended family, but also where they are exiled and forced to travel West.

The dialectic between present North (or West) and past South provides meaning and structure to Morrison's novels. Characters must negotiate between the poles, but the gaps are formidable. They must "make a place for fear as a way of controlling it" (Sula 14). In some cases, this mediation involves physical journeys from South to North or vice versa, journeys that become defining moments, (Nel, Golden Grey) mythic quests, (Milkman, Pilate) failed returns, (Son, Jadine) or heroic accomplishments (Sethe). This mediation often means re-imersion in the oral tradition, as for Milkman and Sethe. In all cases, the transaction is psychological, occuring primarily through memory. Not only do individual characters conduct such negotiations, but through the entwined relationships of multiple characters' stories, each novel documents a collective negotiation between present North and past South. For example, whereas neither Pecola nor Claudia have a South to remember, The Bluest Eye as a whole recalls their cultural, Southern past through the embedded stories of Cholly, Polly, Geraldine, and Soaphead Church.

Milkman Dead, in Song of Solomon, best illustrates the successful renegotiation of North and South and the consequent re-integration of self and community. Living a spiritual death in the North, he begins to "put it all together" (307) by reconnecting with his history through language-community and family stories as well as the words of Solomon's song. Fittingly, he seeks his past in a journey to the South, thereby extending Nel's truncated self-exploration in New Orleans. Milkman is able to revisit the sites where his ancstors' pasts took place and thereby to identify himself with these ancestors. As his knowledge of the past increases, through the stories told to him and his own travels, his geographical journey expands Southward, duplicating Pilate's geographical collection of rocks from the places she has visited. The stories Milkman collects are like Pilate's rocks-both are reminders of their personal pasts and their cultural pasts. Just as the rocks provide the pleasure of connectedness to Pilate, the stories give Milkman self-knowledge, empathy, a sense of place in the African American culture, and a sense of belonging in the natural world. Through the oral discourse and especially the words of Solomon's song, Milkman solves the African American dilemmas of place, past, and identity.3