Mistreated by her mother for being too dark, Bride comes of age in the Nobel laureate’s magnificent, yet frustratingly flawed, novel
In her latest novel, Toni Morrison asks a difficult question: what do we do with the sins of the child when that child’s sins were engendered by a force against which she was powerless? Lula Ann Bridewell, who calls herself “Bride”, is blue-black beautiful, the kind of woman who turns heads wherever she goes. She is tall, elegant, and dresses only in white, the better to reflect her beauty.
But Bride did not always know her beauty or how to wear it. As a child, her mother Sweetness punished Bride for her dark skin, which ended her marriage. Sweetness’s husband Louis could not bring himself to love a child with skin as dark as Bride’s. “We had three good years,” Sweetness tells us, “but when she was born, he blamed me and treated Lula Ann like she was a stranger, more than that, an enemy.” Her mother, meanwhile, insisted her child call her Sweetness instead of anything maternal.
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