Paradise

by Toni Morrison

  “Did she see them?” asked the sons.

  “Better than that!” shouted the fathers. “She felt them, touched them, put her finger on them!”

  “If she was blind, sir, we could believe her. That’d be like braille. But some five-year-old kid who couldn’t read her own tombstone if she climbed out of her grave and stood in front of it?”

  The twins frowned. Fleet, thinking of his mother-in-law’s famous generosity, leapt out of the pew and had to be held back.

  The Methodists, early on, had smiled at the dissension among the Baptists. The Pentecostals laughed out loud. But not for long. Young members in their own churches began to voice opinions about the words. Each congregation had people who were among or related to the fifteen families to leave Haven and start over. The Oven didn’t belong to any one denomination; it belonged to all, and all were asked to show up at Calvary. To discuss it, Reverend Misner said. The weather was cool, garden scents strong, and when they assembled at seven-thirty the atmosphere was pleasant, people simply curious. And it remained so right through Misner’s opening remarks. Maybe the young folks were nervous, but when they spoke, starting with Luther Beauchamp’s sons, Royal and Destry, their voices were so strident the women, embarrassed, looked down at their pocketbooks; shocked, the men forgot to blink.

  It would have been better for everyone if the young people had spoken softly, acknowledged their upbringing as they presented their views. But they didn’t want to discuss; they wanted to instruct.

  “No ex-slave would tell us to be scared all the time. To ‘beware’ God. To always be ducking and diving, trying to look out every minute in case He’s getting ready to throw something at us, keep us down.”

  “You say ‘sir’ when you speak to men,” said Sargeant Person.

  “Sorry, sir. But what kind of message is that? No ex-slave who had the guts to make his own way, build a town out of nothing, could think like that. No ex-slave—”

  Deacon Morgan cut him off. “That’s my grandfather you’re talking about. Quit calling him an ex-slave like that’s all he was. He was also an ex–lieutenant governor, an ex-banker, an ex-deacon and a whole lot of other exes, and he wasn’t making his own way; he was part of a whole group making their own way.”

  Having caught Reverend Misner’s eyes, the boy was firm. “He was born in slavery times, sir; he was a slave, wasn’t he?”

  “Everybody born in slavery time wasn’t a slave. Not the way you mean it.”

  “There’s just one way to mean it, sir,” said Destry.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “None of them do! Don’t know jackshit!” shouted Harper Jury.

  “Whoa, whoa!” Reverend Misner interrupted. “Brothers. Sisters. We called this meeting in God’s own house to try and find—”

  “One of His houses,” snarled Sargeant.

  “All right, one of His houses. But whichever one, He demands respect from those who are in it. Am I right or am I right?”

  Harper sat down. “I apologize for the language. To Him,” he said, pointing upward.

  “That might please Him,” said Misner. “Might not. Don’t limit your respect to Him, Brother Jury. He cautions every which way against it.”

  “Reverend.” The Reverend Pulliam stood up. He was a dark, wiry man—white-haired and impressive. “We have a problem here. You, me. Everybody. The problem is with the way some of us talk. The grown-ups, of course, should use proper language. But the young people—what they say is more like backtalk than talk. What we’re here for is—”

  Royal Beauchamp actually interrupted him, the Reverend! “What is talk if it’s not ‘back’? You all just don’t want us to talk at all. Any talk is ‘backtalk’ if you don’t agree with what’s being said…. Sir.”

  Everybody was so stunned by the boy’s brazenness, they hardly heard what he said.

  Pulliam, dismissing the possibility that Roy’s parents—Luther and Helen Beauchamp—were there, turned slowly to Misner. “Reverend, can’t you keep that boy still?”

  “Why would I want to?” asked Misner. “We’re here not just to talk but to listen too.”

  The gasps were more felt than heard.

