Racial House, Big House, Home
Contemporary Abolitionism in Toni Morrison's Paradise
Megan Sweeney
They think they have outfoxed the whiteman, when in fact they imitate him. . . . How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
In 1998, the Directors' Review Committee of the Texas prison system banned Toni Morrison's Paradise from Texas prisons. According to the Review Committee, Morrison's novel contains "information of a racial nature" that "a reasonable person would construe as written solely for the purpose of communicating information designed to achieve a breakdown of prisons through inmate disruption, such as strikes or riots" (Morrison 1998a). The censorship report cites passages referring to "crosses on fire in Negroes' yards" and a cross "dangling from the rearview mirror of a car full of whites come to insult the little girls of Ruby" (Morrison 1997c, 154). Other cited pages include references to the deaths of Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, and "a nigger name of X" (65); a critique of the ways in which "Booker T. solutions trumped Du Bois problems every time" (212); a meditation about the already-forgotten "ordinary folk" who made the Civil Rights Movement possible (212); an image of a young black boy "spitting blood into his hands" due to the violent suppression of a peaceful Civil Rights demonstration (64); and a passage about four young black men [End Page 40] arrested during a peaceful demonstration, for "possession, resisting, arson, disorderly, inciting and whatever else the prosecution could ferret out of its statutes to level against black boys who said No or thought about it" (206).
I share the Texas Review Committee's belief that Morrison's Paradise is "designed to achieve a breakdown of prisons." However, while the committee assumes that historical references to whites' oppression of blacks will incite prison riots, I argue that Paradise contributes to the work of contemporary prison abolitionism: the project of wresting prisons from their institutionalized and normalized status as a primary means of managing social problems (Davis 1997, 278). As articulated by academics and activists involved in the Critical Resistance Movement, a prison abolitionist framework foregrounds the historical and ongoing ways in which racial and economic inequalities contribute to highly disproportionate rates of incarceration for poor people and people of color. For instance, such a framework highlights how, in the very act of declaring chattel slavery unconstitutional, the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution authorized slavery as punishment for committing a crime: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction" (quoted in Davis 1998, 99). Although the vast majority of prisoners were white prior to Emancipation, the passage of the Black Codes in the post-Civil War United States—which criminalized acts such as "mischief," "insulting gestures," "using profane language," and "having no visible means of support" (Franklin 1998, 4)—transformed the character of punishment into a means of managing former slaves and created an immense black presence within southern prisons, often up to 90 percent of the prison population (Fierce 1994, 88). Because prisoners were more expendable than purchased slaves, the convict lease system required them to perform the hard labor previously performed by slaves yet under even worse working conditions. Prison abolitionists argue that this racial legacy continues to manifest itself in today's rapidly expanding low-wage prison labor system, and in the ongoing social and political disenfranchisement of people of color that results from racialized practices of punishment.
Morrison's Paradise significantly contributes to the work of prison abolitionism by carefully anatomizing the complementary and sometimes [End Page 41] contradictory ways in which race, class, and gender shape the logic of incarceration and punishment practices. Morrison has characterized Paradise as the third book of a trilogy about love and its potential excesses, with Beloved focusing on parental love, Jazz on romantic love, and Paradise on love of God (Malchow-Moller 2001). I argue that Morrison's trilogy about love also provides a historically contextualized, multi-generational view of crime and the process of criminalization: of the roles that the police and the policed, and the hunters and the hunted play in the search to carve out a home space of security and safety. From slavery and Reconstruction in Beloved, to the Harlem Renaissance and northern migration in Jazz, to black nationalism and the Civil Rights Movement in Paradise, Morrison's trilogy offers a rich historical perspective for understanding characters' roles as victims and perpetrators of crimes.1
Beloved powerfully suggests that Sethe's murder of her own child may serve as a logical, rather than pathological, response to the state-sanctioned, communal crime of slavery. Furthermore, the novel suggests that Sethe's process of coming to terms with her action requires the community's simultaneous efforts to come to terms with its own barbaric history. In telling the story of Beloved's son, Joe Trace,2 Jazz draws attention to forms of violence that erupt as symptoms of our communal failure to reckon with the violent legacy of slavery. Joe's desire to establish and preserve a connection with his mother seems to motivate his desire to preserve his connection—through murder—with a young woman named Dorcas. Jazz also tells the story of black women who have fled violence and poverty in the south yet yearn to exercise violence as a means of survival in 1920s New York City. According to the novel, black women in Harlem are always "thinking of ways to be busier" because "what is waiting for them, in a suddenly idle moment," is "the seep of rage. . . . Mindful and particular about what in its path it chooses to bury" (16).3 In order to protect themselves from harms which the law implicitly sanctions and even abets, black women "all over the country . . . were armed; black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier weapon they chose. . . . Any other kind of unarmed black woman in 1926 was silent or crazy or dead" (Morrison 1992, 77-78).4
In Paradise, it is the men of Ruby, Oklahoma who bear arms against the women of their community. The novel opens in July 1976, with Ruby's male citizens setting out to kill five women who seek refuge in a former [End Page 42] Convent on the outskirts of town. Paradise then shuttles between the present-tense time of the massacre and the events leading up to it, beginning in 1890 when Ruby's nine founding families leave Mississippi and Louisiana in order to settle in the all-black town of Fairly, Oklahoma. When these coal-black, "eight-rock"5 families experience rejection by Fairly's lighter-skinned blacks, they become "a tight band of wayfarers bound by the enormity of what happened to them." As the narrator states, "Everything anybody wanted to know about the citizens of . . . Ruby lay in the ramifications of that one rebuff out of many" (189). After establishing their own all-black town in Haven, Oklahoma, Ruby's ancestors move west again when Haven shows signs of deterioration, and they found Ruby in 1949. The pain of their initial rejection, compounded by the failure of Haven, leads Ruby's founding fathers to embrace a dangerous and exclusionary form of cultural nationalism. In order to protect their earthly paradise—their hard-won, male-defined standards of racial purity, sexual morality, economic security, and communal safety—the men of Ruby ultimately wield against the women of their own community the discriminatory forms of policing that they have attempted to escape themselves.
Paradise narrates this dynamic by emphasizing the founding fathers' movement from the position of crucified to the position of crucifier. The novel juxtaposes depictions of the literal and figurative crucifixion of African-American men—through state-sponsored structures of racial inequality, war, incarceration, and capital punishment—with depictions of the crucifixion of African-American women that results when black men embrace the black nationalist family narrative. Although Ruby's founders embrace black nationalism as a bulwark against state-sanctioned racism, their attempts to uphold imprisoning racial and gender norms actually further the state's policing of the black community. The men of Ruby provide a prime example of what Wahneema Lubiano calls "the aesthetics of state repression dressed up in blackface" (Lubiano 1997, 251). In the words of Ruby's Reverend Misner, "They think they have outfoxed the whiteman, when in fact they imitate him. . . . How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it" (306).
