Biblical trees, biblical deliverance: literary landscapes of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison.

Enslaved by law or custom, African Americans have found the Promised Land metaphor an apt vehicle for describing the epic proportion of their suffering. Using this metaphor, they can identify with the Old Testament Israelites who were under God's special providence. When read typologically, their persecutions offer evidence that they are God's new chosen who, like the biblical Jews, can hope for a better life in a different place--a land attainable by a "flight out of Egypt," implying a "crossing over" the Red Sea or its symbolic equivalent. Black vernacular songs such as "Bound for the Promised Land," "Going Into Canaan," "I Won't Have to Cross Jordan Alone," and "Go Down Moses" attest to the metaphor's power for engendering hope. Indeed, the journey to the Promised Land frequently assumes the same symbolic significance as a return to the Garden of Eden or a search for it. The two places, Eden and the Promised Land, can share the same tropes and images, evoking an imaginative place on the other side of some barrier--often a river--that must be crossed for deliverance.

The Promised Land and Eden have been metaphors understood and used by such historic figures as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. In one of the most poignant passages from Narrative of the Life, Douglass describes how the slaves were literally shut out of the master's garden, a metaphoric Eden, by a perverse chief gardener anxious to punish slaves who wished to eat from the tempting, fruit-bearing trees--trees that, by implication, would afford slaves access to knowledge of the good life or a land of milk and honey (39). In an implicit comparison of himself to Moses a century later, King famously proclaimed, "I've been to the mountaintop.... And I've seen the promised land" (286). More than any other Civil Rights leader, King understood the power of such rhetoric for galvanizing an oppressed people; indeed, his rhetorical stance proved a compelling metaphor in not only creating a watershed moment in American history but also in aligning that event with biblical precedent, the Hebrews' escape from slavery under God's protective eye. (1)

The Promised Land/Garden typology affords writers and speakers a host of images that carry symbolic weight. Garden images, notably the knowledge-giving trees of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, are powerful tools for African American writers inscribing into fiction the painful history of slavery and some psychological truths about enslavement. (2) Nonetheless, in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Beloved tree images convey multiple ideas; they posit knowledge of both good and evil. Hurston and Morrison respectively imply, however, that the fruit of trees must be tasted to provide protagonists the self-knowledge necessary for personal growth, redemption, and deliverance.

Fifty years following the 1937 publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Toni Morrison in 1987 published Beloved, a novel with striking affinities with its literary precursor. Like Hurston's, Morrison's novel brings her readers into a life of re-memory. While Hurston's protagonist realizes selfhood within and against a free black community, Morrison's Sethe sorts out her life within the context of slavery. Although their heroines have different backgrounds, Hurston and Morrison turn to some of the same tropes and images, drawn from black vernacular culture, to document their protagonists' attempts at self-liberation. The similarity of these images indicates not so much Morrison's indebtedness to Hurston as it does the existence of a tradition described by Morrison in an interview with critic Gloria Naylor. "Before I began to write," Morrison claims, "I had never read Zora Neale Hurston." She suggests that the similarities critics find mean that "the tradition really exists"; it "makes the cheese more binding, not less, because it means that the world as perceived by black women at certain times does exist" (qtd. in Awkward 165). (3) Thus, in comparing images perceived by characters in the two novels, we can discover much about that binding tradition. Among such critics as Michael Awkward, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Trudier Harris, Karla Holloway, Nellie Y. McKay, and Cheryl A. Wall, the fictions published by Hurston and Morrison have generated substantive and innovative response. Of particular interest to this paper is the variety of image and narrative patterns in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Beloved.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston's protagonist relates her experiences retrospectively. (4) Telling her story to Pheoby, Janie re-visions herself, as she looks back in recognition of the garden images, both negative and positive, that have shaped her personality and identity. Hers is a personal fulfillment realized when she turns her silence into speech, for it is through the power of storytelling that she records who she is and negates the hegemonic voices threatening that identity. As we read Janie re-membering herself, we are struck by the accumulated power of her frequent references to the pear tree through which she has come to know herself. For Janie, the pear tree is the informing image against which all other trees are measured. To understand herself, Janie has revisited that pear tree time and again, documenting life's experiences with references to the pear tree situated in her grandmother's garden, a tree symbolically proffering knowledge that Janie, Eve-like, accepts. In an innovative shift, Hurston replaces the legendary tree of knowledge, the apple tree, with an arguably more fitting symbol of the acquisition of carnal knowledge and sexual experience, the pear tree.

Hurston is not the first literary artist to appropriate the pear tree to symbolize emerging sexuality. In fact, Chaucer chooses the pear tree as the site of sexual fulfillment in "The Merchant's Tale." Married to an old January, the youthful and adulterous May in this tale eagerly meets her illicit younger lover in the garden where they "struggle" in the pear tree. Faulkner follows this tradition in The Sound and the Fury when he has the sensual young Caddy leave her upstairs bedroom window via a pear tree to meet her secret lovers. (5) In reworking this male-defined tradition, Hurston could also have appreciated the "bottom-heavy" fruit of the pear tree, an image against which many self-critical women assess their potential for attracting a mate. (6) Or perhaps she imagined the luscious, brown-skinned fruit as a fitting image for a concupiscent black protagonist's narrative. Ultimately, Hurston's novel provides Janie an informing image to understand her sexuality and against which to evaluate all other "trees" for the good and evil knowledge they can bring her. As Their Eyes opens, Janie sees "her life like a great tree, in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches" (8).

