On Child Abuse and Redemption

I wouldn’t call this the best novel Toni Morrison has ever written, but given how high she has set the bar, God Help The Child is still a powerful read that I would highly recommend.  It is about the abuse of children, and about damaged adults. It is full of Morrison’s characteristically spare but lyrical prose and disconcerting magical realism. It is full of pain and rage, but also redemption and resolution.

Her main character is a little girl named Mary Lou, born with “blue-black” skin to a horrified light-skinned mother who would give her away if she could get away with it, but who instead raises the child with embarrassment behind closed shutters, at arms’ length and with zero affection. Mary Lou’s only moment to shine in the spotlight is at age eight, when she testifies unhesitatingly against a teacher accused of being part of a pederasty ring. Newspaper coverage, neighborly pride and, most of all, approval and a chance to hold hands with her mother, makes it all worthwhile.

Fast forward in time, and Mary Lou is grown up to be a stunningly beautiful woman and a wealthy and successful cosmetic company executive. She has re-named herself Bride, to go with her always white outfits that set off her unique skin tone, and she has distanced herself from her mother, offering money in place of filial love. Early in the novel, we watch uncomprehendingly as Bride waits outside the prison gates with money and gifts for the release of the woman she had sent to prison so many years ago, and we cringe as Bride is beaten to a pulp by that same woman. And when Bride tells her lover Booker about the woman, he walks out on her without looking back.

The rest of the story is devoted to unraveling the two parallel mysteries—that of the released convict and that of the disappeared Booker. We know little of Booker except that he is an enigma, an intellectual who appears to be homeless, who carries around his own secret pain, and about whom Bride knows nothing except that she is in love with him. Rejected yet again, Bride withdraws from life, going through a crisis that takes the surreal form of returning her both emotionally and physically, bit by bit, to her child self.

In her wanderings for answers, she encounters an abused child with whom she is able to connect, and slowly recovers her will to survive and her determination to overcome. Despite several car accidents that serve as less-than-credible devices for getting Bride from point A to point B, the ending is satisfying, although it has a little more Hollywood feel-good and a little less of the edginess one comes to expect from Morrison.

While Morrison has a lot to say worth hearing, it is the few occasions where she indulges unnecessarily in editoralizing that the novel loses its punch. For example, “He suspected most of the real answers concerning slavery, lynching, forced labor, sharecropping, labor, migration, civil rights and black revolution movements were all about money. Money withheld, money stolen, money as power, as war….” And it goes on like this for quite a while. It’s not that I don’t agree with her moral outrage about money as the root cause of evil in the world, but when that outrage erupts in her text, it is so clearly in Morrison’s voice that it disrupts the flow and direction of the story itself.

That relatively small quibble aside, this book—as with all of Morrison’s works—serves as an accusation, a warning and a plea that next time, we must do better by our children.