By challenging carceral logic on both sides of the prison fence—drawing attention to the ways in which black women fall prey to the disciplinary forces of both the state and the patriarchal structures of the [End Page 43] black community—Paradise serves as a powerful counternarrative to historical and contemporary black nationalist narratives that "assume that saving black communities is equivalent to saving black men" (Davis 1998, 309). The novel thus continues the tradition, begun by black women novelists in the 1970s, of critiquing the major tropes of black nationalism by rearticulating them within unfamiliar contexts (Dubey 1994, 11). Flesh-ing out Angela Davis' claim that "the success or failure of a revolution can almost always be gauged by the degree to which the status of women is altered in a radical, progressive direction" (Davis 1971,185), Paradise im-plicitly challenges the paradigmatic status of black nationalist prison narratives such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice (1968), and George Jackson's Soledad Brother (1970). From Mal-colm X's embrace of the tenet that black men must reassert their primacy within black families and communities—a tenet that the Nation of Islam continues to espouse today (Malcolm X 1965, 227), to Cleaver's discussion of black women as vehicles for refining his techniques of raping white women (Cleaver 1968, 14), to Jackson's claims that "the white theory of 'the emancipated woman' is a false idea" and "the factor in the breakdown of the family unit" (Jackson 1970, 48), and that black men must be "the vanguard, the catalyst, in any meaningful change" (Jackson 1970, 283),6 such narratives of liberation relegate black women's concerns to the margins of struggle and participate in the very phenomenon they critique: the continuous disciplining of black bodies within American culture. By giving narrative form to the sexism and racial essentialism that compromised the revolutionary aims of the Black Power and black aesthetic movements, Paradise fleshes out how black nationalism can serve as its own regime of punishment and imprisonment for women.
The continuing primacy of black men's struggles, and the concomitant elision of black women's concerns, likewise inhibits the contemporary project of prison abolitionism. While today's abolitionists rightly emphasize the highly disproportionate incarceration rate for young black men in the United States—one quarter of whom are under the direct jurisdiction of the criminal justice system—prison abolitionist discourse often insufficiently attends to the alarming increase in the demonization and criminalization of African-American women (Davis 1998, 308).7 Given that the incarceration rate for black women in the United States increased 78 percent between 1990 and 1995, an increase more than double the increase [End Page 44] for black men and for white women, and more than nine times the increase for white men (Davis 1997, 268), Paradise offers an urgent reminder of the ongoing need for thoroughly intersectional analyses of crime and punishment.
At the same time, Morrison's novel performs crucial work as an act of imagination and fantasy that resists the "sociological obligations" placed on black fiction writing (Morrison 1995, 455) and challenges reductive conflations of art and politics. When Morrison was speaking at Duke University in April of 1999, a member of the audience asked how her novels might help to counteract the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans in the United States. Countering the notion that reading can produce immediate, radical effects in the political sphere, Morrison replied that her fiction "won't help much," that it requires "serious political work" to eradicate our culture's fetish for incarcerating black men and women. In carefully attending to the crucial distinction between "understanding the politics of intellectual work and substituting intellectual work for politics" (Hall 1996, 275), Morrison helps to clarify the potential political impact of the intellectual work that her fiction performs.
Paradise helps to expand our collective political and legal imaginations by encouraging receptivity to possibilities that transcend the current confines of the social real. In describing the power of her fictional imagination, Morrison writes, "I knew from the very beginning, if I had to live in a racial house, it was important, at the least, to rebuild it so that it was not a windowless prison into which I was forced, a thick-walled, impenetrable container from which no cry could be heard, but rather an open house, grounded, yet generous in its supply of windows and doors" (Morrison 1997a, 4). Paradise participates in this renovation process through its figurations of the Convent and the Convent women. Although the novel begins by signaling that one of the Convent women is white, it refuses to lend this fact determinative status by never specifying which one is white. By figuring the Convent as a "race-specific yet nonracist home" (Morrison 1997a, 5)—a concrete, localized space "where race both matters and is rendered impotent" (Morrison 1997a, 9)—Morrison helps to "move the job of unmattering race away from pathetic yearning and futile desire; away from an impossible future or an irretrievable and probably nonexistent Eden to a manageable, doable, modern human activity" (Morrison 1997a, 4). While refusing the premature insistence that we live in a "colorblind" [End Page 45] society, the Convent renders conceivable a community in which race no longer sharply delimits possibilities for human interaction.
Paradise further stretches readers' political and legal imaginations by rescripting the narrative of Christian sacrifice, giving earthly form to the as-yet-unrealized possibility of a world in which healing, redemption, and safety are not predicated on others' crucifixion. The Convent serves as the locus for this imaginative possibility, as a space of refuge for those fleeing from their communities' tacitly sanctioned forms of intolerance, exploitation, and willful blindness to victimization. As one of Ruby's young citizens, Billie Delia, describes it, the Convent is a place where you can "think things through, with nothing or nobody bothering you all the time. They'll take care of you or leave you alone—whichever way you want it" (176). Connie, the oldest of the Convent's long-term residents, was brought to the Convent as a child by some nuns who rescued her from the streets of Brazil. Each of the other long-term residents—Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas—comes upon the Convent in the process of fleeing a haunting aspect of her past. From the beginning, however, Paradise thwarts the possibility of viewing the Convent as a completely harmonious haven, a conflict-free commune of "sisters." Mavis and Gigi engage in vicious and sometimes violent turf battles, managing "to avoid murder" only for Connie's sake (259). The women bicker, choose sides, and say cruel things to one another, and tensions increase with Pallas' arrival, which seems to jeopardize "the safety available in [the] house" (261). Furthermore, while the women view Connie as one "who shared everything but needed little or no care" (162), Connie grows increasingly exasperated with their "foolish babygirl wishes" and lack of "plans to do anything" (222). When her senses are not blunted by alcohol, Connie wants "to kill them all" (223).8
This imperfect space of refuge nonetheless serves as a place for acknowledging—rather than criminalizing—the embodied effects of social violences and inequalities, and it is here that the Convent women begin the slow, patient work of coming to terms with haunting aspects of their pasts. While Mavis used to agree with her abusive partner that she was "the dumbest bitch on the planet" (37), she realizes after three years in the Convent that "the old Mavis was dead. The one who couldn't defend herself from an eleven-year-old, let alone her husband" (171). She makes peace with her two toddlers, who suffocated to death when she left them in a parked car, by continuing to communicate with their ghosts. Gigi arrives [End Page 46] at the Convent wondering "whether there was anything at all the world had to say for itself . . . that wasn't body bags or little boys spitting blood into their hands so as not to ruin their shoes" (68). She eventually recognizes that she "hasn't approved of herself in a long, long time" because she abandoned the Civil Rights struggle after realizing that it would not be over "in a season or two" (257). Seneca, who was abandoned by her mother, sexually abused by her foster brother, and sexually exploited by a wealthy woman who treats her "like a pet you wanted to be with for a while . . . but not keep. Not love. Not name" (137), learns what it is like to be called by name, and to be needed, at the Convent (249). Pallas begins to reckon with the haunting facts of her mother's and lover's betrayals, her rape by strangers, and her expanding womb, whose revolting, "flesh-producing flesh" will not heed her silent shout of "No!" (249).
