Coda
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [Firs [293 Line —— -2.9 —— Norm PgEn [293 Coda Chatting animatedly beside me prior to the opening curtain of the Margaret Garner Opera, libretto by Toni Morrison, sat two women, clearly a couple. When I informed the closest partner that over 250 other members of the Toni Morrison Society from across the globe had accompanied me to this gala Cincinnati premier in July 2005, she perked up even more. “What in the world does a person in the Toni Morrison Society do?” she inquired. A medical doctor, she anticipated similarly innocent sentiments expressed by the Reverend Jean Frable of the predominantly white Richwood Presbyterian Church in Richwood, Kentucky, where slave Margaret Garner worshipped, when the society crossed the Ohio River two days later to visit that site of memory: “Do you read books other than Toni Morrison’s? Harry Potter, perhaps?” Citing time constraints, this female pastor refused society participants the opportunity to contradict naïve comments such as hers. Her willful ignorance about the political ramifications of literary study manifested itself in her decision to close group discussion about the Margaret Garner story in favor of nonreciprocal lectures. Here she obviously deferred to the wishes of her parishioner Ruth Wade Cox Brunings, descendant of Garner’s white slaveholders and current occupant of the Gaines’s lovely Maplewood Farm, inspiration for Beloved’s Sweet Home.1 Only under society pressure were scholars Steven Weisenburger and Delores Walters granted permission to visit the farm.2 Under the influence of Morrison’s lyrics, however, my opera cohort eagerly elicited conversation, whispering questions well into the first aria. When I explained that most Morrison Society members, the majority of whom are women, read (not just Morrison ’s) books, write, teach, activate, counsel, reach out, and generally try to shake things up, she replied, “What fun.” When I described the 293 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [294 Line —— 0.0 —— Norm PgEn [294 serious gist of my own current scholarship on masculinity and Morrison, maintaining that we need to pay more attention to American boys, she replied: “But aren’t they already privileged enough?” I answered her that most black boys aren’t especially privileged and that many white ones miss the advantage of a culturally broad self-awareness. Like Morrison, I’ve come to believe that Americans still want black males dead or alive. My introduction to Richwood certainly supports this supposition . Northern Kentucky police cars greeted the Toni Morrison Society to control what officers claimed would be an inevitable traffic jam in the tiny hamlet, caused by the arrival of four average-sized tour buses and a minivan. Among our motley crew of threatening, disorderly academics politely lined up to enter the church stood a slender female society member who, like me, had dragged her husband and children along on the jaunt. Once inside we found our families forced to sit at opposite ends of the Amen pew since everybody else had claimed the back seats. Although my silver-bearded, ponytailed, fifty-something replica of Sean Connery looked pretty impressive sitting in his kilt with his wife and young daughter at front left in the church, the blue gaze from the pulpit and the multicolored eyes in the audience stared mostly at the tall, jetblack , forty-something father sitting quietly in slacks and open-necked shirt with his slim wife and two small children to the right. The front-row families found much to laugh seriously about that night after witnessing an unusually intense exhibition of defensive white guilt. Given her opportunity to talk, Ms. Brunings haltingly proposed that the moral conflict driving the Garner slavewoman to terminate an “adulterous relationship” with Archibald Gaines “could have been a compelling motivation for Margaret to run away from Maplewood as well as reuni fication with her husband” (39). Brunings’s own slaveholding ancestors , added the University of California at Berkeley graduate in social work, had not had an easy time of it either. Her minister prepared us for Brunings’s Slavery and...
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