In Love, two women fight until they understand their fighting as a pretense to touch. The fighting is a kind of intimacy, an annual rite of slapping, biting, and hair-pulling that eventually gives way to a “realization that the fights did nothing other than allow them to hold each other.” The epiphany that they are longing to hold each other is eclipsed by a more creative violence. In lieu of brawling, there are stolen rings and invocations of traumatic history that divert them away from the need to be held.
For decades they live and age alongside each other in this way, hurting each other more inventively, unable to transcend the poor contact of fighting in favor of real, tender contact until the last pages, when they are allowed the full epiphany of an embrace. As Toni Morrison put it in an interview about this novel, an epiphany amounts to a happy ending for her characters because “they’re not stupid anymore.” It’s funny, but also a generous conception of closure, and also of narrative, which often feels fraught with the pressure of how to end.
I read Love in a moment of not knowing how to end, an excruciating period of digression within the weird temporality of grief. Beyond my mourning, there was the more mundane experience of forgetting how to write. I aspired to the kind of strict linearity that was the opposite of where I was, wanting the relief of narrowing toward an ending. Fortunately, Love denied me that relief.
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Like much of Morrison’s work, Love doesn’t narrow and insists instead on openness, the timeline vast and heavily populated. Spanning about seven decades, from the 1920s to the 1990s, the novel tells a story about the women whose lives intersect with an important man. He is important because, as the owner of an exclusive hotel in a depressed community, he is a symbol of Black prosperity during a time when those symbols are few, and beyond his symbolism his business provides palpable economic benefits to the chosen folk who are a part of his industry.
On the other hand, he’s a wealthy predator who won’t permit the members of the community to stay in his hotel, reserved as it is for a different class of clientele. His name is Bill Cosey, and in the name of respectability, reverence for hard-won progress, and deference to an old genre of Black patriarchy, his memory is shielded from the collateral damage—the women—he left behind. Many of them participate in shielding him. Heed, his widow; Christine, his granddaughter; May, his daughter-in-law; Vida, a loyal employee; L, a loyal but more discerning employee; and June, a girl who communes with his spirit after his death—all of them are left to parse his legacy. And the most central reverberation of that legacy is the rupture of the friendship between Heed and Christine after Heed, still a child, is offered up to be Bill Cosey’s bride.
Only very late in the book is there any straightforward acknowledgment that Bill Cosey’s marriage to his granddaughter’s friend is what it sounds like, a marriage between an old man and a child. There are allusions—the looseness of a wedding dress (because it is on a child’s body) or the fact that Heed can’t endorse a check or discern whether a glass is for water or champagne (ostensibly because she comes from a poor family, but also because she is a child)—but the more vulgar dimensions of Heed’s exploitation are held out of view. What is presented to us is a pair of old women who have spent decades hating each other. The elision of why they hate each other has partly to do with the alinearity of the text, which bears the omissions natural to a timeline that sprawls backward and forward through the selective experiences of a large cast. And it has partly to do with Morrison’s insistence on personal experience being selective, what a person knows, even about themselves, being subject to their emotional availability to knowledge. So it may be true that a marriage between a child and an old man is a violent contract or that the bond between two girls was ruined by that violence, but neither girl, partly because they were girls and not women, could be aware of those facts.
Instead, oriented by the perversion of important ideals, like the imperative of racial solidarity and the preservation of Black wealth, and the insidious misogyny endemic to that perversion, the women place the blame on each other, affirmed by the communal adulation of Bill Cosey and the elder women around them, who model that culture of mythmaking and apology. Morrison’s choice to render even the facts of personal history as vulnerable to external weather and one’s own bad interpretation, or as open to revision and thus nonlinear, reveals the strangeness of the path toward even an evident truth. It takes time to reconcile the facts of what happened to you, often because it is a process of unlearning and because you are balancing the dissonance of competing truths, like the fact that a man can be banal and inspiring and occasionally tender and also be the violence that undoes people’s lives.
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Love spoke to me in those moments when time felt especially oppressive, when I felt I was moving too slowly through grief or through my work, in part because it affirmed time as simultaneously lawless and capacious enough to leave room for epiphany. For Heed and Christine and the rest of the sprawling cast, Love is a journey away from apology and toward truth. And the truth is that like a lot of men of his ilk, Bill Cosey is just a guy. These are the precise words Morrison used to describe him in the same interview. Just a guy, or a person taking advantage of the liberal allowances of men. Not inherently powerful, but imbued with a power granted by the people he exploits.
Bill Cosey is ordinary, self-pitying when he drinks, philandering, comparatively inert against the more varied universes of the other people with whom he shares the text. People like June, a girl with fused toes who escapes the impoverished boonies around the hotel, striving for something to own after getting out of jail. Like May, a kleptomaniac with plywood over her bedroom windows, trying very hard to buy a gun. Or Romen, a rare point of masculine goodness in the text, shunned for being a killjoy at a gang bang, and for his soft, intentional conception of manhood. A few of the epiphanies that populate the book are intertwined with the revelation of seeing, beneath the power, just a guy.
Romen’s grandfather Sandler Gibbons is one of the first to arrive at that epiphany. Out on a boat one night with Bill, Sandler, a working-class man pressured into keeping the wealthier man company, sees Bill’s perversity, though the myth is so potent he keeps it to himself. Many years later, in each other’s arms, Heed and Christine have a parallel epiphany, able to see with clarity what the man (and myth) have done to them. There are other epiphanies: Heed and Christine’s embrace, a revision of the earlier compulsion to forge contact through fighting; and the conversation Sandler and Romen have about sex, a tense but moving exchange, after Sandler spends much of the book feeling alienated from Romen, a boy who skulks about the house, an unknowable creature born in the Eighties.
Because of how Morrison has opened the definition, these are happy endings. Glimpsing the earthly thing under power. Escaping that power by recognizing what was done to you. Learning how to touch, how to talk. Certainly not everyone in Love gets a happy ending, remaining in ignorance or delusion as some people do, but to even position a happy ending as an emotional event, a change inside the self as opposed to a change outside the self, makes closure the work of feeling. It makes feeling a crucial ingredient to, in Toni Morrison’s words, not being stupid anymore, making love a condition of discovery.
English (US) · 