[In the following essay, Holloway examines Morrison's use of lyrical female voices in The Bluest Eye and The Song of Solomon as a celebration of African-American spirituality and cultural identity.]

In the final pages of Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, an aged, weary, and dying Pilate grants her nephew Milkman her supreme gift—she gives him her voice and urges him to sing. His song, “Oh Sugargirl don't leave me here” that “he could not stop … from coming,” is a passioned embrace of his lineage. Through voicing the “worn old words” of the text that links him to his past, Milkman acknowledges his ancestry.¹

Passages like this indicate the ways in which Morrison's literary voice is linked to ancestral and modern voices of the black diaspora. As I read this novel, a distant memory of my mother's singing crystallized. Mother's voice, a constant hymn throughout my childhood, is connected to the voices of my grandmothers, churchwomen, and my black teachers. I remember all of their tones with great specificity, and their words constantly invade my present with their wisdom.

In the novels of black women writers, women's voices claim ownership to a creative word—a force not unlike the West African concept of nommo, in which the creative artistry of voice connects generations.² Women's voices in these novels are like my mother's; they control and advise through their soft or strident, careful and caring language. These voices make certain that the loss that women of the West African diaspora experienced through the systems of slavery, colonialism, and racism would not be the final measure of their experiences. Instead, an insistent and gendered voice that extended the idea of generation to embody spiritual generation and linguistic creativity salvaged and revised the potential of their womanhood. As a result, the distant and persistent echoes of song maintain a memory, despite the ravages of diaspora fracture, of a West African legacy.

In this essay, I explore the dimensions of voice in two of Toni Morrison's most lyrical novels—Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye. A scene from Morrison's Sula introduces this author's vision of the (re)creative potential of voice.³ I focus on the ways that Morrison's novels reveal the complex and necessary presence of women's voices and song. These voices echo through generations of African and African American women and enact the memories that assure the continuity of their cultural traditions.

Because these voices resonate as well to my own cultural and gendered memories—the rituals, ceremonies, and language of my own experience as an African American woman—I have allowed an italicized voice to emerge in this essay as a means of acknowledging the force and flow of my own memories that persistently invade my reading and scholarly interpretations of Toni Morrison's stories. Instead of insisting that these readings—the scholarly and the personal—distance themselves from each other, Stephanie Demetrakopoulos and I chose to model a “passionate scholarship” that acknowledges feelings as well as ideas as our critical methodology.⁴ I intend for this essay to indicate the necessity of both voices as they speak to the community of voices who are the universe within and without these stories.

The idea of community may be the most visible cultural context within the stories by black women writers. Whether as text or subtext, the interpretive significance of the community's cultural identity and African genesis plays a critical role in articulating the gendered sphere of its enactment.⁵

Toni Morrison's novels reveal this community dramatically and sustain its imagery through the cultured and gendered dimensions of language. For example, in Sula there is an immediate reference to voice and song. The novel's opening scene fleetingly reflects the harmonious vision of an African village that its community has lost. Morrison indicates that this town where (by the novel's end) “there will be nothing left of” has “quiet days, when people in valley houses could hear singing sometimes, banjos sometimes … [and see] a dark brown woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk … her bare feet … raise the saffron dust” (pp. 4, 5). Morrison quickly brings the disruptive and abusive present into this image. The harmonious, vital village vanishes and the story sustains instead imagery that draws us towards the novel's conclusion where Suicide Day, a noisy celebration of death, is its final image. In Sula's final pages, Shadrack, a man whom the violence of Western civilizations has rendered mute and mad, leads a cacophonous and clamorous clan that has lost its connection to the harmony of the African village that the novel's opening scene briefly glimpses. It is left to Morrison's character, Nel, to recognize and name the nature of this loss in the book's final pages. The stylized presentation of Nel's weeping over the death of her friend Sula recalls a ritual lament.⁶ In “circles and circles of sorrow,” a lyrical metaphor that evokes both the circumlocutions of her generational legacy as well as the emotive potential of song, Nel's voice folds her grief and loss into one long, lonely cry, “we was girls together,” and signals the spiritual epiphany of this novel.

the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. “We was girls together,” she said as though explaining something. “Oh Lord, Sula,” she cried, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.” It was a fine cry—loud and long—it had no bottom and … no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

(p. 149)

Her voice reconstructs the physical loss of place and potential that are thematic foci in this story, and forces the remnants of her own memories and the community's lost spirit into a dimension that can contain her grief. The generational voice recalled in the embracing, concentric ripples of Nel's soulful cry, resonate for me in three critical ways as I read Morrison's novels.

