God Help the Child by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is a national – no an international treasure -- but she is first and foremost, “our treasure.”  At 84, she continues to produce some of the finest works of fiction published today.  Her eleventh novel came out in April 2015.  When a Morrison novel enters my reading radar, I pounce and place it on the top of the pile.  Even with only 178 pages, God Help the Child packs every bit of joy, anger, hatred, prejudice, and love, as any of her works.  All this energy and emotion becomes embedded in a story a finely drawn as a silk sheet as it gently glides to cover us.  

God Help the Child is Morrison’s first novel set in the present day.  How timely with the events of Ferguson, New York, and Baltimore to name a few.  Lula Ann, or Bride – as she calls herself – has a stunning beauty which attracts the attention of men and women alike.  Not only gorgeous, she has a rare and sensitive intelligence.  She also displays a justly confident spirit.  As the novel opens, Sweetness says, “It’s not my fault.  So you can’t blame me” (3).  The event she disavows is the birth of her daughter, Lula Ann.  The baby is blue-black, and Sweetness cannot bear to even touch the child.  Lula Ann repulses her.  The father, Louis, abandons the family, accusing Sweetness of infidelity.

This reminds me of Kate Chopin’s short story, “Desiree’s Baby.”  In the story, a couple argue and fight over the color of a baby.  The husband cruelly says to his wife, “You are not white!”  He expels her from the house, and she takes the baby and disappears.  But this 19^th century story set in Louisiana is the thinnest of shadows of Morrison’s novel.  She digs deeply into the psyche of Lula Ann, who struggles to overcome enormous obstacles in her family and society at large.

Each chapter has a different Narrator.  Sweetness opens and closes the novel, and the others – Bride, Brooklyn -- Bride’s best friend at the cosmetics company which employs both of them.  Sofia and Rain are also important characters.  On several occasions, an omniscient narrator intervenes and spreads lots of insight into the characters.

Morrison’s words overflow with emotions and tension.  In a chapter narrated by Sweetness, Morrison writes, “Oh, yeah, I feel bad sometimes about how I treated Lula Ann when she was little.  But you have to understand: I had to protect her.  She didn’t know the world.  There was no point in being tough or sassy even when you were right.  Not in a world where you could be sent to a juvenile lockup for talking back or fighting in school, a world where you’d be the last one hired and the first one fired.  She couldn’t know any of that or how her black skin would scare white people or make them laugh or trick her” (41).  How awful and painful it must be to have to shelter a child from centuries of hate and prejudice.  It sickens me and makes me ashamed that my country – the land of freedom – allows the ugly and pernicious actions of some people to result in murder, riots, and mass incarceration.

Read Toni Morrison’s latest novel, God Help the Child and begin to try and understand what African American mothers have experienced for more than 400 years.  My highest rating is still inadequate 5 stars.

The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker

African-American writer, Alice Walker’s website provides a brief biography.  It reads, in part, “Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated author, poet and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children’s books, and volumes of essays and poetry. She’s best known for The Color Purple, the 1983 novel for which she won the Pulitzer Prize—the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction—and the National Book Award. (http://alicewalkersgarden.com/about-2/).

I read some of Walker’s works in a women writer’s class in grad school, and I found The Color Purple extremely moving.  The persistence and courage of Celie inspired me in a number of ways.  The Temple of My Familiar came my way at the urging of a close friend.  What I found was something quite different from Purple.

Rather than read this novel, it needs to be experienced.  Yes, the story is convoluted, with an amazing array of characters and time periods, with love and hate, fear and courage, but at the end, characters who possessed the same persistence Walker gave us in The Color Purple.  A map of the family and its shifting relationships would most definitely assist a reader.

One interesting character, Fanny, married to an African man, Suwelo, has visions of historical characters.  Suwelo is a history teacher, and he is skeptical that spirits actually contact Fanny.  He researches one, Chief John Horse, and finds Fanny has described his life in meticulous detail.  Suwelo once asked her about the spirits.  “What do you love about these people?” (186). Fanny replies,

“I dunno.  They open doors inside me.  It’s as if they’re keys.  To rooms inside myself.  I find a door inside and it’s as if I hear a humming from behind it, and then I get inside somehow, with the key the old ones give me, (…) and as I stumble about in the darkness of the room, I begin to feel the stirring in myself, the humming in the room, and my heart starts to expand with the absolute feeling of bravery, or love, or audacity, or commitment.  It becomes a light, and the light enters me, by osmosis, and a part of me that was not clear before is clarified.  I radiate this expanded light.  Happiness.  /  And that, Suwelo knew, was called ‘being in love’” (186).

Another character, Lissie, remembers in great detail all of her past lives – from a childhood in Africa, to one during the middle passage, through to one as slavery ended and another during the civil rights movement of the 60s.

Some novels require a great deal of patience and close reading.  Not all are worth that extra effort, but Alice Walker’s Temple of my Familiar most certainly is.  The only flaw involved rapid shifts of time and place, which I found confusing.  Despite this, I did not invoke my rule of 50, and my persistence paid off.  One chapter explains the life of Lissie, and it all fell into place.  5 stars

--Chiron, 8/11/13