The Source of Self-Regard

by Toni Morrison

  He wants to tell me, she thought. He wants me to ask him about what it was like for him—about how offended the tongue is, held down by iron, how the need to spit is so deep you cry for it. She already knew about it, had seen it time after time in the place before Sweet Home. Men, boys, little girls, women. The wildness that shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back. Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye.

  Sethe looked up into Paul D’s eyes to see if there was any trace left in them.

  “People I saw as a child,” she said, “who’d had the bit always looked wild after that. Whatever they used it on them for, it couldn’t have worked, because it put a wildness where before there wasn’t any. When I look at you, I don’t see it. There ain’t no wildness in your eye nowhere.”

  “There’s a way to put it there and there’s a way to take it out. I know em both and I haven’t figured out yet which is worse.” He sat down beside her. Sethe looked at him. In that unlit daylight his face, bronzed and reduced to its bones, smoothed her heart down.

  “You want to tell me about it?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know. I never have talked about it. Not to a soul. Sang it sometimes, but I never told a soul.”

  “Go ahead. I can hear it.”

  “Maybe. Maybe you can hear it. I just ain’t sure I can say it. Say it right, I mean, because it wasn’t the bit—that wasn’t it.”

  “What then?” Sethe asked.

  “The roosters,” he said. “Walking past the roosters looking at them look at me.”

  Sethe smiled. “In that pine?”

  “Yeah.” Paul D smiled with her. “Must have been five of them perched up there, and at least fifty hens.”

  “Mister, too?”

  “Not right off. But I hadn’t took twenty steps before I seen him. He come down off the fence post there and sat on the tub.”

  “He loved that tub,” said Sethe, thinking, No, there is no stopping now.

  “Didn’t he? Like a throne. Was me took him out the shell, you know. He’d a died if it hadn’t been for me. The hen had walked on off with all the hatched peeps trailing behind her. There was this one egg left. Looked like a blank, but then I saw it move so I tapped it open and here come Mister, bad feet and all. I watched that son a bitch grow up and whup everything in the yard.”

  “He always was hateful,” Sethe said.

  “Yeah, he was hateful all right. Bloody too, and evil. Crooked feet flapping. Comb as big as my hand and some kind of red. He sat right there on the tub looking at me. I swear he smiled. My head was full of what I’d seen of Halle a while back. I wasn’t even thinking about the bit. Just Halle and before him Sixo, but when I saw Mister I knew it was me too. Not just them, me too. One crazy, one sold, one missing, one burnt and me licking iron with my hands crossed behind me. The last of the Sweet Home men.

  “Mister, he looked so…free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher. Son a bitch couldn’t even get out the shell by hisself but he was still king and I was…” Paul D stopped and squeezed his left hand with his right. He held it that way long enough for it and the world to quiet down and let him go on.

  “Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you’d be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn’t no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or dead. Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub.”

  Sethe put her hand on his knee and rubbed.

  Paul D had only begun, what he was telling her was only the beginning when her fingers on his knee, soft and reassuring, stopped him. Just as well. Just as well. Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn’t get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of its contents it would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister’s comb beating in him.

  When I moved away from that project, which I thought was sort of incomplete, I began to think about another important point in American life that was also an extremely important point in African American life that I wanted to write about, but this time my problem was not how to deal with the history, but rather how to deal with the culture. There wasn’t a great deal of history that had been written about the twenties, the period I call jazz, or we call jazz. There’d been lots and lots of books, lots and lots of movies, lots and lots of images, lots and lots of everything, but there was still this huge, powerful, amorphous kind of understanding of what that culture was.

  If I say the word “jazz,” I’m sure something comes to mind, something very concrete or maybe something that’s unspecific, maybe just the music, a certain kind of music. And if I pursue that image of jazz music, you know, a sample might surface or a musician or arrangement or a song or something, or maybe just clubs, radio, whatever comes to mind. And places where that particular kind of music we call jazz is played. Or maybe just your own like of it or your dislike of it or your indifference to that particular music. But whatever you’re thinking about that music, in the background of the word “jazz” is the recollection, if not the main feature of your memory, or your association, that jazz is music black people play, or originated, or shaped. But that it’s not exclusively played or even enjoyed by them, now, or for even a long, long time. And also the fact that the appreciation of jazz is one of the few places where a certain kind of race transcendence or race-transcendent embrace is possible. Which doesn’t mean there was no exploitation, but even the exploitation was possible only because of the interest in it, and the passion for it, and the embrace that did take place interracially, so to speak.

