Conflicts In `Paradise' -- Toni Morrison Weaves A Powerful Story Of The Racial, Sexual Issues That Feed A Growing Paranoia Between Town, Commune

------------------------------------------- "Paradise" by Toni Morrison Knopf, $25 -------------------------------------------

Years from now, when scholars want to learn about African-American life from the late 19th century to the early 21st, they will turn not only to the historical record but also to the fiction of Toni Morrison. All of the Nobel laureate's work, but particularly "Song of Solomon," "Beloved," "Jazz" and now "Paradise," her seventh novel, is testament to the power of the imagination in creating a living past.

"Paradise" is a portrayal of African-American domestic and community life a quarter-century ago in all-black Ruby, Okla., as seen in contrast to a nearby quasi-commune known as the Convent. Once a church-affiliated school for Native American girls, the Convent has gradually been transformed since the 1920s into a shelter for women of all races and backgrounds.

Each setting nurtures its own families and its own troubles, both racial and sexual. Each, likewise, is affected by outside political and social events that feed a growing paranoia "like a dormant virus in blossom . . . coming to a raggedy close."

Morrison's fictional Ruby is the post-World War II offspring of Haven, a failed all-black Oklahoma town that had been founded after Reconstruction by late 19th-century migrants from Louisiana. Haven's original eight families - the so-called "8-rock" - were people of resolute character whose deep black skin color had denied them affiliation with other African-American towns encountered during their pioneering trek. As a result, the 8-rock descendants in Ruby inherited a fear of outsiders that becomes manifest in their dealings with the Convent.

Masterful storytelling

"Paradise" begins shockingly, graphically, in the early 1970s, with armed men from Ruby inexplicably attacking the Convent and its residents. Morrison then moves backward in time, wrapping this violent introduction around the history of Ruby and the biographies of the Convent women, gathering each major character into a kind of drawstring narrative that pulls them together toward confrontation.

Though she avoids writing in the first person, Morrison shifts freely among different characters' points of view. It is a masterful storytelling strategy that allows her to vividly highlight the crazy-quilt quality of rumor and history bred by mutual distrust.

Like the Ruby pioneers, the Convent women are refugees as well - modern-day escapees from male violence and neglect. Mavis abandoned an abusive husband in New Jersey; Grace was a party girl who fled to the Convent for protection; Seneca left behind a convict boyfriend; and Pallas is a teenage runaway in hiding from a domineering father.

For all of them, the Convent is a safe haven: "The whole house felt permeated with a blessed malelessness . . . as though (Pallas) might meet herself here - an unbridled legitimized self," writes Morrison.

Connie, the senior member of the Convent and ward of the late Mother Superior, has psychic powers enabling her to "see" the energy that has allowed the other women - "living like mice in a house no one wanted . . . broken girls, frightened girls, weak and lying" - to survive until stumbling upon the Convent.

One of the strengths of "Paradise" is how deftly Morrison uses Connie's magic while avoiding any New Age cliches. Connie's powers are her own secret - though her ability to gather a disparate group of women into an exclusive enclave is clearly perceived as a threat by the men of Ruby. Prominent among them are the 8-rock grandsons, Deacon and Steward Morgan, who take seriously their ancestors' charge to defend and protect Ruby.

The Morgan brothers watch with increasing concern as Ruby's smooth facade begins to crack under the realities that the younger generation brings back from the outside: integration, secularism, even demands for civil rights. Ruby's elders resist change, yet at their peril. As preacher Richard Misner puts it: "A community with no politics is doomed to pop like Georgia fatwood."

Clashing utopias

Essentially, Ruby and the Convent are clashing utopias whose residents meet reluctantly over the course of their histories to exchange goods, even to have affairs. But by the early 1970s, after Grace's misinterpreted affection for another woman and Seneca's care of a pregnant Ruby woman break an invisible social boundary, the Morgans and other 8-rock descendants act. They scapegoat the Convent's damaged residents for alleged witchcraft, lesbianism and "unholy" behavior.

Why do such stalwart survivors take up guns against women to resolve a conflict that really is philosophical, political and, finally, sexual? Misner, the reverend, believes the men act as they do merely because they "could - which was what being an 8-rock meant to them."

Slowly, perfectly, Morrison reveals to us an understanding of tragic, flawed human character through this meticulous recreation of Ruby's history, from the wretchedness of Reconstruction and desperation of the Depression through the seeping radicalism of the 1960s. Ultimately, neither civil-rights battles, the Vietnam War, nor sexual freedom crumble Ruby's perfection; rather, the arrogance of planned isolation pushes Ruby's traditionalists to fire upon those whom they would normally protect.

The real sadness in "Paradise" is that the 8-rock men can't see the strength and value of the integrated world of the Convent, an admittedly flawed Garden of Eden that absorbs and recasts its residents' worldly problems rather than ignore them. The novel is a powerful open-ended examination of racial and sexual community in the late 20th century, and Toni Morrison asks us to see what neither Ruby's men nor even the Convent's women could see: that a real piece of heaven on earth is both black and white, male and female, and open to the world.

Judy Doenges teaches literature and writing at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma.