"Bad" Black Mothers from Beloved to Meridian

Feminist analysis of mothering has been faulted for excluding, among other things, the work of black writers and scholars. African American literary texts in particular have richly explored the historical importance of black mothers, their indispensable if often unappreciated or misunderstood power, and the need to recover, revalue, and complicate our general understanding of this presence. Many of Alice Walker's well-known essays and stories celebrate the role of black mothers and grandmothers in sustaining the creativity of their daughters and granddaughters against the odds. As Walker puts it in her influential "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," "And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read."^[1] Writing a decade and a half later, critic Joanne Braxton calls attention to another archetype in black women's fiction that grows out of historical maternal practice. This is an ancestor figure less peaceful, perhaps, than the grandmother in the garden but sharing in her resourcefulness and importance: the "outraged mother who embodies the value of sacrifice, nurturance, and personal courage—values necessary to an endangered and embattled minority group."^[2] Barbara Christian identifies the historical figure of the slave mother represented in contemporary women's fiction as the key element in recent efforts to reclaim the subjectivity and memory of black slaves, and she points out that "motherhood is the context for the slave woman's most deeply felt conflicts."^[3] The black mother in American culture is frequently observed in these and many

other studies as powerfully present but poorly understood by means of dominant models. Suzanne Carother, for instance, has noted that the conventional assumption in white culture that mothers remain in the private, domestic sphere is simply inappropriate to the circumstances of black mothers, who are traditionally both workers and mothers and who do not raise their children in isolation from other adults.^[4]

Whereas many poets, novelists, and scholars have sought to celebrate the often forgotten black mother for her positive creativity, her power to endure, her willingness to protect and nurture despite psychological and material conflicts, other voices have recently called for more negative images of African American people. Mae Henderson urges that we must not avert the gaze of criticism from "non felicitous" images of women in particular. Worried by the "male scopophilia" made possible by Houston Baker's idealization of women and women writers (and I think by the prescriptiveness of this same idealization), Henderson points out that Walker's "mother in the garden," a symbol of birth and renewal, has to be set beside Sula's grandmother Eva, a symbol of death and destruction when she sets her son Plum on fire.^[5] Reacting to the criticism of black women writers for their treatment of black men in particular, Deborah McDowell argues in an essay on Sula that "the overarching preoccupation with 'positive' racial representation has worked in tandem with a static view of the nature of identification in the act of reading."^[6] Hortense Spillers, responding to McDowell's essay, agrees that "the novel and figure [of Sula ] also offer figures of ambiguity, of 'bad' passions that the heart, the recognition, can no longer afford to deny."^[7] And in her own theoretical emphasis elsewhere on the absence rather than the presence of black mothers, Spillers similarly implies that it is necessary to confront "monstrous" things when we seek to theorize or historicize black mothers. Moreover, with due respect for critical differences, we might deduce from Spillers' subtle argument that the position of "black mother" is as much a terrifying oxymoron, in its own way, as that of "lesbian mother":

The dominant culture, in a fatal misunderstanding, assigns a matriarchalist value where it does not belong; actually misnames the power of the female regarding the enslaved community. Such naming is false because the female could not, in fact, claim her child, and false, once again, because "motherhood" is not perceived in the prevailing social climate as a legitimate procedure of cultural inheritance . . . motherhood as female blood-rite is outraged, is denied, at the very same time that it becomes the founding term of a human and social enactment . . ..

In this play of paradox, only the female stands in the flesh, both mother and mother-dispossessed. This problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject. Actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to "name"), which her culture imposes in blindness, "Sapphire" might rewrite after all a radically different text for a female empowerment.^[8]

The distance between those who stress the ignored and devalued presence of heroic African American mothers and those who emphasize the "bad" or absent mother may be more apparent than real, but it reflects a common problem, at the center of so much thinking about motherhood: how best to give voice to the previously silenced, on what terms to bring the marginalized and dominated into historical recognition without downplaying historical reality. One novel, however, has recently seemed to accommodate the desire both to celebrate and to mourn the black mother: Toni Morrison's Beloved .

