Paradise’s Critical History as Told by Toni Morrison

If the second book in Morrison’s self-termed African American trilogy, Jazz, looks backward to her mother’s 1920s music-as-muse/musing, its third installment, Paradise, nods its 2014 foreword to her grandfather’s war on illiteracy, a discriminating resistance that resounded when Beloved’s Sixo declines to learn to read. Although, unlike most of her critics, Morrison considered her seventh novel her masterpiece, Paradise continues to rank among experimental narratives utilizing modernist and postmodernist techniques that challenge, indeed deter readers. The author intentionally withholds racial information that readers are accustomed to being spoon fed and thus consider vital to their understanding of the text: “I was eager to simultaneously de-fang and theatricalize race, signaling, I hoped, how movable and hopelessly meaningless the construct was” (Origin 66). While even veteran critics can and did ignore or misinterpret the vital signs that do appear in Paradise, its literary critical history, and her Vintage encapsulation, nonetheless reveal that Morrison relied on her masterpiece to teach us a new way to read (see the coda on “Recitatif” at the end of this chapter).

An oft-told family story portrays Morrison’s “Big Papa” attending school for a single day to “tell the teacher he wouldn’t be back because he had to work. His older sister, he said, would teach him to read.” Given that six years after his birth in 1864, a year after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the location of said school and its indubitably revolutionary teacher would need to remain a secret as “black people’s access to education in general and reading specifically was violently discouraged and, in most of the South, teaching African Americans to read had been illegal,” Big Papa’s saga applauds both female and male victory. Rural Alabama would no doubt reflect 1831 Virginia law: “‘Any white person assembling to instruct free Negroes to read or write shall be fined not over $50.00 also be imprisoned not exceeding two months’; ‘It is further enacted that if any white person for pay shall assemble with slaves for the purpose of teaching them to read or write he shall for each offense be fined at the discretion of the justice . . .’ ten to one hundred dollars” (foreword xi). Against all odds, Big Papa’s big sister taught him to read.