I also am aware that my mother and father sleep at odd hours because my father works many jobs and works at night. And these naps are times of pleasure for me and my sister because nobody’s giving us chores, or telling us what to do, or nagging us in any way. In addition to which, there is some feeling of pleasure in them that I’m only vaguely aware of. They’re very rested when they take these naps.
And later on in the summer we have an opportunity to eat corn, which is the one plant that I can distinguish from the others, and which is the harvest that I like the best; the others are the food that no child likes—the collards, the okra, the strong, violent vegetables that I would give a great deal for now. But I do like the corn because it’s sweet, and because we all sit down to eat it, and it’s finger food, and it’s hot, and it’s even good cold, and there are neighbors in, and there are uncles in, and it’s easy, and it’s nice.
The picture of the corn and the nimbus of emotion surrounding it became a powerful one in the manuscript I’m now completing.
Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to render the texture that accompanies, reveals, or displays it to its best advantage. The process by which this is accomplished is endlessly fascinating to me. I have always thought that as an editor for twenty years I understood writers better than their most careful critics, because in examining the manuscript in each of its subsequent stages I knew the author’s process, how his or her mind worked, what was effortless, what took time, where the “solution” to a problem came from. The end result—the book—was all that the critic had to go on.
Still, for me, that was the least important aspect of the work. Because, no matter how “fictional” the account of these writers, or how much it was a product of invention, the act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.”
Along with personal recollection, the matrix of the work I do is the wish to extend, fill in, and complement slave autobiographical narratives. But only the matrix. What comes of all that is dictated by other concerns, not least among them the novel’s own integrity. Still, like water, I remember where I was before I was “straightened out.”
Q. I would like to ask about your point of view as a novelist. Is it a vision, or are you taking the part of the particular characters?
A. I try sometimes to have genuinely minor characters just walk through, like a walk-on actor. But I get easily distracted by them, because a novelist’s imagination goes like that: every little road looks to me like an adventure, and once you begin to claim it and describe it, it looks like more, and you invent more and more and more. I don’t mind doing that in my first draft, but afterward I have to cut back. I have seen myself get distracted, and people have loomed much larger than I had planned, and minor characters have seemed a little bit more interesting than they need to be for the purposes of the book. In that case I try to endow them: if there are little pieces of information that I want to reveal, I let them do some of the work. But I try not to get carried away; I try to restrain it, so that, finally, the texture is consistent and nothing is wasted; there are no words in the final text that are unnecessary, and no people who are not absolutely necessary.
As for the point of view, there should be the illusion that it’s the characters’ point of view, when in fact it isn’t; it’s really the narrator who is there but who doesn’t make herself (in my case) known in that role. I like the feeling of a told story, where you hear a voice but you can’t identify it, and you think it’s your own voice. It’s a comfortable voice, and it’s a guiding voice, and it’s alarmed by the same things that the reader is alarmed by, and it doesn’t know what’s going to happen next either. So you have this sort of guide. But that guide can’t have a personality; it can only have a sound, and you have to feel comfortable with this voice, and then this voice can easily abandon itself and reveal the interior dialogue of a character. So it’s a combination of using the point of view of various characters but still retaining the power to slide in and out, provided that when I’m “out” the reader doesn’t see little fingers pointing to what’s in the text.
What I really want is that intimacy in which the reader is under the impression that he isn’t really reading this; that he is participating in it as he goes along. It’s unfolding, and he’s always two beats ahead of the characters and right on target.
Q. You have said that writing is a solitary activity. Do you go into steady seclusion when you’re writing, so that your feelings are sort of contained, or do you have to get away, and go out shopping and …?
A. I do all of it. I’ve been at this book for three years. I go out shopping, and I stare, and I do whatever. It goes away. Sometimes it’s very intense and I walk—I mean, I write a sentence and I jump up and run outside or something; it sort of beats you up. And sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I write long hours every day. I get up at five thirty and just go do it, and if I don’t like it the next day, I throw it away. But I sit down and do it. By now I know how to get to that place where something is working. I didn’t always know; I thought every thought I had was interesting—because it was mine. Now I know better how to throw away things that are not useful. I can stand around and do other things and think about it at the same time. I don’t mind not writing every minute; I’m not so terrified.
When you first start writing—and I think it’s true for a lot of beginning writers—you’re scared to death that if you don’t get that sentence right that minute it’s never going to show up again. And it isn’t. But it doesn’t matter—another one will, and it’ll probably be better. And I don’t mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it—and fix it again and again and again, and it will be better. I don’t have the hysteria that used to accompany some of those dazzling passages that I thought the world was just dying for me to remember. I’m a little more sanguine about it now. Because the best part of it all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over. That’s the thrill of a lifetime for me: if I can just get done with that first phase and then have infinite time to fix it and change it. I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did. I try to make it look like I never touched it, and that takes a lot of time and a lot of sweat.
