God Help The Child

“It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened […] She was so black she scared me. Midnight black, Sudanese black. I’m light-skinned, with good hair, what we call high yellow, and so is Lula Ann’s father. Ain’t nobody in my family anywhere near that color. Tar is the closest I can think of.”

Sweetness’s disavowal of all responsibility for her mistreatment of her daughter is classic gas lighting, whereby an abuser denies responsibility for cruelty or even tries to convince observers or victims that there was no wrongdoing in his or her behavior. Sweetness’s internalization of racism, made apparent in the negative meanings she attaches to Bride’s physical features, explains in large part why she was unable to love her daughter.

“‘You not the woman I want.’”

With these words, Booker walks out of Bride’s life. His perspective about her womanhood is rooted in idealization of Bride as the archetypal black woman, while Bride’s reaction to Booker (agreement and then hurt) show the hollowness underneath her confident exterior.

“Besides, our affair wasn’t all that spectacular—not even the mildly dangerous sex I used to let myself enjoy. Well, anyway it was nothing like those double-page spreads in fashion magazines, you know, couples standing half naked in surf, looking so fierce and downright mean, their sexuality like lightning and the sky going dark to show off the shine of their skin. I love those ads. But our affair didn’t even measure up to any old R-&-B song—some tune with a beat arranged to generate fever. It wasn’t even the sugary lyrics of a thirties blues song: ‘Baby, baby, why you treat me so? I do anything you say, go anywhere you want me to go.’”

Bride’s references to magazine ads and musical lyrics show how deeply unrealistic are her ideas about love and her shallowness as a thinker at the start of the novel.

“I shouldn’t be thinking this. But her position at Sylvia, Inc., might be up for grabs. How can she persuade women to improve their looks with products that can’t improve her own? There isn’t enough YOU, GIRL foundation in the world to hide eye scars, a broken nose and facial skin scraped down to pink hypodermis.”

Despite Bride’s belief that Brooklyn is a good friend, Brooklyn’s cynical statement in this quote reveals how poor a judge of character Bride is and that Brooklyn is driven by self-interest.

“Memory is the worst thing about healing.”

Many of the characters are forced to confront traumatic pasts in order to move on with their lives. In this quote, Bride grapples with the fact that her ability to heal psychologically from Sofia’s attack is not keeping pace with her physical healing. Her difficulty stems in part from the connection she sees between past victimization and the attack by Sofia.

“Best of all was Sweetness. As we walked down the courthouse steps she held my hand, my hand. She never did that before and it surprised me as much as it pleased me because I always knew she didn’t like touching me. I could tell. Distaste was all over her face when I was little and she had to bathe me.”

This quote supports the idea that Bride was aware of Sweetness’s revulsion toward Bride’s dark skin and identifies the role that racism and colorism play in Bride’s psychological damage.

“‘Black sells. It’s the hottest commodity in the civilized world. White girls, even brown girls, have to strip naked to get that kind of attention.’”

Jeri, who makes over Bride, explains in this quote that blackness can become a commodity once Bride understands that it is fetishized by Western culture. The problem with this bargain is that it is dependent on the association of blackness with sex, a point made even clearer because Jeri’s statement echoes the idea from advertising that sex sells.

“Oh, yeah, I feel bad sometimes about how I treated Lula Ann when she was little. But you have to understand: I had to protect her. She didn’t know the world. There was no point in being tough or sassy even when you were right. Not in a world where you could be sent to a juvenile lockup for talking back or fighting in school, a world where you’d be the last one hired and the first one fired. She couldn’t know any of that or how her black skin would scare white people or make them laugh and trick her.”

In this quote, Sweetness gives a realistic portrayal of the cost of racism and sexism to little black girls, especially during the era in which Sweetness grew up. Nevertheless, her conclusion that cruelty in the world justified her cruelty at home shows how deeply in denial she is about her treatment of her daughter.