  The dictionary definitions of “jazz” list usually three or four entries relating to the music—where it originated in New Orleans around the beginning of the twentieth century, and then they usually go on to characterize the music in very interesting words. “Compulsive,” for example, is used a lot. “Intricate.” “Freely improvised.” And then they sometimes chart the course of jazz from diatonism to grammaticism to atonality, and then they go on to list some other entries in which jazz is not music, it’s a kind of dance done to such music and having some of the characteristics of the music. But it’s distinguished by violent bodily gestures and motions. And then following those definitions are slang definitions, including “vigorous,” “liveliness,” “spirited,” and “insincerity,” “exaggeration,” or “pretentiousness.” All that jazz. Don’t give me all that jazz. You know, something you don’t have to pay any attention to because it’s overstatement. But something that is jazzy is highly energetic and wildly active.

  I don’t think anybody really needs those dictionary definitions to clarify because one of the attractions of the term is its loose association of energy and sensuality. And freedom. And release. And intricacy. All that. All of it backgrounded by a recognizable music black people originated and shaped. I don’t myself usually think of music first. But of the many images that might surface, one would be a sort of recent history period, the twenties, the period known as the Jazz Age. And attached to that term may be the sound of the music as it affected or backgrounded an era or generation of people whom we associate with that period. “Jazz Age” elicits more detailed imagery—Prohibition, a change in fashion that was alarming and sort of exciting in some places, short hair and skirts in which women could actually walk and work and move. And dance. But it also suggested a kind of recklessness and license and sexuality.

  But if you bend the Jazz Age the way I’ve just described it to suit more literary interests, then we make the association with writers who reached their maturity or starte
d out and did something wonderful or had some influence or fame during the twenties and early thirties, and we begin to think of that wonderful poetry and drama and the novels of a whole group of post–World War I American artists: Dos Passos and Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Stein and Pound, and well, you know that list and it’s a familiar one, but familiar too is the whole constellation of things and people, the tone, the music, and the history that the word “jazz” evokes, and all of it is understood to be uniquely American. It’s a uniquely American posture. And it suggests an American modernism that lingered on and on and on until there was something after modernism, and then of course something after that, and then something after that.

  It is an American cultural phenomenon, and as such, it’s more than any of the definitions or connotations that I have mentioned. It’s really a concept. And it’s interesting to me as a writer because it’s so full of contradictions. It’s American, indisputably American, and ethnically marginal. It’s black and free. It’s intricate and wild. It’s spontaneous and practiced. It’s exaggerated and simple. It’s constantly invented, always brand-new, but somehow familiar and known. Wherever you go in the world, if you say, “Jazz,” people say, “Oh yes, yes. I remember.” Or “I understand.” Or “I know.” And I don’t know if they’re thinking about Josephine Baker or what, but it’s “Oh yes, yes. Jazz. I know.” It’s immediately understood and all explanations become redundant.

  Now these contradictions have been very much on my mind because I was trying to think through some other concepts that had to do with this very, very important transition, I think, and transformation in the history of African Americans and very much a transformation in the history of this country. So my attempt then was to take not the history but the culture of jazz, which is much more ineffable and vaporous, and I wanted to demystify and revalorize the jazz idea. And to do that from a viewpoint that precedes its appropriation—you know, when it becomes anybody’s and everybody’s—and that reculturizes and deculturizes this idea.

  It is a part, this view, looking at that period in black life, of a rather sustained investigation I began with Beloved, which was that I’m really looking at self-regard in both racial and gendered terms, and how that self-regard evolves or is distorted or flourishes or collapses, and under what circumstances. In Beloved, I was interested in what contributed most significantly to a slave woman’s self-regard. What was her self-esteem? What value did she place on herself? And I became convinced, and research supported my hunch, my intuition, that it was her identity as a mother, her ability to be and to remain exactly what the institution said she was not, that was important to her. Moving into Reconstruction and beyond it, as difficult as it was to function as a mother with control over the destiny of one’s children, it still became then, certainly, a legal responsibility after slavery. So this is where the sources of self-regard came for Margaret Garner or Sethe. And it is exaggerated because it’s that important and that alien and that strange and that vital. But when Sethe asks, “Me? Me?” at the end of Beloved, it’s a real movement toward a recognition of self-regard.

  But the answer to her question seemed to me to come or be available a generation or two later, when the possibility of personal freedom, and interior, imaginative freedom—not political or economic freedom, those were still distant, although there had been some changes—could be engaged. So it seemed to me that while the history, the data of traditional historians, both documented and denied this change in black life and in the culture, the information available to me in the cultural signs suggested there were alterations in the formulations and the sources of self-regard. Music, its lyrics, its performers held the first signs, for me, of this change in the culture. Movement, migration from rural areas to urban ones, held other kinds of information. The literature, the language, the custom, the posture, all of this was what I would look at.

