Recreating the Black Self: The Hidden Text in Toni Morrison's Jazz

We are a very practical people, very down-toearth, even shrewd people. But within that practicality we also accepted what I suppose could be called superstition and magic, which is another way of knowing things. But to blend these two worlds together at the same time was enhancing, not limiting. (Toni Morrison "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation" 329-330) In an essay that discusses Toni Morrison's authorial voice and her deconstruction of Western realist epistemology Susan Sniader Lanser focuses on the two areas that Morrison highlights in her depiction of human life and behaviour - the inexplicable, and the unknowable. The first revolves around the idea that characters and events cannot be explained with certainty because it is "impossible to assign causes to effects or to delineate clear boundaries of responsibility" (Lanser 131); besides, human behaviour "remains only partially amenable to explanatory forms" (Lanser 132). The unknowable, meanwhile, has to do with the inarticulable or "what realism has designated non-existent or impossible" (Lanser 133). On the one hand the inexplicable conveys a recognition of life's disorder' and of man's robustness and variety; on the other the unknowable evokes a sense of the mystical. As Lanser's reading shows Morrison's approach is in keeping with the postmodern literary concern with reinterpretation and reinvention; her treatment of the human condition exposes the "inadequacy of white European ways of knowing" (Lanser 133). In so doing she constructs an authorial position that connects with the folkloric vision of African-American experience and, I would add, with black female imagination. In terms of culture and epistemology the suppressed or marginalised assumes authority. Although Lanser's remarks are directed at the writer's earlier works the narrative voice in Morrison's latest novel, Jazz, makes clear that the inexplicable and the unknowable are still central to her portrayal of African-American life. The novel opens with the terse pronouncement by the narrator: "Sth, I know that woman" (3). What follows is a winding narrative that serves to qualify the claim of knowing. As the rest of the opening paragraph indicates the gap between action and explanation and between event and meaning is glaring. The diction and syntax accentuate the paradoxical and the strange: Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, "I love you." (3) Near the end of the novel the narrator realises the limitations in the depiction of character and event: Something is missing there. Something rogue. Something else you have to figure in before you can figure it out. (228)

The attempt to delineate responsibility and blame leads ultimately to an admission of helplessness. The narrator remarks: I missed the people altogether.... Now it's clear why they contradicted me at every turn... They knew how little I could be counted on.... That when I invented stories about them - and doing it seemed to me so fine - I was completely in their hands.... Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable - human, I guess you'd say, while I was the predictable one, confused in my solitude into arrogance, thinking my space, my view was the only one that was or that mattered. (220) As in Song of Solomon and Beloved what Morrison does in Jazzis to link the inexplicable and the unknowable with the African-American quest for freedom and self-knowledge. In the process she evokes the mysterious inner life of her people and reveals the power and beauty that prevail beneath the suffering and anguish. Mental and emotional states give rise to strange eruptions which confuse and obliterate distinctions between presence and absence, guilt and innocence. The problem also lies with the fact that identities are not clearly definable. The self in torment especially is often splintered. Yet in other respects it is an amorphous conglomerate of I and the Not I, a merging of self and other, of known and unknown. Thus psychological turmoil spills over into fantastic flights, imaginings, and extraordinary gestures; hauntings and portents create a sense of unreality. The mood shifts from hysteria to hints of mystery and wonder. The tension between order and disorder, between sense and non sense deepens to an increasing impression of some kind of hidden life, luminous and powerful. The rhythm of jazz, of snapping fingers and clicking heels suggests the freedom and solace of an urgent secret vitality that lies beyond the circumscribed limits of common experience and knowledge. It seeps and slips through and between the "cracks" (22) and "crevices" (227) of surface routine, approximated only as a "shade" (227) that "stretches at the edge of a dream" (227). One woman finds the cracks but her husband is not far behind. Morrison's narrator seems to be writing two novels at the same time. One is an attempt to rationalise the circumstances and challenges of contemporary black life in New York City while the other writes itself, bringing to the fore glimpses of a people's spirit and passion that do not conform to recognizable norms of behaviour and experience. What is achieved at the end is not merely an account of continuing oppression and the inevitable denudation of African-American life. There is ultimately a sense of recreation. The narrator says at the close of the novel: If I were able I'd say it. Say, make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you.... (229) On one level recreation looks to the process by which Violet and Joe Trace reconstruct their life and build anew their relationship by means of a sensible review of their priorities. This seems to be a rational working out of their problems. But recreation is also discovery and involves a full opening out to intimations of mysterious, unrealised rhythms of being within the self. The novel begins by describing the nature and extent of Black suffering. In particular it focuses on the predicament of one couple - the Traces - whose flight from country to City marks the constant threat of poverty and deprivation. The struggle for freedom, however, is complicated by historical and personal factors. A keen sense of the past and its related traumas invariably surfaces.

