Toni Morrison's Quarrel with the Civil Rights Ideology in Love

Toni Morrison's Love, (1) in critiquing the American Civil Rights Movement, problematizes both American and African-American history and also uncovers the vexatious interrelationship of history and black identity, concern that has been in the novelist's foreground since the publication of her historical trilogy comprising Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. (2) If, like the trilogy, Love reexamines critically the traumatic history of African-Americans, it also is stridently political in articulating certain harsh truths about the Civil Rights Love not only reformulates some of the crucial issues that impinge on African-American interests within American politics, but also departs significantly from the normative triumphalist discourses of the Civil Rights This essay, through analyzing the complex family history of the protagonist Cosey, seeks to frame Morrison's Love as critique of the American Civil Rights movement that had devastating on the successful pre-World War II black community. Set in the American Civil Rights era that corresponds with the period 1930-1990, Morrison's Love is about the complex legacy of Bill Cosey, successful Jim Crow-era black entrepreneur, and the loss of his personal paradise in the wake of integration. As the novel opens, the reader learns that their competing claims for Cosey's property and legacy turn Christine, the protagonist's granddaughter, and Heed, his second wife and childhood friend of Christine, into mortal enemies. Then, there is May, Cosey's daughter-in-law and Christine's mother, who seizes every opportunity to drive wedge between her daughter and Heed to sustain her supremacy. To some extent, this turbulent and warring world is redeemed by the stable presence of L, Cosey's cook and mediator, who, functioning as the narrator, ably illuminates the historical and social terrain of the novel. As the story unravels through the contrapuntal memory sequences and kaleidoscopic viewpoints of these characters, the novelist weaves and reweaves through the historical fabric, creating arresting vignettes of the intriguing legacies of slavery, racism, and the Civil Rights movement that attest to the temporality of history. Prior to developing critical approach to these specific issues, however, it be profitable to consider Morrison's observations on the Civil Rights era of the sixties, which forms the backdrop of Love: the legitimate and necessary drive for better jobs and housing, we abandoned the past and lot of the truth and sustenance that went with it. And when Civil Rights became Black Power, we frequently chose exoticism over reality. The old verities that made being black and alive in this country the most dynamic existence imaginable--so much of what satisfying, challenging and simply more interesting--were being driven underground--by blacks.... In trying to cure the cancer of slavery and its consequences, some healthy as well as malignant cells were destroyed. (3) Although this ambivalent stance is dramatized extensively in the novel Paradise, it is only with Love that Morrison probes the ideological fissures and fault lines of the Civil Rights movement more deeply. In an interview with Carolyn Denard, Morrison categorically states: I don't think this generation knows at all what going on in 1947 as far as Civil Rights are concerned. They think it all began in the 60s. It's interesting to me to re-examine that period--50s, 60s, and 70s era. (4) Likewise, in another interview with Jessica Jernigan, Morrison states that Love concerns the impact [of] the Civil-Rights movement ... on the people who lived through it, [and] how they dealt with the complex questions the civil-rights movement raised. She adds that the transition from segregation to integration was much more complicated, more deeply interesting than the popular history of the civil rights movement. (5) Thus, by invoking the Civil Rights era as backdrop to Love, Morrison not only shares its legacies with the present generation but also seeks to reexamine it in a new way so that her readers would not be left with the simple notion that there some agitation, some pain, and then, pow, everybody moved into whatever neighborhoods they wanted to and there more access into the corridors of power, there more money, you know, better jobs, etc. …

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