With third person narration and the symbolism of the pear tree, Hurston conveys Janie's changed attitudes toward her grandmother. She tells Pheoby how she "hated her grandmother," a woman who "loved to deal in scraps":

   Nanny had taken the biggest thing god
   ever made, the horizon ... and
   pinched it in to such a little bit of a
   thing that she could tie it about her
   granddaughter's neck tight enough to
   choke her. She hated the old woman
   who had twisted her so in the name of
   love. Most humans didn't love one
   another nohow, and this mis-love was
   so strong that even common blood
   couldn't overcome it all the time. (85)

But Nanny cannot help Janie beyond what she herself can see, and her vision is limited. Yet, she loves her granddaughter and wants a better life for her. Speaking to Janie, Nanny observes, "De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see. Ah been prayin' fuh it tuh be different wid you. Lawd, Lawd, Lawd!" (14, italics added) With her limited perspective, Nanny interprets the pear tree as a tree of death and shame, whereas the sexually conscious Janie sees the tree's life-affirming nature. Janie confirms that sexual, promising, Edenic vision by walking about the little garden and celebrating the pear blossoms and all of creation she sees about her. Nanny, however, awakens from a literal--and arguably both a metaphoric and a historic sleep as well--"bolt[s] upright ... peer[s] out of the window and [sees] Johnny Taylor lacerating her Janie with a kiss" (11). Perceiving sexual knowledge as a harbinger of death, Nanny says to Janie: "What Ah seen just now is plenty for me, honey, Ah don't want no trashy nigger, no breath-and-britches, lak Johnny Taylor usin' yo' body to wipe his loots on" (12). Janie, however, sees something else altogether: to her, Johnny Taylor signifies creative impulse.

Despite her hatred of it, however, Nanny complies with the social hierarchy that places black women beneath black men who, in turn, occupy menial positions beneath white men. Seized by the same fears of domination that later will stir a subjugated community to action, Nanny tries to control the loose woman she now fears Janie has become. (7) When Nanny awakens to see that pear-tree-influenced lacerating kiss, she calls her granddaughter's name. And "that," says Janie, reflecting on her acquisition of knowledge, "was the end of her childhood" (12). Sensing the loss of Janie's innocence and seeing through masculinist lenses, Nanny determines Janie's fate in collusion with the male-authored way of controlling a woman's life: marry her (off) to secure male domination or safety.

Replete with the promise of fecundity, the pear tree argues against the tyranny of control that Nanny unwisely, perhaps unwittingly, chooses. In biblical allusion to a promised land that Nanny has hoped but failed to provide, she tells Janie that she had intended to "throw up a highway through de wilderness" (15). Her grandmother has also wanted Janie "to know" things, but sexual knowledge outside the constraints of marriage is not part of the plan. Hurston subtly alludes to the tree of knowledge when she has Nanny confess that because of the offending kiss, the plan for Janie "to school out and pick from a higher bush and a sweeter berry" has gone awry. Thus, Nanny marries Janie off to Logan Killicks, theoretically to "protect" her (13-14). But from Janie's perspective, "protection" signifies a prophylactic that prevents life--her own. Her first vision as she imagines life with Killicks is of the pear tree "desecrated"; then to her, Killicks's house seems "a lonesome place like a stump in the middle of the woods where nobody had ever been" (20). Thus, like God in the Garden of Eden, Nanny authoritatively imposes a death-like sentence on Janie when she insists on her marriage to a man with the chilling name of Killicks.

As Janie re-gathers the images constituting the life journey she is relating to Pheoby, trees provide the markers of her life. Janie describes her loveless, first marriage, then her meetings with Joe Starks in the "scrub oaks" across the road from Killicks' house. Janie's outer landscape details serve as emotional shorthand for her interior reality. Infused with personal psychology, the scrub oaks of Janie's narrative anticipate the bleak emotional landscape of Janie's second marriage. In fact, she confesses to Pheoby that Joe Starks did not "represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he [did] speak for far horizon ... for change and [for] chance" (28). When Starks suggests marriage, therefore, Janie takes a chance, flings her constraining apron "on a low bush," makes herself a bouquet of flowers, and marries Starks with the naive hope that "from now on until death" she will have a "bee for her bloom" (33).