In the concluding section of the novel, Paradise crystallizes this focus on healing by explicitly troping on the biblical themes of crucifixion, redemption, and resurrection. The Convent women interrupt the usual sequence of the crucifixion narrative by modeling an individual and collective process of earthly healing and redemption that does not require another's sacrifice. Furthermore, although the men of Ruby eventually sacrifice the residents of the Convent, Paradise concludes with the possibility that the Convent women continue to dwell, unvanquished, in some alternative earthly realm. Through this imaginative figuration of the Convent women's healing and continued existence, Morrison's novel insistently fleshes out an alternative to the sacrificial logic that allows us, as a community, to disavow profound social problems by "disappearing" their human evidence behind prison walls. Moreover, the novel powerfully suggests that a politics of abolitionism requires far more than merely throwing open prison doors. Interrupting current practices of imprisonment requires ongoing practices of freedom on both sides of the prison fence; it requires sustained efforts to break down the prison walls and narrative prisons that fracture our efforts to redesign the confining house that race built.
If, as Avery Gordon suggests, we need to know where we live in order to imagine living elsewhere, and we need to imagine living elsewhere before we can live there (Gordon 1997, 5), Paradise facilitates the dual work of knowing and imagining necessary for performing a critical ontology of U.S. culture—for attempting to grasp the present "in what it is" while at the same time experimenting with radical possibilities for "being, doing, [End Page 47] or thinking" otherwise (Foucault 1997, 315). By interrupting the logic that paves the way from the racial house to the Big House, Morrison's novel generates powerful imaginative possibilities for constructing a far more spacious and hospitable social home.
"Unshot, unlynched, unmolested, unimprisoned"?
The pages of Paradise are haunted by images of imprisonment. Connie and her married lover, Deek, separate before dawn "as though, having been arrested, they were each facing prison sentences without parole" (229). The Native American girls once enrolled in the Convent school regard Connie's affair as "instruction about the limits and possibilities of love and imprisonment" (238). Of Pallas' experiences in high school, the narrator states: "Only prison could be as blatant and as frightening, for beneath its rules and rituals scratched a life of gnawing violence" (254), and Ruby resident K. D. Morgan observes that his Aunt Soane "worked thread like a prisoner: daily, methodically, for free" (53). This frequent prison imagery serves as a continual reminder that knowing where we live as a culture involves recognizing the profound extent to which prisons colonize our imaginations and dominate our political landscape.
Paradise's emphasis on prison imagery also helps to illuminate its male characters' dual positioning as victims and victimizers. When Soane Morgan sobs for joy that her two sons remain "unshot, unlynched, unmolested, unimprisoned" in the wake of racialized violence erupting across the United States in the 1960s (101), she captures the novel's focus on black men's profound vulnerability to the disciplinary powers of the state—the likelihood that they will serve as cannon fodder for advancing the interests of whites. Beginning with the constant threat of lynching and dispossession that blacks faced in the Reconstruction South, and moving through the race riots of the late teens, the 1921 bombing of Tulsa, the continuing hostility that black soldiers encountered after returning from World War II, the assassinations and racial uprisings of the 1960s, the vio-lent retaliations against Civil Rights activists, the 1971 Attica rebellion, and the state sacrifice of black soldiers in the Vietnam War—including Soane Morgan's sons—Paradise presents a historical panorama of the dangers to which African-American men have been subject since Emancipation. As the narrator explains, three generations have fought to protect themselves [End Page 48] from what lays "Out There," where "your children were sport, your women quarry, and where your very person could be annulled; where congregations carried arms to church and ropes coiled in every saddle . . . where every cluster of white men looked like a posse" (16). By actively foregrounding black men's position as prey to the predatory state, Paradise counters the dominant construction of African-American men as "superpredators" who instinctually prey on innocent victims, rendering visible, instead, the forms of structural violence and racism to which black men are routinely subject.9 Given this emphasis on black male victims of state violence, it is not surprising that the Review Committee in Texas prisons censored Morrison's novel.
Indeed, the novel's explicit depictions of black male prisoners complement its focus on black male vulnerability to the state. For instance, Paradise includes an intimate portrait of male prisoners and their female visitors—a description all the more striking for its rarity—which brings humanity and visibility to the men whom prison walls work to "disappear," and which illuminates the labor that women perform in trying to preserve the relationships that prisons seem destined to destroy:
Children . . . curled up in the arms of their fathers, playing with their faces, hair, fingers. Women and girls touched the men, whispered, laughed out loud. They were the regulars—familiar with the bus drivers, the guards and coffee wagon personnel. The prisoners' eyes were soft with pleasure. They noticed everything, commented on everything. The report cards little boys brought to them in fat brown envelopes; the barrettes in the little girls' hair; the state of the women's coats. They listened carefully to details of friends and family not there; had advice and instruction for every piece of domestic news.
After emphasizing the intimate, tactile, sensual details of these family visits, the narrator concludes with a reference to the 1971 Attica Prison rebellion:10 "What [the prisoners] never spoke of was what was going on inside, and they did not ever acknowledge the presence of the guards. Perhaps Attica was on their minds." If, as Foucault argues, Attica Prison "is a machine for elimination, a form of prodigious stomach, a kidney that consumes, destroys, breaks up, and then rejects, and that consumes in order to eliminate what it has already eliminated" (Foucault 1991, 27), Morrison's description of the prison visits helps to thwart the prison's [End Page 49] function as a machine of elimination and social death. These black male inmates, the novel seems to insist, remain decidedly alive and connected to the outside.
