Lady Sings the Blues

Though most readers are loath to admit it, narratives of American childhood innocence are mythologies. With American ethnic experiences this is especially true. From Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep to Junot Diaz’s Drown, the greatest literary writers quash the notion that any of us enter adulthood unscathed.  

Toni Morrison’s eleven novels are filled with characters whose jacked-up childhoods hobble them like Oedipus on Mount Cithaeron: Pecola Breedlove and Milkman Dead; Denver and Seneca; Frank Money and Golden Gray. Though her fiction is strewn with broken black bodies, Morrison has always been more interested in the characters that manage to disengage from their psychological and physical damages in order to embrace the extant African-American experience as the human experience.

In (1992), for instance, when Golden Gray tracks down his black father,