The Graduate English Journal of Hunter College

“and that there would arise an earthly city, a beloved community” - Lawrence Jones

           Edwin R. McCabe was the most powerful black man in late-1800's Oklahoma. Educated at Oberlin College, employed on Wall Street, he eschewed limited material success in the Northeast for the expansive possibilities of the Western frontier. By purchasing 320 acres of cheap, fertile land, McCabe founded Langston, Oklahoma in 1890, the “capital” of what he hoped would be the nation's first all-black state. Oklahoma was to be the “paradise of Eden,” declared McCabe in the Langston City Herald, “the garden of the Gods” (In Motion). McCabe clearly saw this “panhandle” territory in the west as a sanctuary, a refuge from the terror of white rule: “Here the negro can rest from mob law, here he can be secure from every ill of southern policies” (In Motion).

            A collective migration to Oklahoma surely must have been spurred by a geographic imagination that saw in those empty plains and dusty horizons the definition of pure freedom - a space unmarred and unadulterated by white hatred and oppression (though, of course, already occupied by Native Americans). For McCabe and the hundreds of other blacks who migrated to the West, Oklahoma's lack of civil law and economic structures was liberating rather than restrictive. The empty page of the Oklahoma plains afforded McCabe the imaginative space to dream of that “paradise of Eden” and that “garden of the Gods.” After centuries of unspeakable horror, after decades of lasting racial inequality, for Edwin McCabe the frontier - long the symbol of American possibility and renewal - represented a repatriation to a paradisiacal homeland, disconnected and unsullied by white history.

            From a social position not dissimilar to McCabe's, the novelist Toni Morrison has sought out un-chartered territory for her imaginative constructions, propelled to the the empty page not only by the history of slavery and racism in America, but also by the literary canon that was produced by those histories. Like her forebears in the frontier, Morrison aims to create textual communities not “like” those of her literary counterparts, but ones that are informed by the history and society of African-Americans. She has authored these black communities throughout her career, from the Ohio of Beloved to the Harlem of Jazz. However, her recent novel, Paradise, finds the most sophisticated and complex expression of community. In this novel, Ruby, “the one black town worth all the pain” (5), is created as a sanctuary from a terrible past and an equally bleak present in white society, “a break from a life where all was owed, nothing owned” (12). Its founders - descendent of original black frontiersmen - attempt to author a community that is self-sufficient, exclusively black, and insulated from the shifting currents of American society. Yet, the utopian vision is interrupted by the simultaneous arrival of social change and the Convent women, both of which present a threat to the patriarchal grip of the elders. With paradise quickly deteriorating into a mutated dream, the “fathers” of the community choose to dictate their own narrative, with violence and authority.

            It is no coincidence that Morrison chose this territory and this time period as the setting for Paradise. The building of communities on the expansive Oklahoma plains not only offers a compelling historical model, but also suggests an incredibly rich metaphor for the act of fiction and, perhaps more importantly, the act of interpretation. Like McCabe, the reader can attempt to connect the history of slavery and racism with the need to build new communities, textual and physical. The historically aware reader must ask: how are the authors of Ruby (and Langston) and the author of Paradiseengaging in a similar endeavor? This paper attempts to explore the parallels in both writing the novel Paradise and building the community within it. Furthermore, by using Edwin McCabe's Langston, Oklahoma as an example of both the socially driven motivation for all-black communities and the inevitable problems caused by utopian vision, I hope to show how the narrative act that is Paradise - equally impelled by social forces - circumscribes the rigid interpretation and exclusionary practices that arise in isolated communities. First, I aim to investigate what prompts this need, this desire to construct a community out of nothingness: how might the steady, empty Oklahoma landscape resemble the clean page with which Morrison began this endeavor? What social forces - both historical and current - drives the “authors” to construct their own communities, to create their own histories, to design tragedy? Secondly, I will attempt to explore what happens when narrative and community “texts” enter the social realm, and are faced with very real and unanticipated political and culture shifts. How do these “communities” - both imaginary and physical - choose to react? Lastly, how does Morrison consciously write of these narrative issues, and open up a new space for interpretation?