First, Morrison's own narrative emphases consistently engage a lyrical strategy and foreground a musical motif. Especially in Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye, as well as in her most recent novel, Jazz (1992), the narrative voice regenerates the poetic expressivity of song.

Second, the fictive maternal singers within her stories themselves layer her authorial narrative strategy, repeating its emphasis on the lyrical dimensions of voice and encouraging our attention toward the musical timbre of the words within her worlds.

Finally, Morrison's novels become a catalyst for my personal memories of the lyrical voices of my own mothers—the black women of my family and community whose words follow, instruct and encourage my connection to their traditions.

Nel's echoing cry ululates as a plaintive lament, re-membering the voices of West African women whose songs inscribed the loss of Goree island, and echoing the voices within the ships of the middle passage, the auction block, and the fields of southern plantations. It powerfully evokes the spiritual generational community. Both the idea and the visual presentation of “girls together” and “girlgirlgirl” communicate the interconnectedness of a womanist re-membrance. They illustrate what Demetrakopoulos notes as the “life stages of [Morrison's] women” (New Dimensions, p. 63), and they are for me intimate reminders of maternal singers and storytellers—the linguistic necromancers of my community.

I: THE LYRICS OF SALVATION—SONG OF SOLOMON

Morrison's novels recall a West African version of reality that allows the coexistence of the spiritual and physical worlds within the same narrative spaces. In these spaces, mythic voices reconstruct an African American universe.⁷

Consider Milkman's acknowledgment of the power he has gained from Pilate's voice in Song of Solomon. Here, Morrison articulates and merges the creative and mythic traditions of black women who have celebrated the mystical and powerful potential of voice.

Milkman is the focus of this far-ranging and complex story; his birth is foretold in the novel's opening scene. On the day that marks the novel's opening, his mother Ruth, who sells velvet rose petals to local shopkeepers, watches a man threatening to leap from the roof of the city hospital. His Aunt Pilate, a “singing woman,” accompanies this dramatic moment with song. Her melody and its confusing lyrics haunt the story and eventually follow the grown Milkman's flight south to reclaim what he thinks will be material wealth. Instead, he finds the spiritual wealth of his legacy through the intervention of Circe, a highly symbolic sibyl-like figure and Susan (Sing) Byrd. Both women reconnect him to the song and memory of his family. Pilate's song about Solomon (Sugarman), sung at the opening and closing frames of the story, is revealed as the remnants of an ancestral praise-song that celebrates Milkman's great-grandfather who literally lifted his body into the air and flew back to Africa to escape the abuses of slavery. Knowing the legacy of the song allows Milkman to claim dominion over his physical life and ownership of his spirit.

In the summer of their fifth and sixth years, my children devoted themselves to flight. My daughter's attack was methodical. She planned the mechanics of her flight first on paper, with Da Vinci-like designs. Then, scissors, scraps, and collected pigeon-feathers in tow, she lugged her imagination to the backyard and attempted to implement her plan. My son was more direct. He scaled the nearest tree and, wings of plastic garbage bags extended, he magnificently thrust himself into the air. After he and his recyclable wings crumpled to the ground, he'd extract himself from the pile of grass clippings he had chosen as his landing site and return to the tree.

I watched their adventures from the kitchen window. I was, at that time, involved in reviewing African American spirituals for references to flight. “Review” meant singing them, humming them, accompanying my children's flight with them. I was easily distracted from my task, probably because my once-viewed-as-magnificent idea that the source of the symbolic networks in Song of Solomon was somewhere hidden within those early black songs was not developing as I had planned. However, as I watched my children play at what I was researching, I gradually realized that the source of the network was more extensive and more resonant than only those spirituals.

For some time, I had been disturbed with the elusiveness of Song of Solomon. I had struggled to grasp some single solid sense of this novel and had been uncomfortable with what I felt as its shifting presence. As I watched my children at play, I recalled the scene that initiated my review of the spirituals and that clarified for me the novel's context. The extensive and complex network of flight and song is the theme of this story—and its multifaceted and shifting presence is its identity.