The spectre of Black history is first apparent in the sufferings of the older generations. For young men and women like Violet and Joe dark memories of the past give rise to fears for the present and create a lingering self-consciousness. While fathers are strong emblems of Black ancestry, mothers provide the more compelling images of dislocation and wretchedness. There is thus a fixation on the mother which is bound up with a wary recollection of what has gone before and a terror of what is yet to come. And this is not just paranoia. Poverty, degradation, and exploitation do still confront the later generations. The ghost of the mother persists and exerts its emotional and psychological toll. At the centre of Jazz, therefore, is the strange, desolate yet arresting figure of a wild woman, a mother, who lives naked, in hiding in the woods, a sinister reminder of the past, but a dreadful warning of the present as well. This is Joe's mother, Wild, a woman abandoned who has in turn abandoned her child at birth. The maternal role has clearly become a tragic perpetuation of Black suffering. The mother is womb and tomb. In her is encapsulated the plight of the Black race. The poignant image of the mother further reveals other aspects of Black affliction. Exploitation and abuse often result in total surrender. This constitutes the double burden of the race. Mothers in the novel constantly attempt suicide or withdrawal in submission to their predicament. But capitulation can also involve a more subtle yet no less ignominous response. For there is often a self-consciousness accompanied by an attraction to whiteness that is the underside of oppression and prejudice. The desire to break free of the past, to forge ahead, while it is intensified by prevailing conditions, is also partly prompted by a desire to blend with the white population, to look and live like the white man. This frequently expresses itself in socio-economic terms so that even a wild woman living all alone in the woods has her own secret hoard of white treasures - a rocking chair without an arm, a set of silver brushes and a silver cigar case, a pair of man's trousers "with buttons of bone", and a silk shirt "carefully folded" (184). Nonetheless, the Black self also embodies an exciting and portentuous vitality. The Black woman, Wild, although very much a victim and an outcast, still presents a powerful image of sensuous beauty and mystery. The fierce passions that exude from her very being evoke an ardent subterranean life that mocks and defeats the narrator's rational and common-sense approach (seen, for example, in the tendency to dismiss Violet as crazy and Joe as foolish or helpless). Morrison's protagonists, Violet and Joe Trace, were determined to escape the plight of their mother. They had come away from the country to live in New York for "the City makes people think they can do what they want and get away with it" (8). Both worked hard to achieve a comfortable life. But the apartment they occupy when the novel opens, though well-furnished, is "situated in the middle of the building so the ... windows have no access to the moon or the light of a street lamp" (12). Besides a job at a hotel Joe sells a brand of cosmetics called Cleopatra to a Black female clientele. Violet, meanwhile, keeps house and works part-time as a hairdresser. Life in the City, as it turns out, is not pretty or easy (8). Vanishing creams, hair dyes and hair pressed straight reveal the unspoken anxieties of the AfricanAmericans. For years Violet has nursed a secret faseination with the image of a blonde baby, Golden Gray, whom her grandmother had looked after in a white woman's home. Joe, on his part, seems to have a liking for fairer women; Dorcas, the girl he shot in an apparent fit of jealousy, had "high-yellow skin" (97) unlike Violet who is "black as soot" (75). The deep awareness of whiteness deflates and ruptures the sense of self. The City eompletes the devastation. For in New York there is no freedom only an endless effort to keep up: Round and round about the town. That's the way the City spins you.... You can ' t get off the track a City lays for you. Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses - young loving. (120)