            In 1943, the social science department of Langston University commissioned a study called “Culture of a Contemporary All-Negro Community.” The researchers - Mozell Hill and Thelma D. Ackiss - had a deliberate objective in mind:

This project is controlled by the hypothesis that Negroes who live in semi-isolation from the dominant culture, and who are thus relatively free from the psychological pressure of the White society, exhibit different patterns of thought and behavior from those who are conditioned to living in racially mixed communities. (5)

As stated, Langston was founded by Edwin McCabe, who had a clear vision in mind in establishing this community. He named the town after John M. Langston, the first black congressman from Virginia to serve in the House of Representatives. Langston was elected in 1890, in a victory that was contested for eighteen months. After six months of service, he was unseated. McCabe chose to name this new city Langston for obvious reasons, as the researchers explain, “the fact that the new community was named for a Negro is indicative of the intention of the promoters to found an all-Negro community. This is borne out by information from old settlers to the effect that Whites were discouraged from locating in Langston” (7). In many ways, Langston was founded as a “family community” with strong interwoven bonds and the collective identity of being black in the post-slavery era. Yet, within half a century, troubles began to arise, quickly dispelling, or at least putting on hiatus, any utopian vision of the “garden of the Gods.” The Langston University study outlined three main problems the community faced: lack of any real economic base, lack of any municipal structure or coordination with county government, and, lastly, but most interestingly, “folk patterns of thought and behavior which stubbornly resists social change, and some of which impinge on the consciousness of college youth, retarding their social adjustment to dominant culture patterns” (6).

            The very motivation for the study seems to be a genuine concern for those “different patterns of thought and behavior,” dictated by an “elite” class of Langston that aims to protect the community from outsiders. Hill and Ackiss detect an “upper crust” of Langston, made up of men long established in the community. They ask, “What are the attributes of members of this community group? …. The three most important attributes appear to be a protracted residence in Langston, relative economic security, and aggressiveness” (32). These ancestral bedrocks of the community must have surely envisioned themselves as the bearers of McCabe's pioneering torch; they felt designated by blood to protect the “paradise of Eden” from the encroachment of a society that never treated them as humans anyway. No longer did these “pioneers” need whites to segregate them; they would segregate themselves and, in an act of reprisal, protect the racial purity of their community: “the older residents…have a fierce pride in having helped found the community. Its racial homogeneity is especially appealing to them” (32). Clearly, this suspicion of white culture in a pre-civil rights area is understandable if not justified. However, we can easily see how the task of protecting Langston from the outside leads to a certain xenophobia and paranoia about change, as the authors tell us, “[T]he people of the community…are a unity and form a definite `we' group. As such they are antagonistic to all outsiders” (33). Not only did the “elders” isolate Langston from the outer lands, they protected the community from inner violators as well, engaging in a “practice of socially isolating an individual who violates the community standards” (34). Clearly, this self-appointed elite vested great faith in the purity of Edwin McCabe's vision.

            Yet, the overall tone of the study is one of portent and skepticism. The researchers are convinced that these fissions in the community and the wayward indifference to an outside world do not bode well for Langston. A study of Langston's economy warns that the lack of an economic base is a reminder that the community “has not fulfilled the promise of its earlier years” (19). The authors express obvious unease with the xenophobia that has arisen in a community deliberately founded as a reaction against racist exclusion. The study concludes:

From a short time, close-range view, then, it would appear the community of Langston has failed in its attempt to develop an enterprising, self-sufficient, all-Negro community. That is indeed a fact for the town has none of the earmarks of a community which will grow and few inducements to encourage settlement in it (38).

While the report finishes with a hopeful belief that the problems of Ruby are “part of the adjustment process,” we are left to conclude that Langston is headed “toward integration and away from particularism” (38). As Langston today is still a mostly black community retaining an all-black university, we are left to believe that the community slowly accepted the existence of the outer America.