Sethe Suggs, like all slave mothers, cannot claim her children. During a brief period of heroic escape, illicit freedom, and fleshly maternal bliss, Sethe's maternal desire is narrativized in terms perfectly inside the dominant conventions of motherhood, establishing readers' confidence in her as mother and sympathy with her as female subject and victim. But the impossibility of her desire is quickly reaffirmed when the legal owner of both Sethe and her children comes to claim his property. The mother attempts to usurp the slave master's rights, stealing his property (as her historical prototype, Margaret Garner, was convicted of doing) by trying to murder her own children rather than surrender them back to slavery. For many readers and characters this act puts her, for good or bad, where she is historically determined to be, "out of the traditional symbolics of female gender."^[9] She succeeds in killing only one child, the baby girl who is at least part of what returns to the story as the ghost, Beloved. The novel spirals around this series of monstrous events: a moment of murder, and then years later the ghostly reappearance "in the flesh" of the young girl who is the spirit of multiply deprived, dispossessed, and inadequately individuated identities, including Sethe's dead baby, Sethe herself, Sethe's mother, and the nameless sixty million who died in the Middle Passage. It closes with the exorcism of Beloved and a gesture toward the empowerment of Sethe as

female social subject rather than misnamed matriarch. Her final words at once instate and call into question this "radically different" and tentative subject: "'Me? Me?'"

The popular and critical success of Beloved verifies the need and effect of telling a story of black motherhood as one of infanticide, outrage, and conflict.^[10] The novel is remarkable for its ability to bring the previously repressed or erased preoedipal mother and enslaved subject to the brink of consciousness and language. The publication of Beloved coincided with the very earliest stages of my interest in childless mothers in contemporary literature, and in fact the enormous acclaim of the novel in popular as well as more academic circles substantiated my growing sense that the mother without child is one of the key sites of moral and political debate today. However, as I continued to think about the particularities of black mothers in America and the insights and impasses of current scholarship, the questions Beloved raises prompted me to greater interest in an earlier novel: Alice Walker's Meridian . Given the recent calls for more "bad" African American fictional characters and more nontraditional women and mothers, it may be a good moment to reconsider its powerful and difficult heroine, Meridian Hill, who cheerfully gives her baby up for adoption. At one point, the novel makes it clear that she does so in order to avoid the very same route Sethe planned to take, infanticide followed by suicide: "She might not have given him away to the people who wanted him. She might have murdered him instead. Then killed herself. She might have done it that way except for one thing: One day she really looked at her child and loved him with as much love as she loved the moon or a tree, which was a considerable amount of impersonal love . . .. When she gave him away she did so with a light heart."^[11]

What might we learn, after Beloved and in the context of a search for the postmodern, maybe postmaternal female subject, by comparing Meridian's and Sethe's "bad" behavior as mothers? By some criteria, Meridian might be judged more guilty and unnatural than Sethe. The twentieth-century black woman's circumstances are far less dire; no one is threatening to take her baby back into slavery. Indeed, Meridian explicitly says that she understands for the first time what slavery is like after her child is born, as against her conscious will her body serves his needs. Whereas Sethe is forced to kill what she loves, Meridian freely chooses to give up her son. In the present of the novel, this is a highly atypical act for a black teenaged mother; according to a recent study by Rickie Solinger, it is contrary to both public policy and

community opinion about the responsibility for black babies.^[12] Although the novel speaks of her "impersonal love" for the child, the perverseness of this choice stands out if we compare it to nonfictional accounts of parents who give up children for adoption. In a study of members of a support group called Concerned United Birthparents, Judith Modell observes that the birth parents she interviewed in fact rejected the rationale that Meridian offers, the notion that a mother sometimes gives her child up because she loves it. Instead, in the central "relinquishment" scenes of their stories, they stressed the involuntarihess of their act, which they preferred to speak of as "surrender."^[13] (Note that there is no noun in our lexicon for what Meridian does: besides loaded terms like "relinquishment" and "surrender" we have only the awkward gerundive phrases, "giving away" or "giving up for adoption," both of which imply at least some degree of ownership and selfsacrifice that does not seem appropriate.) Meridian's dreams are at first haunted by the child, but when she tries to remember him a few years later, she cannot do so. In contrast, the birth parents that Modell studied resist the mandate to forget their children in the very act of telling and retelling their stories. This comparison could suggest, among other things, that Meridian is more selfish, unloving, and unmaternal than Sethe and that Walker fails to see or articulate the outrage of maternal "surrender" fundamental to the historical experience of black subjectivity. Meridian chooses, arguably, what a real mother could only be forced to accept, and she does not even love her child the way most birth parents do.

