God Help The Child and Toni Morrison: God Help the Child

Side view of a dark skinned woman's back in the right hand side of the image.  The woman wears a white dress and is set against a dark gray background.

The novel centers around a young woman called Bride, whose blue-black skin is only one piece of her beauty, her confidence and boldness, and her successful career in the cosmetics industry, but which causes her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves and loses to anger.  Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths,  And finally, Bride's mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that the suffering of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of an adult.

• Colorism: noun (Also known as shadeism) Prejudice or discrimination against individuals with dark skin tone, particularly prevalent among people of the same racial or ethnic group.  The term originates from an essay which appeared in Alice Walker's 1983 book, In Search of our Mother's Gardens. 
  • Colorism is at the root of Sweetness's cold treatment of her daughter and the deep trauma Bride feels as a result.  In the opening of the novel, Sweetness states, "It didn't take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs to realize something was wrong.  Really wrong.  She was so black she scared me. Midnight black, Sudanese black."  Sweetness's attitude is not unique to her alone, she recounts how her grandmother passed for white and "never said another word to any one of her children" and her mother being forced to place her hand on the Bible reserved for Negroes during her wedding for refusing to pass for white.
• Child abuse/Trauma: noun The physical, emotional, sexual, or psychological harm of a child, often by a parent or caretaker.
  • All of the main characters in this novel are exposed to some form of trauma during their childhood. 
    • “Distaste was all over her face when I was little and she had to bathe me,” Bride says of her mother. “Rinse me, actually, after a halfhearted rub with a soapy washcloth. I used to pray she would slap my face or spank me just to feel her touch. I made little mistakes deliberately, but she had ways to punish me without touching the skin she hated — bed without supper, lock me in my room.”  - Toni Morrison, God Help the Child
• Time:  noun 1. The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.
  • "One of the great themes that threads its way through Toni Morrison’s work like a haunting melody is the hold that time past exerts over time present. In larger historical terms, it is the horror of slavery and its echoing legacy that her characters struggle with. In personal terms, it is an emotional wound or loss — and the fear of suffering such pain again — that inhibits her women and men, making them wary of the very sort of love and intimacy that might heal and complete them."
    • Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Child abuse cuts a jagged scar through Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child, a brisk modern-­day fairy tale with shades of the Brothers Grimm: imaginative cruelties visited on children; a journey into the woods; a handsome, vanished lover; witchy older women and a blunt moral — “What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.”

-Kara Walker, New York Times

“Morrison gives us an unflinching look at the wounds that adults can inflict on children with life-altering consequences…. Few authors can deliver exquisitely written prose as Morrison.”

              - Patrik Henry Bass, Essence.com

“It’s a pleasure to sit down with her latest, “God Help the Child,” which is both timely and timeless. “God Help the Child” is no less than a short, tough allegory about the condition of being black in this country today. The novel has a poetic resonance with her first, “The Bluest Eye.””

               -Ellen Emry Heltzel, The Seattle Times

“A book to be read twice at a minimum – the first time for the story, and the second time to savor the language, the gems of phrasing and the uncomfortable revelations about the human capacity both to love and destroy.”

             -Deesha Philyaw, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Unflinching, gorgeously written.”         

            -C. Namwali Serpell, San Francisco Chronicle

"The Nobel Prize winner comes full circle with this rich tale of a young woman's struggle against 'shadism' and parental neglect."
           -Bernardine Evaristo, The Guardian

"Toni Morrison's new novel, God Help the Child, mines lyrical power and human strength from childhood suffering."
           -Walton Muyumba, The Atlantic