Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

184
Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall
and the late afternoon rituals of jazz and dance Avey had shared earlier
with her husband, the pa’doné mwê shapes her life and destiny.
Moreover (and again she only sensed this in the dimmest way),
something in those small rites, an ethos they held in common,
had reached back beyond her life and beyond Jay’s to join them
to the vast unknown lineage that had made their being possible.
And this link, these connections, heard in the music and the
praisesongs of Sunday: “. . . I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns
were / young . . . ,” had both protected them and put them in
possession of a kind of power. (137)
As a triumph of humility rather than humiliation, 19 Avey’s Beg Pardon
links and connects her again to that source of power, to that “vast
unknown lineage” that had made her being possible. In the Nation
Dance that follows, though Avey cannot call her “nation,” she can and
does call her name, the African name given to her by Aunt Cuney.
With the metaphorical journey to the “source,” the spiritual return to
Africa complete, in the last chapter Marshall returns to the theme of
continuity. Th e narrator tells us that Avey will return to Tatem and
rebuild Aunt Cuney’s old house to serve as summer camp for her own
grandchildren and others. And to fulfi ll the mission, at least twice
weekly, she will take the children to the Landing and recount the story
of the Ibos. “‘It was here that they brought them,’ she would begin—as
had been ordained. ‘Th ey took them out of the boats right here where
we’re standing . . . ’” (256).
In having Avey fulfi ll the “mission” at the end of the novel, the
mission of preserving and passing on the story of Ibo Landing,
Marshall characterizes Avey fi nally as a bearer of culture. In Tar Baby,
Morrison attributes the same role to the night women, the women
from Sein de Veilles, and Marie Th ereze. Just as the women from
Sein de Veilles and the night women off er Jadine the opportunity to
reclaim the “ancient properties,” it is Marie Th ereze who fi nally guides
Son to the “source.” Moma and Nana in Th e Wake and Resurrection
and the mother, Celia, in Th e Bitter Nest, are also culture bearers. And
Betye Saar, resurrecting and actualizing in Sambo’s Banjo the history
of black women and antilynching crusades, sustains the tradition of a
“woman’s telling of events.” In assuming themselves and/or assigning
to other women the responsibility of “telling,” of safeguarding and