In recounting this marriage, Janie demonstrates her faith that it would meet her needs. "A big live oak tree" presides over much of the activity when Joe and Janie arrive in Maitland, Florida (33). But that organic tree belies what the marriage proves to be. Hungering for power and authority, Starks booms his entrance into the town: "I god, ... where's de Mayor?" (32). That is, Hurston's spelling transforms his expletive into declaration: I god. Joe Starks's "god" with its lowercase g and "Mayor" with a capital M essentially reduces god while raising the Mayor wannabe to new dominance. Declaring Maitland's need for authority, Starks covets the mayoral position, forges his authority from the subjection, fear, and awe of the citizens, and perpetuates his stronghold by parading his successes, one of which is Janie--ornament-wife, a notch on his sword. (8)

Continually looking for ways to strut his superiority, Starks capitalizes on a mule's death by using its distended belly for a platform, as he postures god-like to make his speech. Nanny's fear had been that Janie, like most black women before her, would become a "mule of the world." Because Starks treats Janie as irreverently as he does the mule, the vivid depiction of the mule's death is an important one, with trees once more serving as markers of knowledge gained or lost--in this case the knowledge of death. Although the mule dies beneath "the big tree," his carcass is dragged significantly to a grove of scrub oaks where impatient buzzards gather, awaiting their opportunity to grow fat on his remains. In an ironic foreshadowing of a pivotal courtroom scene that will put Janie at the mercy of human vultures, the hungry buzzards focus on the "yaller" mule. But they must wait for their ruler, the narrator reports, the leader bird also called "the Parson," who situates himself in a "dead pine tree." Finally, the Parson descends to the carcass, grants the other birds permission to eat, then "[picks] out the eyes in the ceremonial way and the feast went on" until the "yaller mule was gone from the town except for the porch talk." Hurston thus parallels Janie's attempts to disappear as an object of porch talk among residents in the town (55-58).

Despite his use of the yaller mule--and of other people--as so many ruins to stand upon to bolster his ego, Starks is finally unable to transcend impotence and death. Not long after their arrival in Maitland, Janie stopped being "petal-open" to him; he destroyed her sexual eagerness on the day he slapped her in their kitchen. Meantime, she whiles away the time "under a shady tree," lying to herself about what she has to live for (72-73). One insult too many, however, marks the occasion when Janie projects her voice, centers herself in the room, and puts into perspective the braggadocio of Starks. Since Janie cannot thrive alongside her mate, she must conquer and survive on the spoils. In a scene frequently evaluated by critics, the couple exchange heated remarks that effect Janie's transformation--this time at Joe's expense. (9) When Janie fails to cut a plug of tobacco perfectly in their community store, Joe verbally attacks her: "I god almighty! A woman stay around uh store till she get old as Methuselam and still can't cut a little thing like a plug of tobacco! Don't stand dere rollin' yo' pop eyes at me wid yo' rump hanging' nearly to yo' knees!" Embarrassed by Joe Starks's insult and the laughter it arouses on the porch, Janie uncharacteristically asserts herself and retorts with a vernacular self-affirmation: "Ah'm uh woman every inch of me, and Ah know it. Dat's uh whole lot more'n you kin say. You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but 'tain't nothin' to it, but yo' big voice. Humph! Talking bout me lookin' old! When you pull down yo britches, you look lak de change uh life" (75).

The signifying scene receives commentary from a town citizen who glosses the exchange, saying, "Great God from Zion.... Y'all really playin' de dozens tuhnight" (75). Hurston follows this exclamation with the third person narrator's assessment that "Janie had robbed [Joe] of his illusion of irresistible maleness that all men cherish, which was terrible. The thing that Saul's daughter had done to David" (75). These two biblical references remind us once again of the Judeo-Christian mythology informing Hurston's novel. In the first, the biblical city of Zion, conquered by David and later longed for by Israelites eager to return to their homeland, is a symbolic site appropriated centuries later by black Americans as a promised land, where "dere is a better day acomin'." (10) In the second instance, we are told that Joe Starks, who, like David, has had the requisite organizational skills to rule a "kingdom," will no longer enjoy sexual privilege with his mate; indeed, to trace the parallel, we read in 2 Samuel 6:12-23 that David, having brought the ark of God into the "city of David," gloried in his accomplishment with "leaping and dancing." Witnessing this display of male pride, Saul's daughter hardened her heart against her husband. Therefore, we learn, "Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the day of her death." (11) Perhaps unconsciously following the biblical precedent, after this climax Starks no longer sleeps with Janie; instead, he "moved his things and slept in a room downstairs" (77). Juxtaposed, these two biblical references reinforce the notion that Joe Starks has now suffered like an Old Testament king while Hurston sympathetically positions her protagonist as one bound for a better land.

With language Janie has reordered her world, taken from Starks his puppet-string control of her, and seized control over her own story, which includes a relationship with Vergible Woods, a man called "Tea Cake for short" (93). (12) Early in their relationship Janie realizes that Tea Cake wants her to be a player in the game. As he sets up the checkerboard, the narrator tells us, Tea Cake thinks it "natural for [Janie] to play" (92). The most empowering move occurs when Tea Cake jumps Janie's king; she grabs his hand to prevent his seizing control; they wrestle in fun; and Tea Cake yields to her king. As the night winds down, Tea Cake tells Janie "good night" with the observation, "Look lak we done run our conversation from grass roots tuh pine trees." At this point in her narrative, Hurston once again presents a tree image against which Janie contemplates Tea Cake's potential. Hopes for the future blend with images of her past, for Janie thinks Tea Cake looks "like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom--a pear tree blossom in the spring" (101).

