Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  I regret my presumption. And I’m glad I kept my mouth shut. Yeats said famously: “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life or of the work.” He wasn’t happy about it, adding: “That old perplexity an empty purse / Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.” But it was a male chauvinist piggy thing to say. The Grace Paley who wrote the stories that I started reading in Berkeley, California, in 1960, on the recommendation of Tillie Olsen one afternoon at Pacifica Radio just after Tillie asked us: “Oh why do I have to feel it happens to me, too? Why is it like this? And why do I have to care?”—the Paley already telling us that she had looked “into the square bright window of daylight to ask myself the sapping question: What is man that woman lies down to adore him?”—this is the same Grace Paley who grew up Russian-socialist-Jewish-American in the East Bronx, wearing the blue shirt and red kerchief of a Falcon. Who fought before she became a pacifist in gang wars between the Third and Fourth Internationals. Who staged agitprop plays like Eviction! Who was suspended from junior high school, at age twelve, for signing the Oxford Pledge against war. Who would organize abortion speakouts and missile site sit-ins and protest marches on Shoreham and Seabrook. Who would face down signs that said: NUKE THE BITCHES TILL THEY GLOW. THEN SHOOT THEM IN THE DARK. Who’d go to Russia, and to Hanoi, and to Nicaragua, and even the Pentagon, “a kind of medium-level worker in one tendency in the nonviolent direct-action left wing of the antiwar movement,” before ending up at town meetings in Vermont. Who’s probably devoted more time to Peace Centers, Cooper Union lectures, Clamshell Alliances, War Resisters Leagues, and Madre than she has to a literature that seeks to oppose people made of blood and bone to connections made of oil and gold. Who tells her students to read Emma Goldman, Prince Kropotkin, and Malcolm X and the rest of us to read Christa Wolf and Isaac Babel. Who has explained not only that a tank uses up a gallon of gas every seventeen miles, but also that “If you’re a feminist it means that you’ve noticed that male ownership of the direction of female lives has been the order of the day for a few thousand years, and it isn’t natural.”

  Meanwhile of course there were men and children: “I own two small boys whose dependence on me takes up my lumpen time and my bourgeois feelings.” But if “the world cannot be changed by talking to one child at a time, it may at least be known.” And equally, of course, the politics and the literature and the life converge. It’s a patchwork quilt of witness and example; of radiance and scruple; of astonishing art made out of the sibilant clues of the whispering world in the room next door; of a wild humor, a Magical Socialism and a Groucho Marxism, that subverts our weary ways of seeing: “Alongside him on one of those walks was seen a skinny crosstown lady, known to many people over by Tompkins Square—wears a giant Ukrainian cross in and out of the tub, to keep from going down the drain, I guess.” Or: “Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.” Besides: “It’s very important to emphasize what is good or beautiful so as not to have a gloomy face when you meet some youngster who has just begun to guess.” If she began by telling us what women really thought and felt, by rescuing the history of all our mothers for all our daughters, she ends with Mozart and horizons. Faith Darwin indeed, coming down from the trees. Or flying off, like a Stephanie Dedalus. “First they make something,” explains one of her stories, “then they murder it. Then they write a book about how interesting it is.” Not Grace Paley. She embarrassed me into being a better person than I’d have settled for. She has enjoined all of us, her wayward children: “Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.”

  Morrison’s Paradise Lost

  SO ABUNDANT, EVEN prodigal, is Toni Morrison’s first new novel since her Nobel Prize, so symphonic, light-struck, and sheer, as if each page had been rubbed transparent, and so much the splendid sister of Beloved—she’s even gone back to Brazil, not this time to see the three-spoke slave collar and the iron mouth-bit, but to check out candomblé—that I realize I’ve been holding my breath since December 1993. After such levitation, weren’t all of us in for a fall? Who knew she’d use the Prize as a kite instead of a wheelbarrow?

