Can't I Love What I Criticize?: The Masculine and Morrison

6. Circles of Sorrow, Sites of Memory, Forms of Flooding: Colored Men’s Time in Beloved

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 [153 Line —— -1.0 —— Norm PgEn [153 ⠕ CHAPTER 6 Circles of Sorrow, Sites of Memory, Forms of Flooding Colored Men’s Time in Beloved Among the memories that send Son scampering lickety-split at the end of Tar Baby is the site of a smokehouse cot. Wrapped in an Easterwhite towel, having watched his personal dirt swirl down somebody else’s shower drain, he stares out the window of a beautifully kept bedroom at the back of an old black man on the ground below “stooping over some cutting or digging chore” (139). The association of the black man’s back with a vacant bed for vagabonds leads Son to imagine a life for Yardman that echoes the essence of his own experience. He has spent his adult years on the road seeking fraternity and studying backs because they are “simply there, all open, unprotected and unmanipulable . . . stretched like a smokehouse cot where hobos could spend the night.” Unlike eyes or mouths, backs “told it all,” exposing the canker pains, pinched nerves, empty mailboxes, missed trains home, and this-seat-taken signs so familiar to African American males. Fighting back unshed tears at the sight of the back that signals something leaving him, temporarily reprieved when Gideon stands up, Son whispers inaudibly to the man he does not see watching him look: “ ‘Thanks. . . . One more second of your smokehouse cot might have brought me there at last’ ” (139–40). Beloved (1987) brings Morrison’s men there at last. If Tar Baby associates Son’s experience with backs, Beloved captures the lives of Stamp Paid and the last of the Sweet Home men through impressions of hands and feet. If the lovers in Tar Baby occupy totally different time zones, Son preoccupied with his past and Jadine obsessed with her future so that 153 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 [154 Line —— 0.0 —— Norm PgEn [154 they deny themselves a present together, Paul D and Sethe circle about each other in an equally unsatisfying perpetual present. They have survived enslavement by burying their pasts and ignoring their futures. If Tar Baby concludes with limited possibility for African American gender balance, Beloved is the book required to lance the poison from the abscess on American history, penetrate the walls of the separate circles, and bring the potential in line. As an innocently callous Miss Amy Denver, her good hands roughly smoothing out Sethe’s swollen feet, cheerfully informs the half-dead slavewoman: “Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know” (78). Images of battered black bodies are central to this reconstructed slave narrative.1 Memories of slavery’s brutality surface through the characters’ senses; re-membering, understanding, and reconciliation arise as individual and collective bodies painfully become sound. Morrison ’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel notes that Jadine needs to “rememory ” the past of her people and that Son should “lay all that mess down” (36, 86).2 While Beloved represents a re-vision of the slave narrative, the gothic novel, and the romance—relayed primarily from a black female perspective —it is also the most postmodern of Morrison’s first five books. It specifically addresses what occurs when individuals reject a postmodernist world, clinging stubbornly to a single interpretation of time and history: Sethe copes with her past by refusing, ever, to move again, Paul D by declining to stay still. Past and present in Beloved clash and converge , divide and merge, so that a future is possible only when conflicting perspectives coexist peacefully. This means that the black male story must be placed neither above nor below but alongside that of the black female. Zora Neale Hurston confirms: “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth.” She identifies the life of men, however, as less imaginatively personal and more outwardly fixed and rationally theoretical . To explain, she signifies on Frederick Douglass’s apostrophe to the ships: “Ships at a distance...