Mouth Full of Blood

by Toni Morrison

  This effort to balance the demands of cultural specificity with those of artistic range is a condition, rather than a problem, for me. A challenge rather than a worry. A refuge rather than a refugee camp. Home territory, not foreign land. Inhabiting and manipulating that sphere has excited me like no other. Of course African American writers have contemplated, written about, struggled with, and have taken positions on this politics or art, race and/or aesthetics debate since Phillis Wheatley suggested that slavery did her a favor. Jean Toomer tried to escape its shackle altogether by inventing an American race. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, African American scholars, and a host of post–civil rights writers have weighed in on the subject. And it is or has been, since the nineteenth century, a keenly argued concern of every immigrant group of writers in the United States. From Henry James to Chang-rae Lee; from William Faulkner to Maxine Hong Kingston; from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Frank McCourt; from Herman Melville to Paula Marshall. Still it is hard for me to believe that the necessity of responding to a perceived “outsider” status has been demanded so loudly and so insistently of any group more than African American artists. To me the implied, even voiced question, “Are you a black writer or an American writer?” not only means “Are you subverting art to politics?” It also means “Are you a black writer or a universal writer?” suggesting that the two are clearly incompatible. Race awareness apparently can never be sundered from politics. It is the result of a shotgun wedding originally enforced by whites, while African American artists (in the public and academic domains) are faulted and flailed for dealing with the consequences of this marriage. Forced to shout endlessly to white criticism, “These are not my racial politics—they are yours.” These battles against such a mind-set are exhausting and are especially debilitating since those who launched the fray have only to observe it, not participate in it. Have only to misunderstand the demands of cultural specificity as identity politics or assaults on the canon, or special pleading, or some other threatening gesture. And the people most invested in the argument are usually those who have already reaped its benefits.

  I suppose I approached the politics versus art, race versus aesthetics debate initially the way an alchemist would: looking for that combination of ingredients that turns dross into gold. But there is no such formula. So my project became to make the historically raced world inextricable from the artistic view that beholds it, and in so doing encourage readings that dissect both. Which is to say I claimed the right and the range of authorship. To interrupt journalistic history with a metaphorical one; to impose on a rhetorical history an imagistic one; to read the world, misread it; write and unwrite it. To enact silence and free speech. In short to do what all writers aspire to do. I wanted my work to be the work of disabling the art versus politics argument; to perform the union of aesthetics and ethics.

  I am impressed by the fruitfulness and importance of scholarly and literary challenges that search for more ways in which to both sign and defang race, acknowledge its import and limit its corrosive effect on language. That is, work that avoids the unnatural schism between the political realm in which race matters and the artistic one in which it is presumed not to.

  Scholarship that abandons the enforcing properties of the false debate and welcomes the challenges in the liberating ones hidden at its center is becoming sensitive to the fact that things have changed. Language that requires the mutual exclusion of x and y, or the dominance of x over y, is slowly losing its magic, its force. But it is literature that rehearses and enacts this change in ways far in advance of and more probingly than the critical language that follows it. Perhaps it is because of my own farewell to all that art versus politics, culture against aesthetics quarrel that I find literary partings (moments of racial goodbyes) so promising a site in which to examine the sea change expressive language of racial encounter has undergone, a sea change yielding opportunities for richer and more nuanced explorations. Over time the rites of farewell between the races as represented in some selected examples in American literature have moved dramatically from blatant assumptions of racial hierarchy to less overt ones to coded representation to nuanced decodings of those assumptions; from control to dismissal to anxiety to a kind of informed ease. Now, I insist on not being misunderstood here—implying that neutralizing race is the work of literature, its job, so to speak. It is not. Nevertheless the shape of racial discourse can be located there. A shape that plays about and moves through literature and therefore in our imaginations when we read it. Although even this brief inquiry could and ought to be widened, I will limit my observations to women writers because intimacy and alienation and severance between women is more often free of the sexual competition implicit among male writers addressing the same subject, and anxieties about sexual dominance can blur as well as exacerbate the racial equation (as Shakespeare and Hollywood both knew). Saying goodbye is a moment ready-made for literary histrionics, for deep emotional revelations seething with meaning. I am interested in the farewell between black and white strangers who have, or might have, shared something significant; or who represent the end of something larger than themselves, where the separation symbolizes loss or renewal, for example. There are the partings between black and white women whose histories are permanently entangled. Many, if not most, of these are surrogate relationships: surrogate mothers in the nanny-child domain; surrogate mothers, aunts, and other relatives in the servant-mistress category; surrogate sisters in which the friendships become surrogate, illegal, precisely because the dynamics of power between employer and employee are inescapably raced; and sometimes, though rarely, there is the farewell between black and white adult women in which the equity is not race based. Alice Walker’s Meridian is an early example.

  Let me begin with a farewell scene in a fine and prolific writer who is not American, but who was herself a foreigner far from home and who was in a position to form opinions on racial relationships from close quarters, Isak Dinesen. There is a haunting scene in Out of Africa that exhibits standard racial discourse as well as the presumptions of the foreigner’s home. The scene in which the author is leaving a place, Kenya, that has been her home for much of her adult life. The necessity of moving out of Africa and its melancholy surface in each moment of leave-taking.