After twenty years in New York the Traces discovered that they hardly spoke to each other. Childless, Violet took to sleeping with a doll and Joe turned to an eighteen-year-old girl. A terrible sense of dereliction is conveyed as Joe speaks of his condition at the time he met Dorcas: They said the City makes you lonely, but since I'd been trained by the best woodsman ever, loneliness was a thing couldn't get near me. Shoot. Country boy; country man. How did I know what an eighteen-year-old girl might instigate in a grown man whose wife is sleeping with a doll? Make me know a loneliness I could never imagine in a forest empty of people for fifteen miles, or on a riverbank with nothing but live bait for company. (129) Joe's search for his mother, Wild, from the age of fourteen was peremptory. It was first a need to belong and perhaps to know his roots. But it was also an affirmation of his bereft state. For Joe was exploited, often unemployed, and forced to lead a make-shift kind of life. His description of his mother's situation to some extent fits his own circumstances: She was powerless, invisible, wastefully daft. Everywhere and nowhere. (179) For twenty years after the Traces shifted to New York Joe seemed to abandon the search for the mother. He was busy building a new life and constantly seeking opportunities for advancement. But at the age of fifty-three Joe sought the company of a young girl, Dorcas, and with her he revived the memory of his mother, something he never did with Violet during the twenty years they were together. Deeper forces seemed to take over from the surface life of tough competition and hard-earned success. On the one hand Dorcas embodied the "young loving" (120) that he had missed in the mad scramble for jobs and better prospects. On the other she became an extension of the mother he never found. Joe makes no distinction between the two women: When I find her, I know - I bet my life - she won't be holed up with one of them. His clothes won't be all mixed up with hers. Not her. Not Dorcas. She'll be alone. Hardheaded. Wild, even. But alone." (182) Joe's preoccupation with his mother is not just a neurotic fixation. It seems, in part, to signal a sensitivity that derives from a certain ardour and vivacity. For very often the image of his mother is evoked in an atmosphere of wonder and beauty: Important things like how the hibiscus smells on the bank of a stream at dusk; how he can barely see his knees poking through the holes in his trousers in that light, so what makes him think he can see her hand even if she did decide to shove it through the bushes and confirm, once and for all, that she was indeed his mother? ... Her hand, her fingers poking through the blossoms, touching his; maybe letting him touch hers.... All she had to do was to give him a sign, her hand thrust through the leaves, the white flowers, would be enough ....

(36-37) In a way this links up with that sensuous and almost erotic ripeness that so richly filled his life in the country, and which is lacking in Now York: There is no air in the City but there is breath, and every morning it races through him like laughing gas brightening his eyes, his talk, and his expectations. In no time at all he forgets little pebbly creeks and apple trees so old they lay their branches along the ground and you have to reach down or stoop to pick the fruit. He forgets a sun that used to slide up like the yolk of a good country egg, thick and red-orange at the bottom of the sky, and he doesn't miss it, doesn't look up to see what happened to it or to stars made irrelevant by the light of thrilling, wasteful street lamps. (34) The intense and lush images are not totally lost, however, even as Joe seems driven to distraction by later events. They keep coming back to him not just as memories but rather like effulgences that radiate as much from the present as from the past especially during the time when he was looking for Dorcas. Ultimately, such electric moments fuse into a tenuous inner life, and past and present dissolve into epiphanic glimpses. Joe's narrative is full of such flashes of insight: ... Joe had walked past that place and heard what he first believed was some combination of running water and wind in high trees. The music that the world makes, familiar to fishermen and shepherds, woodsmen have also heard. It hypnotizes mammals. Bucks raise their heads and gophers freeze. Attentive woodsmen smile and close their eyes.(176) In his description of his search for his mother the sense of the mysterious and intuitive becomes even more pronounced: . . . redwings, those blue-black birds with the bolt of red on their wings. Something about her they liked ... and seeing four or more of them always meant she was close.(176) The language seems to engender the impression of a spectral world of strange resonances and reverberations. In Violet Trace the intermingling of everyday problems and an almost supernatural sense is also apparent. For her the struggle against the legacy of the mother was even more urgent. The burden of motherhood, of raising children especially in the absence of a husband (who habitually leaves home in search of jobs) is both daunting and threatening. Violet's mother had thrown herself down a well: Her mother. She didn't want to be like that. Oh never like that. (97)