Early that spring, before the summer of my children's obsession, my uncle had died. It was an especially difficult occasion for my family. My aunt had died of breast cancer only a few years before that; they had been a young and wonderful family, and two sons were left parentless.

At the funeral service, the minister prayed an extemporaneous prayer to help guide us through those wretched days. The cadence of his voice slowly rose and fell, a contrapuntal accompaniment to the few audible sobs in the gathering. The upper room of the funeral home was heavy with our collected sorrow. As if to relieve some of this pressure, someone in the back of the room began to hum. We all knew the song, so another voice sang the lyrics until all of us softly relinquished our tears or our sighs into this music. The minister's resonant voice became the rhythmic punctuation to our melody. Soon, instead of his prayers, it was the song's lyrics that he called out to us: “Soon one morning when this life is over …”; and we responded “I'll fly away …” And at that moment our spirits were literally lifted up and out of that sorrowful place and sent to rest in some more nurturing, more forgiving dimension. It was an overwhelmingly emotional event and later, as I remembered that day, I remembered most of all the sensation of being elevated from my sorrow and pain. Either that song or that collocation of music and event and emotion sustained and rescued all of us.

That summer Saturday, as I watched my children's developing design on flight, I realized that the background of their play was the background of this novel as well. Pilate's song accompanied incidents of liberation, flight, birth and remembrance. “Soon One Morning” elevated our spirits with the same objective result in those upper rooms of the Detroit funeral parlour.

The haunting poem by Robert Hayden, “O Daedalus, Fly Away Home,” echoes the myth of this novel and repeats the rhythm and substance of African American spirituals.⁸ The “two wings” reference in Hayden's poem

Night is an African juju man
Weaving a wish and a weariness together to make two wings.
O fly away home fly away

recalls the spiritual's lyrics: “Lord I want two wings to veil my face, Lord I want two wings to fly away” and another's as well: “I'm gonna fly from mansion to mansion—when I'm gone.”

Flight is a recurrent image in these African American songs, and Morrison's story foregrounds cultural metaphors of flight and dominion. This symbolic opportunity for oppressed slaves to free themselves spiritually from the shackles of slavery is the mythic source of this novel. One of the ancestors in this story is Solomon, a member of an ancient tribe of flying Africans, a West African clan whose ability to fly appears even today in legends about this community. Captured and brought to America, these enslaved Africans escaped their bondage by flying back to their African home. The legends of their escape from this continent have been mythologized into the spoken legacy and song of West African and African American history. The rich and complex spirituality of these West Africans paired a miraculous liberation with a similarly miraculous event—the power of flight as transformation and transcendence. Christianity may have offered a religious frame for the displaced African to contextualize this spirituality within the Americas, but the texture of that picture was distinctly black and African. In Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois's description of a southern revival is dominated by imagery that suggests this collusion between flight and the musical cadence and timbre of a spiritual voice:

The black and massive form of the preacher swayed and quivered as the words crowded to his lips and flew at us in singular eloquence. The people moaned and fluttered and then the gaunt-cheeked brown woman beside me suddenly leaped straight into the air and shrieked like a lost soul.⁹

Flight and song are woven together at every crucial juncture in this novel. Milkman Dead's birth is accompanied by the song of his ancestor Solomon. His cousins Hagar and Reba, and his Aunt Pilate sing it to him when he visits their home. At the end of the novel, the song appears again in an older, revised version. Here, children's voices remind Milkman of his own childhood and he comes to understand how physically close, yet spiritually deaf he had been to the heritage that echoed in the community's music.

In Countee Cullen's poem, “Heritage,” a rhythmic and pulsating verse taunts the poet with an insistent memory of Africa and destroys his equilibrium. Song of Solomon is similarly unrelenting. Until the reader acknowledges the resonance of its voice, and until Milkman makes the necessary journey back and reclaims his past and his community, the myth is discomfiting and the song repeats endlessly and without resolution. From its first gripping funereal imagery of red velvet rose petals scattered across the frozen snow, we know that something will be buried in this book, and something born.

The singing woman … walked through the crowd to the rose-petal lady … she whispered … “A little bird'll be here with the morning.” … The women were looking deep into each other's eyes when a loud roar went up from the crowd … Immediately the singing woman began again:

          O Sugarman done fly
          Sugarman done gone …

Mr. Smith had seen the rose petals, heard the music, and leaped on into the air.