Janie's marriage to Tea Cake begins her personal journey toward a gratifying life. (13) She confides to him, "If you kin see the light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all. Ah wuz fumblin' round and God opened de door" (151). In the last chapters of the novel, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog and tries in his madness to shoot Janie, but instead she safeguards her right to live fruitfully and shoots him. In that salvation of sell Janie confronts death, transcends it, and learns a lesson that her grandmother never learned. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil standing in Nanny's garden could not be avoided if Janie were to ever experience a genuine life. Nanny's desire to protect Janie was doubtless prompted by the fear that Janie would fall by knowing too much. Yet it is only in the knowing that Janie can construct herself, can re-member the facts of her life, re-gather those markers of her life, and continually revision her life to make meaning of her past. And in the process of re-membering, re-gathering, and re-visioning, Janie finds her voice and exploits the power of language to create herself and secure deliverance. And what she gives Pheoby and those of us who read that narrative is her story.

Informed by Judeo-Christian mythologies of a Promised Land and an Eden, and also by its literary antecedent, Beloved participates in and contributes to the factual and fictional lives of African Americans seeking an escape from persecution. (14) An important site in Beloved presenting the multivalent symbolism inherent in the Eden myth is Sweet Home. This place that has seemed to the male slaves a virtual sanctuary--a prelapsarian world in contrast to other plantations--becomes, in Sethe's revisionist account, a lie, which they try to escape by crossing the Ohio River. Indeed, Sethe's system of symbols as she experiences "re-memory" challenges the notion that there was anything sweet about Sweet Home. In fact, the death-dealing trees on the Sweet Home plantation form her source of knowledge: most notably, the site where Sixo is "tied to a tree" and roasted (226), and the place where Sethe herself suffers carnal knowledge at the hands of the sexual serpent. Early in her narrative, as Sethe stumbles across memories, "suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty." Sweet Home grows "the most beautiful sycamores in the world" (6). Like Eden's tree of knowledge of good and evil, Sweet Home's trees read ambiguously, for Sethe recalls these beautiful "lacy groves" at the same time that she re-memories the white boys in the groves who forcefully suck the milk from her breasts. After she reports the mammary rape, Sethe, at schoolteacher's command, will be lashed with cowhide by the same boys who raped her. They leave her not only with a bitter memory, but also with scars on her back in the shape of a "chokecherry tree. Trunk, branches, and even leaves. Tiny little chokecherry leaves" (16). (15)

Clearly, her breast milk stolen, Sethe has had her life force literally and figuratively and forcefully stolen as well. And with the chokecherry tree that scars her back and memory, her feminine potential has been violently abbreviated. Indeed, the cherry in common slang references the virginal hymen, and the chokecherry tree, with the Latin name of Prunus virginiana, is known for its bitter fruit. At another point in the narrative, Morrison describes Sethe's impatience to wash away chamomile sap that clings to her legs; she implies that Sethe's impatience is prompted by her recollection of the likeness of the sap to the milky, sticky semen she suffered beneath the trees at Sweet Home in her fall from innocence and ignorance.

Trees of knowledge preside over much of Sethe's story. A primary tree of knowledge is the tree-scar on her back. A second source of tree knowledge is the ink that she made from trees: the cherry gum and oak trees provide the bark from which the ink is made, but Sethe is the agent whose labor creates the very medium that schoolteacher uses to denigrate her. It is this ink that schoolteacher prefers when writing in his notebooks, recording his dehumanizing conclusions about slaves' putative bestial characteristics. With the Sethe-produced, tree-bark ink, schoolteacher, the one who "knows" about good and evil, studies behavior, charts body measurements, numbers teeth, "proving" with pseudo-science that the slaves are less than human. Later in the penultimate chapter of the novel, Sethe, although mentally disoriented and physically depleted, turns to Paul D with a self-accusation, "I made the ink, Paul D. He couldn't have done it if I hadn't made the ink" (271).

Sethe uses the carnal knowledge she could not avoid under the trees at Sweet Home to barter letters from a depraved headstone engraver. Sethe re-members the perverse sex scene, how she rutted with the engraver within the cemetery's confines, as she tried to negotiate some life symbol for her buried daughter. All she asks for is a name that matters, seven letters, "B-E-L-O-V-E-D."

   "Ten minutes," he [had] said. "You got
   ten minutes I'll do it [inscribe the letters]
   for free." Ten minutes for seven
   letters. With another ten could she
   have gotten "Dearly" too? She had not
   thought to ask him and it bothered her
   still that it might have been possible-that
   for twenty minutes, a half hour,
   say, she could have had the whole
   thing, every word she heard the
   preacher say at the funeral ...
   engraved on her baby's headstone:
   Dearly Beloved. But what she got, settled
   for, was the one word that mattered.
   She thought it would be enough,
   rutting among the headstones with the
   engraver, his young son looking on,
   the anger in his face so old; the
   appetite in it quite new. (5)

Seven dearly-purchased letters--one defining word--Beloved, on a tombstone, which, with its dawn-colored stone, signifies the Christian dawn--redemption purchased on a tree. For Sethe, the words matter; words define; and words, both ironically and redemptively, can become flesh as they did when schoolteacher named her a brute, and she felt like one. Words and trees are redemptive as demonstrated when Amy "come out of the trees," calls on "Jesus" to "come here," nurses Sethe's raw and tree-marked back while "wonder[ing] what God had in mind," and warning how a "snake come along he bite you" (187; 79-80). (16) The tree suggests redemption once again when Beloved, the murdered daughter, mysteriously returns to 124 Bluestone Road--"just shot up one day sitting on a stump" (234).