However, the effort to be different, the decision never to have children, was also prompted by the searing image of a beautiful white child, Golden Gray, that had so captured her imagination from the stories told by her grandmother, True Belle. Whatever happened, no small dark foot would rest on another while a hungry mouth said, Mama? (102) Yet the maternal hunger that assailed her at the age of fifty after numerous miscarriages (abortions?) is an instinctive need. The doll she slept with suggests not only her demented state but also her regressive psychopathic retreat into childlike make-believe. More significantly, it is in part a compulsive re-enactment of a mother about whom she felt both guilt and grief. Violet became a fearful daughter, a neglected wife, and a childless mother. Her attack on her husband's dead mistress confirms her psychological turmoil and accentuates her greater torment and abasement as a woman. Dependent and vulnerable she has become one of many women whose lives are not their own, who have to "share men, fight them and fight over them" (84). Violet's despair when the novel opens is compounded by her splintered state. Part of her still belongs with that younger Violet who was strong and able on the field, a resolute woman who made the decision that she and Joe should marry. In New York she had worked with great determination as wife and part-time hairdresser. But by the time she went to Dorcas's funeral Violet's spirit was in shreds. She now hovers tremulously between a childish helplessness and a hard desperate urgency to act: Where she saw a lonesome chair left like an orphan in a park strip facing the river that other Violet saw how the ice skim gave the railing's poles a weapony glint. Where she, last in line at the car stop, noticed a child's cold wrist jutting out of a too-short, hand-me-down coat, that Violet slammed past a whitewoman into the seat of a trolley four minutes late. (89-90) Accordingly, Violet's attack on the dead Dorcas does not only suggest a psychological breakdown. Something of her assertiveness comes through. Thus apart from being a despairing attempt to obliterate the face of woman, the image of the mother, her violence may also be read as a protest against the subjugation and degradation of woman. The traditional masculine reduction of woman to physical attributes associated with appearance and age has no doubt ensured the success of Joe's cosmetic products and helped Violet's career as a hairdresser. But male patronage is exactly what she seems to challenge as she tries to desecrate the looks by which a woman is judged. In so doing she also seems to vituperate her own complicity. For her intention of slashing the face of the dead girl counters her work as a hairdresser, concerned with enhancing the appearance of women. Indeed, many of Violet's clients are prostitutes. Violet tells Dorcas's aunt, Alice Manfred: "I wasn't born with a knife" (85). She had simply picked one up and attempted to use it. The two women recognise this act to be part of the struggle of the new generation of Black women which is no longer defenceless. As Alice reflects: Black women were armed; black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose.(77) In Violet's repeated meetings with Alice Manfred both come to recognise their common plight. Being Black and female, they are victims twice over. The ghost of the mother hovers between them and casts its shadow on the young Dorcas as well.

While Violet had once regarded Dorcas as the enemy she now begins to see the dead girl not just as the woman who had seduced her husband but as the daughter who, like her, sought to avoid the legacy of the mother: Who posed there awake in the photograph? The scheming bitch who had not considered Violet's feelings one tiniest bit, who came into a life, took what she wanted and damn the consequences? Or mama's dumpling girl? Was she the woman who took the man, or the daughter who fled her womb? (109) For Violet, Dorcas becomes part of herself, her fears and her despair. She is also, more and more, the daughter she longs for: "Another time", she said to Alice Manfred, "another time I would have loved her too. Just like you did. Just like Joe". (109) Motherhood is no longer a blight or an instinctive hunger which has to be suppressed. Violet begins to sense that a woman can shape her own life according to her own capabilities and needs. She tells Dorcas's friend, Felice: "Now I want to be the woman my mother didn't stay around long enough to see. That one. The one she would have liked and the one I used to like before ...." (208) Increasingly Violet's life shows mysterious depths and vibrations. Her outbreak at Dorcas's funeral, strange as it may seem, already hints of some inner impetus. It recalls her equally abnormal behaviour on other occasions such as sitting down in the middle of the street one day or placing Dorcas's picture on the fireplace of her home. Even commonplace events assu me significance. As she talks to Alice Manfred and shares with her her woman's life of domestic chores, Violet becomes aware of the possibilities in store for her. Alice, for one, tells her fiercely: "Nobody's asking you to take it. I'm saying make it, make it!" (113) The trick is to do what one can and to do it well even if it means mere housework. To go on. "Not beaten. Not Lost" (113). The laughter that both women share is a sign of their triumph they have discovered in the most mundane some secret source of joy. Violet is thus able to look ahead, to hope: "... it is Spring. In the City" (114). When Violet later catches sight of an unknown girl, Felice, and invites her in her gesture seems motivated by that same secret delight and discernment that she shares with Alice, which the narrator initially has no inkling of. Here is the description of the event at the end of chapter one: . . . when Spring came to the City Violet saw, coming into the building with an Okeh record under her arm and carrying some stewmeat wrapped in butcher paper, another girl with four marcelled waves on each side of her head. Violet invited her in to examine the record and that's how that scandalizing threesome of Lenox Avenue began. (6) The narrator's suggestion of scandal and abnormal conduct makes way for another impression near the close of the novel:

