Paradise: Toni Morrison

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Jefferson Fleetwood: Son of Arnold and Mable Fleetwood. Threatened to shoot K.D. for mistreating Arnette. Controlling. Fought in the Vietnam War. Married Sweetie

Supporting the young people is Reverend Misner, a civil rights activist who is new to town, and his girlfriend Anna Flood. On the opposing side are the conservative Reverend Pulliam and the Morgan brothers. Many of the older women of Ruby are unsure which side to support, including Dovey and Soane Morgan, the wives of Steward and Deek. Pat Best, a schoolteacher and the mother of Billie Delia, has been shunned her entire life because her mother was a light-skinned outsider, yet she still rejects the young people’s call for change and defends Ruby’s traditions to Reverend Misner.Norma Keene Fox: A wealthy women who hires Seneca for sexual humiliation while her husband is away. She pays her 500 dollars and gives her a nice place to stay and feeds her well for three weeks. During this period, the families from Haven have settled into the area seventeen miles south of the Convent. There is not much interaction between the Convent and the town, though Mary Magna is glad to have a pharmacy close by. On one trip into Ruby, Consolata spots Deacon “Deek” Steward, with whom she has a two-month affair that ends when she repulses him with the carnal intensity of her desire.

Pulliam is the minister at the Methodist church in Ruby. He is part of the older conservative generation that believes the slogan on the Oven is and should remain 'Beware the Furrow of His Brow'. His sermon at the wedding of K.D. and Arnette angers Reverend Misner, as Pulliam says that love is not a right, but rather something that must be perpetually worked for and may never be earned. Roger Best This idea of “Paradise” therefore involves many different elements to Morrison and our characters. Freedom is one common thread. Self-determination is another. The ability to escape is a third. However, what many of our characters struggle to grasp is the all-consuming love that is so important for Paradise to become a reality. Through the lens of love, everything becomes clear. One’s vision of a Higher Power (yet anther “Paradise” theme) is all about how love is incorporated. Without love our world falls apart. Love and its corollary, equality, is about embracing the differences we see in the other. This can not be accomplished by a dogmatic adherence to principle, purity or structure. It is not done by taking sides. It is searching for the common ground that makes us all human. Arnette Fleetwood: Jefferson's younger sister. Planning to attend Langston for college. Made advances on K.D. at socials and whenever possible, eventually became pregnant by K.D. around 15 years old. Attempted to abort, but gave birth at Convent and abandoned baby.How has the history of Ruby (and Haven before it) shaped the nature of the town in the 1970s? What did "freedom" mean to the original settlers? What varying views of freedom do the modern inhabitants of Ruby hold? Recitatif is a compact introduction to her trademark use of language and her layered, lyrical narrative style. Is it fair to say that the people of Ruby have perpetuated racism in the town that was supposed to be a haven from it? If so, in what does the town's racism consist?

Morrison discusses her choice of this phrase in the afterward and it definitely leaves an impression on the reader. It sets the expectation of a frenetic pace, although the book does slow down until the last chapter Save-Marie. Each chapter is named after one of the women starting with Ruby, who dies before the story starts and gave her name to the town. Next to arrive is Seneca, who was abandoned by her teen mother as a child and has since tried to appease everyone in her life to keep them from leaving. Like Mavis, Seneca leaves an abusive partner, but she only finds the strength to leave after her boyfriend is sent to prison and his mother tells her to leave. Seneca then enters a degrading relationship with a wealthy older woman. After the woman dismisses her, Seneca hitchhikes around the country until she ends up at the Convent. Reading a novel by Toni Morrison is an act of faith. She demands much from her language and her readers, but when that faith is rewarded, the effect is stunning. Do not miss, as the early critics did, the ending's emphasis on "endless work" (nor the admission that "down here" is all the paradise we're likely to get). What is the "endless work"? The work of interpretation. Midway through the novel, Ruby's resident writer Patricia, who has been assembling a genealogy, discovers that the men of the town have been maintaining their racial purity through incest in a parody of white racism ("They think they have outfoxed the whiteman when in fact they imitate him"). Upon finding this out, she burns her family trees—this to suggest that any attempt at purification is to be rejected as an arbitrary imposition. Ruby's elderly midwife, Lone, takes a view of God that is more in keeping with the novel's narrative mode: Playing blind was to avoid the language God spoke in. He did not thunder instructions or whisper messages into ears. Oh no. He was a liberating God. A teacher who taught you how to learn, to see for yourself. His signs were clear, abundantly so, if you stopped steeping in vanity's sour juice and paid attention to His world.Read the clues, try to assemble the narrative, but accept in advance your defeat even as you press forward in trying to understand. I accept—there is so much more to say about Paradise. About characters and their names ("His grandfather had named his twins Deacon and Steward for a reason"), about twins and doubles. I have merely alluded to Morrison's parody of the Biblical Exodus and its American re-creation by the Puritan settlers, and I have not even mentioned how the novel emphasizes that both Ruby and the convent exist only because the land was cleared by the state of its prior Native American inhabitants. I have not mentioned the novel's love of nature, its endless invention, its food (the hot peppers that grow only at the convent).Clear, detailed and highly readable overview of Morrison’s first six novels, with a postscript on Paradise. Chapters present a discussion of themes and technique without any overt summary of the plot. Chronology of Morrison’s life and the bibliography are rigorous and useful up to the year of the book’s publication. So when a group of traumatized women seek refuge in the outskirts of the town, in what was a former school for Indian girls ran by nuns, their free lives, uncontrolled and unsupervised by men, draws the attention of the town. They become Some citizens find the possibility of change exciting, but the town leaders have identities and fortunes riding on the status quo. For them, Ruby is in a state of moral and physical decay, which only a radical rededication to its founding discipline can cure.

It is around this time that women begin to arrive at the Convent. They arrive by accident, in flight from fraught lives (abusive husbands and dead babies; parental betrayal or neglect; abandonment by lovers and violent pasts), but one by one they seem drawn into staying permanently. The first is Mavis; Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas then follow. They do not all get along – Mavis and Gigi in particular often clash. However, they seem to find in the Convent an escape from troubled circumstances (often related to men) where they are listened to and cared for without judgment. Though they may leave from time to time, the women always return.Lone is the midwife in Ruby. She was adopted as an orphan by the original group on their way to found Ruby, and was taken in by the DuPres family. She, like Soane, Anna, and Billie Delia, is sympathetic to the Convent women. She teaches Connie that she has special powers. She overhears the plot to raid the Convent and tries to stop the men. Luther Beauchamp Nor have I mentioned Paradise's flaws: it really is too short and feels thinner than it should as a result, with poetic prose often doing duty for narrative and characterization (James Wood was not wrong in this complaint). A novel of this spiritual and political ambition should be as long as The Brothers Karamazov, and I am convinced that Morrison would not bore us at that length.