  And I realize I’ve been holding my breath even on those occasions—under a tent at Caramoor, once in a cathedral—to which I’ve been invited as a designated partisan, after which I’m guaranteed a standing ovation because, of course, I’m followed by the laureate, who reads from her novel in progress, which begins: “They shoot the white girl first.” All week long in Stockholm, after the embassy lunch and the postage stamp with her face on it, before the concert and the banquet, between madrigals and snowflakes and candle flames and the joyride in the Volvo limo behind a police escort to the great halls and the grand ballrooms and the singing waiters and the reindeer steak, I had thought of Pecola, pregnant with her father’s baby, believing that if only she had blue eyes she’d be loved as much as Bojangles had loved Shirley Temple. And of Sula, who when she loved a man rubbed the black off his bones down to gold leaf, then scraped away the gold to discover alabaster, then tapped with a hammer at the alabaster till it cracked like ice, and what you felt was fertile loam. Of Milkman in Song of Solomon, who went south from Detroit to a ruined plantation and a cave of the dead, who learned from blue silk wings, red velvet rose petals, a children’s riddle song, and a bag of human bones not only his own true name but also how to fly all the way back to Africa. Of the horseback ghosts of the blind slaves in Tar Baby, where Caliban got another chance against Prospero. Of Sethe in Beloved like a black Medea with a handsaw and Denver who swallowed her sister’s blood and Beloved swimming up from blue water to eat all the sugar in the world: Beloved, that ghost story, mother epic, folk fable, fairy tale, and incantation of lost children, men like centaurs, lunatic history, and babies offered up like hummingbirds to shameful gods. Where had it been hiding, this book we always needed? Who now can picture our literature in its absence, between Whitman and Twain, the Other in Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor? Before Beloved, our canon was wounded, incomplete. Until Beloved, our imagination of America had a heart-sized hole in it big enough to die from, as if we’d never seen black boys “hanging from the most beautiful sycamore trees in the world.” And finally Jazz: as if Sidney Bechet had met the Archduke Trio or Ellington gone Baroque; a novel that wrote itself by talking to us, a story that confided: “I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a long time now, and missed your eyes when you went away from me…. Look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.”

  After her dispossessions and her hauntings, her butter cakes and baby ghosts, her blade of blackbirds and her graveyard loves, Not Doctor Street and No Mercy Hospital and all those maple-syrup men “with the long-distance eyes”: Just look where she was now. We stood at our banquet tables in Stockholm’s City Hall, in white tie and ball gowns and trepidation. A trumpet fanfare sounded. Above us, past a gilded balustrade, the processional began. The winner of the prize came down the marble steps at last, on the arm of the king of Sweden. Never mind that I am pale and I am male. She’d taught me to imagine the lost history of her people, to read the signs of love and work and nightmare passage and redemptive music, to hear the deepest chords of exile. I was proud to be a citizen of whatever country Toni Morrison came from. And that night she gave lessons to the noble rot of Europe on what majesty really looks like.

  All of this—up in the air, dancing on the vaulted ceiling.

  “They shoot the white girl first.” In her lecture to the Swedish Academy, she had spoken against the punishing speech of the organs of obedience, used to “sanction ignorance and preserve privilege”; against the “obscuring” and “oppressive” language of state, the “calcified language of the academy,” the “faux-language of the mindless media,” the “policing languages” of “racist mastery,” and the “seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté
-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words.” Rather than these obscenities, she proposed a tongue that “arcs toward the place where meaning may lie.” Word-work is sublime, she said, “because it is generative; it makes the meaning that secures our difference, our human difference.” Death may be the meaning of life, but language is its measure. Language alone “protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.” Meditating, she had found brave words like “poise,” “light,” “wisdom,” “deference,” “generosity,” “felicity,” and “trust.”

  To these, we must now add “solace.” Like Schopenhauer and the sorrow songs, Paradise seeks consolation. Part history and part Dreamtime, part opera and part Matisse, it would be surpassing and transcendent if only for the notion of a “Disallowing.” But its rainbow parabola also includes Reconstruction and the Trail of Tears, Vietnam and civil rights, patriarchy and ancestor worship, abduction and sanctuary, migration and abandonment, sex and ghosts. Considering degrees of blackness, reversals of color-blind perspectives, and above all longings for home, it will raise a ruckus and rewrite God.