She carried an Okeh record under her arm and a half pound of stewmeat wrapped in pink butcher paper in her hand although the sun is too hot to linger in the streets with meat.... Now she is disturbing me, making me doubt my own self just looking at her sauntering through the sunshafts like that. (197-198) The references to music and sunlight bring to mind Joe's enraptured responses and serve once again to evoke a sense of the mysterious. Empowered by such insights Violet and Joe are able to start again, this time taking care not to let the City take control of their lives. Still working hard they keep a comfortable pace, taking time off to let their secret selves shape their marriage. Violet thus frees herself from the double yoke of Black womanhood while Joe now has the chance to be his own man, a new man, unafraid and content. Violet also becomes a surrogate mother to Felice for she brings to the girl a new taste of life which is nothing like the old. Felice recounts: Her catfish was pretty good. Not as good as the way my grandmother used to do it, or my mother used to before her chest wore out. (216) Felice's parents are, to some extent, replicas of Joe's and Violet's. They are both victims and have succumbed to the tyranny of socio-economic forces. Leaving their only child with her grandmother in New York the parents live and work in Tuxedo, only seeing Felice once every three weeks for two and a half days. Her father fumes at the injustices borne by the Blacks but is powerless to do anything. Her mother resorts to stealing to "get back at the whiteman who thought she was stealing even though she wasn't" (215). When she meets Violet Felice seems threatened by the very pressures that besiege the older woman. As a daughter and as a young unmarried girl working in New York Felice is faced with the same challenges that had almost destroyed Violet and her husband: My grandmother is slower now, and my mother is sick, so I do most of the cooking. My mother wants me to find some good man to marry. I want a good job first. Make my own money. Like she did. Like Mrs Trace.... (204) However, Felice seems untouched by the demands of her fragmented life or she has adjusted comfortably to the duties and responsibilities ofher several roles.. When Violet first sees her she is "sauntering through the sunshafts" (198), clutching an Okeh record under one arm and a half pound of meat in another "although the sun is too hot to linger in the streets with meat" (198). She has come to the Traces in order to recover the ring that Dorcas had borrowed from her but she stays to chat with Violet and becomes friends with husband and wife. At the end of the novel Felice "still buys Okeh records at Felton's and walks so slowly home from the butcher shop the meat turns before it hits the pan" (222). With her detachment and ease and supported by what she has learnt from Violet she depicts the indomitable simplicity and resilience of the Black female self. In her lies the prospect of change and the potential liberation of Black womanhood. As the narrator points out near the end of the novel: "... her speed may be slow, but her tempo is next year's news" (222). In this respect Felice provides a direct contrast to Dorcas for while she represents hope and change the other girl's tragic death looks back to the past and the legacy of the mother. Dorcas is a

pathetic symbol of subjugation, a victim of Black history. As Violet comes to realise, Dorcas's mad dash into one affair after another was an attempt to avoid marriage and motherhood. For her the ghost of the mother prevailed in the person of her Aunt Alice, a wife, a "mother" (to the orphaned Dorcas), abandoned and alone. What Dorcas failed to understand is that Alice, though fearful of joining the Black women's protests, is far from helpless. She has found strength and pride in her womanly skills and has managed to lead an independent life on the income she derives from her sewing. The ghost of the mother is vanquished by the artless versatility and charm of a young girl, Felice. But the spectre of the father remains. For the father, absent though he may be, holds the key to one's colour, race, and place. For those of mixed blood, born of white mothers and Black fathers, the paternal figure is even more terrifying. The torment of Golden Gray focuses on the secret burden of such people. Golden is faced with the terrible decision whether or not to be the son of the father, to be white or Black. As Henry Lestory, the Black man who fathered him, remarks: If she told you I was your daddy, then she told you more than she told me . A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do. (172) Golden's discovery that he is Black immediately cuts him off from all that is safe and familiar. No longer whole, he feels the wounding like a disfigurement. But he seeks not to alleviate the pain but keep it fresh and searing: I am going to freshen the pain, point it, so we both know what it is for. (158) At a glance the encounter with Wild as he prepares to meet his father for the first time serves to bring home to him a sense of recognition and of belonging, however reluctant he may be to take it in: A vision that, at the moment when his scare was sharpest, looked also like home comfortable enough to wallow in? That could be it. But who could live in that leafy hair? that unfathomable skin? But he already had lived in and with it: True Belle had been his first and major love, which may be why two gallops beyond that hair, that skin, their absence was unthinkable. ( L50) The sight of Wild also evokes vistas of mysterious, unexplored depths of being that inevitably entice him. While her deer eyes unnerve him, under her strange influence new sensations emerge accompanied by intimations of some magic hitherto unknown: ...he steps into the yard. The sunlight bangs his own eyes shut and he holds his hand over them, peeking through his fingers until it is safe. The sigh he makes is deep, a hungry airtake for the strength and perseverance all life, but especially his, requires. Can you see the fields beyond, crackling and drying in the wind? The blade of blackbirds rising out of nowhere, brandishing and then gone? The odor of the invisible animals accentuated in the heat mixing now with out-ofcontrol mint and something fruity needing to be picked? (153)

