Paradise (38 page)
Authors: Toni Morrison
“Coming. Just a minute, okay?”
The girl wiping Seneca’s hands looked up from time to time to frown at Jean. “Any glass get in?” she asked Seneca.
Seneca stroked her palms, first one, then the other. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Jean! Traffic’s gonna be hell, babe.”
“Don’t you remember me?”
Seneca looked up, the bright lights turning her eyes black. “Should I? From where?”
“On Woodlawn. We used to live in those apartments on Woodlawn.”
Seneca shook her head. “I lived on Beacon. Next to the playground.”
“But your name is Seneca, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m Jean.”
“Lady, your old man’s calling you.” The girlfriend wrung out the cloth and poured the rest of the beer over Seneca’s hands.
“Ow,” Seneca said to her friend. “It burns.” She waved her hands in the air.
“Guess I made a mistake,” said Jean. “I thought you were someone I knew from Woodlawn.”
Seneca smiled. “That’s okay. Everybody makes mistakes.”
The friend said, “It’s fine now. Look.”
Seneca and Jean both looked. Her hands were clean, no blood. Just a few lines that might or might not leave marks.
“Great!”
“Let’s go.”
“Well, bye.”
“Jean!”
“Bye.”
Gunning the gas pedal while watching his rearview mirror, Jack said, “Who was that?”
“Some girl I thought I knew from before. When I lived in those apartments on Woodlawn. The housing project there.”
“What housing project?”
“On Woodlawn.”
“Never any projects on Woodlawn,” said Jack. “That was Beacon. Torn down now, but it was never on Woodlawn. Beacon is where it was. Right next to the old playground.”
“You sure about that?”
“Sure I’m sure. You losing it, woman.”
In ocean hush a woman black as firewood is singing. Next to her is a younger woman whose head rests on the singing woman’s lap. Ruined fingers troll the tea brown hair. All the colors of seashells—wheat, roses, pearl—fuse in the younger woman’s face. Her emerald eyes adore the black face framed in cerulean blue. Around them on the beach, sea trash gleams. Discarded bottle caps sparkle near a broken sandal. A small dead radio plays the quiet surf.
There is nothing to beat this solace which is what Piedade’s song is about, although the words evoke memories neither one has ever had: of reaching age in the company of the other; of speech shared and divided bread smoking from the fire; the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home—the ease of coming back to love begun.
When the ocean heaves sending rhythms of water ashore, Piedade looks to see what has come. Another ship, perhaps, but different, heading to port, crew and passengers, lost and saved, atremble, for they have been disconsolate for some time. Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise.
A Note About the Author
Toni Morrison is Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University. She has written six previous novels, and has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
ALSO BY TONI MORRISON
The Bluest Eye
(1970)
Sula
(1974)
Song of Solomon
(1977)
Tar Baby
(1981)
Beloved
(1987)
Jazz
(1992)
Playing in the Dark
(1992)
Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power
(1992)
Editor
The Nobel Lecture in Literature
(1994)
Birth of a Nation’hood
(1996)
Coeditor with Claudia Brodsky Lacour
The Dancing Mind
(1996)
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.,
AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 1997 by Toni Morrison
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. Published simultaneously in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
LC 97-80913
Canadian Cataloging in Publication Data
Morrison, Toni
Paradise
I. Title
PS3563.O8749P37 1998 813'.54 C97-932259-6
eISBN: 978-0-307-38811-7
v3.0