            Besides the obvious correspondence of both Langston and Ruby being all-black communities in origin, there are a number of uncanny resemblances between the towns that strengthen the argument for Langston being a, if not the model for Morrison's Paradise. For one, Ruby's predecessor, Haven, was founded by those who were “elected to rule in state legislatures and county offices: who, when thrown out of office without ceremony or proof of wrongdoing, refused to believe what they guessed was the real reason….Almost all of the Negro men chased or invited out of office” (Morrison, 193). Of course, Langston itself was named after a public servant who bitterly fought for his office before being unseated. In addition, the elders of Ruby are confounded by the presence of the Convent women, who cause a tangible anxiety for the townspeople. Langston had its own issue with an “institution” whose shadow cast a suspicious threat to the elite's hegemony: Langston University. The researchers, noticing a “far from satisfactory” relationship, emphasize the “definite cleavage” in the town. Despite the fact that there had been “no attempt on the part of the college personnel to alter community patterns,” the college faculty - with progressive values and ideas on integration - were seen as a potential threat to the hegemony of the elder, not to mention the fact that the college personnel, despite being black, were still outsiders. We can set the example of Langston University against the Convent, an “institution” which similarly represents not only alien blood but also mystery and ambiguity when compared to the moral rigidity of Ruby fathers. In an interesting parallel, Hill and Ackiss also describe in Langston a “Catholic school in the years before statehood which was taught by Whites but attended by children of both racial groups” (7). Of course, after being an embezzler's pornographic playground, the Convent was a Catholic school ran by Mother Mary Magna. It is odd that these two towns share Catholic schools in a state where Catholicism was “as rare as fish pockets” (Morrison, 227). Yet, the Catholic presence perhaps explains the reticence of the present black communities toward white culture. If it is whites who were educating children of “both racial groups” in Langston, perhaps the Langston “elite” were uneasy about the proselytizing mission Morrison describes in the chapter, “Consolata”:

[Christ the King School] was an opportunity to intervene at the heart of the problem: to bring God and language to natives who were assumed to have neither; to alter their diets, their clothes, their minds; to help them despise everything that had once made their lives worthwhile and to offer them instead the privilege of knowing the one and only God and a chance, thereby for redemption. (227)

We can see how the allegiance to racial purity and the antagonism to outsiders was a reaction to not only the history of slavery and the memory of the South, but also the colonial institutions that had once been entrenched in Langston.

            In pointing out the remarkable similarities between this historical black town and a fictional one, I aim not to prove that Morrison necessarily used Langston as a model for Ruby, though certainly it seems more than plausible. What I am trying to point out, in anticipation of a later argument, is that the historical record of these all-black Oklahoma towns provide us with a model for both why these communities spring up and how they deal with being utopian in vision and exclusionary in practice.

            It will undoubtedly help our understanding of African-American communities, both physical and imaginary, to examine the connection between community-building and narrative creation. Philip Page, a Toni Morrison scholar, studies at length the literary representations of communal identity in Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African-American Fiction. Page sees a clear association between the writing act and the settling act, as gestures of ownership, identity, and empowerment. He says, “As they insist on the relevance of the past, the men enact their redemption of it. Through their actions and words, they attempt to atone for their past failures, and, by rewriting the past, they create a new present on which to build a newly envisioned future” (13). Indeed, it is both the memory of the South and the possibility of the future in the Reconstruction era that must have driven men like McCabe and, in Ruby's case, Zechariah, to “enact redemption of the past.” As Page makes clear, this is done through both action, the actual construction of the community, and words, the narrative that must redeem the past and sanctify the present mission. The ancestor who enabled this redemption is regarded as “a metaphorical construction intersecting these texts” (Page quoting Holloway, 13), memorialized not only in the very structures and physicality of the community but also in narrative and myth-building. The myth of the ancestor is dominant in Paradise, evoked not only by the narrative history collected by the 8-rock families (“[Deacon and Steward] remembered the details of everything that ever happened” [13]), but also by the symbolism of the Oven. The Oven is a symbol both of hardship and unity, of memory and re-generation. The Oven - the physical centerpiece of both community life and community narrative - is indeed a font, in both senses of the word. Literally, its actual font, “Beware the Furrow of His Brow,” is a contentious issue that concerns power in the community and who controls Ruby's narrative. Yet, figuratively, it is also a font of narrative, spinning an inexhaustible narrative of the symbol's creation, its movement, and its purpose in the community. Indeed, the Oven is that intersecting “metaphorical construction” and, doubtless, whoever writes the past of the Oven, writes the present of Ruby. The act of narrative may be a redemption of the past, as Page tells us, but it is also a potentially ideological writing of the present.

