The novel Paradise, about isolation and community, about contentions and conflicts, is full of hard facts and holistic vision, yet has a narrative tone that is amusing and loving as it recounts native migrants (dark-skinned Mississippi Negroes) searching for a new home, being excluded from a (light-skinned Oklahoma Negro) town, and creating in late nineteenth-century Oklahoma their own, Haven, which prospers, then fails, so they begin, elsewhere, anew in the early 1950s, with the town of Ruby, a place where the purest blackness is ideal, and there are no facilities for the comfort of the stranger or traveler: blackness is an essence asserted against competing essences for a people who have known danger, exile, mockery, and terror (a racial logic similar to that of the Seven Days vigilantes—an eye for an eye—in Song of Solomon). With time, as changes begin to occur in Ruby, problems evolve: the contesting of purpose, the rebellion of youth. There are competing messages from ministers: one demands selfless devotion to an impersonal divine love; and the other describes divinity as respect and love, with the divine offering sacrifice, making possible human love. The black male town leaders—idealistic, inflexible, intolerant—look for something or someone to blame for the social divisions and, rather than examining the town’s isolation, rigidity, and stasis, focus on women without men, marginal women, outlaw women: among them a once abducted Brazilian girl, Consolata (Connie), who becomes a convent devotee and leader (with what may be necromantic power); and an ill but radiant old woman; a mother in flight from her own young children; and an abandoned, abused young woman adrift in the world. Do we insist on difference, defining ourselves against it? Do we cultivate resilience or resentment? Do we offer each other judgment or compassion, help or hurt? The convent women eat, talk, and work together, and share their dreams— and their being together helps them to heal. (Critic James Wood questioned the seductive power and seriousness of Morrison’s spiritual concerns, her magical realism—and others denounced the book’s apparently political diagram; but such concerns suggest incomprehension of vision.) Eventually, the subject of contested belonging, of community, may make Paradise Toni Morrison’s most resonant work: could there be a more American theme, a more significant matter of international concern, now and ever, anything of more human value?.................................................
This excerpt is from an article, completed in year 2019, as part of a larger
essay discussing literature and film, including Toni Morrison and Beloved and
Zora Neale Hurston and Their Eyes Were Watching God, scheduled to appear
in Film International (Volume 18, No. 2) in 2020, but because of the
international health (coronavirus) and financial crises, was not properly
published, distributed, or available.