(p. 9)

Women's voices and maternal songs preach cultural wisdom in Morrison's novel. They dictate cultural identity and bring order to the African American community. The universe of this novel is negotiated through linguistic metaphors that make both family and event vulnerable to myth-making and spiritualism. The language and the music of Song of Solomon imaginatively reconstruct cultural memory and are clearly a part of the “spoken library” of African American culture. Morrison has acknowledged her intent to value this collaboration between oracy and literacy in African American communities and to convey to her reader the images and cosmology of black language.

The spoken library … [the] children's stories my family told, spirituals, the ghost stories, the blues, and folk tales and myths, and the everyday … instruction and advice of my own people … I wanted to write out of the matrix of memory, of recollection, and to approximate the sensual and visceral responses I had to the world I lived in … to recreate the civilization of black people … the manners, judgments, values, morals.¹⁰

Music is the umbilicus between the children and the men and women they become. In the earliest pages, Milkman's father, Macon, finds himself “surrendering to the sound” of his sister Pilate, who had been “his first caring for” (p. 29). Like his son, Macon feels the absence of Pilate's nurturing presence. His need of her lifeline symbolically engages the creative potential of song and draws him to his sister's window. Macon is vulnerable to her “memory and music” and succumbs, albeit briefly, to his link to the familial unit just inside the window where Pilate frames a generational picture of three singing women—her daughter, Reba, her granddaughter, Hagar, and herself—the elder—the grandmother who sways “like a willow,” tall, strong, gentle, and serene over this scene (pp. 29-30).

Unfortunately, Milkman disrespects the bonds of family and enters into a selfish and abusive relationship with his cousin Hagar that eventually leads to her death. Because his actions fracture Pilate's generational unit, he is left with a debt that extends not only to Hagar's mother and grandmother, but to his own spirit. Milkman disrupts the force and power of their lyrical memories and consequently endangers their generational continuity. The scene of Hagar's funeral, heavy with the musical metaphors of Morrison's methodology make clear this lost lyricism.

Pilate burst in, shouting “Mercy!” … a command … “Mercy?” … a question. It was not enough. The word needed a bottom, a frame. She straightened up, held her head high, and transformed the plea into a note. In a clear bluebell voice she sang it out—the one word held so long it became a sentence—and before the last syllable had died in the corners of the room, she was answered in a sweet soprano: “I hear you.”

(p. 320)

Here, Morrison's narration recalls the West African cultural artistry of call and response.

The people turned around. Reba had entered and was singing too. Pilate neither acknowledged her entrance nor missed a beat. She simply repeated the word “Mercy,” and Reba replied. The daughter standing at the back of the chapel, the mother up front, they sang.

     In the nighttime.
     Mercy.
     In the darkness.
     Mercy.
     In the morning.
     Mercy.
     At my bedside.
     Mercy.
     On my knees now.
     Mercy. Mercy. Mercy. Mercy.

They stopped at the same time in a high silence. Pilate … addressed her words to the woman bordered in gray satin who lay before her. Softly, privately, she sang to Hagar …

     Who's been botherin my sweet sugar lumpkin?
     Who's been botherin my baby?
     Who's been botherin my sweet sugar lumpkin?
     Who's been botherin my baby girl?

… “My baby girl.” The three words were still pumping in her throat as she turned away from the coffin.

(pp. 320-322)

At the novel's end, Milkman's surrender to Pilate's song earns him back his spiritual and ancestral place. The echoing strains of the ancient song of Sugarman/Solomon appear again, but this time Milkman is the singer and he is able to regain the power of woman's song. Morrison makes it apparent in this final scene that voice—spoken or sung—contains this potential.

“Sing,” she said. “Sing a little something for me.” Milkman knew no songs, and had no singing voice … but he couldn't ignore the urgency in her voice. Speaking the words without the least bit of a tune, he sang for the lady. “Sugargirl don't leave me here …” [I]t took a while for him to realize she was dead. And when he did, he could not stop the worn old words from coming, louder and louder as though sheer volume would wake her. He woke only the birds, who shuddered off into the air.

(p. 340, my emphasis)

At the moment of Pilate's death, two birds swoop down to the dead Pilate and the reborn Milkman enacting the metaphor of the spiritual “Lord I want two wings.” In his final generous moment, Milkman literalizes the potential of Pilate's song, re-members his grandfather's flight and assures his own salvation. His liberation into the embodied voice of the female enables the reclamation of his birthright.