At times, Paradise's depictions of black male prisoners capture some of the tensions at play in the novel's focus on black male vulnerability. On one level, for instance, Paradise portrays Seneca's boyfriend, Eddie Turtle, as "furious, victimized . . . Whining. Blaming" (132). When he is first incarcerated for "dr[iving] a car over a child and le[aving] it there" (133), Eddie complains to Seneca about the Bible and the sandwiches that she brings to the prison visit, does not want to hear anything about her new job, and presents her with a list of tasks to perform on his behalf. When Seneca asks Eddie's mother to cash her savings bond to pay for a lawyer, Mrs. Turtle disparages her own son as manipulative and reprehensible. On another level, however, Paradise works against the anonymity, givenness, and seriality of dominant depictions of black male prisoners by foregrounding Mrs. Turtle's intense grief over her son's imprisonment. As soon as Seneca leaves, Eddie's mother lets out "a flat-out helpless mothercry—a sound like no other in the world." Radically refiguring the biblical image of the Pietá, in which a demurely weeping Virgin Mary holds the crucified Christ in her arms, "Mrs. Turtle had let go her reason, her personality, and shrieked for all the world like the feathered, finned, and hoofed whose flesh she never ate—the way a gull, a cow whale, a mother wolf might if her young had been snatched away. Her hands had been in her hair; her mouth wide open in a drenched face" (134). With the wild and haunting sounds of Mrs. Turtle's grief, and with these natural images of a gull, a cow whale, and a mother wolf—undomesticated animals known for fiercely protecting their offspring and remaining loyal to their clans—Paradise works to un-domesticate, to render unnatural and irrational, prisons' naturalized role as systems for eliminating the anonymous black male. At the same time, Morrison's novel underscores how African-American men's encounters with state violence produce multiple effects, including a major expansion of women's caregiving roles. Like the many "ordinary folk" whose "small stories" form no part of the Civil Rights Movement's "grand record or even its footnotes" (212), black women like Seneca and Mrs. Turtle perform crucial caregiving work that all-too-often falls outside the purview of discussions about imprisonment practices.
As the novel progresses, Paradise explicitly links its depictions of black [End Page 50] male prisoners to its overarching emphasis on the theme of crucifixion. The founding fathers' self-conception as crucified Christs seems apparent in several of their foundational myths, which map their own experiences onto biblical accounts of Christ's experiences.11 While the novel ultimately challenges the founding fathers' exclusive claim to the position of crucified black Christs, Paradise nonetheless draws powerful connections between the theme of crucifixion and the racialized violence of the criminal justice system. During the wedding ceremony of K. D. Morgan and Arnette Fleetwood, for instance, Reverend Misner delivers a silent sermon in which he describes the crucified Christ as a black man executed by the state. By divinizing "this official murder out of hundreds"— "the execution of this one solitary black man" propped up between other "death row felons" (146)—Misner transforms the most potent symbol of black male abjection into a sign of radical political possibility. In response to Reverend Pulliam's insistence that "God is not interested in you" (142), Misner views the crucified black Christ as the sign that "move[s] the relationship between God and man from CEO and supplicant to one on one. . . . Not only is God interested in you," Misner silently preaches, "He is you" (147).
After narrating the raid on the Convent, a scene in which the men of Ruby explicitly enact the role of crucifier, Paradise turns its attention one last time to the criminal justice system's crucifixion of black men. Gigi's father, Manley Gibson, is a black man whose death sentence has just been commuted, and he experiences his reprieve as a sort of earthly resurrection, a returning of color and sensation to the world: "He got to go outside and now he was part of the work crew at the lake road. The lake was so blue. The Kentucky Fried Chicken lunch so fine" (309). While this reprieve of a single death row inmate may seem insufficient for constituting a resurrection scenario, the scene's placement in the novel supports such a reading. Gibson's story immediately follows Billie Delia's desire for "a miracle" (308)—for the Convent women to reappear after their apparent deaths in the slaughter—and it initiates the novel's quasi-miraculous conclusion, in which each of the Convent women enacts an embodied fantasy of closure and healing. By narrating Gibson's reprieve in relation to Gigi's final appearance at the lake road—which recalls the resurrected Christ's appearance to his disciples by the Sea of Galilee12 —Paradise lends an aura of resurrection to Gibson's reprieve itself. Given statistically documented patterns of racial disparity in the imposition of the death [End Page 51] penalty in the United States, patterns that the Supreme Court has deemed irrelevant unless one can prove specific evidence of discrimination based on race (Mauer 1999, 130), such a domesticated portrait of resurrection seems both a "minimiracle" (308) and politically essential. By bringing visibility to the bodies incarcerated in the house that race built—fleshing out details of prisoners' everyday lives and challenging prisons' power to sever connections between inside and outside—Paradise helps to destroy the blueprint that deems "the Big House" the ideal home for African- American men.
Working for "the Man"
From its opening page, nonetheless, Paradise makes clear that the founding fathers' obsessive focus on the wrongs they have withstood leads them from the position of crucified to crucifier. Steward Morgan, whose name itself suggests a position of power over subordinates,13 serves as the text's prime example of the ways in which state domination can operate through the subjectivities of those it targets. Having built up his own economic fortune and political security, Steward subjects his community members to exploitative interest rates, he expresses contempt for "stir-up Negro[es]" and students participating in drug store sit-ins (82), and when asked to contribute to the defense of four black teenagers jailed for their peaceful participation in a Civil Rights demonstration, he retorts that "little illegal niggers with guns and no home training need to be in jail" (206). By the conclusion of Paradise, Steward's twin brother, Deek, recognizes that he, too, has "become what the Old Fathers cursed: the kind of man who set himself up to judge, rout and even destroy the needy, the defenseless, the different" (302).
As Steward Morgan stalks the women whom he plans to kill in the Convent raid, he marvels that such a den of iniquity exists less than twenty miles away from Ruby, which "neither had nor needed a jail. No criminals had ever come from this town. And the one or two people who acted up, humiliated their families or threatened the town's view of itself were taken good care of. Certainly there wasn't a slack or sloven woman anywhere in town" (8). Steward's proud assessment of jail-free Ruby stands in sharp contrast, however, to Billie Delia's assessment of the town. After the sacrifice of the Convent women, Billie Delia wonders: [End Page 52]
When will they reappear, with blazing eyes, war paint and huge hands to rip up and stomp down this prison calling itself a town . . . a backward noplace ruled by men whose power to control was out of control and who had the nerve to say who could live and who not and where; who had seen in lively, free, unarmed females the mutiny of the mares and so got rid of them.
While Steward boasts that Ruby does not need a jail, Billie Delia experiences first-hand the imprisoning effects of the 8-rock families' narrowly defined racial and gender norms. While Steward views Ruby as a town in which "nothing for ninety miles around" considers a woman as prey (8), Billie Delia eagerly awaits the revenge of the women preyed upon by men who considered them "detritus: throwaway people that sometimes blow back into the room after being swept out the door" (4). With these contrasting views of Ruby as jail-free and as prison-masquerading-as-town, Paradise underscores how the men of Ruby desire to maintain a "social space that is psychically and physically safe" (Morrison 1997a, 10) yet "become the world they had escaped" (292). In their efforts to safeguard their hard-won home, the men of Ruby end up working for "the Man," taking up the master's tools and contributing to the master's work of policing civil society (Lubiano 1997, 245).