  Bodacious black Eves unredeemed by Mary, they are like panicked does leaping toward a sun that has finished burning off the mist and now pours its holy oil over the hides of game.

  God at their side, the men take aim. For Ruby.

  —Paradise

  In a house shaped like a cartridge, in a state shaped like a gun, the fathers and sons of the nearby all-black town of Ruby shoot down running women as if they were deer. They shoot the white girl first. Not the least of many mysteries in Paradise is how hard it is to figure out which of the five women attacked by a fearful lynching party in a former convent in a godforsaken Oklahoma in the 1970s is, in fact, white. Slyly, Morrison is reminding us that skin color, about which we tend to get hysterical, is only a single datum, and maybe not the decisive one, in a universe of information. We do know the lynchers are “blue-black people,” called “8-rock” after coal at the deepest level of the mines. To understand how it happened—this act of violence at the heart of every Morrison novel, the wound that will not heal—we must first learn the stories of the convent and the town, then the dreams of the players, and finally the template’s design. We are vouchsafed all three simultaneously, in flashes of lyric lightning; in “the cold serenity of God’s wrath”; and in raptures, seizures, or eruptions of volcanic consciousness (“You thought we were hot lava and when they broke us down into sand, you ran”).

  The “big stone house in the middle of nowhere” began as an embezzler’s mansion, with lurid appointments of nude Venus statuary, nipple-tipped doorknobs, and vagina-shaped alabaster ashtrays. After this Gatsby’s imprisonment, it was taken over by nuns and turned into Christ the King School for Native Girls, most of whom would run away from the God who despised them. But these nuns brought with them their own luridities, including an etching of St. Catherine of Siena on her knees offering up a plate of breasts. And when the last nun died—leaving behind only Consolata, the child they’d stolen decades ago from Rio’s slums—the convent became, without even thinking about it, a sanctuary for young women orphaned or broken on history’s wheel, a safe house for the throwaway, castaway female children of the sixties and seventies, on the road and looking to hide from angry fathers, abusive husbands, dead babies, boyfriends in Attica, rapists, Vietnam, Watergate, black water, and little boys on protest marches “spitting blood into their hands so as not to ruin their shoes.”

  Something will happen in 1976 to this haphazard ad hoc community of “women who chose their own company,” these wild-thing Sulas—to Consolata in the cellar with her wine bottle and her bat vision; to Seneca in the bathtub, the “queen of scars,” making thin red slits in her skin with a safety pin; to Mavis, who hears her asphyxiated twins laughing in the dark; to Gigi/Grace, who seeks buried treasure; and to Pallas/Divine, who could be carrying a lamb, a baby, or a jaguar. They are suddenly full of “loud dreaming.” They chalk their bodies on the basement floor. They shave their heads and dance like holy women in the hot rain: If you have a place that you should be in, and somebody who loves you waiting there, then go. If not stay here and follow me. Someone could want to meet you.

  And the nearby town: ah, Ruby. Although Morrison doesn’t say so, the ancients believed that rubies were an antidote to poison, warded off plague, banished grief, and diverted the mind from evil thoughts. A “perfect ruby” was the Philosopher’s Stone of the alchemists. We may also remember Dorothy’s slippers in the movie of The Wizard of Oz. Ruby, Oklahoma, is likewise a refuge as well as a fortress, a Beulah, Erewhon, or New Shangri-la, not to mention the promised land of Canaan, and the last stop of a long line that began with the passage from Africa, that included landfall, slavery, and civil war, Emancipation and Reconstruction—a proud community of freedmen, of gunsmiths, seamstresses, lacemakers, cobblers, ironmongers, and masons:

  They are extraordinary. They had served, picked, plowed, and traded in Louisiana since 1755, when it included Mississippi; and when it was divided into states they had helped govern both from 1868 to 1875, after which they had been reduced to field labor. They had kept the issue of their loins fruitful for more than two hundred years. They had denied each other nothing, bowed to no one, knelt only to their Maker.