  It seemed to me that the twenties, with its sort of nascent and overwhelming jazz idiom, was as distinct as it was because, precisely, of this change. That period, the Jazz Age, was a period when black people placed an indelible hand of agency on the cultural scene. And this agency—unremarked in economic and political terms—informs my project. And all the terms I cited earlier—“defiance,” “violence,” “sensuality,” “freedom,” “intricacy,” “invention,” and “improvisation”—were intimated in the major figuration of that term. Subjective, demanding, deeply personal love relationships. The one place African Americans could command and surrender by choice. Where they did not marry who was chosen for them, or who lived down the road, or who was next door. Where they could effect the widest possible choice—by deciding to fall in love. Claiming another as the beloved. Not because of filial blood relationships or proximity, but precisely because it was ad hoc and accidental and fated but not predictable.

  And this assertiveness, this creative agency, seemed to be most clear in the music, the style, the language of this—that post-Reconstruction era that represented both transition and transformation. You know, like life lived in flour sacking or plain, dull cotton gives you a hunger, a desperation for color and patterns and powerful, primary colors, in the same way that hundreds of years of being mated off or ordered whom to marry, of needing permission to join with another, of having to take these extraordinary, drastic measures to keep a family together and to behave like a family, and all of this under the greatest stress, with so little evidence that anything would ever change. You could get slaves to do anything at all, bear anything, if you gave them any hope that they could keep their children. They’d do anything. Every impulse, every gesture, everything they did was to maintain their families.

  Well, under those historical pressures, the desire for choice in partners, the desire for romantic love, operate as a place, a space, away, for individual reclamation of the self. That is a part, maybe the largest part, certainly an important part, of the reconstruction of identity. Part of the “me” so tentatively articulated in Beloved. That’s what she needs to discover. It will account for the satisfaction in the blues lyric and the blues phrase whether or not, and mostly not, the relationship flourishes. They’re usually, you know, somebody’s gone and not coming back or some terrible thing has happened and you’ll never see this person again. Whether or not the affection is returned, whether or not the loved one reciprocated the ardor, the lover, the singer, has achieved something, accomplished something in the act of being in love. It’s impossible to hear that sort of blues cry without acknowledging in it the defiance, the grandeur, the agency that frequently belies the wail of disappointed love.

  It may be through that agency, and the even more powerful assertiveness of what we call “jazz,” which uses those gestures, that compromise becomes reconciliation. It’s also the way in which imagination fosters real possibilities: you can’t imagine it, you can’t have it. And a third thing grows, where despair may have been, or even where the past lay whole and wouldn’t let go. And it is this third thing that jazz creates and that creates itself in these spaces and intersections of race and gender that interest me and that informed and propel the writing of this book called Jazz. I want to read just a page or two, which is kind of an illustration of that gesture of choice and love:

  It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. The pears they let hang on the limb because if they plucked them, they would be gone from there and who else would see that ripeness if they took it away for themselves? How could anybody passing by see them and imagine for themselves what the flavor would be like? Breathing and murmuring under covers both of them have washed and hung out on the line, in a bed they chose together and kept together, nevermind one leg was propped on a 1916 dictio
nary, and the mattress, curved like a preacher’s palm asking for witnesses in His name’s sake, enclosed them each and every night and muffled their whispering, old-time love. They are under the covers because they don’t have to look at themselves anymore; there is no stud’s eye, no chippie glance to undo them. They are inward toward the other, bound and joined by carnival dolls and the steamers that sailed from ports they never saw. That is what is beneath their undercover whispers.

  But there’s another part, not so secret. The part that touches fingers when one passes the cup and saucer to the other. The part that closes her neckline snap while waiting for the trolley; and brushes lint from his blue serge suit when they come out of the movie house into the sunlight.

  I envy them their public love. I myself have only known it in secret, shared it in secret and longed, aw longed to show it—to be able to say out loud what they have no need to say at all: That I have loved only you, surrendered my whole self reckless to you and nobody else. That I want you to love me back and show it to me. That 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. Talking to you and hearing you answer—that’s the kick.

  But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

  Rememory

  I SUSPECT my dependency on memory as trustworthy ignition is more anxious than it is for most fiction writers—not because I write (or want to) autobiographically, but because I am keenly aware of the fact that I write in a wholly racialized society that can and does hobble the imagination. Labels about centrality, marginality, minority, gestures of appropriated and appropriating cultures and literary heritages, pressures to take a position—all these surface when I am read or critiqued and when I compose. It is both an intolerable and inevitable condition. I am asked bizarre questions inconceivable if put to other writers: Do you think you will ever write about white people? Isn’t it awful to be called a black writer?