God Help the Child by Toni Morrison

God Help the Child

by Karen Lively

Knopf, 2015

ISBN: 978-0307594174

178 p.p.

The anticipation for God Help the Child, the new book by Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison, has been building for a while. The beloved (no pun intended—okay maybe a little pun intended) author of 10 prior novels and 2 critical works was slated to release her first new work in over 3 years and the first to be set in the modern day—very exciting news for the literary community and the world at large! It was December of 2014 when I first heard about its anticipated release and promptly added it to TCJWW’s 10 Must Read Books of 2015 list. Of course, life got in the way as it tends to do, and I didn’t actually get around to reading it until October 2015. Not surprisingly, it was invaluable as both a literary and personal experience. Filled to the brim with beauty, pain, terror, and redemption, God Help the Child cuts like a diamond and shines like one too. I felt a deep personal connection to this book and its themes as I too have been shaped and misshapen by things that happened to me when I was just a child. I am sure that it brought tears to the eyes and an elucidating light to the inner darkness of many people for multitudinous reasons as it explored the heartbreak that racism, familial tension, childhood bullying, and romantic loss can wreak. Especially the two lines that, if you were looking for a two line synopsis of this novel, would work perfectly: “What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.”

Speaking of metaphorical darkness and lightness, Morrison once again proves her virtuosity in playing with notions of color and race. The main source of the tension between Bride and her mother Sweetness—and the driving force behind the novel’s story—is Bride’s color—a blue-black obsidian. Now Bride is absolutely stunning—her physical beauty is elemental in its power, raw and striking. But, she was raised in an earlier, more racially unjust time by Sweetness, who was raised in an even earlier, even more racially unjust time. Sweetness treats Bride with the coldness of a stranger rather than the love of a mother so much so that Bride “used to pray that [Sweetness] would slap my face or spank me just to feel her touch. I made little mistakes deliberately but she had ways to punish me without touching the skin she hated—bed without supper, lock me in my room.”

Color pulses at the heart of Morrison’s work so let’s take a closer look at how it plays out in the novel. Bride is conventionally beautiful but her physical beauty doesn’t come into full bloom until she takes the advice of her “total person” stylist Jeri and dresses in all white and only white, all the time. No makeup. No jewelry, save for the modest diamond and pearl studs Jeri still advises against. “Just, you, girl,” words that inspire Bride’s makeup line You, Girl. It’s interesting how the symbolism of color here seems to imply that beauty emerges from diversity and contrast, an idea that is enriched and complicated by Bride’s name, which she shortened from her full name Lula Ann Bride. White has historically suggested purity and rebirth, while black is dark and dangerous, sexily exotic but a social liability.

At the novel’s inception, Bride is fabulously successful by all conventional standards. She is a career woman with her own lucrative beauty line, a posh apartment, physical beauty which she works to full advantage with a sumptuous and artfully arranged wardrobe, and a passionate, if not substantial, romance with an equally stunning man. Bride’s triumph comes from her metamorphosis from the “scared little black girl” she once was to the beautiful, self-assured woman she now appears to be. Her metamorphosis, we learn, however, has only been external. Despite possessing all the trappings of success, Bride is still, in many ways, that “scared little black girl” on the inside. Her relationship with Booker is largely superficial, its potential unrealized, but his abrupt departure devastates her nonetheless.

Booker’s departure remains a mystery for both Bride and the reader until the end of the story. After a seemingly irrelevant argument, he simply tells her “You not the woman I want” and leaves with no further explanation. The mystery unravels as we delve into the topic of their dispute and its significance to both Bride and Booker. Bride then makes a pilgrimage to rural upstate California to confront a demon from her past and, afterwards, Booker, the man she loved but didn’t quite know. As she travels north, she also travels backwards in time, the novel taking on an element of magical realism as Bride grows thin and gangly, loses her underarm and pubic air, and physically regresses to being a child, that “little black girl” who was so alone and afraid. The story that follows is a tale of healing and ends on a note of both triumph and sobering reality.

Morrison has a track record of creating culturally significant works of deep psychological power and shimmering literary merit and God Help the Child is no different. Its virtuosity should have come as no surprise but it stunned me nevertheless, leaving me breathless, teary, and exultant in turn, as I journeyed through a kaleidoscopic tale of lightness and darkness, both racial and moral, and navigated all its nuanced shades with Bride, a simultaneously relatable and alienating figure who grows more relatable and less alienating as the story presses on.

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Toni Morrison studied humanities at Howard and Cornell Universities, followed by an academic career at Texas Southern University, Howard University, Yale, and since 1989, a chair at Princeton University. She has also worked as an editor for Random House, a critic, and given numerous public lectures, specializing in African-American literature. She made her debut as a novelist in 1970, soon gaining the attention of both critics and a wider audience for her epic power, unerring ear for dialogue, and her poetically-charged and richly-expressive depictions of Black America. A member since 1981 of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has been awarded a number of literary distinctions, among them the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of 11 novels and two nonfiction works. (Bio adapted from the Nobel Prize website).