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- African-American Authors - - General fiction - |
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Paradise |
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 Paradise byToni Morrison Plume Publishing 318 pages, 1999 (reprint edition) ISBN 04522080397 Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart In her first novel since winning the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison undertakes a major storytelling risk in Paradise. The time for the novel is 1976, when the battles for civil rights and justice have changed their fronts - from the streets to the courts. But in Ruby, Oklahoma (pop. 360), an all-black township founded at the end of World War II, battles are still being fought. Rev. Richard Misner, a new preacher in town who feels the political tensions, tries to sort out family feuds and discovers to his horror that discrimination isn’t limited to whites. Morrison weaves a supernatural and mysterious tale that, like the Bible it resonates, is multi-layered, difficult to understand and where time flows easily between three eras: the present, the founding of Ruby, and its predecessor Haven, the place freed slaves who wandered through the Oklahoma territories called home. The story is framed by nine men (symbolic of Ruby’s nine founding families) armed with rifles, shotguns, heavy rope, handcuffs, and Mace entering an abandoned mansion to cleanse their community of its four occupants. "They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. They are seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other." The mansion, known as the Convent because it was once just that, houses four women who have fled from abusive relationships and who have chosen to be with each other. There is no valid reason for the manhunt, except that the women are different from Ruby’s inhabitants and they’re tired of having them around, though the women keep to themselves and rarely venture into town. However, most of Ruby’s population (male and female) has some sort of connection to the Convent. The cast of Paradise is large, and I often felt that I was being introduced to each and every member of Ruby. Though the story’s frame is all-male story, the chapter headings are named after women. Morrison does an excellent job iof creating Ruby’s residents. Each is deftly defined, especially the four Convent women. At the center of the tale is the Oven, the community field kitchen built in Haven by the freed slaves and transported brick by brick to Ruby. Someone painted a Black Panther fist on the back of the oven, much to the chagrin of the township. There is also a major controversy brewing regarding the Biblical command etched in stone by the Oven’s builders: Beware the Furrow of His Brow. Paradise starts out mysterious and remains that way throughout the entire novel. As quickly as you want to turn the page, you want to savor the majestic depth of Morrison’s language and imagery. |
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