  In 1890, armed with advertisements of cheap land for homesteading—at the expense, of course, of the Choctaw, Creek, and Arapaho who happened to live there—they “took that history, those years, each other, and their uncorruptible worthiness” and walked to Oklahoma, fifteen families looking for a place to build their communal kitchen, to inscribe on this brick altar of an Oven a ferocious prophecy (“Beware the Furrow of His Brow”), to seed their fields and their women and make a home they called Haven—one of many all-black towns in the territory of the time, like Taft, Nicodemus, Langston City, and Mound Bayou. Following a specter into the wilderness, they’d endured black-skinned bandits, “time-sharing shoes,” rejection by poor whites and rich Choctaw, yard-dog attacks, and the jeers of prostitutes. What they hadn’t prepared for—a humiliation that more than rankled, that “threatened to crack their bones”—was the “contemptuous dismissal” they received from Negro towns already built. This was the infamous “disallowing.” And the reason for it is the secret of Ruby, which is where nine of the families went next, in 1949, after the men came home from war to Haven, to find America unchanged: “Out There where your children were sport, your women quarry, and where your very person could be annulled.” Disallowed like the ex-slaves before them, the ex-soldiers dismantled their Oven and pulled up their stakes and struck out again. For Ruby.

  Prosperous Ruby: wide streets, pastel houses, enormous lawns, many churches (if only one bank), and flower gardens “snowed with butterflies”; household appliances that “pumped, hummed, sucked, purred, whispered, and flowed”; Kelvinators and John Deere, Philco and Body by Fisher. No diner, no gas station, no movie house or public telephone, no hospital or police, no criminals and no jail, no “slack or sloven women,” nor, of course, any whites. “Here freedom was a test administered by the natural world that a man had to take for himself every day. And if he passed enough tests long enough, he was king.” It was as if Booker T. Washington had gone to bourgeois heaven without having to die first dirt-poor. Because nobody ever dies in Ruby, either. That’s the deal they made with God, the guy with the Furrowed Brow. It’s payback for the Disallowing.

  I’ll explain the Disallowing in a minute. But you should know that something is also happening in Ruby in the seventies. A new reverend, a veteran of the civil rights movement, messes with the minds of the children. (He actually thinks that “a community with no politics is doomed to pop like Georgia fatwood.”) Somebody paints, on their sacred Oven, a jet-black fist with red fingernails. Not only do daughters refuse to get out of bed and brides disappear on their honeymoons, but the women of Ruby begin to question the Fathers, who get angrier and noisier:

  They dug the clay—not
you. They carried the hod—not you. They mixed the mortar—not one of you. They made good strong brick for that oven when their own shelter was sticks and sod. You understand what I’m telling you?… Act short with me all you want, you in long trouble if you think you can disrespect a row you never hoed.

  Naturally, the convent women are blamed. Hadn’t they shown up at a wedding reception to which they should never have been invited in the first place, “looking like go-go girls: pink shorts, see-through skirts; painted eyes, no lipstick; obviously no underwear; no stockings”? Haven’t our own women, who can’t drive cars, been seen on foot on the road going to or coming from secret visits there—for vegetables, for pies, and maybe even for abortions? “The stallions were fighting about who controlled the mares and their foals,” thinks Billie Delia, who as a child rode bare-bottomed on a horse until they reviled her for it. Graven idols, black arts, narcotic herbs, lesbian sex!

  Besides—“out here under skies so star-packed it was disgraceful; out here where the wind handled you like a man”—the women of the convent are not 8-rock.

  For ten generations they had believed the division they fought to close was free against slave, rich against poor. Usually, but not always, white against black. Now they saw a new separation: light-skinned against black…. The sign of racial purity they had taken for granted had become a stain. The scattering that alarmed Zechariah because he believed it would deplete them was now an even more dangerous level of evil, for if they broke apart and were disvalued by the impure, then, certain as death, those ten generations would disturb their children’s peace throughout eternity.