Heretical Reflections of the End of Art (or The Green Toilet Paper Characters Trip)

[alice wellintown]

Excerpt  1919  by Toni Morrison Sula (1973)

Except for World War II, nothing ever interfered with the celebration
of National Suicide Day. It had taken place every January third since
1920, although Shadrack, its founder, was for many years the only
celebrant. Blasted and permanently astonished by the events of 1917,
he had returned to Medallion handsome but ravaged, and even the most
fastidious people in the town sometimes caught themselves dreaming of
what he must have been like a few years back before he went off to
war. A young man of hardly twenty, his head full of nothing and his
mouth recalling the taste of lipstick, Shadrack had found himself in
December, 1917, running with his comrades across a field in France. It
was his first encounter with the enemy and he didn't know whether his
company was running toward them or away. For several days they had
been marching, keeping close to a stream that was frozen at its edges.
At one point they crossed it, and no sooner had he stepped foot on the
other side than the day was adangle with shouts and explosions.
Shellfire was all around him, and though he knew that this was
something called it, he could not muster up the proper feeling—the
feeling that would accommodate it. He expected to be terrified or
exhilarated—to feel something very strong. In fact, he felt only the
bite of a nail in his boot, which pierced the ball of his foot
whenever he came down on it. The day was cold enough to make his
breath visible, and he wondered for a moment at the purity and
whiteness of his own breath among the dirty, gray explosions
surrounding him. He ran, bayonet fixed, deep in the great sweep of men
flying across this field. Wincing at the pain in his foot, he turned
his head a little to the right and saw the face of a soldier near him
fly off. Before he could register shock, the rest of the soldier's
head disappeared under the inverted soup bowl of his helmet. But
stubbornly, taking no direction from the brain, the body of the
headless soldier ran on, with energy and grace, ignoring altogether
the drip and slide of brain tissue down its back.
When Shadrack opened his eyes he was propped up in a small bed. Before
him on a tray was a large tin plate divided into three triangles. In
one triangle was rice, in another meat, and in the third stewed
tomatoes. A small round depression held a cup of whitish liquid.
Shadrack stared at the soft colors that filled these triangles: the
lumpy whiteness of rice, the quivering blood tomatoes, the
grayish-brown meat. All their repugnance was contained in the neat
balance of the triangles—a balance that soothed him, transferred some
of its equilibrium to him. Thus reassured that the white, the red and
the brown would stay where they were—would not explode or burst forth
from their restricted zones—he suddenly felt hungry and looked around
for his hands. His glance was cautious at first, for he had to be very
careful—anything could be anywhere. Then he noticed two lumps beneath
the beige blanket on either side of his hips. With extreme care he
lifted one arm and was relieved to find his hand attached to his
wrist. He tried the other and found it also. Slowly he directed one
hand toward the cup and, just as he was about to spread his fingers,
they began to grow in higgledy-piggledy fashion like Jack's beanstalk
all over the tray and the bed. With a shriek he closed his eyes and
thrust his huge growing hands under the covers. Once out of sight they
seemed to shrink back to their normal size. But the yell had brought a
male nurse.
"Private? We're not going to have any trouble today, are we? Are we, Private?
Shadrack looked up at a balding man dressed in a green-cotton jacket
and trousers. His hair was parted low on the right side so that some
twenty or thirty yellow hairs could discreetly cover the nakedness of
his head.
"Come on. Pick up that spoon. Pick it up, Private. Nobody is going to
feed you forever."
Sweat slid from Shadrack's armpits down his sides. He could not bear
to see his hands grow again and he was frightened of the voice in the
apple-green suit.
"Pick it up, I said. There's no point to this. The nurse reached under
the cover for Shadrack's wrist to pull out the monstrous hand.
Shadrack jerked it back and overturned the tray. In panic he raised
himself to his knees and tried to fling off and away his terrible
fingers, but succeeded only in knocking the nurse into the next bed.
When they bound Shadrack into a straitjacket, he was both relieved and
grateful, for his hands were at last hidden and confined to whatever
size they had attained.
Laced and silent in his small bed, he tried to tie the loose cords in
his mind. He wanted desperately to see his own face and connect it
with the word "private"—the word the nurse (and the others who helped
bind him) had called him. "Private" he thought was something secret,
and he wondered why they looked at him and called him a secret. Still,
if his hands behaved as they had done, what might he expect from his
face? The fear and longing were too much for him, so he began to think
of other things. That is, he let his mind slip into whatever cave
mouths of memory it chose.
He saw a window that looked out on a river which he knew was full of
fish. Someone was speaking softly just outside the door . . .
Shadrack's earlier violence had coincided with a memorandum from the
hospital executive staff in reference to the distribution of patients
in high-risk areas. There was clearly a demand for space. The priority
or the violence earned Shadrack his release, $217 in cash, a full suit
of clothes and copies of very official-looking papers.
When he stepped out of the hospital door the grounds overwhelmed him:
the cropped shrubbery, the edged lawns, the undeviating walks.
Shadrack looked at the cement stretches: each one leading
clearheadedly to some presumably desirable destination. There were no
fences, no warnings, no obstacles at all between concrete and green
grass, so one could easily ignore the tidy sweep of stone and cut out
in another direction—a direction of one's own.
Shadrack stood at the foot of the hospital steps watching the heads of
trees tossing ruefully but harmlessly, since their trunks were rooted
too deeply in the earth to threaten him. Only the walks made him
uneasy. He shifted his weight, wondering how he could get to the gate
without stepping on the concrete. While plotting his course—where he
would have to leap, where to skirt a clump of bushes—a loud guffaw
startled him. Two men were going up the steps. Then he noticed that
there were many people about, and that he was just now seeing them, or
else they had just materialized. They were thin slips, like paper
dolls floating down the walks. Some were seated in chairs with wheels,
propelled by other paper figures from behind. All seemed to be
smoking, and their arms and legs curved in the breeze. A good high
wind would pull them up and away and they would land perhaps among the
tops of the trees.
Shadrack took the plunge. Four steps and he was on the grass heading
for the gate. He kept his head down to avoid seeing the paper people
swerving and bending here and there, and he lost his way. When he
looked up, he was standing by a low red building separated from the
main building by a covered walkway. From somewhere came a sweetish
smell which reminded him of something painful. He looked around for
the gate and saw that he had gone directly away from it in his
complicated journey over the grass. Just to the left of the low
building was a graveled driveway that appeared to lead outside the
grounds. He trotted quickly to it and left, at last, a haven of more
than a year, only eight days of which he fully recollected.
Once on the road, he headed west. The long stay in the hospital had
left him weak—too weak to walk steadily on the gravel shoulders of the
road. He shuffled, grew dizzy, stopped for breath, started again,
stumbling and sweating but refusing to wipe his temples, still afraid
to look at his hands. Passengers in dark, square cars shuttered their
eyes at what they took to be a drunken man.
The sun was already directly over his head when he came to a town. A
few blocks of shaded streets and he was already at its heart—a pretty,
quietly regulated downtown.
Exhausted, his feet clotted with pain, he sat down at the curbside to
take off his shoes. He closed his eyes to avoid seeing his hands and
fumbled with the laces of the heavy high-topped shoes. The nurse had
tied them into a double knot, the way one does for children, and
Shadrack, long unaccustomed to the manipulation of intricate things,
could not get them loose. Uncoordinated, his fingernails tore away at
the knots. He fought a rising hysteria that was not merely anxiety to
free his aching feet; his very life depended on the release of the
knots. Suddenly without raising his eyelids, he began to cry.
Twenty-two years old, weak, hot, frightened, not daring to acknowledge
the fact that he didn't even know who or what he was . . . with no
past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book, no comb, no
pencil, no clock, no pocket handkerchief, no rug, no bed, no can
opener, no faded postcard, no soap, no key, no tobacco pouch, no
soiled underwear and nothing nothing nothing to do . . . he was sure
of one thing only: the unchecked monstrosity of his hands. He cried
soundlessly at the curbside of a small Midwestern town wondering where
the window was, and the river, and the soft voices just outside the
door . . .
Through his tears he saw the fingers joining the laces, tentatively at
first, then rapidly. The four fingers of each hand fused into the
fabric, knotted themselves and zigzagged in and out of the tiny
eyeholes.
By the time the police drove up, Shadrack was suffering from a
blinding headache, which was not abated by the comfort he felt when
the policemen pulled his hands away from what he thought was a
permanent entanglement with his shoelaces. They took him to jail,
booked him for vagrancy and intoxication, and locked him in a cell.