In Song of Solomon, childhood, ideally a time of intimacy with things spiritual, is threatened by the loss of cultural identity. This novel demands our attention to the possibility that we may reclaim the strength of the spirit if we recall our ancestral songs. When Pilate sings, her face is “all mask; all emotion and passion … left her features and entered her voice” (p. 30). When that African American spiritual calls for “two wings to veil my face,” it is both an affirmation and a promise of the strength of an African spirituality that assures endurance and spiritual dominion.

That summer, when my son pulled himself back into that tree and when my daughter furiously erased her design and modified her drawings, they were assuring themselves a future where flight was always in potentia. It did not need to have been actualized during that season. The next spring, Bem rediscovered that tree and Ayana whirled in March winds as if she had wings. I hummed their imaginations along, firm in my belief that childhood is a spiritual pause—a moment of memory and an assurance of the creative potential held within our cultural legacies.

II: THE LEGACY OF VOICE—THE BLUEST EYE

The Bluest Eye, Morrison's first novel, illustrates the promise of childhood but, with strategies similar to Morrison's later works, challenges her reader to explore with her an alternative text—the bleak remnants of creativity that has no dimension for its expression.

This novel chronicles the destruction of the sensitive, reflective young Pecola Breedlove who is pushed into insanity after her father rapes her. The MacTeer family—mother and father, sisters Claudia and Frieda—is the background image for the more central and symbolic Breedloves, a family of social outcasts internally disintegrating under the weight of various horrors. Pecola's parents are Pauline and Cholly.

The world of the children in this novel is uncompromisingly grim and, accordingly, the haunting strains of the blues accompany its often desolate images.

I thought of Shirley after I read this story. Shirley was a childhood playmate. I remember her linty braids, her snotty, self-assured play, and how the piece of sugar bread and her recitation of real or imagined slights to her leadership of our games kept her lips constantly moving.

The Bluest Eye is a journey into the spaces of cultural and gendered memory, and as I remember Shirley I do not know whether she is the sisters Frieda and Claudia, or whether she is Pecola—whether or not she is a child of hope or of despair. Somehow, though, it does not matter, because this is a novel in which I can recall the scope and feel of my own childhood.

Morrison does not allow me to linger long over the comfort that these early memories bring with them. Instead, she arrests my reverie with an episodic narrative that eventually forces me to understand the rape of the child Pecola. The memories stop here. As strongly as I have known and felt this story of black girlhood, as clearly as I had remembered the slick nauseating feeling of Vaseline or a sugar-coated spoon of Vicks sliding reluctantly down my throat during some distant illness; as longingly as I have recalled those precious and abbreviated hugs and remembered, shuddering, the quick angry switches—it all stops with the rape of the child Pecola.

Morrison both encourages reminiscence and disrupts it with the force of voice in this story. Story-telling and stories told access the narrative structures of this text and compel close and anguished attention.

Claudia's opening reflection tells about planting marigold seeds in the fall of 1941. She and her sister, Frieda, felt that planting the marigolds and then saying “the right words over them” would cause them to blossom, and would alleviate the smothering disarray of their friend's life. They hoped their words would work some magic to erase Pecola's ugliness, ensure the life of the child she carried, obliterate the gossip about her, as well as inform their own ignorance. They must indeed be potent words. The sisters were to learn that year about extremes—innocence, lust, faith, and despair—all equally nonproductive. Claudia's reflection leads her to understand that “there is nothing more to say” because her words cannot contain the overwhelming sorrow of this story. Herein lies its tragedy. When a community's language is disabled by its trauma and when its expressive potential is erased, spiritual desolation is the result. As Claudia, Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove, and finally Pecola lose their verbal expressivity, they fall more deeply into a chasm of despair. But Claudia, who distances herself from the tragedy, ultimately regains the promise of her voice—“I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply” (p. 160, my emphasis)—and survives that year.

