God Help The Child

Morrison introduces the theme of justice through the stories of Sofia Huxley and Booker Stabern. While these characters both have interactions with the criminal justice system, the outcomes for the characters serve as a sharp critique of the ability of that system to deliver justice to offenders and victims.

Based on the details that Bride remembers in terms of her interactions with the prosecutor, the letters Sofia receives from her husband, and Sofia’s monologues, it is likely that Sofia was wrongly convicted of molesting children. In Bride’s case, the conviction was most certainly wrongful. Sofia’s account of the violence she witnesses inside of prison and the letters from her husband about the torture he experiences illustrate how prison hardens and traumatizes the incarcerated instead of rehabilitating them.

The ferocious violence Sofia inflicts on Bride seems just, but Sofia’s fear that she would be reincarcerated for assaulting her false accuser is reasonable given how the justice system works. One of the ironies of the novel is that it takes this act of violence for Sofia to begin the process of healing. Ultimately, Morrison’s decision to cast Sofia as the one character who might be capable of redemption is a rebuke of common notions of the difference between upstanding people and those who come under the control of the criminal justice system.

The criminal justice system seems to serve victims no better than the incarcerated based on the experiences of the Stabern family. Morrison’s story of Adam Stabern’s kidnapping, torture, and murder by Humboldt seems to be ripped from the headlines in that it portrays the disappearance of children—especially black children—that happens all too often. The Stabern family never fully recovered from the loss of Adam, but the process of going through a highly publicized trial that sensationalized Adam’s death seems also to have done grave damage to the family and most particularly to Booker. Queen Olive’s labeling of Booker’s drawn out mourning as carrying around Adam’s corpse captures perfectly how hard it is for the families of victims to move on even when the killers of their family members are brought to justice.

In Booker’s case, this inadequacy to find closure even after the trial leads him to attempt to bring some justice into the world by becoming a vigilante of sorts. The first direct scene of Booker in the novel is of him assaulting a man who is fondling himself near a playground, and Booker also recounts assaulting two addicts who are using while their toddler cries in the back seat. While such rough and swift justice satisfies some emotional need for Booker, the relief is always short-lived and puts him in danger of becoming a criminal as well, as shown by his arrest after the second assault. Even more consequential is that Booker’s black and white thinking about morality and justice leads him to make bad decisions. His flight from Bride, for example, is the result of his belief that she was showing mercy to a child molester; because of Booker’s overdeveloped sense of justice, he acts first and thinks later.

Morrison’s overall message about justice in the novel seems to be there is not true justice in the world, not for the guilty and most certainly not for the innocent.

Some critics have described Morrison’s novel as a dark fairytale that consistently refuses sentimentality and the happy ending. The dark mood that dominates in the novel is especially apparent in Morrison’s representation of mothering. The mothers and maternal figures in the novel include Evelyn, Mrs. Stabern, Sofia’s mother, Rain’s mother, Queen Olive, and Sweetness.

The most attentive mothers in the novel are Evelyn, Mrs. Stabern, and Sofia’s mother. Evelyn, who is essentially a foster mother to Rain, picked the little girl up off the streets (she and Steve essentially kidnapped the girl) and engages in intensive parenting that involves hard household work and homeschooling Rain. While Evelyn is one of the few figures who seems to nurture rather than damage the child in her care, her refusal to hear the truth that Rain has to tell about her early life indicates that she can be an old-fashioned mother only if she flees from the harsh reality of the world. Mrs. Stabern’s representation is brief, but she also only manages to nurture her children by in isolation from the modern world.

While Sofia’s mother is attentive, her kind of attention damages her child. Sofia’s mother is represented indirectly and briefly, but Sofia’s description of her parents’ harshness, tendency to judge, and stingy Christianity make it clear that strict parenting may be no better at producing well-adjusted adults than neglect. Indeed, the authoritarian mothering (and fathering) that Sofia is subject to merely makes her a more compliant wife and prisoner, a sad commentary on what such mothering does to children.

On the other end of the spectrum is Rain’s mother, a woman who sexually traffics her daughter for drugs and eventually throws the little girl out on the streets. She is the ultimate in neglectful mothers and actively and intentionally does harm to her child. Rain may never recover even with the love of Evelyn and Steve.

Sweetness is the character who has the most to say about mothering, and much of what she says is designed to deny her mistreatment of her daughter. While one of the most central values of idealized motherhood is self-sacrifice by the mother for the sake of the child, Sweetness consistently sacrifices her daughter and her relationship with her daughter for her own sake. The clearly articulated revulsion Sweetness feels for Bride’s dark skin is a result of internalized racism, but it also reflects the deep narcissism at the root of Sweetness’s feeling that Bride’s black skin is a mark against Sweetness.

Underneath Sweetness’s bluster and claims that Bride’s loveless childhood was designed to prepare her for the harsh, racist world outside is some small, infrequently confessed knowledge that she was a bad mother. Sweetness’s foreboding prediction of difficulties ahead as Bride becomes a mother in her own right is tinged with a bitterness but also a realistic perspective on how trauma is perpetuated down through the generations.

The last maternal figure in the novel is Booker’s aunt, Queen Olive. She mothers Booker as he recuperates and feeds Bride when the bedraggled young woman shows up on her doorstep. Queen Olive dispenses seemingly sage advice: she advises Booker to hold on to Adam as long as he needs and to Bride to go fight for her man. She is most certainly capable of nurture—of other people’s children. In the end, however, Morrison has Queen Olive leave the frame of the narrative as a woman who dies by a fire she set with her own hands and does so without the company of any of her children, who apparently despise her or are indifferent. This terrible end and the dark mood imposed by the “So they think” (178) that bookends Booker and Bride’s imagining of the world they will create for their child is the culmination of Morrison’s pessimism about the possibility of being a good mother in the world as it is.