With the fiction project I followed the same procedure: waiting to see if certain images I had would wax or wane, yield or implode. One of those images was of a group of ladies standing on the steps of an African Methodist Episcopal church, three rows of them, in early-twentieth-century finery, posing as for a class or club photograph. They are exceptionally beautiful and they are earning a great deal of admiration, you can tell, from the eyes that watch them. Another image is also of women. Girls, rather. They are novices in habits running from the police who have come to arrest them. Both groups of women are associated with churches. The first group is an image—almost like a painting—that surfaced unsummoned; the second is a wholly unreliable piece of village gossip.
Two hundred and some pages later I feel certain this is a wane. Not a wax, although I am also certain that the project is impossible. While each novel I have written, other than the first two, seemed equally undoable, it still astonishes me how, the more work one does, the more difficult it becomes, the more impossible the task. In this instance I am trying to re-create, in the setting of the black towns of the West, a narrative about paradise—the earthly achievement of—its possibility, its dimensions, its stability, even its desirability. The novel’s time frame, 1908 to 1976, and the history of its population, former and children of former slaves, require me to rely heavily on the characters’ reserves of faith, their concept of freedom, their perception of the divine, and their imaginative as well as organizational/administrative prowess. For like many, but not all, deliberately, carefully constructed nineteenth-century communities, a deeply held and wholly shared belief system was much more vital to the enterprise than was physical endurance, leadership, and opportunity. In fact, faith in a system of belief—religious belief—enabled endurance, forged leadership, and revealed opportunity to be seized. Although for freed men and women prosperity, ownership, safety, and self-determination were thinkable, hungered-for goals, desire alone could not, did not animate the treacherous journey they took into unknown territory to build cities. The history of African Americans that narrows or dismisses religion in both their collective and individual life, in their political and aesthetic activity, is more than incomplete—it may be fraudulent. Therefore, among the difficulties before me is the daunting one of showing not just how their civic and economic impulses respond to their religious principles, but how their everyday lives were inextricably bound with these principles. If the polls taken in 1994, which indicate that 96 percent of African Americans believe in God, are correct I suspect the 4 percent who do not so believe are a recent phenomenon—unheard-of among slave and ex-slave populations. Assuming the religiosity of nineteenth-century African Americans is a given, then, and few texts, fiction or memorialist, have neglected this aspect. But this is 1996 and the solution for fictional representation that takes this in account is not to layer religiosity onto an existing canvas of migration and the quest for citizenship, or to tip one’s hat to characters whose belief is unshakable. It is rather to construct a work in which religious belief is central to the narrative itself.
Thus the first problem with paradise: how to render expressive religious language credibly and effectively in postmodern fiction without having to submit to a vague egalitarianism, or to a kind of late-twentieth-century environmental spiritualism, or to the modernist/feminist school of the goddess-body adored, or to a loose, undiscriminating conviction of the innate divinity of all living things, or to the biblical/political scholasticism of the more entrenched and dictatorial wings of contemporary religious institutions—none of which, it seems to me, represents the everyday practice of nineteenth-century African Americans and their children, nor lends itself to postmodernist narrative strategies. The second problem then is part of the first: how to narrate persuasively profound and motivating faith in and to a highly secularized, contemporary, “scientific” world. In short, how to reimagine paradise. (The question that surfaces immediately—Why reimagine it at all, since the ablest geniuses have already and long ago provided unsurpassed and unsurpassable language to describe it?—is a question I will address in a moment.) Right now I want to outline what my problem is and then tell you why I have it.
Paradise is no longer imaginable or, rather, it is overimagined—which amounts to the same thing—and has thus become familiar, common, even trivial. Historically, the images of paradise, in poetry and prose, were intended to be grand but accessible, beyond the routine but imaginatively graspable, seductive precisely because of our ability to recognize them—as though we “remembered” the scenes somehow. Milton speaks of “goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit, / Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue, /…with gay enameled colours mixed”; of “Native perfumes”; of “that sapphire fount the crispèd brooks, / Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold”; of “nectar, visiting each plant, and fed / Flowers worthy of Paradise…”; “nature boon / poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain”; “Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm; / Others, whose fruit, burnished with golden rind, / Hung amiable—Hesperian fables true, /…of delicious taste; / Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks / Grazing the tender herb”; “Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose”; “caves / of cool recess, o’er which the mantling vine / Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps / Luxuriant.”
Such a beatific expanse, in this the last decade of the twentieth century, we recognize as bounded real estate, owned by the wealthy, viewed and visited by guests and tourists, or it is regularly on display for the rest of us in the products and promises sold by various media. Overimagined. Quite available if not in fact, then certainly as ordinary unexceptional desire. Let’s examine the characteristics of physical paradise—beauty, plenty, rest, exclusivity, and eternity—to see how they are understood in 1996.
Beauty of course is a duplicate of what we already know, intensified, refined. Or what we have never known articulated. Beatific, benevolent nature combined with precious metals and jewelry. What it cannot be is beauty beyond imagination.
Plenty, in a world of excess and attending greed that tilts resources to the haves and forces the have-nots to locate bounty within what has already been acquired by the haves, is an almost obscene feature of paradise. In this world of tilted resources, of outrageous, shameless wealth squatting, hulking, preening itself before the dispossessed, the very idea of plenty, of sufficiency, as utopian ought to make us tremble. Plenty should not be regulated to a paradisiacal state, but to normal, everyday, humane life.
Rest, that is the superfluity of working or fighting for rewards of food or luxury, has dwindling currency these days. It is a desirelessness that suggests a special kind of death without dying.
Exclusivity, however, is still an attractive, even compelling, feature of paradise because certain people, the unworthy, are not there. Boundaries are secure; watchdogs, gates, keepers are there to verify the legitimacy of the inhabitants. Such enclaves are cropping up again, like medieval fortresses and moats, and it does not seem possible or desirable for a city to be envisioned in which poor people can be accommodated. Exclusivity is not just an accessible dream for the well-endowed, but an increasingly popular solution for the middle class. “Streets” are understood to be populated by the unworthy and the dangerous; young people are forced off the streets for their own good. Yet public space is fought over as if it were private. Who gets to enjoy a park, a beach, a mall, a corner? The term “public” is itself a site of contention. Paradise as exclusive terrain therefore has a very real attraction to modern society.