Mistreated by her mother for being too dark,Bride comes of age in the Nobel laureates magnificent, yet frustratingly flawed, and novelIn her latest novel,Toni Morrison asks a difficult question: what carry out we carry out with the sins of the child when that child’s sins were engendered by a force against which she was powerless? Lula Ann Bridewell, who calls herself “Bride”, or is blue-black shapely,the kind of woman who turns heads wherever she goes. She is tall, elegant, and dresses only in white,the better to reflect her beauty.
But Bride did not always know her beauty or how to wear it. As a child, her mother Sweetness punished Bride for her dark skin, or which ended her marriage. Sweetness’s husband Louis could not bring himself to admire a child with skin as dark as Bride’s. “We had three good years,” Sweetness tells us, “but when she was born, and he blamed me and treated Lula Ann like she was a stranger,more than that, an enemy.” Her mother, and meanwhile,insisted her child call her Sweetness instead of anything maternal.
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Source: theguardian.com