This is not the way she is usually judged, however. In the second half of the twentieth century, although infanticide is still a crime, giving up a child for adoption is not, and to most readers Meridian's antimaternal behavior is excusable, if not likable, and not "bad" enough to raise the moral, psychological, or political questions that Sethe's does. A few critics have recapitulated the "core plot" of the story without even mentioning this episode.^[14] Among the critics who focus at least some attention on Meridian's giving up of her child, the consensus is that Meridian must give up her son in order to pursue her life as a civil rights activist or to realize "self-affirmation."^[15] Some readers have even seen the guilt that she feels for doing so as a central problem, the main cause of the illness from which she must gradually recover in the course of the novel's telling. No readers that I know of have suggested that Meridian ought to have kept Rundi with her while she struggled to come of

age and join the civil rights movement or waited until he was grown up to become a heroine, and no critics to my knowledge fault Walker for implicitly failing to understand that women's power is deeply rooted in the biological or social capacity to mother that Meridian so blithely seems to put behind her.

I by no means wish to argue that Meridian or Walker should be thus critiqued, but it is important to note that the apparent acceptance, bordering for some readers on approval, of the black civil rights heroine as mother without child rests on common assumptions about female selfhood, (black) motherhood, (white) feminism, and the socalled feminist novel. One assumption is that Meridian clearly belongs to and reflects its era, the early days of second-wave feminism, with its allegedly radical repudiation of women's role as mothers.^[16] Hence the novel is often categorized as a feminist bildungsroman, the story of the heroine's quest for selfhood set against the forces, including motherhood, that threaten her. Notably selfhood and motherhood are locked in opposition in this typically white formulation, as they are in most thinking about either term (and in many readings of Beloved as well). It is further assumed that mothering necessarily entails a sacrifice or at least compromise of an autonomous, cohesive self that some if not all women, often for good reasons, are not prepared to make. The conflict is constructed as a simple one: the interests of the individual woman versus the interests of her child, female self-affirmation versus the institution of motherhood. Women have a right to "surrender" their maternal responsibilities to others (as long as they surrender them completely). Meridian is the case par excellence of the woman who chooses to repudiate motherhood, and having said that, the case is closed.

However, Meridian in fact complicates all these rarely challenged assumptions and may open up difficult, usually unasked questions about how and why a black mother would give up her children, what happens to her when she does, and what her story may signify. The claim that Meridian renounces motherhood for the civil rights movement suggests a slightly inaccurate reading of the plot. Meridian gives up Eddie Jr., whom she has already renamed Rundi, not when she volunteers with the voter registration project in her home town (during which time her mother-in-law seems happy to care for the baby all day), but when she receives a scholarship to Saxon College. It is true enough that Meridian has already failed to bond with her child well before the scholar-

ship offer arrives, and the style of activism she has begun to practice, soon to be followed by nights spent in jail, would interfere with primary caretaking of a young child. But Meridian herself never cites her desire to join the civil rights movement as a factor in her decision, and it is important to be precise about the fact that it is her admission to Saxon College, an elite institution of higher education for black women modeled after the elite white women's schools, that precipitates the act of giving Rundi away. Saxon observes the dominant tradition in female education that rigidly enforces the divide between women who are mothers and women who are not, and it dictates that only the latter are permitted to have a life of the mind. However, Meridian suggests that this influential white model of independent, educated female identity, which again puts self-development so starkly in opposition to motherhood, misrepresents and erases the experience of black women in America. Saxon turns southern African American daughters into ladies who will not be able to tell their mothers' stories; as Barbara Christian has noted, Meridian suggests in other ways too that some African American women themselves ignore their maternal heritage.^[17]

It is also important not to put Meridian's choice in terms of activism versus mothering because this way of seeing the problem perpetuates a conception that Walker's novel—and this study as a whole—contravenes: that mothering and political action, like mothering and thinking or writing, are mutually exclusive practices. This is the kind of presupposition that has been used against women of many nationalities and races who do take political action, and it may serve to disarm those who might. It flies in the face of events such as the Latin American motherist movements or, closer to home, the role of women in the peace movement of the sixties.^[18] In the context of Meridian, it falls into the trap of denying or policing the role of mothers and older African American women in enabling the civil rights movement—a forgetting explicitly deplored in stories like Toni Cade Bambara's "My Man Bovanne" or Walker's own "Everyday Use." And finally it fails to account for what is arguably the novel's most important point: Meridian's highly "maternalized" brand of activism, as we shall see, challenges those dominant notions of the opposition between self-affirmation (or group affirmation) and the work of caring for and about children.^[19] I do not suggest that we should entirely set aside the assumption that Meridian gives her child away in order to "find herself" or experience what Lindsey Tucker describes as "mobility," for there is an undeniable validity

to such claims.^[20] But we need to make them very carefully, because the selfhood Meridian seeks and finds in the course of this novel is not the western autonomous personhood, privileged and upwardly mobile, that we often think of when we speak of the self, and motherhood for black women is not merely the passive, domestic, private, and dependent experience that it is often said to be in dominant white models.