“What that teacher was accused of was sort of like what Mr. Leigh did. Was I pointing at the idea of him? His nastiness or the curse he threw at me? I was six years old and had never heard the words “nigger” or “cunt” before, but the hate and revulsion in them didn’t need definition. Just like later in school when other curses—with mysterious definitions but clear meanings—were hissed or shouted at me. Coon. Topsy. Clinkertop. Sambo. Ooga booga. Ape sounds and scratching of the sides, imitating zoo monkeys.”

In this quote, Bride reveals how impactful racism and colorism have been in terms of her self-esteem. This quote is also a rare moment of introspection in which Bride attempts to make sense of her own actions.

“We were at the bottom of the heap of murderers, arsonists, drug dealers, bomb-throwing revolutionaries and the mentally ill. Hurting little children was their idea of the lowest of the low—which is a hoot since the drug dealers could care less about who they poison or how old they were and the arsonists didn’t separate the children from the families they burned. And bomb throwers are not selective or known for precision.”

Sofia points out in this quote the irony of a prison hierarchy that places child abusers on the bottom when many people inside and out of prison damage or even kill children. This quote reinforces Morrison’s representation of children as suffering.

“When I tend to my patients—put their teeth back in their mouths, rub their behinds, their thighs to limit bed sores, or when I sponge their lacy skin before lotioning it, in my mind I am putting the black girl back together, healing her, thanking her. For the release. Sorry Mommy.”

In this quote, Sofia imagines her work as a health aide as self-healing and as restitution for the physical harm she did to Bride. Her reference to her mother also highlights the degree to which her relationship with her mother was an unloving one.

“Too weak, too scared to defy Sweetness, or the landlord, or Sofia Huxley, there was nothing in the world left to do but stand up for herself finally and confront the first man she had bared her soul to, unaware that he was mocking her. It would take courage though, something that, being successful in her career, she thought she had plenty of. That and exotic beauty.”

In this quote, Bride connects multiple traumas in her life and discovers a common thread of low self-esteem and fear driving her. Her decision to stand up for herself finally would ordinarily be an indication of a shift in her character, but the reference to her exotic beauty shows just how shallow her self-awareness and self-esteem are.

“That’s when she understood that the body changes began not simply after he left, but because he left.”

The regression of Bride’s body over the course of the narrative indicates her return to childhood. Bride, who was frequently unprotected and unloved during her childhood, never received the nurturing she needed to develop strong self-esteem. When Booker rejects her by claiming she is not the woman for him, Bride’s body literalizes the rejection by becoming a girl’s body, thus allowing Bride to return to childhood and grow again.

“She missed Brooklyn whom she thought of as her only true friend: loyal, funny, generous. Who else would drive miles to find her after that bloody horror at a cheap motel then take such good care of her? It wasn’t fair, she thought, to leave her in the dark as to where she was. Of course she couldn’t tell her friend the reason for her flight. Brooklyn would have tried to dissuade her, or worse, taunt and laugh at her.”

Bride’s self-involvement and lack of judgment is on display in this quote. The quote is ironic because the reader already knows, unlike Bride, that Brooklyn is not truly a friend.

“The biggest problem was finding food and storing it for later. She deliberately made no friends of any kind—young or old, stable or wandering nuts. Anybody could turn you in or hurt you. Corner hookers were the nicest and the ones who warned her about dangers in their trade—guys who didn’t pay, cops who did before arresting them, men who hurt them for fun.”

This quote captures the upside-down world Rain inhabited as a child sex worker who is forced to survive on the streets after being prostituted by her mother. Morrison’s point in this passage is to provide further documentation of the suffering of children but also to counter myths about parenting as loving and childhood as innocent.

“Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks’ hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running. So as a graduate student he turned to economics—its history, its theories—to learn how money shaped every single oppression in the world and created all the empires, nations, colonies with God and His enemies employed to reap, then veil, the riches.”

