Toni Morrison - Paradise

Forty-two years ago he had fought for hand room in the rear window of Big Daddy Morgan's Model T, space in which to wave goodbye to his mother and baby sister, Ruby. The rest of the family-Daddy, Uncle Pryor, his older brother Elder, and Steward, his twin-were packed tight against two peck baskets of food. The journey they were about to begin would take days, maybe two weeks. The Second Grand Tour, Daddy said. The Last Grand Tour, laughed Uncle Pryor. The first one had been in 1910, before the twins had been born, while Haven was still struggling to come alive. Big Daddy drove his brother Pryor and his firstborn son, Elder, all over the state and beyond to examine, review and judge other Colored towns. They planned to visit two outside Oklahoma and five within: Boley, Langston City, Rentiesville, Taft, Clearview, Mound Bayou, Nicodemus. In the end, they made it to only four. Big Daddy, Uncle Pryor and Elder spoke endlessly of that trip, how they matched wits with and debated preachers, pharmacists, dry-goods store owners, doctors, newspaper publishers, schoolteachers, bankers. They discussed malaria, the booze bill, the threat of white immigrants, the problems with Creek freedmen, the trustworthiness of boosters, the practicality of high book learning, the need for technical training, the consequences of statehood, lodges and the violence of whites, random and organized, that swirled around them. They stood at the edge of cornfields, walked rows of cotton. They visited print shops, elocution classes, church services, sawmills; they observed irrigation methods and storage systems. Mostly they looked at land, houses, roads.

Eleven years later Tulsa was bombed, and several of the towns Big Daddy, Pryor and Elder had visited were gone. But against all odds, in 1932 Haven was thriving. The crash had not touched it: personal savings were substantial, Big Daddy Morgan's bank had taken no risks (partly because white bankers locked him out, partly because the subscription shares had been well protected) and families shared everything, made sure no one was short. Cotton crop ruined? The sorghum growers split their profit with the cotton growers. A barn burned? The pine sappers made sure lumber "accidentally" rolled off wagons at certain places to be picked up later that night. Pigs rooted up a neighbor's patch? The neighbor was offered replacements by everybody and was assured ham at slaughter. The man whose hand was healing from a chopping block mistake would not get to the second clean bandage before a fresh cord was finished and stacked. Having been refused by the world in 1890 on their journey to Oklahoma, Haven residents refused each other nothing, were vigilant to any need or shortage. The Morgans did not admit to taking pleasure in the failure of some of those Colored towns-they carried the rejection of 1890 like a bullet in the brain. They simply remarked on the mystery of God's justice and decided to take the young twins and go on a second tour to see for themselves.

What they saw was sometimes nothing, sometimes sad, and Deek remembered everything. Towns that looked like slave quarters, picked up and moved. Towns intoxicated with wealth. Other towns affecting sleep-squirreling away money, certificates, deeds in unpainted houses on unpaved streets.

In one of the prosperous ones he and Steward watched nineteen Negro ladies arrange themselves on the steps of the town hall. They wore summer dresses of material the lightness, the delicacy of which neither of them had ever seen. Most of the dresses were white, but two were lemon yellow and one a salmon color. They wore small, pale hats of beige, dusty rose, powdery blue: hats that called attention to the wide, sparkly eyes of the wearers. Their waists were not much bigger than their necks. Laughing and teasing, they preened for a photographer lifting his head from beneath a black cloth only to hide under it again. Following a successful pose, the ladies broke apart in small groups, bending their tiny waists with rippling laughter, walking arm in arm. One adjusted another's brooch; one exchanged her pocketbook with another. Slender feet turned and tipped in thin leather shoes. Their skin, creamy and luminous in the afternoon sun, took away his breath. A few of the younger ones crossed the street and walked past the rail fence, close, so close, to where he and Steward sat.

