Toni Morrison - Paradise

Pat climbed the stairs to her bedroom and decided to while away the rest of the evening on her history project, or rather what used to be a history project but was nothing of the sort now. It began as a gift to the citizens of Ruby-a collection of family trees; the genealogies of each of the fifteen families. Upside-down trees, the trunks sticking in the air, the branches sloping down. When the trees were completed, she had begun to supplement the branches of who begat whom with notes: what work they did, for example, where they lived, to what church they belonged. Some of the nicer touches ("Was Missy Rivers, wife of Thomas Blackhorse, born near the Mississippi River? Her name seems to suggest…") she had gleaned from her students' autobiographical compositions. Not anymore. Parents complained about their children being asked to gossip, to divulge what could be private information, secrets, even. After that, most of her notes came from talking to people, asking to see Bibles and examining church records. Things got out of hand when she asked to see letters and marriage certificates. The women narrowed their eyes before smiling and offering to freshen her coffee. Invisible doors closed, and the conversation turned to weather. But she didn't want or need any further research. The trees still required occasional alterations-births, marriages, deaths-but her interest in the supplementary notes increased as the notes did, and she gave up all pretense to objective comment. The project became unfit for any eyes except her own. It had reached the point where the small m period was a joke, a dream, a violation of law that had her biting her thumbnail in frustration. Who were these women who, like her mother, had only one name? Celeste, Olive, Sorrow, Ivlin, Pansy. Who were these women with generalized last names?

Brown, Smith, Rivers, Stone, Jones. Women whose identity rested on the men they married-if marriage applied: a Morgan, a Flood, a Blackhorse, a Poole, a Fleetwood. Dovey had let her have the Morgan Bible for weeks, but it was the twenty minutes she spent looking at the Blackhorse Bible that convinced her that a new species of tree would be needed to go further, to record accurately the relationships among the fifteen families of Ruby, their ancestors in Haven and, further back, in Mississippi and Louisiana. A voluntary act to fill empty hours had become intensive labor streaked with the bad feelings that ride the skin like pollen when too much about one's neighbors is known. The town's official story, elaborated from pulpits, in Sunday school classes and ceremonial speeches, had a sturdy public life. Any footnotes, crevices or questions to be put took keen imagination and the persistence of a mind uncomfortable with oral histories. Pat had wanted proof in documents where possible to match the stories, and where proof was not available she interpreted-freely but, she thought, insightfully because she alone had the required emotional distance. She alone would figure out why a line was drawn through Ethan Blackhorse's name in the Blackhorse Bible and what the heavy ink blot hid next to Zechariah's name in the Morgan Bible. Her father told her some things, but he refused to talk about other things. Girlfriends like Kate and Anna were open, but older women-Dovey, Soane and Lone DuPres-hinted the most while saying the least. "Oh, I think those brothers had a disagreement of some kind." That's all Soane would say about the crossed-out name of her great-uncle. And not another word.

