Toni Morrison - Paradise

"This is why we are here: in this single moment of aching sadness-in contemplating the short life and the unacceptable, incomprehensible death of a child-we confirm, defer or lose our faith. Here in the tick tock of this moment, in this place all our questions, all our fear, our outrage, confusion, desolation seem to merge, snatch away the earth and we feel as though we are falling. Here, we might say, it is time to halt, to linger this one time and reject platitudes about sparrows falling under His eye; about the good dying young (this child didn't have a choice about being good); or about death being the only democracy. This is the time to ask the questions that are really on our minds. Who could do this to a child? Who could permit this for a child? And why?"

Sweetie Fleetwood wouldn't discuss it. Her child would not be laid to rest on Steward Morgan's land. It was a brand-new problem: the subject of burial sites had not come up in Ruby for twenty years, and there was astonishment as well as sadness when the task became necessary.

When Save-Marie, the youngest of Sweetie and Jeff's children, died, people assumed the rest of them, Noah, Esther and Ming, would quickly follow. The first was given a strong name for a strong son as well as being the name of his great-grandfather. The second was named Esther for the great-grandmother who loved and cared for the first so selflessly. The third had a name Jeff insisted upon-something having to do with the war. This last child's name was a request (or a lament): Save-Marie, and who was to say whether the call had not been answered. Thus the tense discussion of a formal cemetery was not only because of Sweetie's wishes and the expectation of more funerals, but out of a sense that, for complicated reasons, the reaper was no longer barred entry from Ruby. Richard Misner was therefore presiding over consecrated ground and launching a new institution. But whether to use the ad hoc cemetery on Steward's ranch-where Ruby Smith lay-was a question out of the question for Sweetie. Under the influence of her brother, Luther, and blaming Steward for the trouble he got her husband and father-in-law into, she said she would rather do what Roger Best had done (dug a grave on his own property), and she couldn't care less that twenty-three years had passed since that quick and poorly attended backyard burial took place. Most people understood why she was making such a fuss (grief plus blame was a heady brew) but Pat Best believed that Sweetie's stubbornness was more calculated. Rejecting a Morgan offer, casting doubt on Morgan righteousness might squeeze some favors from Morgan pockets. And if Pat's 8-rock theory was correct, Sweetie's vindictiveness put the 8-rocks in the awkward position of deciding to have a real and formal cemetery in a town full of immortals. Something seismic had happened since July. So here they were, under a soapy sky on a mild November day, gathered a mile or so beyond the last Ruby house, which was, of course, Morgan land, but nobody had the heart to tell Sweetie so. Standing among the crowd surrounding the bereaved Fleetwoods, Pat regained something close to stability. Earlier, at the funeral service, the absence of a eulogy had made her cry. Now she was her familiar, dispassionately amused self. At least she hoped she was dispassionate, and hoped amusement was what she was feeling. She knew there were other views about her attitude, some of which Richard Misner had expressed ("Sad. Sad and cold"), but she was a scholar, not a romantic, and steeled herself against Misner's graveside words to observe the mourners instead. He and Anna Flood had returned two days after the assault on the Convent women, and it took four days for him to learn what had happened.

Pat gave him the two editions of the official story: One, that nine men had gone to talk to and persuade the Convent women to leave or mend their ways; there had been a fight; the women took other shapes and disappeared into thin air. And two (the Fleetwood-Jury version), that five men had gone to evict the women; that four others-the authors-had gone to restrain or stop them; these four were attacked by the women but had succeeded in driving them out, and they took off in their Cadillac; but unfortunately, some of the five had lost their heads and killed the old woman. Pat left Richard to choose for himself which rendition he preferred. What she withheld from him was her own: that nine 8-rocks murdered five harmless women (a) because the women were impure (not 8-rock); (b) because the women were unholy (fornicators at the least, abortionists at most); and (c) because they could-which was what being an 8-rock meant to them and was also what the "deal" required.

Richard didn't believe either of the stories rapidly becoming gospel, and spoke to Simon Cary and Senior Pulliam, who clarified other parts of the tale. But because neither had decided on the meaning of the ending and, therefore, had not been able to formulate a credible, sermonizable account of it, they could not assuage Richard's dissatisfaction. It was Lone who provided him with the livid details that several people were quick to discredit, because Lone, they said, was not reliable. Except for her, no one overheard the men at the Oven and who knew what they really said? Like the rest of the witnesses she arrived after the shots were fired; besides, she and Dovey could be wrong about whether the two women in the house were dead or just wounded; and finally, she didn't see anybody outside the house, living or dead.

As for Lone, she became unhinged by the way the story was being retold; how people were changing it to make themselves look good.

Other than Deacon Morgan, who had nothing to say, every one of the assaulting men had a different tale and their families and friends (who had been nowhere near the Convent) supported them, enhancing, recasting, inventing misinformation. Although the DuPreses, Beauchamps, Sandses and Pooles backed up her version, even their reputation for precision and integrity could not prevent altered truth from taking hold in other quarters. If there were no victims the story of the crime was play for anybody's tongue. So Lone shut up and kept what she felt certain of folded in her brain: God had given Ruby a second chance. Had made Himself so visible and unarguable a presence that even the outrageously prideful (like Steward) and the uncorrectably stupid (like his lying nephew) ought to be able to see it. He had actually swept up and received His servants in broad daylight, for goodness' sake! right before their very eyes, for Christ's sake! Since they were accusing her of lying, she decided to keep quiet and watch the hand of God work the disbelievers and the false witnesses. Would they know they'd been spoken to? Or would they drift further from His ways? One thing, for sure: they could see the Oven; they couldn't misread or misspeak that, so they had better hurry up and fix its slide before it was too late-which it might already be, for the young people had changed its words again. No longer were they calling themselves Be the Furrow of His Brow. The graffiti on the hood of the Oven now was "We Are the Furrow of His Brow."

However sharp the divisions about what really took place, Pat knew the big and agreed-upon fact was that everyone who had been there left the premises certain that lawmen would be happily swarming all over town (they'd killed a white woman, after all), arresting virtually all of Ruby's businessmen. When they learned there were no dead to report, transport or bury, relief was so great they began to forget what they'd actually done or seen. Had it not been for Luther Beauchamp-who told the most damning story-and Pious, Deed Sands and Aaron-who corroborated much of Lone's version-the whole thing might have been sanitized out of existence. Yet even they could not bring themselves to report unnatural deaths in a house with no bodies, which might lead to the discovery of natural deaths in an automobile full of bodies. Though not privy to many people's confidence, Pat gathered from talks with her father, with Kate and from deliberate eavesdropping that four months later they were still chewing the problem, asking God for guidance if they were wrong: if white law should, contrary to everything they knew and believed, be permitted to deal with matters heretofore handled among and by them. The difficulties churned and entangled everybody: distribution of blame, prayers for understanding and forgiveness, arrogant selfdefense, outright lies, and a host of unanswered questions that Richard Misner kept putting to them. So the funeral came as a pause but not a conclusion.