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Review: Toni Morrison's 'God Help the Child'

 
Toni Morrison, 84, is the only living American Nobel laureate for literature. Her accolades include a Pulitzer.
Toni Morrison, 84, is the only living American Nobel laureate for literature. Her accolades include a Pulitzer.
Published April 15, 2015

With God Help the Child, Toni Morrison brings her brilliant multibook epic of black life in America into the present.

Morrison's first 10 novels were all set in the past, from the 1970s (Paradise and Tar Baby) all the way back to the last days of slavery (her masterpiece, Beloved) and further, to its earliest years (A Mercy). God Help the Child takes place in the 21st century, complete with cellphones and references to the war in Iraq, but it's part of the same long arc — and it bends toward hope.

Although they are all stand-alone stories, the books are linked by theme and by their author's gift for embodying complex issues of race and gender in the vivid lives of unforgettable characters — and in ravishingly lovely prose.

Morrison has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Book Critics Circle's lifetime achievement award; she is the only living American Nobel laureate for literature. And those are just highlights of her career. Long since an eminence and icon of American culture, Morrison could, at 84, rest on her laurels, but she still has stories to tell. God Help the Child is a fierce one, of parents and children, men and women, terrible loss and tentative rebirth.

And, of course, it is a story about blackness — a topic that could not be more timely.

The birth of the book's protagonist is the subject of its first chapter, told to us by her mother, the bitterly named Sweetness. Her first words: "It's not my fault." That "it" signifies a lot of things, but what she's talking about specifically is her daughter's skin. "She was so black she scared me. Midnight black, Sudanese black. I'm light-skinned, with good hair, what we call high yellow, and so is Lula Ann's father. Ain't nobody in my family nowhere near that color."

The baby's blue-black skin will break up her parents' marriage when her suspicious father leaves despite her mother's protestations of fidelity. And it will turn Sweetness so cold toward Lula Ann that, the daughter tells us, "I used to pray she would slap my face or spank me just to feel her touch."

In the second chapter, we meet the grownup Lula Ann Bridewell, transformed into the single-named Bride. That ebony skin has become the bold trademark of a stunning young woman, a successful manager at a cosmetics company who at 23 drives a Jaguar and has a personal assistant. A stylist has taught her to dress always and only in white to emphasize her exotic beauty, "a panther in snow." Bride notes with dry wit, "At first it was boring shopping for white-only clothes until I learned how many shades of white there were."

Bride has, it seems, shaken off the past, her mother's (and her culture's) obsession with color, and created a new life. But it's not that simple. Her first words to the reader: "I'm scared. Something bad is happening to me. I feel like I'm melting away."

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Bride has found the perfect man — and then lost him. In Booker Starbern she had not only a tender lover but someone she could trust, someone to whom she poured out her most shameful secrets. Yet she knew next to nothing about him, and she has no idea why one day he said, "You not the woman I want" and walked out.

Booker is such a mystery to her that Bride doesn't know where to begin looking for him; her quest will take her on a long, strange journey indeed. Her effort to atone for a terrible thing she did as a child — motivated by her aching desire for Sweetness' affection — will almost get her killed, as will her attempt to track down Booker in rural California. But what she will learn at each stage of the journey is that, scarring as her childhood traumas were, she's not alone.

Morrison has often deftly married realism to folklore, myth and magical realism, and she does it in this book as well. Bride's breakdown after Booker's departure manifests itself physically in ways that underline how his rejection echoes her childhood trauma: First her pubic hair disappears, then her breasts vanish. Other characters, such as a little girl named Rain who rescues Bride from a mishap and a woman called Queen Olive who knows a great deal about Booker, seem to shimmer on the border between real people and figures out of some lost folklore.

God Help the Child does, come to think of it, have something of a fairy tale ending — hard-earned, provisional, fragile as smoke, but even in the wise and ruthless eyes of Toni Morrison, real.

Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com or (727) 893-8435. Follow @colettemb.