There were nine large intact families who made the original journey, who were thrown out and cast away in Fairly, Oklahoma, and went on to found Haven. Their names were legend: Blackhorse, Morgan, Poole, Fleetwood, Beauchamp, Cato, Flood and both DuPres families. With their siblings, wives and children, they were seventynine or eighty-one in all (depending on whether the two stolen children were counted). Along with them came fragments of other families: a sister and a brother, four cousins, a river of aunts and greataunts shepherding the children of their dead sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews. Stories about these fragments, which made up some fifty more, surfaced in the writing compositions of Pat's students, the gossip and recollections at picnics, church dinners and woman talk over chores and hair preparation. Grandmothers sitting on the floor while a granddaughter scratched their scalps liked to reminisce aloud. Then bits of tales emerged like sparks lighting the absences that hovered over their childhoods and the shadows that dimmed their maturity. Anecdotes marked the spaces that had sat with them at the campfire. Jokes limned the mementos-a ring, a pocket watch-they had clamped in their fists while they slept and the descriptions of the clothes they had worn: too big shoes that belonged to a brother; the shawl of a great-aunt; the lace-trimmed bonnet of a younger sister. They talked about the orphans, males and females aged twelve to sixteen, who spotted the travelers and asked to join, and the two toddlers they simply snatched up because the circumstances in which the children were found wouldn't let them do otherwise. Another eight. So about one hundred and fifty-eight total completed the journey. When they got to the outskirts of Fairly, it was agreed that Drum Blackhorse, Rector Morgan and his brothers, Pryor and Shepherd, would announce themselves, while the others waited with Zechariah, who was too lame by then to stand unaided and straight in front of unknown men whose respect he would have demanded and whose pity would have broken him in two. His foot was shot through-by whom or why nobody knew or admitted, for the point of the story seemed to be that when the bullet entered he neither cried out nor limped away. It was that wound that forced him to stay behind and let his friend and his sons speak in his stead. It proved, however, to be a blessing because he missed witnessing the actual Disallowing; and missed hearing disbelievable words formed in the mouths of men to other men, men like them in all ways but one. Afterwards the people were no longer nine families and some more. They became a tight band of wayfarers bound by the enormity of what had happened to them. Their horror of whites was convulsive but abstract. They saved the clarity of their hatred for the men who had insulted them in ways too confounding for language: first by excluding them, then by offering them staples to exist in that very exclusion. Everything anybody wanted to know about the citizens of Haven or Ruby lay in the ramifications of that one rebuff out of many. But the ramifications of those ramifications were another story.

Pat went to the window and raised it. Her mother's grave lay at theedge of the yard. The wind soughed as though trying to dislodge sequins from the black crepe sky. Lilac bushes swished the side of the house. The mineral trace was overcome by the smell of supper food in the air. Pat closed the window, returned to her desk to prepare for another entry in her log.

Arnette and K. D., married last April, were expecting a child next March. Or so said Lone DuPres, who ought to know. Lone was one of the stolen babies. Fairy DuPres had noticed her sitting quiet as a rock outside the door of a sod house. The sight of the silent child in a filthy shift could have remained just one more lonely picture they came across, except that the desolation about the place was unforgiving.

Fairy was fifteen then and bullheaded. She and Missy Rivers went to investigate. Inside was the dead mother and not a piece of bread in sight. Missy groaned before she spit. Fairy said, "God damn it. 'Scuse me, Lord," and picked the baby up. When they told the others what they'd found, seven men reached for their shovels: Drum Blackhorse, his sons Thomas and Peter, Rector Morgan, Able Flood, Brood Poole, Sr., and Nathan DuPres' father, Juvenal. While they dug, Fairy fed the baby water-soaked meal cake. Praise Compton tore her underskirt to wrap around it. Fulton Best fashioned a sturdy cross. Zechariah, flanked by two of his boys, Shepherd and Pryor, and resting his ruined foot on its heel, delivered a burial prayer. His daughters Loving, Ella and Selanie gathered pink yarrow for the grave. There was a serious discussion about what to do with the child-where to place her- because the men seemed adamant about not adding a half-starved baby to their own quarter-starved ones. Fairy put up such a fight she wore them down and then argued with Bitty Cato over the name. Fairy won that, too, and named the baby Lone because that's how they found her. And Lone she still was for she never married, and when Fairy, who raised her and taught her everything she came to know about midwifery, died, Lone slipped right in and took over the birthing for everybody except now Arnette was insisting on going to the hospital in Demby to give birth. It cut Lone to the quick (she still believed that decent women had their babies at home and saloon women delivered in hospitals), but she knew the Fleetwoods hadn't given up on thinking she was partly responsible for Sweetie and Jeff's children, in spite of the fact that she had delivered thirty-two healthy babies to doing-just-fine mothers since the last broken Fleetwood baby was delivered. So she said nothing except that Arnette's time would be March of '75.