Toni Morrison - Paradise

So the rule was set and lived a quietly throbbing life because it was never spoken of, except for the hint in words Zechariah forged for the Oven. More than a rule. A conundrum: "Beware the Furrow of His Brow," in which the "You" (understood), vocative case, was not a command to the believers but a threat to those who had disallowed them. It must have taken him months to think up those words-just so-to have multiple meanings: to appear stern, urging obedience to God, but slyly not identifying the understood proper noun or specifying what the Furrow might cause to happen or to whom. So the teenagers Misner organized who wanted to change it to "Be the Furrow of His Brow" were more insightful than they knew. Look what they did to Menus, forcing him to give back or return the woman he brought home to marry. The pretty sandy-haired girl from Virginia. Menus lost (or was forced to give up) the house he'd bought for her and hadn't been sober since. And though they attributed his weekend drunks to his Vietnam memories, and although they laughed with him as he clipped their hair, Pat knew love in its desperate state when she saw it. She believed she had seen it in Menus' eyes as well as in her father's, poorly veiled by his business ventures.

Before she put away the K. D. pages, Pat scribbled in the margin: "Somebody beat up Arnette. The Convent women, as folks say? Or, quiet as it's kept, K. D.?" Then she picked up the file for Best, Roger.

On the back of the title page, labeled: Roger Best m. Delia she wrote: "Daddy, they don't hate us because Mama was your first customer. They hate us because she looked like a cracker and was bound to have cracker-looking children like me, and although I married Billy Cato, who was an 8-rock like you, like them, I passed the skin on to my daughter, as you and everybody knew I would. Notice how a lot of those Sands who married Seawrights are careful to make sure that their children marry into other 8-rock families. We were the first visible glitch, but there was an invisible one that had nothing to do with skin color. I know all of the couples wanted preacher-attended marriages, and many had them. But there were many others that practiced what Fairy DuPres called 'takeovers.' A young widow might take over a single man's house. A widower might ask a friend or a distant relative if he could take over a young girl who had no prospects. Like Billy's family. His mother, Fawn, born a Blackhorse, was taken over by his grandmother's uncle, August Cato. Or, to put it another way, Billy's mother was wife to her own great-uncle. Or another way: my husband's father, August Cato, is also his grandmother's (Bitty Cato Blackhorse's) uncle and therefore Billy's great-granduncle as well. (Bitty Cato's father, Sterl Cato, took over a woman named Honesty Jones. It must have been she who insisted on naming her daughter Friendship, and she was probably riled at hearing the child called Bitty for the rest of her life.) Since Bitty Cato married Peter Blackhorse, and since her daughter, Fawn Blackhorse, was wife to Bitty's uncle, and since Peter Blackhorse is Billy Cato's grandfather-well, you can see the problem with blood rules. It's distant, I know, and August Cato was an old man when he took over little Fawn Blackhorse. And he never would have done it without Blackhorse permission. And he never would have received permission if he had a loose reputation because coupling outside marriage or takeovers was not only frowned upon, it could get you ostracized so completely it behooved the fornicators to pack up and leave. As may have been the case (it would explain the line through his name) with Ethan Blackhorse-Drum's youngest brother-and a woman named Solace, and certainly was believed to be the case with Martha Stone, Menus' mother (although Harper Jury couldn't settle on whom he thought his wife betrayed him with). So August Cato shunned temptation or any thought of looking outside the families and asked Thomas and Peter Blackhorse for Peter's daughter, Fawn. And maybe his advanced age was why she had just the one child, my husband, Billy. Still, the Blackhorse blood is there, and that makes my daughter, Billie Delia, a fifth? cousin to Soane and Dovey, because Peter Blackhorse was brother to Thomas Blackhorse and Sally Blackhorse, and Thomas Blackhorse was Soane's and Dovey's father. Now, Sally Blackhorse married Aaron Poole and had thirteen children. One of whom Aaron was going to name Deep, but Sally pitched a fit, so Aaron, with a humor more grim than anybody would have thought, named him Deeper. But two others of those thirteen children Billie Delia is in love with, and there is something wrong with that but other than number and the blood rules I can't figure out what." Pat underscored the last five words then wrote down her mother's name, drew a line under it, enclosed it in a heart and continued: "The women really tried, Mama. They really did. Kate's mother, Catherine Jury, you remember her, and Fairy DuPres (she's dead now), along with Lone and Dovey Morgan and Charity Flood. But none of them could drive then. You must have believed that deep down they hated you, but not all of them, maybe none of them, because they begged the men to go to the Convent to get help. I heard them. Dovey Morgan was crying as she left to find somebody, going from house to house: to Harper Jury, Catherine's own husband, to Charity's husband, Ace Flood, and to Sargeant Person's (how come that ignorant Negro doesn't know his name is Pierson?). All of the excuses were valid, reasonable. Even with their wives begging they came up with excuses because they looked down on you, Mama, I know it, and despised Daddy for marrying a wife with no last name, a wife without people, a wife of sunlight skin, a wife of racial tampering. Both midwives were in trouble (it was coming too soon, legs folded underneath) and all they wanted was to get one of the nuns at the Convent.