  A passage toward the end reads as follows:

  Now the old women were sorry that I was leaving them. From this last time, I keep the picture of a Kikuyu woman, nameless to me, for I did not know her well, she belonged, I think, to Kathegu’s village, and was the wife or widow of one of his many sons. She came towards me on a path on the plain, carrying on her back a load of the long thin poles which the Kikuyu use for constructing the roofs of their huts,—with them this is women’s work. These poles may be fifteen feet long; when the women carry them they tie them together at the ends, and the tall conical burdens give to the people underneath them, as you see them traveling over the land, the silhouette of a prehistoric animal, or a Giraffe. The sticks which this woman was carrying were all black and charred, sooted by the smoke of the hut during many years; that meant that she had been pulling down her house and was trailing her building materials, such as they were, to new grounds. When we met she stood dead still, barring the path to me, staring at me in the exact manner of a Giraffe in a herd, that you will meet on the open plain, and which lives and feels and thinks in a manner unknowable to us. After a moment she broke out weeping, tears streaming over her face, like a cow that makes water on the plain before you. Not a word did she or I myself speak, and, after a few minutes, she ceded the way to me, and we parted, and walked on in opposite directions. I thought that after all she had some materials with which to begin her new house, and I imagined how she would set to work, and tie her sticks together, and make herself a roof.

  Lots of other Kenyans wept and deplored Dinesen’s exit: because of their affection for her, or perhaps the loss of paid employment and protection, the despair of having to find
other shelter. But the above recollection bedevils me for other reasons. What does the phrase “barring the path to me” mean? Not barring the path, or barring me in the path, but barring the path to me. Is the path only to and for Dinesen? Is the woman out of place? The syntax is curious. Additionally there is the sustained speculation about the woman’s errand—carrying wood to build, rebuild, or repair her roof. To make a home for herself in a land that is her home, but in which she (the Kikuyu woman) is made to feel the outsider. While the true foreigner, the author, is leaving a false home about which she has some misgivings. The description of Dinesen’s African woman is instructive. The sticks on her head make Dinesen think of a “prehistoric animal.” Furthermore, the quiet woman is staring at her with what emotions we cannot yet know because she is relegated to the animal kingdom, where emotions and thoughts and life itself cannot be known by us. The woman is like a giraffe in a herd, speechless, unknowable, and when she evinces some powerful emotion such as sorrow, or rage, or disgust, or loneliness, or even joy we cannot know it because her tears are like a cow voiding its urine in public. It is a picture, says Dinesen, that she keeps with her, this nameless unknown woman. Surely a surrogate, a symbol, of Kenya and what she thinks of the world she is leaving behind. In these passages, beautiful “aesthetic” language serves to undermine the terms: the native, the foreigner, home, homelessness in a wash of preemptive images that legitimate and obscure their racist assumptions while providing protective cover from a possibly more damaging insight.

  If we leave 1930s Africa and move to 1940s America to another writer with claim to some intimate relations to blacks, there is further instruction.

  In a classic tale of American womanhood, Gone with the Wind, the black woman/white woman connection is the one we have learned from Harriet Beecher Stowe and others: a ubiquitous mammy whose devotion and nursing skills are as fierce as they are loyal. These surrogate mothers are more serviceable than real mothers not only because of their constancy, but also because, unlike biological mothers, you can command them and dismiss them without serious penalty. Notwithstanding their presence in the text, there will always come a time when these surrogates leave—they either exit the narrative itself because they are no longer relevant to it, or they leave the life of their mistress because their value as teachers is reduced when the cared-for matures, or when circumstances have changed: moving away, insubordination, or death. Of interest to me is how this severance is played out. Is protective language summoned to make the black woman’s disappearance palatable? Is there a dependence on a metaphoric equation with the unfeeling, unthinking animal world? Are there deep or awkward silences to accompany her dismissal? Are there tears or a stubborn insistence upon permanent attachment?

  In spite of the very real difference in the level of literary accomplishment, Mitchell’s mammy is like Dinesen’s Kikuyu in important ways. Similes chosen to bring each into view are from the animal kingdom; both black women are speechless with grief when departure is imminent; the severance in both instances is seen as trauma, a devastating deprivation to the black woman and in Mitchell, to the white woman as well. The “not one word spoken” by the Kenyan woman becomes the garbled babble of a black woman (who in sixty years of dialogue with her mistress had never learned to pronounce the word “white”) and a quiet begrudging while her young mistress weeps.

  These early and classic relationships between women of different races, frequently maternal, friendly, loving, are echoed in Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl in a mesmerizing deathbed scene with another surrogate, a woman named Jezebel with whom the mistress had a close and mutually satisfying friendship. The dialogue is revelatory.

  “You must eat to keep up your strength.”

  “Don’t want nothin’, Missy.”

