Morrison tackles race in bold 'Child'
Toni Morrison is 84, about six decades older than Lula Ann Bridewell, the central character of her pained, urgent new novella, God Help the Child (***½ out of four). What has changed for black women during those 60 years?
Everything, the book suggests; nothing, too. James Baldwin once said that when he was young, "the world was white…now it is struggling to remain white – a very different thing."
As Lula Ann's story begins, she's evidence of that distinction, living a life probably unavailable to black women of Morrison's generation, with a powerful job at a cosmetics company and luxurious objects all around her.
She also has a feeling of shame that none of those attainments can remedy. It comes from being dark-skinned, "midnight black," and as a child, despite her beauty, always therefore disgusting to her lighter-skinned mother. "I used to pray she would slap my face or spank me just to feel her touch," Lula Ann says.
God Help the Child is the tale of Lula Ann's halting rebirth from this shame. It takes the shape of a fable: she departs her life and goes in search of Booker, an enigmatic former boyfriend, and on her half-mythic journey begins to physically regress toward childhood, her breasts getting smaller, the hair disappearing from her body, her earring holes closing.
It's a lovely effect, reminiscent of the passage of time in John Cheever's great story "The Swimmer." Can other characters see Lula Ann's transformation? By the end of this brief and beautiful book, we don't know precisely whether the change was real or imagined; nor does it matter, because of course the accident of skin color and the penalties that can come with it aren't "real," either.
Morrison also has a secondary theme, the sexual abuse of children, though it's sketchier and less successful than her handling of race. Nearly every character has a close run-in with a molester – another magical effect, I wondered, showing how pervasive predators can seem after you've met just one, or melodrama, of which the author has been guilty in her lesser work?
In all, though, God Save the Child is superb, its story gliding along the tracks of Morrison's utterly assured prose. (She could write a great Don DeLillo novel with her left hand: Lula Ann's Jaguar is "sleek, rat gray with a vanity license, looked like a gun.")
It's to this Nobel laureate's credit that so late in life she's still looking outward, tracking what a woman like herself might feel, if she were born in 1992: a great novelist, with time left to say a few more prayers for her innumerable descendants.
God Help the Child
By Toni Morrison
Knopf, 178 pp.
3 1/2 stars out of four
Charles Finch is author of The Last Enchantments.