Miss Fairy said one of them used to work in a hospital. Catherine Jury went to Soane's to see if Deek was there. He wasn't, but Dovey was. It was Dovey who went to Seawright's, then Fleetwood's. Went to every house in walking distance. The Moss DuPreses lived way way out. So did Nathan (who would have hitched Hard Goods and galloped to Jesus for help). So did Steward, the Pooles, the Sands and the rest. Finally they got Senior Pulliam to agree. But by the time he got his shoes tied it was too late. Miss Fairy rushed from your bedside to Pulliam's house and hollered through his door-too exhausted to knock, too angry to step inside-and said, 'You can take your shoes back off, Senior! Might as well get your preacher clothes ready so you'll be in time for the funeral!' Then she was gone from there. "When Daddy got back everybody was worried sick about what to do and how long the bodies could last before, father or no father, husband or no husband, you both had to go in the ground. But Daddy came back the second day. No time for a decent wake. So you were his first job. And a wonderful job he did too. You were beautiful. With the baby in the crook of your arm. You would have been so proud of him. "He doesn't blame anybody except himself for being at mortuary graduation. We have quarreled about it and he doesn't agree with me that those 8-rock men didn't want to go and bring a white into town; or else didn't want to drive out to a white's house begging for help; or else they just despised your pale skin so much they thought of reasons why they could not go. Daddy says more than one woman has died in childbirth and I say, who? So the mother without one died and the baby whom you planned to name Faustine, if a girl, or Richard, after Daddy's oldest brother, if a boy, died too. It was a girl, Mama. Faustine. My baby sister. We would have grown up together. Patricia and Faustine.

Too light, maybe, but together it would not have mattered to us.

We'd be a team. I have no aunts or uncles, remember, because all of Daddy's sisters and brothers died of what they called walking pneumonia but what must have been the 1919 influenza epidemic. So I married Billy Cato partly because he was beautiful, partly because he made me laugh, and partly (mostly?) because he had the midnight skin of the Catos and the Blackhorses, along with that Blackhorse feature of stick-straight hair. Like Soane's and Dovey's hair, and like Easter and Scout had. But he died, Billy did, and I took my lightish but not whiteish baby and moved back in your pretty little house with the mortuary and your headstone in back and have been drylongso teaching the children who call me Miss Best using Daddy's last name as everybody else does, so short was the time I was Pat Cato." The words had long ago covered the back of the page, so she was using fresh sheets to continue: "I may as well tell you that except for you and K.D.'s mother, nobody in Ruby has ever died. Please note I said in Ruby and they are real proud about that believing they are blessed and all because after 1953 anybody who died did it in Europe or Korea or someplace outside this town. Even Sweetie's children are still alive and God knows there is no reason they should be. Well, crazy as it sounds, I believe the claim of immortality is this town's rebuke against Daddy's mortuary business, since he has to wait for our killed-in-actions or somebody out at the Convent or an accident someplace else, otherwise his ambulance is never a hearse. (When Billy died there was nothing left to bury except some "effects," including a gold ring too twisted to poke a finger through.) They think Daddy deserves rebuke because he broke the blood rule first, and I wouldn't put it past them to refuse to die just to keep Daddy from success. As it turned out, war dead and accidents in other towns (Miss Fairy died on a trip back to Haven; Ace Flood died in the Demby hospital but was buried in Haven) were all the work Daddy has had and it is hardly enough. Neither is the ambulance business, so I work hard to convince him that the money the town pays me for teaching is just household money and he doesn't have to borrow anymore on his shares in Deek's bank and should forget gasoline stations and what all."