The distinction becomes clearer if we carefully reconsider the notion that Meridian is a feminist "novel of self-discovery." According to Rita Felski's persuasive description of this narrative structure, which she claims has emerged in the last twenty years of writing by women, such novels identify "autonomy" and "coherent selfhood" as "women's most pressing need"; gender is seen as "the primary marker" of subjectivity, and other determinants are ignored. Female community is vital in these novels, and concomitantly, "there is no sustained exploration of the interrelations . . . between feminism and the rest of society" and little interest in metafictional questions. Felski subdivides the "novel of self-discovery" into two subtypes: the "feminist bildungsroman," with a historical and linear plot marking progress outward, and the "novel of awakening," in which the discovery entails movement inward to "a given mythic identity" or authentic "innerself." Both presume "a process of separation as the essential precondition for any path to self-knowledge."^[21]

Felski mentions Meridian twice, both times parenthetically: at the beginning of her discussion she lists it as one of the novels she has in mind, and later she cites Truman as an example of the kind of sexist male radical often found in the "self-discovery" novel. Yet Meridian seems to evoke the category of "self-discovery" novel only to subvert it, at least as it is defined by Felski's criteria. Gender is by no means the only determinant of Meridian's subjectivity; her racial, familial, and regional identities are influential too, although often in contradictory ways. Though the "female community" is beyond question important in Meridian in ways that I explore in this chapter, it is at best an ambiguous source of support. Meridian remains isolated from many women from whom help and encouragement might be expected, and her foregrounded personal relationships in the novel are to a black man and a white woman. This heroine's journey reverses the normal quest pattern, as it takes her neither outward nor inward but back toward an incomplete but resilient connection between inside and outside, self and community, and past and present. Meridian's quest begins rather

than ends in the separation that white feminist novels are often said to require. There is something special and unique about Meridian even as a child, and she detaches herself from the roles of wife, lover, and biological mother early on. But then she returns to the various communities she has always revered, despite her distance from them, to heal herself: the rural South, the Black Church, the principles and practices of the civil rights movement. Her gradual downward social mobility and poverty arrest the apparent progress outward she began when she joined the voter registration drive and entered Saxon College, and near the end of the novel she imagines herself walking behind the "real revolutionaries" (201).^[22] Both parts of the old term "self-knowledge" are scrutinized in this heroine's story. Meridian's self is represented as neither cohesive nor autonomous in traditional ways. This character, the soul of integrity, lacks formal, psychological, and epistemic wholeness; the ways we know her and the ways she knows herself and the world around her are not conventional, coherent, or rational.

Reopening and centering the question of why this black mother gives up her son, I suggest that Meridian explores the roots of both (black feminist) politics and (black women's) selfhood in a revised understanding of motherhood as a historical and psychological experience of nothing less than trauma, much as Beloved does. Meridian is not a feminist bildungsroman but a formally innovative and metafictionally self-conscious novel best described by the spatial metaphor Walker herself has used: the crazy quilt. "You know, there's a lot of difference between a crazy quilt and a patchwork quilt," Walker has said. "A crazy quilt . . . only looks crazy. It is not patched; it is planned."^[23] As Melissa Walker points out, "The impact of a crazy quilt depends on shapes, colors, and textures, but what usually gives such quilts significance and emotional validity is that each individual piece has a history."^[24] Patterned in this way, the novel gives far less prominence than Beloved does to the individual psyche or subjectivity of a main protagonist. In the first section below, I consider how the history of "each individual piece" in the crazy quilt works to situate Meridian's giving up of her child in what we might call the "reproductive consciousness" of rural southern black females in the second half of the twentieth century. In the second and final part of the chapter, I argue that Meridian's selfhood is not only less separate but also less cohesive than certain conventional models imply, suggesting a psychological model of personality split along vertical rather than

horizontal lines—a model often associated only with a "crazy" personality, one who is dissociated and disconnected.^[25]