Because the men of Ruby view "unadulterated and unadulteried 8-rock blood" as their recipe for immortality (217),the demonized, hypersexualized bodies of the Convent women represent all that threatens to undermine their "family values" and black nationalist principles. The Convent women serve as scapegoats for men's sexual improprieties, for the young people's frequent trips to get VD shots, for Soane Morgan's desired miscarriage of her third child, and for Arnette Fleetwood's successful attempt to abort the fetus she conceived out of wedlock. The Convent women likewise carry the blame for the negative effects of the town's repressive policing of racial purity: for Pat Best's violent altercation with her racially impure daughter; for Menus' habit of getting drunk every weekend since he agreed not to marry his light-skinned woman; and for Sweetie Fleetwood's breakdown, spawned by six years of keeping vigilance over her "defective" babies who threaten the purity of the 8-rock line (271). As embodiments of defiance, the Convent women are even blamed for the younger generation's interpretation of the town's founding motto: Ruby's [End Page 53] young people desire to "Be"—rather than "Beware"—the furrow of God's brow.
The Convent women's bodies provide a prime surface for inscribing this plethora of evils because they are unabashedly un-docile bodies, and bodies that are unabashedly unattached to men. The women seal their reputation as "bodacious black Eves unredeemed by Mary" (18) when they make their crowd-stopping appearance at K. D. and Arnette's wedding reception. Flagrantly flouting the patriarchal, heterosexual norms of family values, they arrive with "Jezebel's storehouse raided" to decorate their bodies (156); they "danc[e] nasty," looking at no one but "their own rocking bodies" (157-58); and they later appear embracing in the back seat of a car and "rolling on the ground . . . secret flesh on display" (169). Like the biblical figure of Eve, whose temptation of Adam allegedly brought sin into the world, and like Jezebel, who promoted pagan worship of the fertility god, Baal,14 the Convent women embody the threat that women's bodies, sexuality, and desire can exceed the bounds of patriarchal policing. Indeed, the women utterly decenter male power and desire by focusing their desire on each other and on themselves. Through the lens of the black nationalist family romance, such women must therefore be deemed "outlaw[s]" (169), women unlike any others that community members have "ever heard tell of" (8).
While reflecting on a story about his brother, Elder, Steward Morgan clearly articulates how the community's internal policing of its women supplements the white world's repressive policing of the black community. As Elder told the story, he at first felt a connection with two men who were shouting at a "streetwalking woman." When one of the men hit the woman in the face, however, "the scene slid from everyday color to black and white," and Elder found himself running to defend the black woman from the vicious punches and kicks of the white men (94). Because he ultimately abandoned the woman on the street when someone called the police, Elder remained haunted for the rest of his life by "the sight of that whiteman's fist in that colored woman's face." Whatever he felt about her trade, he prayed for the black woman until he died, and he demanded to be buried in the uniform—still not mended—that he tore during his struggle to help her. On the one hand, Steward likes this story because it demonstrates how the men of his generation assume full responsibility for their behavior. On the other hand, he dislikes that the story involves the defense of "a whore"; [End Page 54] in fact, he can see the white men's point, can "even feel the adrenaline, imagining the fist was his own" (95). By foregrounding Steward's ability to transpose his own fist onto the white man's fist as he punches a black prostitute, Paradise captures how gender ultimately trumps race in the black nationalist family narrative. With no consideration of the racial and economic inequalities that may have led the black woman to prostitution in the first place, the black man joins forces with the white man in brutally policing black female sexuality.
Morrison further complicates this analysis of the gendered workings of black nationalism by emphasizing how racism sometimes signifies as gender. In Paradise, the traffic in women often revolves around—and provides an alibi for—men's attempts to maintain a sense of racial purity. United through their rejection by whites and by light-skinned blacks, the men of Ruby do their best to vilify and rout out any women who show signs of "racial tampering," who produce a "visible glitch" in the 8-rock bloodline (196-97). Ruby's official story about Billie Delia provides the clearest illustration of this process. Billie Delia's grandfather, Roger Best, first broke the blood rule by marrying a woman who "looked like a cracker" (196), whom Steward considered "the dung we leaving behind" (201). Ever since, Roger and his descendants have spent their days "trying to please, to make up for" (201). Roger's daughter, Pat—born before her parents were married—has worked so hard to attain a sense of dignity that she comes to view her own light-skinned daughter, Billie Delia, as a liability. Within the gendered racial economy of Ruby, Billie Delia gets permanently branded as the town tramp for pulling down her panties in public at the age of three, even though she remains a virgin throughout the novel. Even her own mother can no longer separate what she sees from what she fears seeing in Billie Delia's behavior, and she finds herself trying "to smash" the fast girl "that lived in the minds of the 8-rocks, not the girl her daughter was" (204). As Pat Best ultimately realizes, she has participated in the community's gendered sacrifice of her racially unacceptable daughter.15
By so carefully and forcefully anatomizing Ruby's criminalization of particular women, Paradise gives compelling narrative form to the historical fact that "the female criminalization process has had more to do with the marking of certain groups of women as undomesticated and hypersexual, as women who refuse to embrace the nuclear family as a paradigm," than with women's illegal acts (Davis 1997, 275). While the novel's [End Page 55] favorable portrayal of Reverend Misner signals its implicit endorsement of the best impulses of a revolutionary Black Power stance—Misner champions Black Pride and political empowerment while at the same time sharply critiquing the founding fathers' isolationism, reification of history, and crucifixion of those who fall outside of rigidly defined norms—Paradise offers sharp criticism of black nationalist narratives that imprison women within the dictates of patriarchal power. Indeed, the novel suggests that such narratives buttress dominant constructions of single, welfare-dependent, African-American mothers as hypersexualized "agent[s] of destruction, the creator[s]of the pathological, black, urban, poor family from which all ills flow" (Lubiano 1992, 339). Doubling Reverend Misner's view that "choos[ing] to lose" a brother is worse than any communal shame he may cause (303), Paradise suggests that choosing to lose a sister is nothing short of criminal.
Monstrous Women Bridling Monsters
The multiple sacrifices of women in Paradise—culminating with the death of Sweetie Fleetwood's daughter—leave some critics and readers highly dissatisfied with the redemptive, magical-realist overtones of the novel's conclusion. Shortly before the men of Ruby invade the Convent, Connie leads the Convent women in a collective, ritualized healing process that results in their embodied, earthly redemption. After the attempted slaughter, all five Convent women disappear, including two whom the men apparently killed. Reverend Misner and Anna Flood sense the presence of a door or window in a field near the Convent, and their question, "What on earth would it be? What on earth?" (305), suggests that the women have escaped to an alternative realm, a sort of paradise on earth. Billie Delia hopes "with all her heart that the women [a]re out there, darkly burnished, biding their time, brass-metaling their nails, filing their incisors—but out there. Which is to say she hope[s] for a miracle" (308). Because Paradise concludes with each of the Convent women participating in a fantasy of healing closure or revenge, the novel may be viewed as delivering on this hope for a miraculous resurrection.
