The One All-Black Town Worth the Pain: (African) American Exceptionalism, Historical Narration, and the Critique of Nationhood in Toni Morrison's Paradise

Abstract

In her most recent novel, Paradise (1998), Toni Morrison offers us story of a small western African community, Ruby, whose contemporary members understand themselves in relation to an historical narrative of ancestral perseverance, idealism, and triumph. According to their self-narrative, they are descendants of a group of wandering ex-slaves who--at God's command and after having been rejected by a string of already established pioneer communities, black as well as white--eventually succeeded in establishing perfect, all-black community of Haven in a far-away in Oklahoma. Though community was later removed to another secluded place, still in Oklahoma, where it attained its present name, by 1976, time of narrative present for most of novel, it has come to seem fulfillment of its founding fathers' paradisiacal promise. Having thrived and prospered where other black communities failed, in its own parlance it now appears the all-black town worth pain (5). In spite of Ruby's superior self-narrative, however, by 1976 a vast discrepancy has developed between community's perfect and stable self-image and its actual conditions and cultural practices. As things now are in Ruby, unwanted children are conceived and aborted, wished-for children are born broken, and young have begun to react against conservative lifestyle and authoritarian politics of community's leading elders. Though at first community's patriarchs react to this development by launching a series of angry accusations against its young male lions of failing their ancestral responsibility, novel culminates in a horrific massacre conducted by these two groups of men on a group of unconventional women living in a called Convent. In this way Morrison suggests that price of Ruby's insistence on maintaining a morally superior master narrative may well be sacrifice of that very narrative. Rather than a perfect paradise, Ruby ends up as a conservative, patriarchal, t horoughly racialized, and violent community. By molding Ruby's self-narrative in cast of an ancestral heroic commemoration of success of community's founding fathers in establishing a covenanted community in an inhospitable western landscape, by dramatizing angry accusations made by community's contemporary patriarchs against younger generations when discrepancy between its morally superior master narrative and its actual cultural practices becomes too vast to ignore, and by ultimately having Ruby scapegoat a group of unconventional women for its internal problems, Morrison invites us critically to acknowledge presence of of most canonical European narratives--that of exceptionalism, in African discourse. Used widely across whole spectrum of Studies, this narrative and ideology behind it defy easy definition. As it appears from Dale Carter's survey article American An Idea That Will Not Die (1997), concept has been defined in a great variety of ways, depending on individual scholar's discipline. Among literary historians, however, there is fairly general consensus about definition offered by Thomas B. Byers in his 1997 article A City upon a Hill: Literature and Ideology of Exceptionalism: American exceptionsm ... is claim that America is ... unique, of a (superior) kind--and generally that that kind carries with it a unique moral value and responsibility (86). From this perspective, exceptionalism resounds story of small group of Puritan pilgrims who fled from persecution in England in early seventeenth century in order to establish an exemplary Christian community-a city upon a hill, as it was termed by their leade r, John Winthrop--in new world. Continuing a general European desire for a utopian place that was not Europe but rather its opposite--a desire that had preoccupied European imagination even before continent was discovered--this group, according to Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury, defined utopia in relation to one source above all, Bible, and especially its opening chapters, Genesis and Exodus, tale of Chosen People and Promised Land. …