Significantly, Beloved appears on the tree stump on the evening of carnival day. Despite its seeming secularization, the carnival expands the symbolic nature of the narrative when Paul D, promising Sethe and Denver a life, invites them to the festivities. The carnival scene in this novel suggests but does not insist upon the "farewell flesh" activities that have etymologically and historically highlighted Christian preparation for Lent. The Christian allusions intensify with the presence of the Snake Charmer, the character who might be perceived as Christ-like since he can hold the satanic representative at bay. Meantime, as Paul D, Sethe, and Denver enjoy the carnival festivities, "a fully dressed woman walked out of the water [near the house on Bluestone Road] ... and leaned against a ... tree." She made her way through the woods, "past a giant temple of boxwood," then to the yard of 124 where "she sat down on the first handy place--a stump" (50).

Unlike the deadly stump image in Hurston's novel that suggests a truncated life force, the stump in Morrison's narrative suggests renewal, for Beloved has emerged from death to sit on the stump, much like a new sprout would grow from its original source. This renewal image, combined with the carnival activities, the snakes, and the recurring tree symbolism, reverts to the Christian tree; that is, the cross, and the preparation for Easter, the resurrection that typologically presents the death tree as a life tree. When Paul D, Sethe, and Denver return from their day at the carnival, they discover the woman who will prove to be Beloved resurrected from death to live among them. In the later chronology of events, Beloved will leave on a Friday--just disappear among the trees. Are we to read this detail as signifying "Good Friday"? It's hard to say. When combined with the other direct references and subtle allusions, however, we can read this detail as one more example of Morrison's use of biblical lore, especially the garden mythologies of Genesis and the Gospels.

Sethe's life is ennobled by another character who, like Sethe, is signified by trees and influenced by the idea of carnival. Baby Suggs, holy, holds services in the Clearing against a backdrop of trees where the people wait and watch. Moses-like and preaching with her heart, Baby Suggs urges her parishioners, her "O my people" congregation, to love their flesh, telling them that "the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it" (88). These same followers who have listened to their mentor, enjoyed first and envied later the excess of her loaves-and-fishes celebration, have turned from her in repulsion because she did not heed her own motto, "Good is knowing when to stop" (87). Once she senses that she has incurred the resentment of her people, (17) Baby Suggs retreats to her spiritual security blanket, the carnival-colored quilt. (18) In bed, the woman who has preached a love of the flesh, bids farewell to her own, the black body prison that once condemned her to servitude. In bed, Baby grieves her personal losses and her black-white experiences tempered only by the two orange quilt squares that nurture her imagination. Missing Baby Suggs after her death and seeking the comfort her mother-in-law used to provide, Sethe goes to the Clearing, "smells [the] leaves simmering in the sun," asks "for some clarifying word," then leaves the Clearing having caught a "glimpse of happiness" with Paul D (94-95). (19)

To pursue the relationship of words and trees, we need to look at Paul D, Sixo, and schoolteacher and the ambiguous tree imagery through which their stories unfold. When Paul D studies the tree-scar on Sethe's back, he marks the distinction between the "revolting clump of scars" before him and other trees he has known. "Trees," he thinks, are "inviting; things you could trust and be near; talk to if you wanted to as he frequently did since way back when he took the midday meal in the fields of Sweet Home [which] ... had more pretty trees than any farm around." In fact, Paul D personifies a favorite tree, calls it "Brother," and remembers how he and fellow slaves sought its shelter at noonday. Paul D is not the only slave who enjoys partaking of the pleasure offered by trees, however. Within the protective foliage of Sweet Home trees, Sixo would night-cook his potatoes; in fact, he sometimes would rise in the middle of the night, go to the pretty trees, and by the light of Edenic stars, dance naked and "start the earth-over" (21). This positive re-membrance, however, ignores the torture Sixo would experience on a tree at Sweet Farm at the hands of schoolteacher, the satanic purveyor of knowledge.

The tree serves once again as a multivalent symbol when Paul D reflects on his years at Sweet Home as he, all alone, engages in a mock Eucharist on the porch of a dry goods shop used as a church. From a bottle of liquor that he has stashed in his coat pocket, he drinks beneath the cross of a white-oak tree, and questions his own manhood. Recalling manhood as bestowed on him by a white man, that is, by Mr. Garner, who had called his male slaves "men," Paul D wonders if the simple act of naming him a "man" had made it so. Conversely, did Garner have the ability to "wake up one morning" and take "the [defining] word" away? (221) Like Adam naming the animals, did Garner make Paul D a man by simply calling him one, and did schoolteacher, who replaced Garner as chief gardener, a perverse god, make him less than a man when he called him a brute?