Q. In Song of Solomon, what was the relationship between your memories and what you made up? Was it very tenuous?
A. Yes, it was tenuous. For the first time I was writing a book in which the central stage was occupied by men, and that had something to do with my loss, or my perception of loss, of a man (my father) and the world that disappeared with him. (It didn’t, but I felt that it did.) So I was re-creating a time period that was his—not biographically his life or anything in it; I use whatever’s around. But it seemed to me that there was this big void after he died, and I filled it with a book that was about men because my two previous books had had women as the central characters. So in that sense it was about my memories and the need to invent. I had to do something. I was in such a rage because my father was dead. The connections between us were threads that I either mined for a lot of strength or they were purely invention. But I created a male world and inhabited it and it had this quest—a journey from stupidity to epiphany, of a man, a complete man. It was my way of exploring all that, of trying to figure out what he may have known.
God’s Language
; Part of this essay is a substitute for an entry or series of entries in a journal or notebook that I have never kept. The kind of writer’s journal, many of which I have read, which contains ideas for future work, sketches of scenes, observations and meditations. But especially the thoughts that undergird problems and solutions the writer encounters during a work in progress.
I don’t keep such notebooks for a number of reasons, one of which is the leisure time unavailable to me, the other is the form my meditations take. Generally it is a response to some tangled, seemingly impenetrable dis-ease; an unquietness connected to a troubling image. (The images may be something seen in the material world or they might not be.) Other times I circle around an incident, a remark, or an impression that is peculiar enough to first provoke curiosity, then mysterious enough to keep recurring. With The Bluest Eye it was an exchange I had as a child with a friend that worried me on and off for years. In Sula it was a, to me, contradictory response my mother and her friends had to a woman in town. Another was a powerfully imagistic piece of male mythology inapplicable to women and dismissive of the consequences of the truth of that myth on women. In burrowing into those images or remarks or impressions questions surface: Suppose my childhood friend got what she prayed for? What were my mother’s friends appreciating while they were disapproving? What was the real trick of the Tar Baby? Why was Margaret Garner so completely without remorse and what effect would her remorselessness have on the neighborhood and her family? These questions, obvious, even idle, when gentled along or nudged led to more nuanced ones. All the time I am ruminating on these things I am not searching for a theme or a novelistic subject; I am just wondering. Most of this wondering is wandering, and disappears sooner or later. But occasionally, within or among these wanderings, a larger question poses itself. I don’t write it or my musings down because to do so would give them a gravity they may not deserve. I need to be or feel pursued by the question in order to be convinced that the further exploration is bookworthy. When that happens, at some point a scene or a bit of language arrives. It seems to me a waste of valuable time to sketch or record that when, if it is interesting enough to embellish, I could be tracking it by actually turning it directly into a fictional formulation. If I learn that I am wrong about its staying power or its fertility, I can always throw it away. So I get out the yellow legal pad and see what happens.
With the fiction project I followed the same procedure: waiting to see if certain images I had would wax or wane, yield or implode. One of those images was of a group of ladies standing on the steps of an African Methodist Episcopal church, three rows of them, in early-twentieth-century finery, posing as for a class or club photograph. They are exceptionally beautiful and they are earning a great deal of admiration, you can tell, from the eyes that watch them. Another image is also of women. Girls, rather. They are novices in habits running from the police who have come to arrest them. Both groups of women are associated with churches. The first group is an image—almost like a painting—that surfaced unsummoned; the second is a wholly unreliable piece of village gossip.
Two hundred and some pages later I feel certain this is a wane. Not a wax, although I am also certain that the project is impossible. While each novel I have written, other than the first two, seemed equally undoable, it still astonishes me how, the more work one does, the more difficult it becomes, the more impossible the task. In this instance I am trying to re-create, in the setting of the black towns of the West, a narrative about paradise—the earthly achievement of—its possibility, its dimensions, its stability, even its desirability. The novel’s time frame, 1908 to 1976, and the history of its population, former and children of former slaves, require me to rely heavily on the characters’ reserves of faith, their concept of freedom, their perception of the divine, and their imaginative as well as organizational/administrative prowess. For like many, but not all, deliberately, carefully constructed nineteenth-century communities, a deeply held and wholly shared belief system was much more vital to the enterprise than was physical endurance, leadership, and opportunity. In fact, faith in a system of belief—religious belief—enabled endurance, forged leadership, and revealed opportunity to be seized. Although for freed men and women prosperity, ownership, safety, and self-determination were thinkable, hungered-for goals, desire alone could not, did not animate the treacherous journey they took into unknown territory to build cities. The history of African Americans that narrows or dismisses religion in both their collective and individual life, in their political and aesthetic activity, is more than incomplete—it may be fraudulent. Therefore, among the difficulties before me is the daunting one of showing not just how their civic and economic impulses respond to their religious principles, but how their everyday lives were inextricably bound with these principles. If the polls taken in 1994, which indicate that 96 percent of African Americans believe in God, are correct I suspect the 4 percent who do not so believe are a recent phenomenon—unheard-of among slave and ex-slave populations. Assuming the religiosity of nineteenth-century African Americans is a given, then, and few texts, fiction or memorialist, have neglected this aspect. But this is 1996 and the solution for fictional representation that takes this in account is not to layer religiosity onto an existing canvas of migration and the quest for citizenship, or to tip one’s hat to characters whose belief is unshakable. It is rather to construct a work in which religious belief is central to the narrative itself.