            Gurleen Grewal, in her critical study, Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison, recognizes the necessity of narrative in the post-slavery era. She states, “What frees the survivor from this entrapment [of vindictiveness] entails the `therapeutic process…of constructing a narrative, of reconstructing a history and essentially, of re-externalizing the event' ” (Grewal quoting Dori Laub, 15). Grewal later quotes the historian Michael Roth as saying that writing the past “ `is one of the crucial vehicles for reconstructing or reimagining a community's connections to its traditions' ” (12). Surely, the narrative Edwin McCabe chose to write for the construction of Langston (“garden of Gods”) can be seen as a “re-imagining” of the traditions of the African-American and as a “re-externalizing” of the painful memory of slavery. Similarly, the narrative spun by the 8-rock fathers of Ruby allows them reassert the importance of memory for a people whose history had previously been violently robbed, emptied, stripped.

            Yet, we must take notice that both these critics see African-American collective narrative as a “rewriting” or a “reconstruction” or a “re-externalizing”of the past. Surely, this re- implies not a direct transcribing of history, nor a tracing of ghostly figures, but a reinterpretation, through an ideological filter, written onto the present, guided by a deliberate hand. A “rewrite” implies a new, edited, alternate version of the original. A “reconstruction” delimits the inadequacy of the original construction and suggests the rebuilding of a new and improved structure. Thus, when the history of Ruby, or Langston for that matter, is re-presented to its citizens, by definition, that history has been dramatically changed: things are left out, other things are emphasized, and, perhaps, some things are completely imagined.

            The re-writing of the past in Ruby is played out by Morrison in the chapter “Patricia.” In this chapter, the children of Ruby are putting on a Christmas pageant for the town. Their performance is a powerful moment in the novel, a terrifying vision of the re-writing of history. Onstage, the children represent not one, but seven holy families, comprised of only 8-rock children (more on the number discrepancy later). Clearly, the concept of seven holy families - seven Marys, seven Josephs - is a Ruby reconstruction of the birth of Christ, yet the representation of 8-rock, and only 8-rock, onstage suggests the mythical history Deacon and Steward and the other “elite” are trying to write on this community. Their performance attempts to present the 8-rock families as the roots of not only the community, but Christian civilization in general. They are not just the center of the community, but the locus of a system of morality, redemption, and salvation.

            Yet, in either a gesture of 8-rock meta-theater or Morrison's use of irony, the 8-rock children's performance is also a display of “disallowing.” The masked innkeepers - “bobbing and bowing” - disallow the seven holy families from taking rest at their inns. The holy familes are thrown food and told, “Take this and get on out of here” (211). Clearly, this is a performance of the “Disallowing,” the same very antagonism the 8-rock families were once shown. It is the same very antagonism for the outsider that the Langston University researchers detected within the community's “elite.” And it is the very same antagonism that the 8-rock families now show to both stranger and inner transgressor. Hence, when control of narrative is wrested into the hands of the fathers of the communities, when the narratives of Langston and Ruby are rewritten, not only the past is altered, but the present as well. As things are “disallowed” into the historical accounts, so are people, beliefs, attitudes.