Booker has a grand theory about the world, namely that it is entirely driven by greed and exploitation. There are several ironies in his perspective. The first is that his lifestyle is supported by the profit from his grandfather’s exploitation of poor people. The second is that although Booker sees his perspective as being rooted in reason, the reader can see a direct connection between this perspective and Booker’s devastation when he discovers the suffering and exploitation Adam suffered before he died.

“‘Don’t let him go,’ she said. ‘Not until he’s ready. Meantime, hang on to him tooth and claw. Adam will let you know when it’s time.’ She comforted him, strengthened him and validated the unfairness of the censure he was feeling from his family.”

Queen Olive, who has every appearance of being the sage, maternal African American woman handing out folksy advice in this quote, is later revealed as a bad source of advice. Her advice proves damaging to Booker and thus undercuts yet another black female archetype.

“Public demands and cries for vengeance disguised as justice were rampant and harrowing. Signs, rallies in front of the courthouse, editorials—all seemed unassuageable by anything less than the culprit’s beheading. Booker joined the chorus but was not impressed by so facile a solution. [...]Wasn’t there a tribe in Africa that lashed the dead body to the back of the one who had murdered it? That would certainly be justice—to carry the rotting corpse around as a physical burden as well as public shame and damnation.”

In this quote, Booker describes how the trial of his brother’s murderer helped him to realize that the legal system is incapable of delivering healing and justice for victims and survivors. The implication of this quote is also that the trial itself was just another source of trauma in Booker’s childhood.

“Each time he imagined her eyes glittering toward him or her lips open in an inviting, reckless smile, he felt not just a swell of desire but also the disintegration of the haunt and gloom in which for years Adam’s death had clouded him. When he stepped through that cloud and became as emotionally content as he had been before Adam skated into the sunset—there she was. A midnight Galatea always and already alive.”

Booker’s central character flaw is his tendency to idealize life and people. His description of Bride as a “midnight Galatea” is an allusion to the Greek myth in which the goddess of love transformed a sculptor’s statue into a woman in answer to his prayers. In Booker’s case, his own tendency to idealize created an image of Bride that was far from the reality of who she is. His recognition of her shallowness occurs six months into the relationship.

“‘Scientifically there’s no such thing as race, Bride, so racism without race is a choice. Taught, of course, by those who need it, but still a choice. Folks who practice it would be nothing without it.’”

This quote is one in which Booker attempts to use reason to comfort Bride as she tells him about the suffering racism and colorism have caused her. On the one hand, he is factually correct. On the other hand, his abstract response shows how pedantic and abstract he can be even with someone he claims to love.

“They will blow it, she thought. Each will cling to a sad little story of hurt and sorrow—some long-ago trouble and pain life dumped on their pure and innocent selves. And each one will rewrite that story forever, knowing the plot, guessing the theme, inventing its meaning and dismissing its origin. What waste. She knew from personal experience how hard loving was, how selfish and how easily sundered.”

These are the thoughts Queen Olive has as she watches Booker and Bride attempt to patch things up. Her vision of love is profoundly pessimistic but in line with Morrison’s realistic representation of love in the novel.

“[H]is effort at ‘Kind of Blue,’ was off-key and uninspired. He cut it short and, with a sadness he had not felt since Adam’s death, threw his trumpet into the gray water as though the trumpet had failed him rather than he had failed it.”

Booker throws his trumpet in the stream after scattering Queen Olive’s ashes. The action symbolizes his decision to let go of his brother and move on to a new life with Bride. That his first act in this new stage is one in which he fails to recognize his own lack of commitment to practice as the source of the poor playing is foreshadowing that things will not work out well in his new relationship.

“A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath. So they believe.”

This quote captures the idealistic notions that Booker and Bride have about their child now that Bride is pregnant. The implication of the last line is that this child will suffer all the evils named in the prior lines. The quote thus reinforces Morrison’s perspective on the unavoidable suffering of children.