The difference in focus and scope in short stories and novels is not as great as is sometimes supposed. A short story, I was taught, has one central point, one focus, one perspective. It makes a sharp point in a single reading. A novel, on the other hand, can be as vast as the night sky, as deep as a northern lake with unfathomed depths and as many perspectives as an author can juggle in consideration of the human condition.
Then there is a story like the one from Toni Morrison in the Feb. 9 issue of The New Yorker earlier this month. To be fair, it was not crafted as a short story but is instead an excerpt from her upcoming novel, God Help the Child. In Sweetness, the main detail of the story seems to overwhelm the point of it all initially. But this is Morrison, and even in an excerpt, there are many ideas to consider. There also is an emotional wallop at the end.
The sparse, unsparing excerpt is told from the perspective of Sweetness, who is the mother of Bride, the novel's protagonist. Nothing about life was easy for Sweetness, especially after she gives birth to a daughter with blue-black skin. Sweetness and her husband are not. Her husband, a porter, does not believe in his wife's fidelity after Lula Ann is born.
But it's not just losing her husband, having to move and going on welfare that are reasons to Sweetness for not wholeheartedly loving her daughter; those things come later. It's her daughter's skin. Sweetness is afraid of and fears for her daughter from the beginning. "She was so black it scared me," Sweetness relates. She momentarily even thinks about smothering the newborn.
The difference between her skin and her daughter's skin is a barrier that cannot be scaled, a gap that cannot be bridged. Sweetness brags about how light-skinned her family is, and the pride they take in passing for white. Her grandmother passed for white, married a white man and refused to even open letters from her family.
This part of the story initially threatens to overwhelm everything else. It's easy to want to yell at Sweetness: This is your daughter, your baby, a living creature who depends totally on you. Sweetness knows that, and answers that charge about why skin color is so important to her:
Some of you probably think it's a bad thing to group ourselves according to skin color -- the lighter the better -- in social clubs, neighborhoods, churches, sororities, even colored schools. But how else can we hold on to a little dignity?
Sweetness was raised by a mother who she said could pass for white but choose not to, and how that bothered her because she and her husband couldn't even put their hands on the white people's Bible when they were married. Yet as a housekeeper, she cooked meals for her white employers and scrubbed their backs in the tub. That was all right but touching their Bible? That just was not to be considered.
I know I don't understand the scope of this issue. I'm white. The nearest thing I have to my upbringing is that we were looked down on in the department stores because my father was stationed out at the Air Force base; one clerk wondered aloud if my mother would be able to pay for our coats or if we would just not pay the bill when Dad was transferred to another base. My mother grew six inches staring down that woman when she told her she was paying cash. It was just the indignity -- why, didn't that clerk know our roots were in that town? That my grandparents had lived there for decades and that my mother was raised there? It wasn't like we were outsiders. We belonged here.
It would be a false equivalency on my part to say an experience like ours would be just like what any person of color goes through, and I do not mean to do that. The most it can do for me is to create a small connection to help open my heart. I know I cannot put myself in the place of a person of color. I do see that people find ways to separate themselves, to distinguish themselves, but that what they also really want is to belong.
Reading is one way of listening to other people. It's a way for me to learn, to find ever more ways of connecting our humanity that we all share and to marvel at the ways in which our diversity makes us unique. It is a way to celebrate the grand purpose of serious fiction, which is to consider aspects of the human condition.
But this is not the focus of Morrison's novel or the excerpt. It is the why of what happens. What happens to children and what it does to them are at the heart of what she is saying.
Sweetness is tough on the child, justifying the withholding of love and other sins as trying to toughen her up, to help her survive the cruel world out there. In her old age, the statement from Sweetness that ends this excerpt echoes the title of the novel. God help the child indeed.
In the beginning, Sweetness claims that "It's not my fault." By the end of the excerpt, the question is not whether it's her fault or not, but what she claims is not her fault -- the color of her daughter's skin, the way Bride turned out and now treats her, the legacy Sweetness has created for her grandchild. And is Sweetness able to realize she's lying when she says she is not at fault?
That Morrison can convey so much in a short excerpt tells me the novel itself (which also is short, more novella length at less than 200 pages) will explore questions like this and their ramifications. It also tells me that like most of Morrison's writing, it will be deep and hurting, in search of absolution and forgiveness.
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