With astonishing frequency, critics and readers alike dismiss this conclusion as "implausible" and "contrived." Writing for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani states that Paradise is "a contrived, formulaic [End Page 56] book" whose "one surreal set-piece feels like a hasty afterthought, clumsily grafted on to try to kick the story to another level" (Kakutani 1998).16 David Gates argues in Newsweek that Paradise asks us "to swallow too many contrivances," and he deems Connie's transformation "from a lush to a charismatic guru . . . more convenient than convincing" (Gates 1998, 62). Connie's "rambling speech" to the Convent women is "full of incantatory gibberish," contends Geoffrey Bent in the Southern Review, and he ridicules the "bathos" and sentimentality of the scene in which the Convent women "miraculously was[h] away their traumas" by dancing naked in the rain (Bent 1999, 145). After noting the "dark and perverse powers" that "an apparently possessed Connie" invokes, Adam Mars-Jones writes in the Observer: "If Morrison had resisted the temptation to bring in possession, ghosts and amateur miracles, Paradise might have attained the status of masterpiece" (Mars-Jones 2001). An Amazon.com reader's report encapsulates these critics' and other readers' views with his sarcastic rhetorical question: "Anyone buy that ending?" While these readers view Paradise's fantasy-driven conclusion as "hokey" (Kakutani 1998), other readers charge that the conclusion operates as a palliative, an aestheticized attempt to compensate for the slaughter of women that takes place at the level of the social real. Proponents of this viewpoint argue that Morrison falls back on the relief that the foundational myth of crucifixion and resurrection provides, rather than positing much-needed, real-world possibilities for women's survival and resistance.17
In my view, readings of Paradise's conclusion as either contrived or compensatory overlook two central features of the novel. First, Paradise rescripts the foundational myth of Christianity. I read the novel's conclusion, therefore, not as Morrison's foray into uncharted territories of "perverse powers" or "possession," but rather as her troping on the biblical themes of the Last Supper, crucifixion, resurrection, and redemption. According to the traditional biblical narrative, the possibility of redemption—the promise that believers will achieve disembodied perfection and immortality in heaven—rests on Christ's crucifixion and resurrection. Paradise wrests crucifixion from its privileged position as the gateway to redemption by depicting the Convent women as achieving a sort of earthly redemption, not by means of others' crucifixion, but by means of their collective, ongoing, embodied efforts to analyze and to address the subjective effects of social wounds. The novel thus disrupts the presumed [End Page 57] causality, temporality, and spatiality of the narrative of Christian sacrifice. Second, I read Paradise's conclusion as a political necessity precisely because the Convent women's processes of healing and continued survival cannot fully be mapped onto the social real. Morrison's novel couples a frank anatomizing of the carceral continuum with an act of utopian imagination that stretches our theoretical horizon of possibilities for creating an earthly elsewhere.
Although the Convent women perform the ongoing work of healing over a number of months and years, Paradise crystallizes this work into a ritual-ized process of transformation in its re-imaginings of the Last Supper, crucifixion, redemption, and resurrection. Throughout the novel, Connie functions as a sort of Christ figure. The women view her as someone "who locked no doors and accepted each as she was. . . . [an] ideal parent, friend, companion in whose company they were safe from harm" (262). Like Christ, Connie revives two individuals who have crossed over into death. Her divinity becomes even more pronounced after her encounter with a god who seeks her out in the garden (283); underscoring Reverend Misner's message that God "is you" (147), this god wears sunglasses, like Connie, and he shares her "tea-colored hair" and eyes as "green as new apples" (252). Infused with her own divinity, Connie prepares a special meal for the women—a sort of Last Supper—and then echoes Christ in inviting the women on a journey of discovery: "If you want to be here you do what I say. Eat how I say. Sleep when I say. And I will teach you what you are hungry for. . . . If you have a place that you should be in and somebody who loves you waiting there, then go. If not stay here and follow me" (262).18 Connie's imperatives serve as a ritualized invitation rather than signaling another paradise-cum-totalitarian-regime; while she takes charge of the redemption rituals, the other women fully participate in, and negotiate, the collective process of healing.
As the first step of their intense, months-long journey of learning to know where they live in order to imagine living elsewhere, Connie traces each woman's body silhouette on the Convent floor. Literalizing the wom-en's need to fill in the picture of their lives, the body templates serve as a concrete reminder of the ways in which the body is a palimpsest, a historical record of overlapping traces and "a text which is as complicated and indeterminate as any literary manuscript" (Grosz 1994, 117). The templates encourage an understanding of the ways in which bodies are inscribed— [End Page 58] often violently—by sociosexual norms; by histories and institutions which confine, supervise, harm, and immobilize; and by cultural and personal dictates which categorize bodies into socially significant groups (Grosz 1994, 141). At the same time, the templates encourage an understanding of the body as an "open-ended, pliable set of significations" which can be rewritten, reinterpreted, and reconstituted "in quite other terms than those which mark it" (Grosz 1994, 61). The Convent women's body templates serve, moreover, as the ground on which they can begin to understand their "psychical corporeality" or "embodied subjectivity" (Grosz 1994, 22), a process that entails learning to recognize the radical inseparability and mutual dependence of the psychical and the social, mind and body, private and public, and self and other.
In the language of her childhood, Connie tells the other women about times in her life when she has felt imprisoned in either "bones" or "spirit." The Mother Superior of the Convent twice taught her, she explains, that "my body is nothing my spirit everything": once when she was an abused and hungry child in Brazil, and once after her affair with Deek Morgan, when "my flesh so hungry for itself it ate him" (263). When the Mother Superior dies, Connie once again feels imprisoned in her body—"My bones on hers the only true thing. Not spirit. Bones"—but she eventually recognizes that spirit "is true, like bones. It is good, like bones." Connie's ultimate realization that spirit/mind and body must be valued equally thus stands as her foundational lesson for the women: "Hear me, listen. Never break them in two. Never put one over the other. Eve is Mary's mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve" (263).
Next begins the period of "loud dreaming," when it does not matter "who said the dream or whether it had meaning," and when "a monologue is no different from a shriek" (264). Stepping into each other's nightmares, "half-tales, and the never-dreamed," the Convent women weave together a tableau of abuse and child murder, of racially-motivated violence, of abandonment and sexual exploitation, of betrayal and rape. This intense phase of individual and collective reckoning then gives way to the work of reinscription and reinterpretation. As they artfully fill in their templates, making careful etchings of body parts and memorabilia, the women gently press and question each other about the particular stories that haunt them, helping each other to transform their physical and mental scars into maps that others can read and learn from, and assisting each [End Page 59] other in the ongoing process of self-creation. With Connie "feeding them bloodless food and water" (265),19 the women alter. No longer "broken girls, frightened girls, weak and lying" (222), and "no longer haunted" (266), each has "embraced and finally let go of" the pain and terror that kept her imprisoned in her past (283). The Convent inhabitants become "holy women" (266)—washed clean, calmly themselves, finally at home.