As he meditates on Sweet Home with its trees and garden images, Paul D recalls the wonderfully sheltering tree that he had called Brother, but he recognizes as well that he and the other slaves at Sweet Home have been "isolated in a wonderful lie"--that so many of these trees he remembers provided limbs and switches for whipping and gallows for lynching. He recalls as well, in an ironic perversion of the biblical Eden, the ambiguity, the treachery of sensory perceptions. Indeed, the serpent image in his story comes in the form of the snake-rattling noise that a slave redeemer would make, someone appointed to signify to other slaves with her rattling noise that it is time to leave "the garden" and escape from the bloody side of the Ohio River to a promised land on the other side--a geographic redemption. Instructed to "follow the tree flowers" north to freedom, Paul D finally finds his way to 124 Bluestone Road. But it is Paul D's Eucharist on the steps of the Church of the Holy Redeemer that marks his moment of knowing. Knowledge constitutes the recognition that the garden is a lie, that slavery is a horror, and that his manhood was "clipped" when first his gun and then his thoughts were taken away by schoolteacher.

Thus, the themes of innocence and knowledge, the images of Eden and the Promised Land provide an extended--albeit subtle--extended metaphoric background to both male and female characters in Beloved. The symbolic props of the Promised Land and Garden landscapes help the black protagonists preserve and bring to conscious awareness the painful reality of destructive forces. At the same time, however, these same tree images, alluding as they do to the fall, to both Christian and secular redemption, and to the power of words to create and destroy, allow the characters to exploit the power of symbol to reconstruct themselves. Indeed, the integrity of selfhood seems to require an "I am"--a realization of the Logos. Paul D, in fact, intuitively understands the power of words for creating and restoring. Recalling how Sethe had respected his manhood, Paul D, looking at the woman before him--Sethe depleted, her breasts "exhausted," her body beneath the "carnival" colored patchwork quilt--wants to put "his story next to hers." Christ-like, Paul D touches Sethe's face, and supplants the great "I am" with a logos reality especially for her: "You your best thing, Sethe. You are" (273, emphasis added).

The mythologies of Eden and Promised Land have indeed provided a mother lode of images for writers wanting to signify their protagonists' emergence to a richer identity and a better life. Certainly African American protagonists, whether factually or fictionally rendered, found in the myth of deliverance a belief system that represented power and stimulated change. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood that power and used it to point his followers toward a Promised Land of sacred fulfillment and civil rights. Tapping into the same mythology, Hurston and Morrison created some of the most enduring characters in black literary history. Profoundly inspired by trees of knowledge, these characters, especially Janie and Sethe, could painfully but productively "find out about livin' fuh theyselves," seek deliverance, and share those impulses and discoveries in the stories they inhabit (Hurston 183).

Works Cited

Andrews, William L., and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Casebook. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Awkward, Michael. Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women's Novels. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

--, ed. New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Bell, Bernard W. "Beloved: A Womanist Nee-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past." African American Review 29 (1992): 7-15.

Bond, Cynthia. "Language, Speech, and Difference in Their Eyes Were Watching God." Gates and Appiah 204-17.

Bonnet, Michele. " 'To Take the Sin out of Slicing Trees': The Law of the Tree in Beloved." African American Review 31 (1997): 41-55.

Brown, Lloyd. "Zora Neale Hurston and the Nature of Female Perception." Obsidian 4 (1978): 39-40.

Carby, Hazel. V. "The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston." Ed. Awkward 71-93.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. "The Merchant's Tale." The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Ed. Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Clarke, Deborah. "'The porch couldn't talk for looking': Voice and Vision in Their Eyes Were Watching God." African American Review 35 (2001): 599-613.

Corey, Susan. "Toward the Limits of Mystery: The Grotesque in Toni Morrison's Beloved." The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. Ed. Marc C. Conner. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2000. 31-48.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. Ed. Benjamin Quarles. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.

--. "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?: An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York on 5 July 1852." The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews. Vol. 1: 1847-1854. Ed. John Blassingame. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Fulweiler, Howard W. "Belonging and Freedom in Morrison's Beloved: Slavery, Sentimentality, and the Evolution of Consciousness." Iyasere and Iyasere 113-42.

Furman, Jan. "Remembering the 'Disremembered': Beloved." Toni Morrison's Fiction. Columbia: UP of South Carolina, 1996. 67-84.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "'The Blackness of Blackness': A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey." Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Methuen, 1984.

--. "The Speakerly Text." Gates and Appiah 154-203.

--, and K. A. Appiah, eds. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993.

Grewal, Gurleen. "On the Rocking Loom of History, A Net to Hold the Past: Beloved." Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Ed. Gurleen Grewal. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1998. 96-117.

Harris, Trudier. "Beloved: Woman, Thy Name is Demon." Andrews and McKay 127-57.

Holloway, Karla C. "Beloved: A Spiritual." Andrews and McKay 67-78.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Harper, 1990.

Iyasere, Solomon O., and Maria W. Iyasere, eds. Understanding Toni Morrison's Beloved and Sula: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by the Nobel Prize-winning Author. Troy, NY: Whitson, 2000.

Kaplan, Carla. "Introduction." Zora Neale Hurston. Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States. Ed. Carla Kaplan. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. xxi-xxxi.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. Ed. James M. Washington. San Francisco: Harper, 1991.

Krumholz, Linda. "The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison's Beloved." Andrews and McKay 107-25.

Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. "'Tuh De Horizon And Back': The Female Quest in Their Eyes Were Watching God." Black American Literature Forum. 17 (1983): 109-15.

May, Samuel J. "Margaret Garner and seven others." Andrews and McKay 25-36.

McDowell, Deborah E. "Lines of Descent/Dissenting Lines." Gates and Appiah 230-40.

McKay, Nellie Y. "Crayon Enlargements of Life: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as Autobiography." Ed. Awkward 51-70.

--. "Introduction." Andrews and McKay 3-19.

Mitchell, Carolyn A. "'I love to Tell the Story': Biblical Revisions in Beloved." Iyasere and Iyasere. 173-89.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin, 1987.

Navasky, Victor. "The F.B.I.'s Wildest Dream." Uncivil War. Race, Civil Rights and The Nation, 1865-1995. New York: Nation, 1995. 116-19.

Powell, Betty Jane. "'will the parts hold?': The Journey Toward a Coherent Self in Beloved." Iyasere and Iyasere. 143-54.

Raymond, Janice G. A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection. Boston: Beacon, 1986.

Sale, Maggie. "Call and Response as Critical Method: African-American Oral Traditions and Beloved." African American Review 26 (1992): 41-50.

Shange, Ntozake. For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf. New York: Collier, 1977.

Wall, Cheryl A. "Tea Cake." The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Eds. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. 387.

--. "Zora Neale Hurston: Changing Her Own Words." Gates and Appiah 76-97.

Washington, Mary Helen. "'I Love the Way Janie Crawford Left Her Husbands': Emergent Female Hero." Gates and Appiah 98-109.

Notes

(1.) On April 3, 1968, in an eerie foreshadowing of his own death by assassination the following day, King told a crowd that "we've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land" (286). Five years earlier, following his "March on Washington" speech, an F.B.I. memorandum indicated that King's "demagogic" address on that occasion demonstrated that he was the "most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country" (qtd. in Navasky 116).

(2.) McDowell refers to the Promised Land myth in her discussion of Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain, a novel published immediately after Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston's titular reference to Moses, suggests, of course, a novel of deliverance. Other American writers have incorporated into their works the promised land theme. Larson's Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero and Lemann's The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America, to name just two of many such titles, attest to the rhetorical power inherent in the myth. Many critics have also discussed the pear tree in Their Eyes Were Watching God as a sexual symbol. See, for example, Wall, who notes the lyrical passage wherein Janie longs to be a "pear tree--any tree in bloom!" Wall reads this scene as expressing Janie's "point of view" with the pear tree serving as a "recurring metaphor" (89-90). Other critics who discuss this scene are Kubitschek, Brown, and Gates ("Speakerly"). Bonnet has studied the trope of trees in Beloved. My reading complements rather than contradicts her 1997 essay wherein she argues that the tree in Morrison's novel represents a natural law of African religion.

(3.) Morrison is countering critics' contentions of a "Hurstonian influence" on The Bluest Eye and Sula. Her comments can as easily apply to the system of images she employs in Beloved; i.e., these affinities can emanate from the shared experiences of African Americans rather than from direct literary borrowing. See Awkward's "Introduction" for a discussion of "denigration," his word to describe the appropriative impulses found in the "black women's novel" (9-10); see also Morrison's remarks as noted by Awkward (165). Sale recognizes Morrison's desire to present a Black aesthetic in her work, and discusses how the call-and-response patterns are nuanced in Beloved, especially in the presentation of individual histories. Bell discusses Morrison's multivocal approach to narrating Sethe's story. Sethe is remembering her past to arrive at "social freedom and psychological wholeness" (8). Grewal suggests that Morrison converts readers' anger against Sethe to anger against slavery's injustices. Grewal sees the novel as a narrative about "healing the self and uniting the traumatized individual [Sethe] with the community" (104).

(4.) Hurston's narrative technique has stirred much critical debate. Carby examines the academic acceptance and celebration of Hurston's work to offer an alternative reading of Janie's storytelling; she notes that the relationship of Hurston to her reading audience parallels Janie's tense relationship to her folk audience, the community on the porch that expects from Janie an oral tale (82-83). McKay suggests that Janie's text traces a "psychological development from a male-identified woman to a self firmly grounded in a positive sense of independent black womanhood" ("Crayon" 58). Wall notes Janie's self discovery in narrating her own story (89). Clarke argues that the ability to visualize is essential for women telling their stories. Janie's effective storytelling, therefore, depends on and theorizes a "rhetoric of sight" (600). Kaplan advises readers of Hurston's fiction to understand her passion for African American folklore. Without this understanding, Kaplan says, Hurston's "unexpected segues into folklore, magical realism, and myth lose some of its force" (xxi). Washington argues that Janie is omitted from the dominant, oral discourse of her community and remains, therefore, a passive female but one who, remaining passive on the outside, internally questions the community's standards (107). Remarking on "Janie's quest for consciousness," Gates also examines Hurston's various methods of narration, informed in part by an oral tradition, the Speakerly Text (134-203). Bond, however, sees Hurston as both presenting and critiquing the tradition of Speakerly Texts (154-203). For an especially thorough discussion of narrative technique, see Awkward (15-56).

(5.) See Geoffrey Chaucer and William Faulkner.

