CAAR Conference, Münster, March 1999:
Abstract: Dr. Cathy Waegner, Universität Siegen
Liberating Metaphorical Sites:
Morrison, Winfrey, and the Popularizing of the "All-Black" Oklahoma Settlements
Toni Morrison's controversial new novel Paradise highlights a chapter of African-American self-liberation that had, as she puts it, "virtually been erased from history "1: the founding of towns in Oklahoma territory by former slaves escaping from the oppression of the Southern post-Reconstruction. Of the 28 settlements, 12 remain today, and the movement of black populations into "their own self-owned and self-supporting areas" is a "powerful story" which shows African-Americans creating their own version of the New Eden. Morrison imagines the mythology which propels and transmutes one of these "chosen cities"2 climaxing in the Moses-like male lawgivers of the town destroying the "black Eves"3 of the renegade female community on the outskirts. In the January program of Oprah Winfrey's widely viewed Book Club (over 15 million regular U.S. viewers, with broadcasts in 132 countries), Paradise was presented; the broadcast included a segment on the Oklahoma cities of Langston and Rentiesville. These formerly "erased" settlements have thus now acquired high international profile. To what extent, however, is the picture presented by Winfrey of these "perfect towns"4 a simplification of the historical/current phenomenon, as well as a misinterpretation of Morrison's complex metaphors?
In my paper, after sketching the history of these previously little-known settlements,5 I will consider the portrait of them in the Oprah Winfrey program [using video excerpts], in which they are ostensibly shown positively as making the 'American Dream' available to blacks: freedom to obtain education, own businesses, develop a sense of pride and self-worth, practice 'good citizenship'. However, in the interviews with an historian, a former mayor, a musician, and a 99-year-old resident, a latent sub-text--not quite edited out--reveals discrimination and stereotypical interaction between the African-American and white worlds which implies that the Oklahoma "gated cities"6 did/do not in fact achieve paradisiac liberation.
If it is part of Winfrey's agenda to put as positive a face as possible on the all-black towns, it is certainly not Morrison's. She unflinchingly shows conflicts over education, ruthless entrepreneurship, pride and self-worth sliding into arrogance and destructive self-righteousness, 'good citizens' becoming a black lynch mob. Darker-skinned blacks relentlessly persecute lighter-skinned ones, blacks fear any white intrusion, the leadership crushes the younger generation. Despite these negative ramifications, which seem to reflect the black founding fathers' pact with God metamorphosing into a Faustian one, Morrison's notion of "paradise" can be seen as a liberating, achievable one. It is not an exclusive gated city which admits only the select and bans those rejected to some type of hellish ghetto--it is rather a process of "being open to all the places in between,"7 an intercultural space, a metaphor which could become popular reality.
1 Alice van Straalen, "A Talk with Toni Morrison." Book of the Month Club News, April 1998; the quotations in the following sentence are also from this interview.
2 Transcript of the "Oprah Winfrey Book Club" program, March 6, 1998, p. 7.
3 Toni Morrison, Paradise. NY: Random House, copyright 1997, published 1998, p. 18.
4 The semi-ironic term is Morrison's (Transcript, p. 7).
5 I will also compare them to such better-known African-American communities as Zora Neale Hurston's hometown of Eatonville, Florida, fictionalized in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
6 This is the third term that Morrison uses on the Winfrey show to suggest that the Oklahoma settlements fall short of their Edenic paradigm, op cit.
7 Transcript, p. 17.