The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,97
on. If we were going to succumb to the idiocy of scientific racialism, the logic of the opposite would be unspeakable: that in Three Lives it is the black blood that provides the “vital courage” and “endurance.” There is tension and some readerly distrust of these hierarchies and claims, because of the contradictions that accompany them. Africanistic women, for example, are suffused with loose immorality, but Mrs. L., the friend and major force in Lena’s tiny world, spends her professional life midwifing and likes especially to deliver girls in trouble; she even seems to be involved in abortions with her wicked doctor lover at one point. Why these white girls in trouble are not also guilty of amorality and looseness as are their dark sisters is part of the question these matters pose. That series of episodes is glazed over by pointing to the generosity of Mrs. L. and her skill. There is no lingering over the unmorality of her patients; they are not assumed to have a “promiscuous” nature because of their skin color, or even, it seems, to have been seeking the wisdom of the world down at the docks.
The last point to which I wish to direct attention is the one with which I began: that much of this business of imagining Africanistic people has to do with the careful, consistent construction of an American who gets his or her distinction in asserting and developing whiteness as a precondition to Americanness.
Three Lives centers on two immigrant women and one black woman who is never given a nationality, although she is the only natural-born citizen among the three. When a minor character in the Good Anna section visits Germany, her mother’s birthplace, and becomes embarrassed by Anna’s peasant manners, her remark is that her cousin is “no better than a nigger.” Miss Stein, fascinated with her project The Making of Americans has indeed delivered up to us a model case in literature: (1) build barriers in language and body, (2) establish difference in blood, skin, and human emotions, (3) place them in opposition to immigrants, and (4) voilà! The true American arises!
Sandwiched between a pair of immigrants—her aggression and power contained by the palms of chaste but restraining white women—Melanctha is bold but discredited; free to explore but bound by her color and confined by the white women on her left and her right, her foreground and her background, her beginning and her end, who precede her and follow her. The format and its interior workings say what is meant. All of the ingredients that have an impact on Americanness are on display in these women: labor, class, relations with the Old World, forging an un-European new culture, defining freedom, avoiding bondage, seeking opportunity and power, situating the uses of oppression. These considerations are inextricable from any deliberation on how Americans selected, chose, constructed a national identity. In the process of choosing, the unselected, the unchosen, the detritus is as significant as the cumulative, built American. Among the explorations vital to the definition, one of the strongest is the rumination of Africanistic character as a laboratory experiment for confronting emotional, historical, and moral problems as well as intellectual entanglements with the serious questions of power, privilege, freedom, and equity. Is it not just possible that the union, the coalescence of what America is and was made of, is incomplete without the place of Africanism in the formulation of this so-called new people, and what implications such a formulation had for the claims of democracy and egalitarianism as far as women and blacks were concerned? Is not the contradiction inherent in these two warring propositions—white democracy and black repression—also reflected in the literature so deeply that it marks and distinguishes its very heart?
Just as these two immigrants are literally joined like Siamese twins to Melanctha, so are Americans joined to and defined by this Africanistic presence at its spine.
Hard, True, and Lasting
“MANY STRANGERS TRAVERSE our land these days. They look on our lives with horror and quickly make means to pass on to the paradises of the north. Those who are pressed by circumstances and forced to tarry a while, grumble and complain endlessly. It is just good for them that we are inbred with habits of courtesy, hospitality, and kindness. It is good that they do not know the passion we feel for this parched earth. We tolerate strangers because the things we love cannot be touched by them.” That’s a paragraph from a short story