The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,82

sentence, but it doesn’t “play,” as they say in the theater.

My new first sentence became “In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.” Instead of my original plan, here I am introducing an outside-the-circle reader into the circle. I am translating the anonymous into the specific, a “place” into a “neighborhood,” and letting a stranger in through whose eyes it can be viewed. In between “place” and “neighborhood” I now have to squeeze the specificity and the difference; the nostalgia, the history, and the nostalgia for the history; the violence done to it and the consequences of that violence. (It took three months, those four pages, a whole summer of nights.) The nostalgia is sounded by “once”; the history and a longing for it is implied in the connotation of “neighborhood.” The violence lurks in having something torn out by its roots—it will not, cannot grow again. Its consequences are that what has been destroyed is considered weeds, refuse necessarily removed in urban “development” by the unspecified but no less known “they” who do not, cannot, afford to differentiate what is displaced, and would not care that this is “refuse” of a certain kind. Both plants have darkness in them: “black” and “night.” One is unusual (nightshade) and has two darkness words: “night” and “shade.” The other (blackberry) is common. A familiar plant and an exotic one. A harmless one and a dangerous one. One produces a nourishing berry; one delivers toxic ones. But they both thrived there together, in that place when it was a neighborhood. Both are gone now, and the description that follows is of the other specific things, in this black community, destroyed in the wake of the golf course. “Golf course” conveys what it is not, in this context: not houses, or factories, or even a public park, and certainly not residents. It is a manicured place where the likelihood of the former residents showing up is almost nil.

I want to get back to those berries for a moment (to explain, perhaps, the length of time it took for the language of that section to arrive). I always thought of Sula as quintessentially black, metaphysically black, if you will, which is not melanin and certainly not unquestioning fidelity to the tribe. She is New World black and New World woman extracting choice from choicelessness, responding inventively to found things. Improvisational. Daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out-of-the-house, outlawed, unpolicing, uncontained, and uncontainable. And dangerously female. In her final conversation with Nel she refers to herself as a special kind of black person woman, one with choices. Like a redwood, she says. (With all due respect to the dream landscape of Freud, trees have always seemed feminine to me.) In any case, my perception of Sula’s double-dose of chosen blackness and biological blackness is in the presence of those two words of darkness in “nightshade” as well as in the uncommon quality of the vine itself. One variety is called “enchanter,” and the other “bittersweet” because the berries taste bitter at first and then sweet. Also nightshade was thought to counteract witchcraft. All of this seemed a wonderful constellation of signs for Sula. And “blackberry patches” seemed equally appropriate for Nel: nourishing, never needing to be tended or cultivated, once rooted and bearing. Reliably sweet but thorn-bound. Her process of becoming, heralded by the explosive dissolving of her fragilely-held-together ball of string and fur (when the thorns of her self-protection are removed by Eva), puts her back in touch with the complex, contradictory, evasive, independent, liquid modernity Sula insisted upon. A modernity that overturns prewar definitions, ushers in the Jazz Age (an age defined by Afro-American art and culture), and requires new kinds of intelligences to define oneself.

The stage-setting of the first four pages is embarrassing to me now, but the pains I have taken to explain it may be helpful in identifying the strategies one can be forced to resort to in trying to accommodate the mere fact of writing about, for, and out of black culture while accommodating and responding to mainstream “white” culture. The “valley man’s” guidance into the territory was my compromise. Perhaps it “worked,” but it was not the work I wanted to do.

Had I begun with Shadrack, I would have ignored the smiling welcome and put the reader into immediate confrontation with his wound and his scar. The difference my