The Eloquence of Toni Morrison

Reading Toni Morrison's Beloved is like trying to make your way through a maze. Just when you think you see the way out, you're staring at impenetrable hedge again, feeling puzzled, even maddened, as she jumps around in time, offering only tidbits of a scene or memory she'll return to later, eschewing logic for poetry. But her sentences are always worth reading--and re-reading.

Here’s how Morrison describes Stamp Paid, a former slave who worked for the Underground Railroad:

"...sneaking was his job—his life; though always for a clear and holy purpose. Before the War all he did was sneak: runaways into hidden places, secret information to public places. Underneath his legal vegetables were the contraband humans that he ferried across the river. Even the pigs he worked in the spring served his purposes. Whole families lived on the bones and guts he distributed to them. He wrote letters and read to them the ones they received. He knew who had dropsy and who needed stovewood; which children had a gift and which needed correction. He knew the secrets of the Ohio River and its banks; empty houses and full; the best dancers, the worst speakers, those with beautiful voices and those who could not carry a tune."

I love the cadence of this passage, established by its many pairs of words joined by and: wrote and read; empty and full; best and worst. Morrison varies the syntax of the pairs: adjectives like "empty houses and full" (with that unconventional placement of the second adjective); clauses like "who had dropsy and who needed stovewood"; modified nouns like "contraband humans" under "legal vegetables." The many opposites echo the escaped slaves' vision of the world as having only two kinds of people, "whitepeople" and "blackpeople." Only one race was human.

Here's another passage that jumped off the page for me:

"Deeper and more painful than his belated concern for Denver or Sethe, scorching his soul like a silver dollar in a fool’s pocket, was the memory of Baby Suggs—the mountain to his sky. It was the memory of her and the honor that was her due that made him walk straight-necked into the yard of 124, although he heard its [ghosts’] voices from the road."

I love the alliterative s's, the silver-dollar simile that elevates a common cliche into poetry, and the mountain-sky metaphor that lets us know exactly how the man felt about Baby Suggs.

Finally, two passages that need no analysis:

"[The voices] had become an occasional mutter—like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work: a sth when she misses the needle’s eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her one good platter; the low, friendly argument with which she greets the hens. Nothing fierce or startling. Just that eternal, private conversation that takes place between women and their tasks."

"From the night-sky they ice-skated under a star-loaded sky and drank sweet milk by the stove, to the string puzzles Sethe did for them in afternoon light, and shadow pictures in the gloaming."

Release

Slow for the sake of flowers as they turn
Toward sunlight, graceful as a line of sail
Coming into the wind. Slow for the mill-
Wheel's heft and plummet, for the chug and churn
Of water as it gathers, for the frail
Half-life of spraylets as they toss and spill.
For all that lags and eases, all that shows
The winding-downward and diminished scale
Of days declining to a twilit chill,
Breathe quietly, release into repose:
Be still.     - R.S. Gwynn


For our friend, Paul.

Artists and Spectators

We gawk and stare as the painters slice off their ears and down the booze and act like clowns. But we rely on them to make up for our own timidity, on their courage to dignify our caution. We are spectators in the casino, placing bets; that’s the nature of the collaboration that brings us together, and we can sometimes convince ourselves that having looked is the same as having made, and that the stakes are the same for the ironic spectator and the would-be saint. But they’re not. We all make our wagers, and the cumulative lottery builds museums and lecture halls and revisionist biographies. But the artist does more. He bets his life. ♦

from "Van Gogh's Ear: The Christmas Eve that changed modern art." Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker Jan. 4, 2010

This passage is from a long, wonderful article about Van Gogh: his passion, his suffering, his revolutionary art. It is as true for writers as it is for painters, and it makes me proud to be, in my small way, an artist as well as a spectator.

Submitted by Jan Tarasovic