  “Can’t you think of anything that would taste good to you? Now think a minute, and tell me. Isn’t there something?”

  The old woman gave a sly chuckle; one paper eyelid winked, and her eyes gave out a flash of grim humour. “No’m, I cain’t think of nothin’ I could relish, lessen maybe it was a li’l pickaninny’s hand.”

  She turned back again to the bed, took up Jezebel’s cold grey claw, and patted it. “Good-bye til another time, Auntie. Now you must turn over and have a nap.”

  Evocative as this scene is, rampant with pleasant memories and a shared view of the world, its serenity explodes with flashes of the serviceable but sinister language of racial antagonism. The hint of cannibalism (understood to be “natural” to Africans) and not the patting of a hand, the patting of “a cold grey claw.”

  But something else begins to take place in fiction: changes that are usually attributed to social climate; the signs of the times. In any case, speech permissible in the nineteenth and early twentieth century is crude in the late twentieth. But that may not be the whole story. Surely the entrance of post–Harlem Renaissance minority voices into the political and literary landscape has had a share in this alteration. Perhaps a readership and a critical community that is intolerant of the easy dismissal of others. In any case there are fewer instances of unreflective dismissals; deeper probes into these relationships; more exacting observations of these exits and disruptions in the relationships. In 1946 Carson McCullers published The Member of the Wedding.” Before that The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

  In both novels black women exit the life of the protagonist. The scene between Berenice and Frankie in The Member of the Wedding is one of struggle for control in which we witness the jealousy of the surrogate mother at the flight of the child. Then there is Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, where it is clear Lee is working away from certain assumptions of unknowableness. Although Calpurnia has self-revealing conversations only with other blacks and children—never white adults—the grapple for language to deal with these complicated matters is apparent. There are no leave-taking moments in the novel, nor in Lillian Hellman’s autobiographical work that has several recollections of her servant, Caroline Ducky. Yet the point is sustained by the reach of these authors for a seriousness not shown in earlier writers. There seems to be a blossoming suspicion among these white women writers that complex thought, ambiguity, nuance are actually possible in their black characters, and that their speech does not require the strange, creative spellings that no other character’s speech needs.

  Lucille Clifton opens her own lovely memoir, Generations, in 1976, with a conversation between strangers of each race—a conversation that rings with the sayable and the unsaid.

  But two years before that Diane Johnson fills in those gaps that lie about in Clifton’s memoir and in other works. Her 1974 The Shadow Knows digs deeply into these relationships. The narrator has two domestics critical to her life: one disruptive, vengeful, grotesque; another benevolent, supportive, cheerful. The reflective quality of the prose is worth quoting.

  “But I’m trying to confess that I don’t think I experience Osella as a human, not really.” “And she had seemed dead on arrival, delivered lonely and bereaved and far from home to our zoo, like some insignificant common animal barely noticeable to the keeper, me, who was more preoccupied with the misery of the delicate gazelle—me.” Here the animal characteristics are equally distributed and the more lyric “gazelle” is delivered with irony. Later she muses, “I notice that whenever I describe Osella or think of her, it is in metaphors of things not people, or of fat animals. It is as if I did not consider her human, this fellow woman with whom I shared my children and my home and many hours …. There was nothing in her that wouldn’t sit down sisterly and share a recipe but there was something in me.” This is no casual, lazy (Margaret Mitchell) language: Osella is impossibly if understandably lunatic. While the death of Ev, who follows Osella, is a subject of the narrator’s deep personal mourning.

  Language ricochets in these race-inflected farewell scenes. In Beloved also there is a leave-taking between a white girl and a black one. The scene moves toward the parting that must take place between them, yes, but the
scene is also meant to enact a goodbye to the impediments of race right in the middle of highly racialized dialogue. Each one begins by speaking in the language of the period. The power relationships are manifest in the casually racist remarks of Amy and the deceitful acquiescence of Sethe. Following their joint venture in the birth of Denver, they speak, finally, not of farewell, but of memory; how to fix the memory of one in the mind of the other—or, as with Sethe, how to immortalize the encounter beyond her own temporal life. While the action is separation, the parting of ways, the language is meant to displace it, is meant to invite meditation on its necessity. Washing up on the bank of the Ohio River is our knowing that if both women had been of the same race (both white or both black) they could have, might have, would have stayed together and shared their fortune. Neither one felt she belonged anywhere. Both are traveling through unknown, strange territory looking for a home. So the language is designed to imply the solitude of their farewell is somehow shaming.

  In the later decades of the twentieth century the dissolution of the restrictions imposed by race consciousness on expressive language begins to erode, as in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. Instead of suppressing, ignoring the possibilities in these relationships, instead of the comfort of stereotype and the safety of an indolent imagination, one begins to hear not Dinesen’s silence or Mitchell’s gabble, but verbal fencing; not the unmitigated devotion or disobedience of servants, but the wrestle over the meaning of home; the probing of subtle jealousies, complicated forms of resistance, hatred, love, anger; the learned and earned exchange of mutual perception.