Shuffling Toward Cincinnati

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In 1949 Toni Morrison left Ohio. Aside from a brief stint in the ‘60s, she never lived there again. Yet Morrison remained invested in Ohio as the imaginative origin of her fiction. First there was The Bluest Eye (1970), set in her hometown of Lorain; then Sula (1973) set in the fictional Medallion, Ohio. Song of Solomon (1977) departs from Morrison’s home state but remains within the Great Lakes, this time set in an unnamed town in a similarly industrial state, Michigan. And Tar Baby (1981) is the exception that proves the rule: after crafting a polyvocal narrative voice that she gave over to the setting itself, a Caribbean island, Morrison went on to pen her magnum opus, Beloved (1987), set in Cincinnati. It’s as if her novels moved Southward, only to return home again.

Place is so central that Morrison often opens a novel by naming the town where the plot will occur. Song of Solomon’s first line is situated in triplicate: “The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock.” The suicidal insurance agent who inaugurates the novel’s fixation with flight is almost overburdened by his locational baggage, tied down by his occupation, his town (“Mercy,” the hospital, serves as synecdoche), and the greatest of the so-named lakes. Sula begins with the line: “In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.” As she often does, here Morrison synthesizes the whole plot in the novel’s opening line. In this case, she seeds in the “roots” that the community will be uprooted, or that within something there germinates the potential for its negation. (And even if you choose to ignore this introductory vignette, which Morrison might prefer since this was not her intended opening for the novel, place still appears in the second line of the novel’s real beginning: “Blasted and permanently astonished by the events of 1917, [Shadrack] returned to Medallion handsome but ravaged…” Even here, place is only subordinate to the momentous force of historical time.) “In that place” echoes across her novels, including Jazz (1992), which announces “Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue.” That is, what one is can only be known through where one is.

But then what do we make of the fact that Morrison wrote from upstate New York, but not about it? I suppose I might generalize to say that you only know a place when you leave it, but this strikes me as too aphoristic, too rote for Morrison’s style. I think, rather, that Morrison was influenced by her current location even when writing about communities elsewhere. In the forward to Sula she writes: “In 1969, in Queens, snatching liberty seemed compelling. Some of us thrived; some of us died. All of us had taste.” Her shrewd “taste” hails from the Black aesthetic sensibility cultivated within a specific cultural location. Certainly, many novelists limn settings from the edifice of their hometowns, but setting does not equal background, at least not for Morrison. Hers are places where people lived, relatives died, the whole spectrum of human life and tragedy played out here, for groups of people not interchangeable but shaped by the idiosyncrasies, joys, and flaws their environs. So when Morrison comes back to the Midwest as an active site for fictional creation and, for her characters, interpersonal relation, she proclaims: life happens in Ohio.

Yet, in line with Morrison’s penchant for dialectics, life happens alongside the possibility of non-life. That is, insofar as a particular milieu yields aesthetic form, it must also retain an obliterating formlessness. Her Northern towns are populated by the descendants of the enslaved, who carry with them memories of abjection. In Playing in the Dark she says that “nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery”: freedom’s contours can only be traced by marking enslavement, that profound unfreedom that built, bore, and made a nation.

And if unfreedom gave birth to America, then it also inversely gestated a hope for freedom located in a cardinal direction: North. The Great Lakes region writ large foretold an economic prosperity that it could never deliver for the many Black migrants fleeing the South during the Great Migration (which likewise brought Morrison’s own family North, first settling in Akron before moving to Lorain). Lorain, Cincinnati, and Medallion are uncertain settings, never entirely reliable because their sheen of hope remains tinted by historical displacements. Her characters know well that you can have the ground torn up from under you, and that you might have to move elsewhere to snatch at something like liberation. Take Song of Solomon, a novel set into motion by a loss prior to its protagonist’s birth: Milkman or Macon Dead III, the novel’s quasi-hero, bears the name of the first Macon, a farmer who the neighbouring white community killed for his profitable land—made so by his sheer will and toil alone—thereby orphaning the second generation of Deads. When the Dead family (one of Morrison’s many facetious names) removes to the Great Lakes region, they carry with them this maiden loss, which continues to dictate their relationships to the other lands they encounter. The first Macon was killed for his land, so the second Macon tries to accumulate it as a landlord, leaving the third to try and find a more vitalizing relationship to it. 

The Great Lakes region therefore always contains the Great Migration’s agile promise, yet Morrison rarely textualizes this movement so literally. Instead, she negates it through “reverse migrations” in which her characters retrace their ancestors’ steps by heading Southward. Repeatedly in her works she invents Black families living in the North—many with violent pasts, some upwardly mobile, some not—who venture South. Many scholars have noted Morrison’s frequent chronotypic reverse migrations: Jennifer Terry, for instance, remarked two decades ago that insofar as the “sites of North and South are key to the author’s portrayal of black dislocation with the demographic shift of the Great Migration,” these countervailing poles also “[bear] a symbolic relation to the intercontinental displacement of the Middle Passage” as the embryonic and brutal displacement. America’s Northern and Southern poles always have been dialectally construed, and so reverse migration provides a metaphorically potent track to navigate characters’ individual origins (the North), their ancestral connections (the South) and, symbolically, their collective histories (the Middle Passage).