Claudia's reflections affirm the value Morrison places in artistic expressivity. She describes a conversation between her mother and one of her friends as a “gently wicked dance” (p. 16), an artistic metaphor that will be recalled to Sula as the “dark brown woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk.” Visual and aural artistry exchange their strategies and intimately interact in Morrison's fiction. Whether as dance or song, visual scenery or verbal artistry, all collaborate in The Bluest Eye to indicate how this creative potential is lost in the fractured communities of diaspora peoples.¹¹ Artistic allusions animate the verbal symbol and, in Morrison's work, the animated word is musical. Indeed, the children in this novel listen to their mother's conversation for “truth in timbre” (p. 16).

However, it is the mothers in this novel, studied contrasts, who guide our vision and our hearing. Mrs. MacTeer allows us to understand the impetus toward desolation, and also how to resist it. Claudia and Frieda listen to her voice for signs of her temperament; but it is not only the spoken voice that signals their mother's demeanor.

If my mother was in a singing mood, it wasn't so bad. She would sing about hard times, bad times, and somebody-done-gone-and-left-me times. Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took all of the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.

(p. 24)

The musical voice, their mother's singing, becomes a means of spiritual catharsis and, following slavery's field days rituals, the mask of song signals surreptitious actions.

My soul look back and wonder / How I got over … In Black America, the oral tradition has served as a fundamental vehicle for “gittin ovuh.” That tradition preserves the Afro-American heritage and reflects the collective spirit of the race. Through song, story, folk sayings, and rich verbal interplay among everyday people, lessons and precepts about life and survival are handed down from generation to generation.¹²

Language in our communities is a historically powerful medium. In this novel, Claudia reflects that “my mother's fussing soliloquies always irritated and depressed us” (p. 23) and “if Mama was fussing … it was like somebody throwing stones” (p. 24). The actual dialogues between mother and daughters are not particularly eloquent or mellifluous—they contain mostly ordinary sentiments and necessary directives. But it is not only these dialogues that teach the girls how to reflect on their lives. Instead, the melodious fussing soliloquies and the “songs my mother sang” offer them their instruction.

In contrast to the creative expression that Mrs. MacTeer salvages, Mrs. Breedlove (Pecola's mother) has lost her voice. A distant narrator takes over the telling of her story because she has lost contact with sound. Silence characterizes her tragedy. We meet her slipping “noiselessly out of bed” and attempting to regain her control as she berates her husband Cholly to get her some wood. But her tirade may as well be noiseless. It is met by Cholly's silence and the narrator comments that “to deprive her of these [verbal] fights was to deprive her of all the zest and unreasonableness of life” (p. 36). Unlike the sisters' mother, she was unable to claim the refuge of soliloquy or song. Separated from this tradition, all her energy is spent trying to engage in verbal battle one who refuses her fuel for the fire. Although Cholly pours out his “inarticulate fury” on his wife, during their battles they did not “talk or groan or curse” (p. 37). Although Mrs. Breedlove's prayerful conversations with Jesus do attempt some engaged language, her environment is too dark and brutal to allow her this spiritual escape. In consequence, Pauline Breedlove loses any creative, expressive potential and Claudia and Frieda's mother endures.

These women's strength lies in real speech—the creative and generative power of voice. The background of the Breedloves' anger is their inarticulateness, as well as the functional inarticulateness of the words they do exchange. The only time we learn of the potential force and violence of Mrs. Breedlove's words is when they are directed toward Pecola. And we shudder at the intensity of the mother's bitter confrontation of her daughter who has spilled blueberry pie on the floor of the white folks' kitchen.

“The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice”—a folk refrain that is a familiar lyric in the African American community—may come to some readers' minds as Morrison sculpts this scene.¹³ It is a referent that makes obvious the cruel twist within this episode. The mother's words, “hotter and darker than the smoking berries,” cause the girls to “back away in dread” (p. 87). Even more bitter is the final narrative in this section. Here, the little white girl that Polly Breedlove cares for gets the benefit of the warm and soothing language that Pecola desperately needs. With the connotation in mind that the folk line evokes—the positive value of darkness and the pleasure it holds—this scene is pathetically inversive. Instead of her own dark Pecola, Mrs. Breedlove salves the quizzical uneasiness of the white child saying: “Hush. Don't worry none,” in a whisper where “the honey in her words complemented the sundown spilling on the lake” (p. 87).