  Pulliam narrowed his eyes and was about to answer when Deek Morgan left the row and stood in the aisle. “Well, sir, I have listened, and I believe I have heard as much as I need to. Now, you all listen to me. Real close. Nobody, I mean nobody, is going to change the Oven or call it something strange. Nobody is going to mess with a thing our grandfathers built. They made each and every brick one at a time with their own hands.” Deek looked steadily at Roy. “They dug the clay—not you. They carried the hod—not you.” He turned his head to include Destry, Hurston and Caline Poole, Lorcas and Linda Sands. “They mixed the mortar—not a 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? And we respected what they had gone through to do it. Nothing was handled more gently than the bricks those men—men, hear me? not slaves, ex or otherwise—the bricks those men made. Tell, them, Sargeant, how delicate was the separation, how careful we were, how we wrapped them, each and every one. Tell them, Fleet. You, Seawright, you, Harper, you tell him if I’m lying. Me and my brother lifted that iron. The two of us. And if some letters fell off, it wasn’t due to us because we packed it in straw like it was a mewing lamb. So understand me when I tell you nobody is going to come along some eighty years later claiming to know better what men who went through hell to learn knew. Act short with me all you want, you in long trouble if you think you can disrespect a row you never hoed.”

  Twenty varieties of “amen” italicized Deek’s pronouncement. The point he’d made would have closed off further argument if Misner had not said:

  “Seems to me, Deek, they are respecting it. It’s because they do know the Oven’s value that they want to give it new life.”

  The mutter unleashed by this second shift to the young people’s position rose to a roar, which subsided only to hear how the antagonists responded.

  “They don’t want to give it nothing. They want to kill it, change it into something they made up.”

  “It’s our history too, sir. Not just yours,” said Roy.

  “Then act like it. I just told you. That Oven already has a history. It doesn’t need you to fix it.”

  “Wait now, Deek,” said Richard Misner. “Think what’s been said. Forget naming—naming the Oven. What’s at issue is clarifying the motto.”

  “Motto? Motto? We talking command!” Reverend Pulliam pointed an elegant finger at the ceiling. “‘Beware the Furrow of His Brow.’ That’s what it says clear as daylight. That’s not a suggestion; that’s an order!”

  “Well, no. It’s not clear as daylight,” said Misner. “It says ‘…the Furrow of His Brow.’ There is no ‘Beware’ on it.”

  “You weren’t there! Esther was! And you weren’t here, either, at the beginning! Esther was!” Arnold Fleetwood’s right hand shook with warning.

  “She was a baby. She could have been mistaken,” said Misner.

  Now Fleet joined Deek in the aisle. “Esther never made a mistake of that nature in her life. She knew all there was to know about Haven and Ruby too. She visited us before we had a road. She named this town, dammit. ’Scuse me, ladies.”

  Destry, looking strained and close to tears, held up his hand and asked, “Excuse me, sir. What’s so wrong about ‘Be the Furrow’? ‘Be the Furrow of His Brow’?”

  “You can’t be God, boy.” Nathan DuPres spoke kindly as he shook his head.

  “It’s not being Him, sir; it’s being His instrument, His justice. As a race—”

  “God’s justice is His alone. How you going to be His instrument if you don’t do what He says?” asked Reverend Pulliam. “You have to obey Him.”

  “Yes, sir, but we are obeying Him,” said Destry. “If we follow His commandments, we’ll be His voice, His retribution. As a people—”

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nbsp; Harper Jury silenced him. “It says ‘Beware.’ Not ‘Be.’ Beware means ‘Look out. The power is mine. Get used to it.’”

  “‘Be’ means you putting Him aside and you the power,” said Sargeant.

  “We are the power if we just—”

  “See what I mean? See what I mean? Listen to that! You hear that, Reverend? That boy needs a strap. Blasphemy!”

  As could have been predicted, Steward had the last word—or at least the words they all remembered as last because they broke the meeting up. “Listen here,” he said, his voice thick and shapely with Blue Boy. “If you, any one of you, ignore, change, take away, or add to the words in the mouth of that Oven, I will blow your head off just like you was a hood-eye snake.”