Therefore, when Morrison retraces the great migration in reverse, sending her characters back down from whence they came, she insinuates other such reversals: freedom and unfreedom, place and placelessness. In Sula, Helene and her daughter Nel return to the South in a journey that recontextualizes their own racial self-understanding in new ways. As Sula will demonstrate, reverse migration is instructive: chugging along “Back to her grandmother’s house in the city where the red shutters glowed, and already [Helene] had been called “gal”’ in a racially charged encounter on the segregated train. Helene interprets her racialization differently while en route to visit her dying grandmother, and thus “it was on that train, shuffling toward Cincinnati, that she resolved to be on guard—always.” That is, the train’s languid movement towards a promised destination mimes “slouching towards Bethlehem” by a different name. 

Sula’s epochal heaving chimes with Yeatsian syntax. The novel leans towards an unnamed history: when Sula dies in 1940, the US’s belated entry into WW2 is less than a year away, the consequences of which are foreshadowed in Shadrack, who remains traumatized by the events of the preceding war. And, moreover, when Sula accidentally drowns the guileless Chicken Little, I hear a rattle akin to “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Morrison proves herself to be the Last Modernist once again. Or, if Jameson is right that postmodernism takes to space the way modernism was occupied with time, then Morrison conflates—maybe even detonates—time and space so that each signifies the other.  Thus, time embeds itself in place, threatening disunity as characters move lurchingly towards a future about to breach historical containment.

Thus, physical movement indicates a kind of historical momentum. Insofar as Morrison’s bodies are dancing, active, expressive, her places are likewise shifting and changing, and not necessarily for the better. Namwali Serpell notes that in Song of Solomon’s reverse migration, the train “trembles, shivers, and dances as it births its passengers into the progressive era.” Her diction rightly identifies that the destination of all this shuffling is, for Morrison, less often a real location than an idea or temporal precipice. So Song’s characters feel that something is coming—not global war like Sula but something more diffuse: integration, capitalism’s acceleration. Milkman, who “never stood straight; he slouched,” drags his uneven feet towards an uncertain end.

Similarly, for the denizens of Bottom, the Black community in Sula, modernity brings an assimilationist drive which prays on their inveterate desire for freedom by promising freedom of a different kind: the freedom to buy, sell, compete, and accumulate. However, like Song before it, Sula squashes this desire for economic mobility—literally so in the case of the tunnel, a construction project that would have provided much-needed employment, but which refused to hire Black labourers. The community, in desperate need for an affective release without Sula’s presence, destroys the tunnel rather than live with “the place where their hope had lain since 1927” (again, note the conflation of place and time). Yet the scene isn’t celebratory since in their need to “kill it all, all of it, to wipe from the face of the earth” the symbol of their dispossession, they punningly go “too far” into the tunnel, which collapses and kills many in the crush. In that way, modernity signals dissolution rather than progress. 

Sula presages the community’s destruction from the very beginning. The opening lines foretell that when Bottom, once an ironically named hilltop community settled by the formerly enslaved (with the false promise of farmable land), eventually becomes desirable property for the white inhabitants of Medallion, “The black people, for all their new look, seemed awfully anxious to get to the valley, or leave town, and abandon the hills to whoever was interested.” But the narrator chides: “It was sad, because the Bottom had been a real place… Maybe it hadn’t been a community, but it had been a place. Now there weren’t any places left, just separate houses.” Moving down to the valley, towards the promise of modernity, consigns this place to the past and dissolves what had once been, if not a legible culture than at least a conjugated network, into fragments. Or, in other words: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” 

Sula is about many things: the way girlhood breeds quasi-erotic attachments, imperfect or murderous mothers, the degree to which a witness can be deemed responsible for violence, et cetera. But for me, upon this most recent re-reading, Sula strikes me as a novel caught in the thrall of the end, nearly apocalyptic in register from the very first line. “Bottom had been a real place,” but, by novel’s end, its economic prospects are obliterated and its identity inverted. Or, I suppose, “righted” since Bottom was at the top, but its inhabitants have been dispersed to the topographic bottom. Yet now the ironic name doesn’t signify, it only literalizes their loss. Sula bears all the hallmarks of Morrisonian place, as I see it: a sense of motility, a coincident temporality, a setting both thick with historical grounding yet simultaneously forewarning its own future. There is an ontological uncertainty in her sense of place that likewise cautions adaptability because a community has less to do with land than ancestry (people make a place, not the other way around). Yet Sula doesn’t fall back on platitudes. The novel knows that land is valuable and doesn’t dismiss its characters’ desires so much as encourage them to grasp at it with full force, despite the structural forces that will inevitably constrain them. 

Across her works, Morrison reveals how the historical traces of enslavement are sedimented within the American consciousness and, perhaps more importantly, the aesthetics of the American novel itself. In order to express the historically engrained uncertainty of place resultant from Black Americans’ originary and violent movement, her settings cannot be set in stone. If, as is the case, an epochal upheaval has already happened—the apocalypse has already come—a novel’s setting should reflect this sense of an ending as a form of historical sedimentation. Sula’s plot unfolds in a place and time ‘after’ calamity, where the worst has already happened, and so is always possible. There is something shifting, changing, labile, in her idea of location—a sense of “rootedness” that is just out of reach. There is a desire for a “rooted” place that cannot be since there is too much motion, too many threats, no safe landing—which the North, and more specifically, the Midwest, was promised to be. Instead, the only grounding is in a collective. If you can’t be rooted to the land, you might as well be rooted to each other.