(6.) Among recent allusions to the image of the pear-shaped female body as an object of attention is "the lady in red" in Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls. Shange's lady in red with "slight bosoms" very consciously "let her thigh slip from her skirt" while "she slowed to be examined"; this woman "with big legs" is aware that men "who fall prey to the / dazzle of hips ... had wanted no more than to lay between her sparkling thighs" (31-35). Linda Pastan's poem, entitled "Pears," refers to the "pear / Eve ate." "Why else," she asks, is it "the shape of the womb, or of the cello?" (lines 2-6). And Lucille Clifton's "homage to my hips" celebrates her "mighty hips," her "magic hips" that can "put a spell / on a man and spin him like a top!" (lines 11-15).

(7.) In this context, I borrow "loose woman" from Raymond's A Passion for Friends. No matter how loved, the (heteronormative) loose woman, putatively like a loose cannon, is to be feared as she threatens others with her unattached status. Other women fear the loose or unattached woman, for it is she who can lure other males into her snare. Authority forces assigned to protect the virginity of a young woman find that job challenging since to the male, the virgin is the loose woman, the untamed one ripe for deflowering and ready for masculine control (62; 73-79). Awkward discusses Nanny's economic ambition for Janie--to know the leisure of wealthy whites, a leisure that Nanny, a woman born into slavery, could only envy (22).

(8.) "Like the God of the Old Testament," Awkward argues, "Starks ... virtually wills light into existence with the power of his voice" (34).

(9.) Critics disagree about what this strategic scene achieves. For example, Gates argues that on this occasion Janie "rhetorically" murders Joe Starks ("Blackness" 290), and he also suggests that "the gaining of her own voice is a sign of her authority, but not a sign of a newly found unified identity" ("Speakerly" 187). Clarke interprets the scene as a "linguistic ... castration" that exploits the "visual" as an instrument with empowering potential (606). Wall sees Janie's confrontation as an act of "self-reclamation" ("Zora" 92).

(10.) In Psalms 137:1 the exiled Israelites, grieving for their homeland, declare that "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion," a passage that Frederick Douglass identifies with and will quote in his "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" One of the many black spirituals that draws on the Old Testament image of bondage and the belief in God as the great deliverer is "I am seekin' for a City." This spiritual declares that "a better day" is "a comin'" when the "walls of Zion" will be restored.

(11.) Earlier in the biblical narrative, Michal became a bride of David. Because David could not meet the marriage-price, the scheming Saul, hoping to see David killed and engaging in phallocentric discourse, suggested that a suitable substitute would be a "hundred foreskins of the Philistines." To Saul's surprise and disappointment, David prevailed and received Michal in marriage (1 Samuel 18: 25-30).

(12.) Wall has recognized the meaning in Vergible's name. He is "a veritable man of nature ... at ease being who and what he is" ("Tea Cake" 387). Yoked to "Woods," his name signifies the legitimate trees against which Janie measures her happiness.

(13.) This is not to suggest that Tea Cake is a flawless mate. Wall, for example, argues convincingly that Tea Cake's exemplary qualities are offset by realistic instances of sexism See Wall, qtd. in Awkward 37.

(14.) McKay describes Morrison's justification for writing Beloved as a need for a memorial to heal the wounds of slavery. Morrison's outrage at "the absence of a historical marker" that reminds the American public of the horrors of slavery legendarily prompted her to create a literary monument that would address that need. ("Introduction" 3-4). For a detailed account of the Margaret Garner case, based on Cincinnati newspaper articles, see May. Garner, an escaped slave, murdered one of her four children and apparently intended to kill them all in order to assure that they would not be returned to slavery. Morrison uses this incident as the basis of Sethe Sugg's story in Beloved. Holloway discusses Morrison's "reclamation" and mythologizing of the Margaret Garner story, and suggests that Morrison suspends time and space to document the uniqueness of black women's sense of slave history. Holloway argues that "slavery itself defies traditional historiography" (68). Harris explains the "aura of myth" inhabiting the slaves' memories of Sweet Home, and argues that "these memories ... shape the narrative structure of the novel" and "give an oral quality to the telling of the tale" (149).

(15.) Corey discusses Sethe's scar as "grotesque," with an effect that is "both repulsive and attractive" as it documents the protagonist's humiliating, brutal, and complex past (34).

(16.) Mitchell discusses the spirituality of characters in Beloved, viewing Amy as a Christ figure and a "Good Samaritan" (179). See also Fulweiler's portrayal of Amy as "an unconscious theologian" (126).

(17.) Highlighting the importance of community in Morrison's novels, Furman notes the community's particular role in judging individual conduct; yet, in Beloved, the community's assessment is compromised when its judgments are informed by "spite, jealousy, and meanness" (72).

(18.) See Powell for the importance of color to the dying Baby Suggs (143-54).

(19.) Krumholz points out that the Clearing provides a psychological space for cleansing, for "a space to encounter painful memories safely and rest from them" (110).

Glenda B. Weathers is Professor of English at the University of Montevallo in Alabama, where she chairs the department and teaches courses in American, Young Adult, and World Literature. She has published essays in South Atlantic Review, Kansas English, and College & Undergraduate Libraries.