  Dovey Morgan, chilled by her husband’s threat, could only look at the floorboards and wonder what visible shape his loss would take now.

  Days later she still hadn’t made up her mind about who or which side was right. And in discussion with others, including Steward, she tended to agree with whomever she was listening to. This matter was one she would bring to her Friend—when he came back to her.

  Driving away from the meeting at Calvary, Steward and Dovey had a small but familiar disagreement about where to go. He was headed out to the ranch. It was reduced to a show ranch now that gas rights had been sold, but in Steward’s mind it was home—where his American flag flew on holidays; where his honorable discharge papers were framed; where Ben and Good could be counted on to bang their tails maniacally when he appeared. But the little house they kept on St. Matthew Street—a foreclosure the twins never resold—was becoming more and more home to Dovey. It was close to her sister, to Mount Calvary, the Women’s Club. It was also where her Friend chose to pay his calls.

  “Drop me right here, Steward. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

  “You going to catch your death.”

  “No I won’t. Night chill feels good right now.”

  “Girl, you a torment,” he said, but he patted her thigh before she got out.

  Dovey walked slowly down Central Avenue. In the distance she could see lanterns from the Juneteenth picnic hanging near the Oven. Four months now, and no one had taken them down to store for next year. Now they provided light—just a little, just enough—for other kinds of freedom celebrations going on in its shadows. On her left was the bank, not as tall as any of the churches but seeming nevertheless to hog the street. Neither brother had wanted a second floor like the Haven bank had, where the Lodge kept its quarters. They didn’t want traffic into their building for any reason other than bank business. The Haven bank their father owned collapsed for a whole lot of reasons, and one of them, Steward maintained, was having Lodge meetings on the premises. “Ravels the concentration,” he’d said. Three streets beyond, on her right, next to Patricia Best’s house, was the school where Dovey had taught while the ranch house was being completed but Soane had taught longer since she lived so close. Pat ran the school by herself now, with Reverend Misner and Anna Flood filling in for Negro History classes and after-school typing lessons. The flowers and vegetables on one side of the school were an extension of the garden in front of Pat’s own house.

  Dovey turned left into St. Matthew Street. The moon’s light glittered white fences gone slant in an effort to hold back chrysanthemums, foxglove, sunflowers, cosmos, daylilies, while mint and silver king pressed through the spaces at the bottom of the slats. The night sky, like a handsome lid, held the perfume down, saving it, intensifying it, refusing it the slightest breeze on which to escape.

  The garden battles—won, lost, still at bay—were mostly over. They had raged for ten years, having begun suddenly in 1963, when there was time. The women who were in their twenties when Ruby was founded, in 1950, watched for thirteen years an increase in bounty that had never entered their dreams. They bought soft toilet paper, used washcloths instead of rags, soap for the face alone or diapers only. In every Ruby household appliances pumped, hummed, sucked, purred, whispered and flowed. And there was time: fifteen minutes when no firewood needed tending in a kitchen stove; one whole hour when no sheets or overalls needed slapping or scrubbing on a washboard; ten minutes gained because no rug needed to be beaten, no curtains pinned on a stretcher; two hours because food lasted and therefore could be picked or purchased in greater quantity. Their husbands and sons, tickled to death and no less proud than the women, translated a five-time markup, a price per pound, bale or live weight, into Kelvinators as well as John Deere; into Philco as well as Body by Fisher. The white porcelain layered over steel, the belts, valves and Bakelite parts gave them deep satisfaction. The humming, throbbing and softly purring gave the women time.