Thus the first problem with paradise: how to render expressive religious language credibly and effectively in postmodern fiction without having to submit to a vague egalitarianism, or to a kind of late-twentieth-century environmental spiritualism, or to the modernist/feminist school of the goddess-body adored, or to a loose, undiscriminating conviction of the innate divinity of all living things, or to the biblical/political scholasticism of the more entrenched and dictatorial wings of contemporary religious institutions—none of which, it seems to me, represents the everyday practice of nineteenth-century African Americans and their children, nor lends itself to postmodernist narrative strategies. The second problem then is part of the first: how to narrate persuasively profound and motivating faith in and to a highly secularized, contemporary, “scientific” world. In short, how to reimagine paradise. (The question that surfaces immediately—Why reimagine it at all, since the ablest geniuses have already and long ago provided unsurpassed and unsurpassable language to describe it?—is a question I will address in a moment.) Right now I want to outline what my problem is and then tell you why I have it.
Paradise is no longer imaginable or, rather, it is overimagined—which amounts to the same thing—and has thus become familiar, common, even trivial. Historically, the images of paradise, in poetry and prose, were intended to be grand but accessible, beyond the routine but imaginatively graspable, seductive precisely because of our ability to recognize them—as though we “remembered” the scenes somehow. Milton speaks of “goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit, / Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue, / … with gay enameled colours mixed”; of “Native perfumes”; of “that sapphire fount the crispèd brooks, / Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold”; of “nectar, visiting each plant, and fed / Flowers worthy of Paradise …”; “nature boon / poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain”; “Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm; / Others, whose fruit, burnished with golden rind, / Hung amiable—Hesperian fables true, / … of delicious taste; / Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks / Grazing the tender herb”; “Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose”; “caves / of cool recess, o’er which the mantling vine / Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps / Luxuriant.”
Such a beatific expanse, in this the last decade of the twentieth century, we recognize as bounded real estate, owned by the wealthy, viewed and visited by guests and tourists, or it is regularly on display for the rest of us in the products and promises sold by various media. Overimagined. Quite available if not in fact, then cer
tainly as ordinary unexceptional desire. Let’s examine the characteristics of physical paradise—beauty, plenty, rest, exclusivity, and eternity—to see how they are understood in 1996.
Beauty of course is a duplicate of what we already know, intensified, refined. Or what we have never known articulated. Beatific, benevolent nature combined with precious metals and jewelry. What it cannot be is beauty beyond imagination.
Plenty, in a world of excess and attending greed that tilts resources to the haves and forces the have-nots to locate bounty within what has already been acquired by the haves, is an almost obscene feature of paradise. In this world of tilted resources, of outrageous, shameless wealth squatting, hulking, preening itself before the dispossessed, the very idea of plenty, of sufficiency, as utopian ought to make us tremble. Plenty should not be regulated to a paradisiacal state, but to normal, everyday, humane life.
Rest, that is the superfluity of working or fighting for rewards of food or luxury, has dwindling currency these days. It is a desirelessness that suggests a special kind of death without dying.
Exclusivity, however, is still an attractive, even compelling, feature of paradise because certain people, the unworthy, are not there. Boundaries are secure; watchdogs, gates, keepers are there to verify the legitimacy of the inhabitants. Such enclaves are cropping up again, like medieval fortresses and moats, and it does not seem possible or desirable for a city to be envisioned in which poor people can be accommodated. Exclusivity is not just an accessible dream for the well-endowed, but an increasingly popular solution for the middle class. “Streets” are understood to be populated by the unworthy and the dangerous; young people are forced off the streets for their own good. Yet public space is fought over as if it were private. Who gets to enjoy a park, a beach, a mall, a corner? The term “public” is itself a site of contention. Paradise as exclusive terrain therefore has a very real attraction to modern society.
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