Former Princeton Atelier director Toni Morrison, 84, will see “God Help the Child,” her 11th novel, published April 21 by Knopf.
In her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), Toni Morrison gave us Pecola Breedlove, a poor girl growing up in Ohio in 1941. Pecola is obsessed with notions of white beauty, wishing she could be white and “beautiful,” not black and “ugly.” The gulf between how she looks and how she wishes she looked is a factor when she eventually loses her mind.
In Morrison’s latest, God Help the Child, due out April 21 from Knopf, we meet Bride, a young woman in present day Southern California, who wears only the color white to emphasize the beauty of her blackness. It’s this self confidence, despite a difficult childhood, that as much as anything helps Bride hold it together when her life falls apart.
When Bride (given the name Lula Ann) was born, her light-skinned mother was traumatized. Lula Ann was, in her mother’s words, “so black she scared me. Midnight black, Sudanese black.” The mother shunned her, and the father split. The mother could barely bring herself to touch her daughter, telling her to call her Sweetness, not Mother. “Being that black and having what I think are too-thick lips calling me ‘Mama’ would confuse people,” she says. “Besides, she has funny-colored eyes, crow-black with a blue tint, something witchy about them too.”
Surely the parallels between the two novels are intended. Lula Ann (who rechristens herself Bride in an effort to gain self esteem) even has the blue eyes that Pecola so desired. Not the bluest, but blueish, against perhaps skin as dark as the skin that, in 1941, convinced Pecola Breedlove that she was irredeemably ugly.
What redeems Bride, in her mother’s eyes, is a decision she makes when she is 8 and asked to give evidence in a trial involving a teacher at her school. The teacher, Sofia Huxley, stands accused of child molestation, and Bride testifies that she was among the abused. Her account is instrumental in the guilty verdict against Huxley, who receives a sentence of 25 years to life in prison.
Bride’s strength on the stand gives Sweetness a reason to be proud at last, the only problem being that she lied — her testimony puts an innocent woman in prison. When Huxley is released on parole, 15 years into her sentence, Bride has just been through a bad breakup with her smoldering and enigmatic boyfriend, Booker, who after six months of great sex, announces, “You not the woman I want,” and storms out of her apartment and her life. Adrift, she decides to visit Huxley, leading to a series of brutal confrontations that will lead Bride to reexamine and revector her life.
Readers familiar with Morrison’s historical novels like Beloved (set in 1873), Jazz (1920s) and the more recent A Mercy (1690s) may be excited to hear that the 84-year-old Nobel Prize winner has set her sights on the modern day. When we first meet her, Bride is a very successful cosmetics exec who seems to have overcome her harrowing childhood. Unlike Pecola, she’s not decimated by her mother’s preference for lighter skin. She drives a Jaguar and is getting set to launch her new beauty line, called You, Girl, which she expects will make her even richer.
In a lot of ways, she and her blonde dreadlocked friend and colleague, Brooklyn, are typical millennials: young, beautiful and ambitious, conspicuous consumers conscious of their status and appearance. Meanwhile Booker, sensitive, educated and a musician, has shunned the material life in favor of a rootless, seeking existence. But there is an undercurrent in each character’s arc that protects them from seeming precious or simple. The novel shifts among points of view: Sweetness, Bride, Brooklyn, Booker, a few others.
As in other Morrison novels, momentous events are often revealed in an oblique fashion. Cars crashes happen and fiery deaths pounce on us from nowhere; terrible crimes are first revealed via a look back, to be parsed out over subsequent chapters. As always, it’s a writing style that works if you are ready for it.
As you’d expect given the title, children suffer. Even Sofia Huxley, who’s revealed to have grown up with a stiflingly strict mother. Many characters recount experiences of childhood sexual abuse, and the brother of one character is raped and murdered by a serial killer. Bride wasn’t actually molested by Huxley, but her classmates were assaulted by other teachers at the school. And she does witness a sexual assault as a child, an attack that Sweetness tells her to shut up about or they’ll risk losing their apartment.
Bride’s relationship with Sweetness is icy, but relatively benign compared to the plight of Raisin, whom Bride meets when a mishap during her journey of self discovery strands her in a logging community in California’s rural north. Raisin has been “rescued” by a couple of neohippies, Steve and Evelyn, who found her at age 6 in the city and have taken to the backwoods where they are living “a real life.” The story of Raisin’s childhood might have been bleakest of all, if Steve and Evelyn hadn’t essentially kidnapped her and given her a cat she could love.
God Help the Child is a fast read, short at 192 pages, but it’s anything but slight. The less substantial a thing feels, the more substance it probably has. It’s packed to the corners with symbolism and layers of meaning. There’s Bride’s name, her job in cosmetics (despite not wearing makeup herself), her car and her all-white wardrobe; Brooklyn’s appropriated dreadlocks and Steve and Evelyn’s voluntary poverty, their notions of what constitutes real life; Booker’s scars and his trumpet. Just to name a few.
In The Bluest Eye, the character of Soaphead Church levels at God the charge of not helping Pecola. I can’t say whether Morrison intends for us to draw a line from Pecola Breedlove to Bride, but you can draw one; you can also draw a line from the doomed baby born in the final pages of The Bluest Eye to the unborn baby revealed toward the end of God Help the Child. It’s as if, all these years later, Morrison wishes she hadn’t told us the fate of the baby in The Bluest Eye, so now we have a new one whose fate we can project — although the title of the latest work may be a hint as to how she expects things to work out.
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