            Gurleen Grewal, in a far more sophisticated reading of texts and communities than Philip Page, sees narrative not just as a way remembering and unifying, but a potentially dangerous tool of exclusion. Unlike Page, Grewal recognizes the danger that both white and minority communities face when a utopian vision necessitates “disallowing” for “purity's” sake. Grewal is especially aware of the potential danger of post-slavery re-writings: “Trauma's unconscious mode of expression is to repeat itself, to reenact in a different guise what has never been redressed or represented” (15). Indeed, Ruby becomes this disguised repetition of trauma and violent exclusion. The penultimate event of the book is the slaughtering of the Convent women, the re-assertion of narrative control of Ruby. The Convent women - like, perhaps to a lesser degree, Langston University - threaten the reconstruction of history, thereby endangering the present, and future, narrative. So, it is deemed by Deek and Steward and K.D. and Sargeant and Migus and others that narrative control must be regained. The attempt to literally rewrite the Oven was enough of a danger; the Convent women sully the mythical ancestor, the metaphorical construction of past and present, as well. At this moment, the 8-rock fathers seek not to write history, but to author the present; they seek to no longer transcribe memory ideologically, but to author the future of Ruby with forceful and terrifying originality.

            Of course, the authors of the violent moment do not see their task as a reassertion of power and control of narrative; instead, they see it as an almost divine calling to protect the community. The entrance of the Convent women into community life represents a transgressive breach of utopia, of paradise, of a “garden of the Gods” (the mythological tone of Paradise, coupled with the fact that supposedly no one has died in Ruby in decades, indeed makes these men near immortal, and Ruby their sacred garden). Therefore, the men take great pride in their violent authoring of Ruby, as the opening narrator tells us, “That is why they are here in this Convent. To make sure it never happens again. That nothing inside or out rots the one all-black town worth the pain” (Morrison, 5). Yet, despite their pride, Morrison intends for the audience to see the blindness of their ways. Because Ruby was “worth the pain,” because, perhaps, the narrative had finally become theirs, because trauma can reenact itself, the 8-rocks become the lynch mob, they become the oppressor, they become the exclusionists. Richard Misner ponders this tragic revisiting of history, “They think they have outfoxed the whiteman when in fact they imitate him….Unbridled by Scripture, deafened by the roar of its own history, Ruby, it seemed to him, was an unnecessary failure” (Morrison, 306). The tone of Richard's judgment seems remarkably similar to the closing remarks of the Langston University study, which expressed reservations about the future of this “enterprising, self-sufficient, all-Negro community.”

            Though the Convent women were in fact “black,” with the exception of the unnamed white girl, their actual race meant little, but their blood, their Otherness, and their open-ended interpretations of society and race meant much. Katherine Clay Bassard explains this in Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African-American Women's Writing, “Meeting the criteria of `blackness' from the white / legal point of view did not necessarily qualify one for membership in the community” (131). Hence, “membership” into the community seems not guaranteed by blackness, but by a willingness to accept the narrative power of the 8-rock families. Richard Misner certainly discovers this: though black himself and a proponent of black rights, Misner has no place in the community and is generally socially isolated as well. He works for partial control over the narrative of Ruby, and sees the future generations as the ones who can perhaps wrest that control, and discover for themselves “a true home.” His battle is fought out over the oven and its motto, as he argues for changing its font to “Be the Furrow of the Brow.” His desire for a hand in writing the present, or at least, wresting that control from the sole voice of 8-rock, leaves Misner confused and distanced, because as Lone tells the reader, “neither [Deek nor Steward] put up with what he could not control” (Morrison, 278-9).