Pecola is the pathetic victim of her mother's verbal and her father's physical abuse. Both diminish and destroy their daughter. Cholly's violent inarticulateness is easily traced. He is an abandoned child. Everything we learn about his background, every hurting and abusive gesture and every humiliation pushes him toward the extremes he eventually expresses. Guileless, and primed with ready sympathy for the tragically abused Cholly, the reader is easily led to the scene where we are forced to confront Cholly's rape of his daughter. And, as we look back at the life that Morrison has unrelentingly traced as abusive and painful, we almost understand this climactic event.

However, if we don't understand it, Morrison explains that it is only because we lack the musical metaphor.

The pieces of Cholly's life could become coherent only in the head of a musician. Only those who talk their talk through the gold of curved metal, or in the touch of black-and-white rectangles and taut skins and strings echoing from wooden corridors could give true form to his life.

(p. 125)

Because we are denied music's cohesive power in the deafening scene of his child's rape, our understanding of Cholly's fracture is piecemeal and reluctant. The blues that saves Mrs. MacTeer is no solace for Cholly, Pecola, or even the reader who has come to depend on its mediative power. Cholly's creativity is frustrated and fractured, and the balm of spirituals, blues, or jazz (even though they are near—attached to the stories of others in this novel), is unavailable to him. Cholly never speaks again in this novel after a childhood encounter with his father who refuses to acknowledge his paternity. From that moment forward, a narrator presents a third-person perspective of Cholly's thoughts and mediates the music that Cholly cannot claim. Only the narrative's creative mesh enables the reader to bear the story of the rape of his child.

The “floodlight of drink” illumines this dark incident and the sequence of Cholly's emotional releases—“revulsion, guilt, pity, then love”—flow toward his daughter and drag us along with him. We know he was voiceless. Physical expression—his crawl across the kitchen floor toward his wife-like child, his nibble at her ankle, his confusion of tenderness and lust—was all that was left for him. Because he has been rendered inarticulate and silent, the force toward expressive action—an incoherent and blasphemous behavior—explosively speaks for him. Unlike the control Mrs. MacTeer maintains because of her spiritually enabled and creatively engaged song, what is left to Cholly is absolutely uncontrollable. Pecola's only left legacy is her mother's dim hatred and her father's desperate rage. In this moment of violent abuse, Pecola's own voice is ripped away. She is left silent and insane.

If language and speech do offer retribution and salvation, then Pecola's silence indicates the hopelessness of this child. At the novel's end, Claudia and Frieda sign and say “magic” words and offer Pecola their linguistic enchantment. But Pecola is mute and their incantations—their call to her spirit—have no potential response.

The only insight we have left of Pecola is her own—through the dialogue of her unconscious with itself. For Mrs. MacTeer and her daughters, magic words, song, and soliloquy brought grace. But there was no grace, no mediative musical magic for Pecola. We learn through her internal dialogue that Mrs. Breedlove does not speak to her daughter, that no one at school speaks to her, and that the rape on the kitchen floor was not the only time Cholly violently molested his daughter. We learn that even this internal voice does not bring Pecola solace because it taunts her with the possibility that the blue eyes she dreamed of having are not quite blue enough.

At the novel's end, the pathetic Pecola—who was “so sad to see” sifts through the garbage. Her sky-blue eyes and the sunflowers that grow wild around her metaphorically mix light and air into the earthy refuse of a garbage dump. Sadly, the image of waste remains the most powerful metaphor in the story. There are no words left to explore her loss, and no song can embrace or contain her spiritual desolation. This pitiful vision—clear, uncompromised, and silent—is all that remains.

I've grown past my childhood memory of Shirley and her sugar bread sandwiches and her brother June-bug. Shirley's memories of me may be similar—if they exist at all. And perhaps Morrison is saying that the extremes of our childhood memories etch themselves against the present only if we have the voices, or call upon the music, or re-member the refrains clearly enough to recall them into our lives at the critical moments of conflict and crisis. Today, my mother's hymnal sits on my piano. I've placed it inside a worn lacy leather bookcover that once covered a bible in my grandmother's home. Mother's inscription on the inside cover says “For my children—so that they might remember.” This is Toni Morrison's legacy as well. If we remember our mothers' singing, we embrace the hymn of generation.

