In a rank corner of the private garden lurk other entities. In The Bluest Eye, there is a man who is reputedly able to work miracles. He is also a pedophile and he gives off the sickening odor of being rotten to the core. But he is not cut down. In her second novel, Sula, Morrison described the attitude of the community toward disturbing elements like that: “Such evil must be avoided…and precautions must naturally be taken to protect themselves from it. But they let it run its course, fulfill itself, and never invented ways either to alter it, to annihilate it or to prevent its happening again.” To outsiders this may seem morally lax. But to the narrator of Sula, this stance simply demonstrates “the full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones.”
In the village where Toni Morrison grew up, the forces of good and evil coexisted. But there were grandparents, relatives, fathers and, above all, mothers to instruct children how to live and how to choose good over evil. A mother had the authority to mete out punishment, give comfort, or render judgment to any of the community’s children as if they were her own.
The children were expected to help take care of the aged. In a 1979 interview, Morrison told of an old man she heard about in Lorain who wandered away from his home and wasn’t found until many months later. He had died of a heart attack. When she was young, she said, children would have been sent out to comb the area for one who had wandered away. “There aren’t any people to do that anymore, no children, no neighbors. Agencies do it. Well, the town I grew up in used to respond to an event like that almost like a chorus.”