            It is the addiction to narrative authority and a clouded vision of utopia that drive the conspiring men to kill the women of the Convent. Patricia, always somewhat of an outsider because of her marriage to a non-8-rock, understands this better than most: “[Pat] withheld from [Misner] what was her own: that nine 8-rocks murdered five harmless women because the women were unpure (not 8-rock)…and because they could - which was what being an 8-rock meant to them” (Morrison, 297). The resistance and hostility to social change seems stereotypically “Southern” in this context, perhaps evidence that “the South is a cultural memory and identity that is no longer physically present but is indelibly marked within” (Page, 12). Sargeant exemplifies this attitude in Lone's ruminations, “Sargeant…would be…wondering aloud why this deliberately beautiful town governed by responsible men couldn't remain so: stable, prosperous, with no talk-back young people” (Morrison, 277). Of course, the reader can pick up on the double meaning of “talk-back”: Sargeant wants to quell both what he sees as disrespectful youth, and those who are trying to assert their own narrative voice, who are trying to write their own individual histories.

            It is at this juncture that we can begin to see that narrative is not simply about a collective history, but concerns conceptions of the self. After all, if the narrative of Ruby was really about collective identity, it would not be in the hands (or voice) of those with self-interested power, but would be a communal exercise. Morrison expresses this beautifully in the mind of Lone DuPres, as she contemplates the 8-rock twins, Deacon and Steward:

[They] were overwhelmed by the permanent threat to his cherished view of himself and his brother. The women in the Convent were for him a flaunting parody of the nineteen Negro ladies of his and his brother's youthful memory and perfect understanding….They, with their mindless giggling, outraged by dulcet tones, the tinkling in the merry and welcoming laughter of the nineteen ladies who…were now doomed to extinction by this new and obscene breed of female. He could not abide in them for sullying his personal history with their streetwalkers' clothes and whores' appetites: mocking and desecrating the vision that carried him and his brother through the war, that imbued their marriages and strengthened their efforts to build a town where the vision could flourish. He would never forgive them that. (Morrison, 279 [italics mine]).

This passage - written in lush, rhythmic prose - shows the reader that the community narrative, in this situation, is not so much about preserving collective history, but about preserving selfhood. Deacon and Steward entire identities depend upon Ruby; their rose-colored memories of Ruby are really memories of youth and innocence, later corrupted by an ever more modern world. In a sense, when we spoke of “narratives of the community,” we were not speaking of a multi-voiced, multi-perspective “text.” Rather, as Morrison makes beautifully plain in this passage, community narratives are truly just conceptions of self, rooted in a notion of place. How can any single narrator inscribe a community text without being guided by personal desires and even unconscious motivations? Hence, the threat to the “collective” narrative does not endanger the fabric of the community, but the “personal history,” “the cherished view” of the self. This forces the reader to question: were the Convent women actually the real threat to the 8-rock's hegemony? Or were the Convent women simply a disguise, a metaphor for the rapidly shifting cultural mores and technological standards of the modern era that quickly calcified the self-sufficient village, the isolated, insular community?

            The violent authoring of the self that the men enact derives from interpretation of what the Convent women mean. The 8-rock men, as self-declared authors of the community, interpret the women with rigid orthodoxy. Philip Page, in an essay, “Furrowing All the Brows: Interpretation and the Transcendent in Toni Morrison's Paradise,” elaborates on the importance of interpretation, “For Rubyites, the Convent is an open sign, freely available for interpretation….The most significant of these interpretations is the growing sense among some Rubyites that the Convent is not a sanctuary but a `coven'…The resulting extermination of the Convent is an extreme interpretation” (639). Because a larger, problematic social trend can be neatly crystallized and targeted as a dangerous social threat, the 8-rock men choose to interpret the Convent women as the malign tumor of Ruby. Their target - resembling “panicked does leaping toward the sun” - is easy to hit literally and figuratively. Again, Lone interprets the 8-rock fathers' interpretation,

Here, when the men spoke of the ruination that was upon them - how Ruby was changing in intolerable ways - they did not think to fix it by extending a hand in fellowship or love. They mapped defense instead and honed evidence for its need, till each piece fit an already polished groove. (275)