With this powerful figuration of baptism and redemption, Paradise suggests a theorization of healing that bears tremendous importance for a prison abolitionist politics. Evelyn Shockley argues that the Convent women "salvage each other through a fierce love and isolation not entirely different from Ruby's grounding ethos" (Shockley 1999, 718). I am arguing, instead, that Morrison's novel highlights a distinction between the isolationist retreat of Ruby's founding fathers—which leads to exclusion, ossification, and the crucifixion of those who embody difference and change, and the temporary retreat of the Convent women—which leads to a redemptive letting go, by way of an active embrace, of their imprisoning pasts. By foregrounding both the necessity and the power of this healing process, Paradise serves as a crucial counter-narrative to leftist arguments that insufficiently theorize subjective experiences of injury and healing, and that foreclose political and legal possibilities for addressing subjects' experiences of bodily trauma and/or psychical wounds.20
For instance, in her well-known essay, "Wounded Attachments," Wendy Brown argues that politicized identity fosters a paralyzing attachment to wounding and victimization that leads to a "loss of futurity" (Brown 1993, 406). While her call to "rehabilitate the memory of desire . . . prior to the formation of identity at the site of the wound" risks sounding like a call for public disavowal of historical and social sources of injury (Brown 1993, 407), Brown's later work, Politics Out of History, places greater emphasis on the need to engage consciously and deliberately with the past in order to summon a different future. Notwithstanding, the past remains curiously abstract and bloodless in Politics Out of History, and a problematic gulf remains between Brown's call to redeem past suffering as an unfinished "outrage to the present" (Brown 2001, 171), and her tendency to dismiss political and legal efforts to attend to the systematic forms of social wounding to which particularly raced, gendered, and classed bodies remain subject.
Morrison's novel, by contrast, emphasizes that the Convent women are washed clean in the redemptive rain only after they have collectively [End Page 60] immersed themselves in the salty brineof their histories. If the body is a page that can be reinscribed, Paradise draws crucial attention to the quality and distinctiveness of the paper (Grosz 1994, 191), to the specific materiality and concrete effects of inhabiting a particularly marked body. Furthermore, the novel highlights the difficult work involved in reckoning with individual and collective pasts. Stepping into each other's psychical and corporeal pain leaves the Convent women feeling "exhausted and enraged," and they go to bed "vowing never to submit to that again" (264). However, as they begin to inscribe their stories on their body templates, the women push each other toward deeper understandings, fuller reckonings, and alternative inscriptions. In learning "to bridle, without being trampled, the monsters that slavered them" (303), the Convent women demonstrate that one can only "lift the weight" of the past and "reduc[e] the scope of its determinations" by fully engaging with it (Brown 1993, 405, 407); ghosts take their leave only when they have been given their due (Gordon 1997, 208).
Through this fictional portrait of the Convent women, Paradise draws attention to the difficult, necessary work that some women in prison perform in trying to reckon with their experiences of inter-subjective and social injury.21 An abolitionist politics, the novel seems to suggest, must facilitate individuals' and communities' sustained attempts to address the systematic structural violences that make us a nation of wounded and wounding subjects. As I have learned through conducting ethnographic fieldwork with incarcerated women, vengeful punishment is so firmly entrenched as the naturalized response to crime that even those whose experiences illuminate deep-seated social inequalities and violences frequently read their own and others' stories through a vilifying and indi-vidualizing lens. By fleshing out the Convent women's collective efforts to generate alternative forms of literacy for reading their experiences, Paradise substantiates the utopian possibility—in order to render it more feasible in the social real—that the retributive framework of law-and-order discourse will give way to individual and communal engagements with the social sources of hauntings and wounds.
This utopian insistence that things might be otherwise likewise motivates Paradise's fantasy-driven conclusion. On the one hand, the raid on the Convent serves as a graphic reminder that the women's individual and collective work of healing can do little to interrupt the inexorable logic of social sacrifice, which predicates communal salvation on the crucifixion of [End Page 61] designated scapegoats. On the other hand, Morrison juxtaposes her appropriately "paranoid" reading of Ruby's law-and-order culture with a powerful "reparative" vision of un-haunted and un-hunted women who embody the possibility of survival.22 The novel does not suggest that the Convent women achieve immortality. In fact, their slaughter initiates a seismic shift that brings mortality to the town of Ruby; the death of Sweetie Fleetwood's daughter forces the 8-rocks "to have a real and formal cemetery in a town full of immortals" (296). Rather, Paradise gives imaginative form to an alternative space of embodied, earthly existence—a space in which women who stray outside the rigid bounds of the black nationalist family romance are not successfully sacrificed or eliminated for the "good" of the community.
Resurrection "does not resuscitate a past which had been present," Derrida writes; "it engages the future" (quoted in Cornell 1992, 147). With its rescripted resurrection scenario, Paradise holds the actual, the imagined, and the possible in tension,23 performing what Ursula K. LeGuin calls "an archeology of the future": "remember[ing] what has yet to be" and "demand[ing] it as already 'ours'" (qtd. in Cornell 1991, 237). Morrison's novel provides a history of the present in which crucifixion is haunted by the immanence and imminence of earthly resurrection; lest we grow deaf to the utopian possibility that things might yet be otherwise, the unvan-quished Convent women clamor to be heard. At a time when the map of Oklahoma is studded with prisons rather than independent black towns (Walters 2003), Paradise offers a "minimiracle" of imagination that forces the present to waver, that concretizes the possibility of an earthly home in which a passionate commitment to social justice, rather than a reliance on imprisonment and crucifixion, constitutes the grounds for achieving safety and redemption "down here in Paradise" (Morrison 1997c, 318). In this sense, then, the Texas prison system's Review Committee seems right on target; with its powerful suggestions for remodeling the house that race built, Paradise, indeed, seems "designed to achieve a breakdown of prisons."
Endnotes
I am extremely grateful to Dana Collins, Ashwini Tambe, Rebecca Wanzo, and the anonymous reviewers at Meridians for their insightful feedback on drafts of this essay.
1. Morrison's novel, Tar Baby, also emphasizes criminality through the figure of Margaret, a white woman who has physically and emotionally abused her son [End Page 62] over a number of years. Margaret's black house servant, Ondine, essentially hides the evidence of abuse by holding the household together and acting as a surrogate mother to the boy. While highlighting how the labor of black women serves to perpetuate the mythical ideal of white, middle-class motherhood, Tar Baby also contextualizes Margaret's crime by emphasizing her isolation and the structural hierarchies that prevent her from befriending Ondine, her one potential companion.
