The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,131

can be gleaned and communicated from sound, from the aural quality of the text. I only want to suggest that this is more than being influenced by blues or jazz. It is plumbing the music for the meaning that it contains. In other words, the “aesthetic implications” of which Romare Bearden spoke ought to include what is usually absent from aesthetic analysis. Most often the analysis is about how successful the technique is in summoning pleasure, a shocking or moving or satisfying emotional response.

Seldom does it center on the information, the meaning the artist is communicating by his style, via his aesthetics. It can be said, has been said, that the collage techniques, employed by several modernist artists (Matisse, for example) were taken to new levels by Bearden and reflect the “fractured” life he depicts—an intervention into the flat surface that repudiates as it builds on the cubism of earlier periods. And that collage was representative of the modernist thrust of African American life as well as its insurgency. Both structure and improvisation inform this choice—the essence of African American music. The attraction to me in this technique is how abrupt stops and unexpected liquidity enhance the narrative in ways that a linear “beginning, middle, and end” cannot. Thus I recognize that my own abandonment of traditional time sequence (and then, and then) is an effort to capitalize on these modernist trends. And to say something about the layered life—not the fractured or fragmented life of black society, but the layered life of the mind, the imagination, and the way reality is actually perceived and experienced.

The third, palette, or color, is one of the last and most crucial of my decisions in developing a text. I don’t use color to “prettify” or please, or provide atmospherics, but to imply and delineate the themes within the narrative. Color says something directly or metaphorically. The red, white, and blue strokes at the beginning of Song of Solomon should lie quietly in the mind of the reader as the American flag background the action is commenting on. The withholding of color in Beloved, its repudiation of any color at all until it has profound meaning to the character: Baby Suggs hankering for some; Sethe’s startle when she is able to let it come into view; the drama of one patch of orange in a quilt of bleak greys. These studied distributions of color or its absence, the careful placement of white for its various connotations (the white, rather bridal dress of the figure praying next to Sethe; the dresses of the church ladies at the pie table in Tar Baby), the repetition of a collection of colors chosen to direct the reader to specific and related scenes in Paradise, do not mimic the choices of a Romare Bearden, but are clearly aligned with the process.

I am convinced that among the reasons Bearden must be widely viewed in galleries, should occupy the burgeoning attention of scholars to African American art, is only partly canon formation; is only minimally the quenching of nationalistic desire; is supplementally a tribute to his genius. The more significant reason in the exploration of the resonances, alignments, the connections, the intergenre sources of African American art is the resounding aesthetic dialogue among artists. Separating art forms, compartmentalizing them, is convenient for study, instruction, and institutions. But it is hardly representative of how artists actually work. The dialogue between Bearden and jazz music and musicians is an obvious beginning. The influence writers acknowledge is a further step. The borders established for the convenience of study are, I believe, not just porous, they are liquid. Locating instances of this liquidity is vital if African American art is to be understood for the complex work that it is and for the deep meaning it contains.

Romare Bearden sat in an airplane seat once and told me he would send me something. He did. An extraordinary, completely stunning portrait of a character in one of my books. Not his Pilate of 1979, but the Pilate in Song of Solomon—part of a series, I gather. Imagine my surprise at what he saw. Things I had not seen or known when I invented her. What he made of her earring, her hat, and her bag of bones—far beyond my word-bound description, heavy with the life that both energized and muted her; solitary, daring anyone to deprive her of her symbols, her history, her purpose. I had seen her determination, her wisdom, and her seductive eccentricity,