Indeed, Morrison's “nicely polished groove” represents not only the danger of a prescribed, binary narrative. The “polished groove” also metaphorically speaks to the act of reading and criticism. So often in the practice of criticism, the reader tries to expose prescribed ways of thinking, in an attempt to free the interpretive mind from “honing” evidence to fit the “polished groove.” While Morrison surely has much to say about the self-destructive design of utopias, perhaps she is also speaking to the need for openness to texts and reading. Clearly, there is a danger in rewriting of narrative, yet Morrison is also expressing the risks of unbending critical interpretation - both of texts and people - in the wake of our attempt to move away from such rigidity and such binary modes of thought: “How hard they worked for this place; how far away they once were from the terribleness they just witnessed. How could so clean and blessed a mission devour itself and become the world they had escaped?” (Morrison, 292)

            “Our past was appropriated,” Toni Morrison told an interviewer, “I am one of the people who has to reappropriate it” (David, 184). Morrison here takes on an enormous, daunting, and courageous task. The rewriting of an oppressive history into something life-affirming and non-discriminatory is an incredible act of humanism and the power of expression. Yet this endeavor is one unavoidably laced with the dangers of retelling and reappropriating that were laid out earlier in the chapter. Without doubt, the artist faces the same dangers of narrative, the same temptation to slip into a binary mode of allowing / disallowing. The artist essentially performs narrative just like the 8-rock fathers; like the “elite,” she must be highly selective in choosing who and what to leave in her textual community, and who and what to leave out. Katherine J. Mayberry develops this point in an essay on Morrison's Jazz:

Traditional narrative can be regarded as a literary inscription of the dominant values of a hierarchical system: like the culture in which it evolved, traditional narrative is based upon a series of discriminatory logics that empower a dominant voice to promote, demote, include, exclude, and finally, at the end, to emerge victorious over the other voices” (Mayberry, 298).

This description of “traditional narrative” seems to perfectly sum up the logic of the Ruby narrative. But if the 8-rock's rewriting of Ruby so closely mirrors the authoring of a textual community, how does Toni Morrison escape having this “mission devour itself”? (Morrison, 292) If the original, utopian vision of Ruby and Langston necessitated an inverted disallowing of the “other,” how does Morrison prevent fitting her narrative into an ideologically “polished groove”?

            Morrison, of course, is conscious of this dilemma. Paradise, in a metaphoric sense, is about this danger in writing and interpreting. It is about the ways in which we rewrite community to serve ourselves and the ways we hone “evidence” to fit our methods of reading texts. The multi-voiced narrative of Paradise allows us to get the story from a number of perspectives; it simultaneously exemplifies the lack of a flawless, objective narrator while reminding us that a true community narrative must not be in the authority of one particular elite. As Mayberry explains, “In order for the narrative to be harmless: narrators must admit the impossibility of their claims to know other characters; they must reveal that behind all narrative there is a narrating figure who is human and fallible and enormously pretentious” (325). There are a number of deliberate inaccuracies in the multi-narratives of Ruby; Morrison forces the reader to see that there cannot be an authoritative narrative in a text or a community, which removes justification for exclusion and violence.

            Similarly, there cannot be an authoritative interpretation of that narrative, for the narrative is prone to the ever-shifting currents of culture: “if there is a powerful force in narrative, it is the story itself, which gathers its own momentum and inevitability independent of the teller” (Mayberry, 304). That is, there is no fixed value to a narrative; its meaning cannot be sterilely “contained within its own formal structure” (Greenblatt, 2253). Surely, the authors of Ruby saw their “text” as insulated from the “fields of force, places of dissension and shifting interests, occasions for the jostling of orthodox and subversive impulses” that Stephen Greenblatt envisions outside of Renaissance texts. The “occasions for jostling” indeed seems to summarize what Ruby was presented with, and rather than submit to the challenge, the 8-rock elder sought to eliminate that jostling. They chose to ignore “fields of force” that inevitably influence a textual community or a community text. As a social production, the authoring of community - again, both physical and imaginary - is determined by history and succeeds to then determine history itself. Gareen Grewals expands upon this point eloquently, “The literary text is not isolated but embedded in and constituted by the material and historical processes to which it belongs, processes upon which the literary text may exert its own radical longings and determinations” (xi).