2. The novel implies a continuation between Beloved and "Wild," an inhabitant of the woods who gives birth to protagonist Joe Trace but abandons him as a baby.
3. Joe's wife, Violet—known as "Violent" for cutting Dorcas' lifeless face during her funeral—accommodates her desires for violence by imagining herself as two Violets, and she cherishes the violent, strong, proud Violet who sometimes emerges without warning. Alice Manfred, who cared for her niece, Dorcas, after her parents were killed in the East St. Louis riots of 1917, does all that she can to suppress her anger. When she hears the anger in street music, Alice has to "hold her hand in the pocket of her apron to keep from smashing it through the glass pane to snatch the world in her fist and squeeze the life out of it for doing what it did and did and did to her and everybody else she knew or knew about" (59). In the war of survival, Alice chooses surrender, yet she, too, was once "starving for blood;" she wanted to run over her husband's other woman with a horse until nothing but "tormented road dirt remained" (86).
4. The only women who remained unarmed were those who "found protection in the church and the judging, angry God whose wrath in their behalf was too terrible to bear contemplation;" those who bought houses and hoarded money "as protection and the means to purchase it;" those who were attached to armed men; those who did not carry pistols "because they became pistols . . . shooting down statutes and pointing out the blood and abused flesh;" and those who "swelled their little unarmed strength into the reckoning one of leagues, clubs, societies, sisterhoods designed to . . . make a way, solicit, comfort, and ease."
5. According to the novel, "8-rock" refers to the blue-black color of the coal found at the deepest levels of coal mines (193).
6. In a 1971 interview, Angela Davis argues that George Jackson's thinking about black women evidences a progression, and she refers to a letter that Jackson wrote describing his "transformation" (Davis 1971, 186). In one of his last letters collected in Soledad Brother, Jackson states that black women's role in the revolution should be "the very same as the man's" (Jackson 1970, 298).
7. Angela Davis also argues that prison abolitionist work still frequently replicates the tendency, common in histories and theories of punishment, to treat racism as a contingent element of the criminal justice system (Davis, ADR 102).
8. Morrison expresses her own frustration with the character of Mavis during Oprah's televised discussion of Paradise. Defending the self-protective behavior of Mavis's daughter, whom some readers view as "terrible," Morrison explains, [End Page 63] "That's a scary thing when you have a grown parent who cannot defend herself. How could they defend you? She can't even feed them properly" ("Book Club" 1998, 14).
9. The NAACP now runs clinics in predominantly black high schools to teach black teens to avoid harm at the hands of police officers (Gutiérrez-Jones 2001, 132). In an interview in Salon Magazine, Morrison discusses how her fears for her own two sons increased during the 1980s: "I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are. I mean, if you can find police still saying they thought a candy bar was a gun, or they thought whatever they thought—things that would never be coherent if they had shot a white kid in the back. Could they tell those parents, 'It looked like a gun to me, but it was a Mars bar?' It's just surreal. So that is what they are prey to" (Morrison 1998b).
10. The 1971 Attica rebellion—in which 43 people died—increased tensions between prisoners and guards and between prisoners of different races. Some guards immediately sought to undermine prisoner politicization by intensifying efforts to foment racial strife (Weiss 1991 4).
11. For instance, just as Christ and Simon Peter spend the night in the Garden of Gethsemane prior to Christ's crucifixion, the founding fathers continually rehearse a story about their leader, Big Papa, who received the inspiration to found Ruby while praying in a garden all night, with his son falling asleep at his side.
12. See John 21:1-14.
13. I thank Ashwini Tambe for this astute observation.
14. Baal is an ancient fertility god responsible for germinating crops, increasing flocks, and adding children to the community, and Baal worship included male and female religious prostitution. Jezebel's death was prefigured in the Bible: "Dogs will devour Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel" (1 Kings 21: 23).
15. A parallel dynamic is at work in the community's rejection of Menus' "pretty redbone girl." Community members brand her as a prostitute, as "more like a fast woman than a bride" (278), in order to dissuade Menus from marrying a woman "of racial tampering" (197). Because he does not have the courage to go and live somewhere else with his woman, Menus drowns his shame and sorrow in alcohol.
16. In a startlingly bad reading, Kakutani contends that Paradise is delivered in a "hectoring, didactic voice," that it "mechanically pits men against women, old against young, the past against the present," and that almost every character "is a two-dimensional cliché, thin and papery and disposable." Furthermore, she argues that "Ms. Morrison's efforts to endow the story with a symbolic subtext tend to feel hokey. There are gratuitous biblical allusions (like comparing the story of Ruby's founders to the story of the Holy Family, turned away from the inn) and even more gratuitous suggestions that the women at the convent are feminist martyrs, like the witches of Salem" (Kakutani 1998). [End Page 64]
17. For readers who wish to resist the foundational myth of crucifixion and resurrection, one might argue that cementing this narrative produces trauma, rather than relief.
18. In the Gospel according to Matthew, Christ states, "Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matthew 10: 37-39). In Luke's Gospel, Christ states, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23).
19. "Bloodless food and water" alludes to the Christian Eucharist.
20. Paradise also lends an embodied and gendered dimension to Foucault's notion of care of the self, which—by virtue of the historical context from which it ensues—technically does not apply to women (Grosz 1994, 158).
21. My current book project explores incarcerated women's readings of a variety of texts about women and crime—from non-fiction "true crime" books to Gayl Jones' Eva's Man—as theoretical interventions into current debates about crime and punishment. Drawing on extensive interviews and group discussions with imprisoned women, I analyze how the incarcerated readers attempt to mediate their experiences as wounding and wounded subjects through their complex engagements with various texts. While their readings sometimes reproduce the vilifying and individualizing tendencies of law-and-order discourse, the incar-cerated women also demonstrate alternative forms of literacy for reading law-breaking women's experiences. See my article in Feminist Studies 30.2 (Summer 2004); Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 25.1-2 (Winter/Spring 2003); and Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 35.3-4 (fall/winter 2002).
22. In her introduction to Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, Eve Sedgwick argues that a "paranoid" reading practice focuses on rooting out and exposing systemic oppressions, and it requires "that bad news be always already known" (Sedgwick 1997, 10). A "reparative" reading practice, by contrast, stays attuned to "a heartbeat of contingency" (25), remains open to surprises—both good and bad, acknowledges the productive possibilities often generated by mistakes, and fosters the use of one's own resources to assemble fragments into "something like a whole . . . not necessarily like any preexisting whole" (8).
23. In her Nobel Lecture, Morrison states that "the vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. . . . It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie" (Morrison 1993).
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