Golden's breakaway from all familiar moorings to embark on the life of a Black man thus holds the promise of further revelations. The narrative anticipates and celebrates this rich unfolding of deeper shades and nuances: He has the courage to do what Duchesses of Marlborough do all the time: relinquish being an adored bud clasping its future, and dare to open wide, to let the layers of its petals go flat, show the cluster of stamens dead center for all to see. (160) In The Signifying Monkey where he presents a theory of African-American literary criticism Henry Louis Gates Jr refers to the trope of the Talking Book. This was, in the early years of African-American literary history, "a sign of absence" (Gates 137). The Talking Book suggests a text that spoke to the master (the white man) but remained inaccessible to the slave because the latter was not only unable to read but unable to read the master's language. Appearing first in the slave narrative of Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, formerly an African prince, the reference to the (non)Talking Book shows how a character "conflates an oral figure (voice) with a visual figure (his black face)" (Gates 137). The book refused to speak to the slave and the only reason he could think of was that he had a black face. When the text subsequently spoke it reflected the assimilation of the Black man and denoted a more devastating absence, the masking of the African's voice, face, and culture. The Black man became a European in disguise. When later writers struggled to find a voice in the act of writing, to encode a Black presence in their texts the Talking Book was a means of "literally writing themselves into being through carefully crafted representations in language of the Black self" (Gates 131). This was not just a matter of shaping a Black vernacular by posing the spoken against the written word. The enactment of the Black self in language involves the act of signifying. In African-American tradition signification does not just denote meaning but "ways of meaning" (Gates 81) derived from shared knowledge and attitudes. By means of renaming and remeaning the writers were able to transform linguistic domination into linguistic play. Signification questions the meaning of white meaning and creates "a silent second text" (Gates 86). In Toni Morrison's Jazz what is signified upon is not just "white European ways of knowing" (Lanser 133) but such knowledge as assimilated by the African-American. The novel critiques the narrator's meaning and reasoning. By means of direct or indirect discourse the voices of the characters cut in hinting of mysteries too deep for reason. The narrator finally learns and is "released in secret" (221), that is, into the hidden life beneath and between the logical and the everyday. The knowledge is borne out in the statement near the close of the novel: " Now I know" (221).

References Bryant, Cedric Gael. "The Orderliness of Disorder: Madness and Evil in Toni Morrison's Sula." Black American Literature Forum 24.4 (Winter 1990):731-745. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York and London: Routledge 1990. Cornwell-Giles, JoAnne. Afro-American and Western Consciousness: The Politics of Knowing. Black American Literature Forum 24.1 (Spring 1990):85-98. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. __________ (ed.). Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology. New York: Meridian, 1990. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K.A. Appiah (ed.). Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Guerrero, Edward. Tracking 'The Look'in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Black American Literature Forum 24.4 (Winter 1990):761-773. Holloway, Karla F.C. Revision and (Re)membrance: A Theory of Literary Structure in Literature by African-American Women Writers. Black American Literature Forum 24.4 (Winter 1990):617-631. Lanser, Susan Sniader. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Zarrative Voice . Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992. Morrison, Toni. Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation. Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents. Ed. Dennis Walder. Oxford, New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1990. __________. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1992. Powell, Timothy B. Toni Morrison: The Struggle to Depict the Black Figure on the White Page. Black American Literature Forum 24.4 (Winter 1990):747-760. Walther, Malin LaVon. Out of Sight: Toni Morrison's Revision of Beauty. Black American Literature Forum 24.4 (Winter 1990):775-789.