            Hence, Morrison's Paradise argues that narrative cannot have a fixed meaning, nor can interpretations of fluid meanings be rigidly imposed. This case is made not only by the example of Ruby, but by the method with which Morrison rewrites, represents, reconstructs, reappropriates, and redeems histories like Langston, Oklahoma. Readers have exhibited exorbitant frustration at reading Paradise, often puzzled by the complicated family structures, the seemingly abundant inaccuracies, and the mystical images. For instance, the novel's second paragraph makes claim that the hunting party is “nine, over twice the number of the women they are obliged to stampede” (3). Once the reader completes the novel, we learn there were, in fact, five women supposedly killed, making nine not more twice the number of women. In addition, the number of actual “8-rock” families seems to be in constant flux. We are left as flustered as Patricia in trying to compile a genealogy chart and we are left scratching ours heads at the resurrection of the murdered women at the close of the novel. Is this deliberate obfuscation by Morrison? No: it is an attempt to leave openness in the narrative, to avoid attaching fixity to this tale, to essentially mythologize the text, suspending our natural desire to “hone” passages for our “polished grooves.” Philip Page explains the purpose of such ambiguity in Reclaiming the Community, “When such questions are repeatedly left open, the gaps created by the lack of answers force characters, like their authors and their readers, to wrestle with the issues raised and to recognize the validity not only of what is said but also of what is not said” (25). The gaps in fiction, spaces of narrative openness and interpretive freedom, are exactly what Morrison wants to point out to us, and exactly what she wants us to explore.

            “Paradise necessitates exclusion,” Morrison commented, “it's based on the notion of exclusivity. All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in” (Reames quoting Morrison, 20). In truth, even McGraw's “paradise of Eden” and “garden of Gods” is based on this binary logic, which continues to operate on the same terms as the system that drove him and his followers to the plains of Oklahoma. Morrison seems to be not as interested in pointing out the quixotic fallibility of utopian vision. Rather, I've tried to argue that she has adapted - in a sense, rewritten - a historical narrative like Langston to point out to us the possibilities of free, open interpretations. She said of the mysterious conclusion of the book, when Connie's head rests in Piedade's lap, that “ `this paradise is a third place in addition to earth and heaven; it is an “in-between” place….open to all these paths and connections and interstices in between' ” (Reames quoting Morrison, 74). Morrison shows us that both text and community are open spaces we inhabit, fluidly crossing from one to another, discovering a certain freedom not just in the narrative of the inhabited spaces, but in the openness of interpretation.

Bassard, Katherine Clay. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early
       African American Women's Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

David, Ron. Toni Morrison Explained. New York: Random House, 2000.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “Introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance.”
       The Norton Anthology Of Theory and Criticism. Gen. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York:
       W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Grewal, Gurleen. Circle of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge:
       Lousiana State University Press, 1998.

Hill, Mozell C. and Thelma D. Ackiss. “Culture of a Contemporary All-Negro Community.”
       Langston University Bulletin. Langston, Oklahoma: Langston University, 1943.

Mayberry, Katherine J. “The Problem of Narrative in Toni Morrison's Jazz.”
       Toni Morrison's Fiction: Contemporary Criticism. Ed. David Middleton. New York:
       Garland Publishing, 2000.

“Migration to Oklahoma.” In Motion: The African American Migration Experience. 2005.
       Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. 17 May 2005
       <http://www.inmotionaame.org>. Morrison, Toni. Paradise. New York: Random House, 1998.

Page, Philip. “Furrowing All the Brows: Interpretation and the Transcendent in Toni Morrison's
       Paradise.” African American Review, 35:4 (2001 Winter), pp. 637-64.

Page, Philip. Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African-American Fiction. Jackson:
       University Press of Mississippi, 1999

Reames, Kelly. Paradise: A Reader's Guide. New York: Continuum Books, 2001.

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