"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

As part of the African culture brought to the South, the oral tradition survived slavery and became part of African American culture. Even though most African Americans who migrated North gave up their Southern, rural ways to become the "New Negro," they brought the Southern oral tradition with them in their language systems.

Morrison infuses her fiction with rhetorical tropes from the Southern oral tradition of Black English: signifying, call and response, and witnessing and testifying. Signifying is the art of verbal battle that defines community and those who are in it. Signifying in the oral tradition was and is, according to Clarence Major, "'performance' talk; to berate someone; to censure . . . speaking ironically" (416). Signifying is an in-group activity in which "[i]ndividual participation is necessary for community survival" (Smitherman, Talkin 75). It is thus an act of delineation. Those who cannot signify, or are not signified on or with, are outside the group. It is also a marker of delineation because one must have access to communal knowledge in order to understand its indirect meanings, for it is "a way of encoding messages or meanings which involves, in most cases, an element of indirection" (Mitchell-Kernan 311).

In The Bluest Eye, the survival of this language system as a way to talk indirectly about a difficult situation and mark Mrs. MacTeer as an "in-group" member who continues to perform the language in the tradition of her Southern and African ancestors is evident in her three-quarts of milk soliloquy: Three quarts of milk. That's what was in that icebox yesterday. Three whole quarts. Now they ain't none. Not a drop. I don't mind folks coming in and getting what they want, but three quarts of milk! What the devil does anybody need with three quarts of milk? . . . I don't know what I'm supposed to be running here, a charity ward, I guess. Time for me to get out of the giving line and get in the getting line. (22-23)

Her speech is directed, indirectly, at Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola, but it is also directed at the reader. The reader is given the opportunity to participate in the signifying act by recognizing the signifying and relating it to knowledge of others who have also participated in the ritual. Mrs. MacTeer is teaching her audience about waste, but she is also teaching them life lessons: one must be ever vigilant against poverty because it is always waiting to consume the unaware, there are limits to things, too much of anything is bad, and family takes care of family.

In Song of Solomon, Morrison uses a signifying conversation between Macon and Pilate to show again the way in which the language pattern continued in the oral discourse of the migrants but also to demonstrate the love that remains between a brother and sister whose migration to the urban North seems to have distanced them from each other. The signifying here is perhaps the best example of the power of indirection of the signifying act. `Why can't you dress like a woman?' He was standing by the stove. `What's that Sailor's cap doing on your head? Don't you have stockings? What are you trying to make me look like in this town?' Pilate had sat there listening to him, her wondering eyes resting on his face. Then she said, 'I been worried sick about you too, Macon.' (20)