Southern ethos / Black ethics in Toni Morrison's fiction

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 1998 by Fultz, Lucille P

"You left out a s, ma'am," the boy said. The North was new to him and he had just begun to learn that he could speak up to white people.

-Song of Solomon

The South "symbolizes the worst that America has offered to blacks-racism, poverty, and oppression. But it also represents the roots of Black culture, history and `home.' It is `down home' (Bone xxii) to many Blacks not born there; a 'homeplace' for people whose fathers and mothers left decades ago" (Holt 137-138).' It is this mecca, so to speak, toward which many African American writers turn in their search for a site that represents a home base for certain characters seeking grounding and stability. In another sense, however, the South-with a sense of the place of a White ethos that privileges Whiteness as a site of supremacy and Blackness as the site of inferiority-is most problematic for Blacks. Robert Bone has stated that Blacks' ambivalence toward the South is due to the fact that they are at once "deeply moved by the natural beauty of the region" and "repelled by its moral ugliness" (xxi). Philip Page is most eloquent on the role of the South in the composite African American experience when he writes about Toni Morrison's texts, noting that for her the "past is both rural and South." And "as characters in the urban North struggle to create healthy identities, they must come to terms with their own or their ancestors' rural southern pasts by somehow fusing past and present." Page further states "that past is unavoidable because it is heavily value-laden and emotionally burdened, both positively and negatively"(29). 2

Perhaps Denver most cogently formulates this contradictory notion of the Southern past when she responds to her mother's and Paul D's fixations on Sweet Home, Kentucky: "How come everybody run off from Sweet Home can't stop talking about it? Look like if it was so sweet you would have stayed" (Beloved 13). But Denver can never know the "ultimate bittersweet" of Sweet Home, "a place they cannot forget but can barely endure to remember" (29). Clearly the Sweet Home Sethe and Paul D are thinking of at this moment is redolent of the natural world, one that resonates with other Toni Morrison characters, most notably Pauline Breedlove, Sethe, and Paul D, as noted above. Despite this ambivalence, for those African Americans writers who have fictionalized the South, it is an indispensable place because it is more than an erstwhile home: it is an always already originary site of their African Americanness, the place of rootedness and perdurability of the African American spirit. For many African Americans the South remains a place of comfort and contradictions-a place to turn toward and a place to turn from.

For example, when Pauline Breedlove finds herself alienated from the African American community in Lorain, Ohio, and emotionally abandoned by her husband Cholly, she evokes idyllic memories of the South that stress the beauty of the natural world which becomes a metaphor for her erotic memories of her lost love for her Cholly. Her now famous evocation of that lost world mirrors the memories of, perhaps, many African Americans who left the rural South for the concrete and smog-polluted cities and factory towns of the North:

When all of us left from down home and was waiting down by the depot for the truck, it was nighttime. June bugs was shooting everywhere. They lighted up a tree leaf, and I seen a streak of green every now and again. That was the last time I seen real june bugs. These things up here ain't june bugs. They's something else. Folks here call them fireflies. Down home they was different. But I recollect that streak of green. I recollect it well. (The Bluest Eye 89)

Later she muses:

When I first seed Cholly, I want you to know it was like all the bits of color from that time down home when all of us chil'ren went berry picking after a funeral and I put some in the pocket of my Sunday dress, and they mashed up and stained my hips. My whole dress was messed with purple, and it never did wash out. Not the dress nor me. I could feel the purple deep inside me. (91-92)

Pauline's assertions that "[a]ll of them colors was in me" and that the "purple never did wash," (92) are reinforced by her associating them with her former closeness to Cholly and her nostalgia for that natural beauty. These are homologous to her memory of certain lost erotic moments with Cholly that she will never forget. Pauline's mingling of the southern past and the northern present is evidence of the permanent hold the South has on her. Pauline, of course, has highly romanticized the region that was the site of her birth and has forgotten the pain and neglect associated with her crippled foot, "the complete indifference with which a rusty nail was met when it pinched clear through her foot," (88) marking her difference and setting her apart from the rest of her family. She becomes the "other" within the family because she is physically different. This difference, Morrison implies, is a result of poverty and racism that denied medical attention to Pauline's injured foot. Hence, her selected memory of the South does not include the painful experiences.