  The dirt yards, carefully swept and sprinkled in Haven, became lawns in Ruby until, finally, front yards were given over completely to flowers for no good reason except there was time in which to do it. The habit, the interest in cultivating plants that could not be eaten, spread, and so did the ground surrendered to it. Exchanging, sharing a cutting here, a root there, a bulb or two became so frenetic a land grab, husbands complained of neglect and the disappointingly small harvest of radishes, or the too short rows of collards, beets. The women kept on with their vegetable gardens in back, but little by little its produce became like the flowers—driven by desire, not necessity. Iris, phlox, rose and peonies took up more and more time, quiet boasting and so much space new butterflies journeyed miles to brood in Ruby. Their chrysalises hung in secret under acacias, and from there they joined blues and sulphurs that had been feeding for decades in buckwheat and clover. The red bands drinking from sumac competed with the newly arrived creams and whites that loved jewel flowers and nasturtiums. Giant orange wings covered in black lace hovered in pansies and violets. Like the years of garden rivalry, the butterflies were gone that cool October evening, but the consequence remained—fat, overwrought yards; clumps and chains of eggs. Hiding. Until spring.

  Touching the pickets lining the path, Dovey climbed the steps. There on the porch she hesitated and thought of turning back to call on Soane, who had left the meeting early. Soane worried her; seemed to have periods of frailty not related to the death of her sons five years ago. Maybe Soane felt what Dovey did—the weight of having two husbands, not one. Dovey paused, then changed her mind and opened the door. Or tried to. It was locked—again. Something Steward had recently begun that made her furious: bolting the house as though it were a bank too. Dovey was sure theirs was the only locked door in Ruby. What was he afraid of? She patted the dish under a pot of dracaena and picked up the skeleton key.

  Before that first time, but never again, there was a sign. She had been upstairs, tidying the little foreclosed house, and paused to look through a bedroom window. Down below the leaf-heavy trees were immobile as a painting. July. Dry. One hundred one degrees. Still, opening the windows would freshen the room that had been empty for a year. It took her a moment—a tap here, a yank or two—but she managed finally to raise the window all the way up and lean forward to see what was left of the garden. From her position in the window the trees hid most of the backyard and she stretched a bit to see beyond their spread. Then a mighty hand dug deep into a giant sack and threw fistfuls of petals into the air. Or so it seemed. Butterflies. A trembling highway of persimmon-colored wings cut across the green treetops forever—then vanished.

  Later, as she sat in a rocker under those trees, he came by. She had never seen him before and did not recognize any local family in his features. At first she thought it was Menus, Harper’s son, who drank and who once had owned the house. But this man was walking straight and quickly, as though late for an appointment, using this yard as a shortcut to someplace else. Perhaps he heard the light cry of her rocker. Perhaps he wondered whether his trespass was safe. In any case, when he turned and saw her he smiled, raising a palm in greeting.

  “Afternoon,” she called.

  He changed his direction and came near to where she sat.

  “You from around here?�
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  “Close,” he said, but he did not move his lips to say so.

  He needed a haircut.

  “I saw some butterflies a while back. Up there.” Dovey pointed. “Orangy red, they were. Just as bright. Never saw that color before. Like what we used to call coral when I was a girl. Pumpkin color, but stronger.” She wondered, at the time, what on earth she was talking about and would have stuttered to a polite close—something about the heat, probably, the relief evening would bring—except he looked so interested in what she was describing. His overalls were clean and freshly ironed. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled above the elbows. His forearms, smoothly muscled, made her reconsider the impression she got from his face: that he was underfed.

  “You ever see butterflies like that?”

  He shook his head but evidently thought the question serious enough for him to sit on his heels before her.

  “Don’t let me keep you from where you’re going. It was just, well, my Lord, such a sight.”

  He smiled sympathetically and looked toward the place she had pointed to. Then he stood up, brushing the seat of his overalls, although he had not sat down in the grass, and said, “Is it all right if I pass through here?”

  “Of course. Anytime. Nobody lives here now. The man who owned it lost it. Nice, though, isn’t it? We’re thinking about maybe using it from time to time. My husband…” She was babbling, she knew, but he seemed to be listening earnestly, carefully to every word. At last she stopped—too ashamed of her silliness to go on—and repeated her invitation to use the shortcut whenever he wanted.

  He thanked her and left the yard, moving quickly between the trees. Dovey watched his figure melt in the shadow lace veiling the houses beyond.