Lying on a cot, Shadrack could only stare helplessly at the wall, so
paralyzing was the pain in his head. He lay in this agony for a long
while and then realized he was staring at the painted-over letters of
a command to fuck himself. He studied the phrase as the pain in his
head subsided.
Like moonlight stealing under a window shade an idea insinuated
itself: his earlier desire to see his own face. He looked for a
mirror; there was none. Finally, keeping his hands carefully behind
his back he made his way to the toilet bowl and peeped in. The water
was unevenly lit by the sun so he could make nothing out. Returning to
his cot he took the blanket and covered his head, rendering the water
dark enough to see his reflection. There in the toilet water he saw a
grave black face. A black so definite, so unequivocal, it astonished
him. He had been harboring a skittish apprehension that he was not
real—that he didn't exist at all. But when the blackness greeted him
with its indisputable presence, he wanted nothing more. In his joy he
took the risk of letting one edge of the blanket drop and glanced at
his hands. They were still. Courteously still.
Shadrack rose and returned to the cot, where he fell into the first
sleep of his new life. A sleep deeper than the hospital drugs; deeper
than the pits of plums, steadier than the condor's wing; more tranquil
than the curve of eggs.
The sheriff looked through the bars at the young man with the matted
hair. He had read through his prisoner's papers and hailed a farmer.
When Shadrack awoke, the sheriff handed him back his papers and
escorted him to the back of a wagon. Shadrack got in and in less than
three hours he was back in Medallion, for he had been only twenty-two
miles from his window, his river, and his soft voices just outside the
door.
In the back of the wagon, supported by sacks of squash and hills of
pumpkins, Shadrack began a struggle that was to last for twelve days,
a struggle to order and focus experience. It had to do with making a
place for fear as a way of controlling it. He knew the smell of death
and was terrified of it, for he could not anticipate it. It was not
death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In
sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were
devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of
the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National
Suicide Day.
On the third day of the new year, he walked through the Bottom down
Carpenter's Road with a cowbell and a hangman's rope calling the
people together. Telling them that this was their only chance to kill
themselves or each other.
At first the people in the town were frightened; they knew Shadrack
was crazy but that did not mean that he didn't have any sense or, even
more important, that he had no power. His eyes were so wild, his hair
so long and matted, his voice was so full of authority and thunder
that he caused panic on the first, or Charter, National Suicide Day in
1920. The next one, in 1921, was less frightening but still worrisome.
The people had seen him a year now in between. He lived in a shack on
the riverbank that had once belonged to his grandfather long time
dead. On Tuesday and Friday he sold the fish he had caught that
morning, the rest of the week he was drunk, loud, obscene, funny and
outrageous. But he never touched anybody, never fought, never
caressed. Once the people understood the boundaries and nature of his
madness, they could fit him, so to speak, into the scheme of things.
Then, on subsequent National Suicide Days, the grown people looked out
from behind curtains as he rang his bell; a few stragglers increased
their speed, and little children screamed and ran. The tetter heads
tried goading him (although he was only four or five years older then
they) but not for long, for his curses were stingingly personal.
As time went along, the people took less notice of these January
thirds, or rather they thought they did, thought they had no attitudes
or feelings one way or another about Shadrack's annual solitary
parade. In fact they had simply stopped remarking on the holiday
because they had absorbed it into their thoughts, into their language,
into their lives.
Someone said to a friend, "You sure was a long time delivering that
baby. How long was you in labor?"
And the friend answered, "'Bout three days. The pains started on
Suicide Day and kept up till the following Sunday. Was borned on
Sunday. All my boys is Sunday boys."
Some lover said to his bride-to-be, "Let's do it after New Years,
'stead of before. I get paid New Year's Eve."
And his sweetheart answered, "OK, but make sure it ain't on Suicide
Day. I ain't 'bout to be listening to no cowbells whilst the weddin's
going on."
Somebody's grandmother said her hens always started a laying of double
yolks right after Suicide Day.
Then Reverend Deal took it up, saying the same folks who had sense
enough to avoid Shadrack's call were the ones who insisted on drinking
themselves to death or womanizing themselves to death. "May's well go
on with Shad and save the Lamb the trouble of redemption."
Easily, quietly, Suicide Day became a part of the fabric of life up in
the Bottom of Medallion, Ohio.
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