They were on their way to a restaurant just beyond. Deek heard musical voices, low, full of delight and secret information, and in their tow a gust of verbena. The twins did not even look at each other. Without a word they agreed to fall off the railing. While they wrestled on the ground, ruining their pants and shirts, the Negro ladies turned around to see. Deek and Steward got the smiles they wanted before Big Daddy interrupted his conversation and stepped off the porch to pick each son up by his pants waist, haul them both onto the porch and crack butt with his walking stick.

Even now the verbena scent was clear; even now the summer dresses, the creamy, sunlit skin excited him. If he and Steward had not thrown themselves off the railing they would have burst into tears. So, among the vivid details of that journey-the sorrow, the stubbornness, the cunning, the wealth-Deek's image of the nineteen summertime ladies was unlike the photographer's. His remembrance was pastel colored and eternal.

The morning after the meeting at Calvary, pleased with his bird quota and fired, not tired, from no sleep, he decided to check out the Oven before opening up the bank. So he turned left instead of right on Central and drove past the school on the west side, Ace's Grocery, Fleetwood's Furniture and Appliance and several houses on the east. When he arrived at the site he circled it. Except for a few soda cans and some paper that had escaped the trash barrel, the place was blank. No fists. No loungers. He should speak to Anna Flood who owned Ace's store now-get her to clean up the pop cans and mess that came from purchases made at her store. That's what Ace, her father, used to do. Swept that place like it was his own kitchen, inside, out and if you'd let him he'd sweep all across the road. Pulling back onto Central, Deek noticed Misner's beat-up Ford parked at Anna's. Beyond, to his left, he could hear schoolchildren group-reciting a poem he'd learned by rote too, except he had had to hear Dunbar's lines only once to memorize them completely and forever. When he and Steward had enlisted there was a lot to learn-from how to tie an army tie to how to pack a bag. And just as they had in Haven's schoolhouse, they had been first to understand everything, remember everything. But none of it was as good as what they learned at home, sitting on the floor in a firelit room, listening to war stories; to stories of great migrations-those who made it and those who did not; to the failures and triumphs of intelligent men-their fear, their bravery, their confusion; to tales of love deep and permanent. All there in the one book they owned then.

Black leather covers with gold lettering; the pages thinner than young leaves, than petals. The spine frayed into webbing at the top, the corners fingered down to skin. The strong words, strange at first, becoming familiar, gaining weight and hypnotic beauty the more they heard them, made them their own.

As Deek drove north on Central, it and the side streets seemed to him as satisfactory as ever. Quiet white and yellow houses full of industry; and in them were elegant black women at useful tasks; orderly cupboards minus surfeit or miserliness; linen laundered and ironed to perfection; good meat seasoned and ready for roasting. It was a view he would be damned if K. D. or the idleness of the young would disturb. It was a far cry from the early days of Haven and his grandfather would have scoffed at the ease of it-buying property with dollars ready to hand instead of trading years of labor for it. He would have been embarrassed by grandsons who worked twelve hours five days a week instead of the eighteen-to-twenty-hour days Haven people once needed just to keep alive, and who could hunt quail for pleasure rather than the desperate need to meet a wife and eight children at table without shame. And his cold, rheumy eyes would have narrowed at the sight of the Oven. No longer the meeting place to report on what done or what needed; on illness, births, deaths, comings and goings. The Oven that had witnessed the baptized entering sanctified life was now reduced to watching the lazy young. Two of Sargeant's boys, three of Poole's, two Seawrights, two Beauchamps, a couple of DuPres children-Sut's and Pious' girls. Even Arnette and Pat Best's only child used to dawdle there. All of whom ought to be somewhere chopping, canning, mending, fetching. The Oven whose every brick had heard live chords praising His name was now subject to radio music, record music-music already dead when it filtered through a black wire trailing from Anna's store to the Oven like a snake. But his grandfather would have been pleased too. Instead of children and adults convening at night in those early days to scratch letters and figures with pebbles on scraps of shale, learning to read from those who could, there was a schoolhouse here too. Not as big as the one they'd built in Haven, but it was open eight months a year and no begging the state for money to run it. Not one cent.