In the literature of black women writers, interpretive spaces gain cultural dimensionality through metaphoric and linguistic manipulations of ancestral patterns of oracy. Mythic recursion, a recherche du temps perdu, is the linguistic vehicle that embodies the creative vision in Toni Morrison's novels. Her recovery of the language of creative generation encourages the memories of music in our own lives. They enable the clear and powerful reach of a lyrical voice that emerges inversively from the tragedy of the child Pecola, whose lost soul is symbolically imaged through her silence. It swells with the magical, powerful older women of Song of Solomon, whose voices and songs insist on a return to our state of natural grace; and it sweeps through the Bottom land of Sula until Nel, full of the memory of her friend Sula cries “circles and circles” of sorrow around that memory. Morrison's novels celebrate a woman-centered spirituality, the reclamation of legacy, and the righteous and lyrical acknowledgment of a memory of things past.

Notes

1. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 340. Parenthetical references in the text are to this edition.

2. Among the Dogon of the Upper Volta, the spirits of Nummo were represented by the divine number of eight—the symbol of speech. In Conversations with Ogotemmeli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas (Oxford University Press, 1965), Marcel Griaule interviewed an elder of that clan, Ogotemmeli, who explained that “when Nummo speaks, what comes [forth] is a warm vapour which conveys, and itself constitutes speech … the first word had been pronounced before the genitalia of a woman … and came from a woman's genitalia” (pp. 18, 20). In the 1970s, some African American literary essays and anthologies used the concept of nommo (Nummo) to associate that sense of creative generation with their work. See, for example, Paul Harrison, The Drama of Nommo (New York: Grove Press, 1972) and William H. Robinson, ed., Nommo: An Anthology of Modern Black African and Black American Literature (New York: Macmillan, 1972). The attention to Afrocentric critique in the 1970s and 1980s, and the enthusiastic, but often superficial embrace of the term in critical essays and reviews, led literary theorist Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in a speech before the African Literature Association, to call for “no mo' nommo.”

3. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973); The Bluest Eye (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970). All references cited in the text are to these editions.

4. See New Dimensions, p 1. The term is Barbara Du Bois's from her essay, “Passionate Scholarship: Notes on Values, Knowing, and Method in Feminist Social Science,” in Theories of Women's Studies, eds. Gloria Bowles and Renate Duelli Klein (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 112.

5. See Melvin Dixon, Ride Out the Wilderness (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), for a discussion of the relationship between place and cultural identity in African American literature.

6. See Elizabeth Tolbert, “The Voice of Lament” in this volume, especially with respect to the ritual aspect of the lamenter's voice and its identity with the feminine.

7. For an extended discussion of voice in twentieth-century African and African American writers, and a theoretical exploration of the idea of multiple narrative designs, see Karla F. C. Holloway, Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women's Literature (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

8. Demetrakopoulos's essay in New Dimensions discusses this poem. See especially pp. 86-87 where Demetrakopoulos draws an essential parallel between the literature in this tradition and Morrison's own “eloquent” reflection on this theme of flying and song. Demetrakopoulos quotes Morrison as saying: “That is one of the points of Song: all the men have left someone, and it is the children who remember it, sing about it, mythologize it, make it a part of their family history” (p. 87).

9. W. E. B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (Chicago, 1903; reprinted New York: Fawcett, 1961), pp. 140-41.

10. Toni Morrison, “On the ‘Spoken Library.’” Excerpts quoted in the English Journal (Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English), February 1978. Morrison further commented that this library must be “interpreted, used” as a source of truth, and that the images, cosmology, and humanity of truth lie within spoken language.

11. In The Fractured Psyche (unpublished manuscript), Joyce Pettis explains the notion of fracture with critical insight relevant to the traditions of African American women's literature. Pettis suggests “linking the ability to talk in certain culturally specific ways … maintain[s] a fragile mental equilibrium” in Paule Marshall's work, and implicates the work of other black women writers as well in “Talk as Defensive Artifice,” African American Review 26, 1 (Spring 1992), 109-117.

12. Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), p. 73.

13. The epigraph in Wallace Thurman's novel, The Blacker the Berry (Macauley, 1929; reprinted New York: Macmillan, 1970), cites these lines. Within the African American community, this well-known aphorism reflects on the sweet sensuality and value of a dark-skinned woman. Although sensuality is not relevant to this scene, skin color certainly is.

This essay is a version of three of my chapters from Karla Holloway and Stephanie Demetrakopoulos, New Dimensions of Spirituality: A BiRacial and BiCultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987). I extend my appreciation to the publishers for permission to reprint this text.