God Help the Child

God Help the Child

Cover of the first edition
Author	Toni Morrison
Language	English
Genre	African-American literature
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf Inc
Publication date	April 30, 2015
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print
Pages	192
ISBN	0307740927
Preceded by	Home

God Help the Child is the 11th and final novel by American writer Toni Morrison. News of the book, as well as the title and opening line, were released in December 2014. The novel's original title, preferred by Morrison herself, is The Wrath of Children.

Release

On February 9, 2015, The New Yorker published an excerpt from the work under the title "Sweetness", the opening lines being: "It's not my fault. So you can't blame me. I didn't do it and have no idea how it happened."

God Help the Child was first published by Alfred A. Knopf on April 30, 2015.

Plot

A young girl with blue-black skin is neglected and abused by the light-skinned parents who are ashamed of her. Lula Ann Bridewell, who calls herself "Bride", is blue-black beautiful, 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, which ended her marriage. Sweetness's husband Louis could not bring himself to love a child with skin as dark as Bride's. "We had three good years," Sweetness tells us, "but when she was born, he blamed me and treated Lula Ann like she was a stranger, more than that, an enemy." Her mother, meanwhile, insisted her child call her Sweetness instead of anything maternal. Later, boyfriends introduced her to their white parents in order to make them upset.

Bride grew up without love, tenderness, affection or apology. Sweetness makes it clear she saw herself as protecting her child from a world that would be even more inclined to punish Bride for the darkness of her skin. While Sweetness will apologize for her child's dark skin, what she will not apologize for is how she sees the world and how she raises her child, saying: "Some of you probably think it's a bad thing to group ourselves according to skin color – the lighter, the better – in social clubs, neighborhoods, churches, sororities, even colored schools. But how else can we hold on to a little dignity?" This is what makes it so difficult to judge Sweetness's choices. She should know better, but it is painfully clear her choices have been shaped by the realities of being black in a white world – a world where the lighter your skin, the higher you might climb.

As a young adult, Bride dates a man named Booker Starbern for a few months. She asks him no questions about his life, though she reveals to him the details of her loveless childhood with Sweetness. After finding out her plan to give gifts to a woman just leaving prison after being convicted of child sexual abuse, Sofia Huxley, Booker tells Bride "You not the woman I want." Once she replies with a snarky response, he leaves her.

Since Bride works in the beauty industry, she brings a gift with skin care products to Sofia. Bride goes to her door and begins to explain how she was one of the students who falsely testified against the ex-teacher. Bride had lied in order to win some affection from Sweetness. This tactic worked, as Sweetness had held hands with Bride in public for the first time. However, Sofia had been kept in prison for 15 years and was mistreated in prison by guards and other inmates because she was convicted of a sex crime against children. Sofia was thus furious with Bride, who had upended her life, believing she was punching the Devil herself as she beat Bride and threw her into the street. Bride did not report the police, who would have sent Sofia back to jail, and so Sofia spent the night crying for the first time since she had been convicted.

Needing support, Bride calls her pseudo-friend and coworker, Brooklyn, a white woman with thick dreads, to help her. Hoping to take Bride's job, Brooklyn verbally supports Bride taking some time away from the office. She knows Bride is lying about being beaten by a man in the street. Brooklyn prides herself on being able to understand people beyond what they say, a skill she developed growing in an unstable home near an uncle by whom she was molested. The one slip up with this ability, she reflects, is when she found Booker naked in Bride's bed reading. She stripped naked and climbed into bed with him, assuming she could seduce him. However, he shows disinterest and returns to his book as she dresses. She believes she simply came on too quickly and that she could have seduced him otherwise.

As Bride recovers, her body begins changing: she loses her curvy figure, her ear piercings heal up, and she begins feeling forgetful. She eventually receives a bill from a repair shop in the mail addressed to Booker. She pays his bill and follows the return address. Bride wrecks her car on the way in a very rural area. She is found by a white girl, Rain, who brings her guardian to get her out of the vehicle. As she heals up and her car is getting fixed, she stays with the couple and Rain, learning that they are poor activists. Rain tells her that her guardians kidnapped her, though she is happy about it. Her birth mother was sex trafficking her, but had kicked her out when she bit one of the men who assaulted her. They found her in the Rain behind a dumpster and carried her home with them. Bride is the only person who lets her speak about her past, and Rain is sad when Bride leaves.

After she heals and leaves, Bride finds Booker's favorite aunt, Queen, and gets advice and Booker's new address from her. She gets in an altercation with Booker and afterward quickly falls asleep. When she wakes up, she learns about Booker's personal history. His favorite brother had been assaulted and killed by a pedophile as a young child. His family tried to not speak about the event or his brother, and Booker felt as though he was the only one who remembered him. This led to him leaving his family and only keeping contact with Queen, who gave him permission to be upset and to hold onto his brother's memory. She understands that he left her because he thought Sofia had actually abused children, and that Bride was forgiving her. Bride explains that she had falsely accused Sofia, and the couple make up.

Shortly after, Queen's house catches on fire from her burning her box-springs outside. Bride and Booker take shifts watching over her at the hospital, though Queen soon passes away. Booker gives Queen a private funeral service, though he is frustrated with his uninspired trumpet playing and throws his instrument away. When he returns to the car, Bride tells him she is pregnant with his child. He responds positively, looking forward to their future.

The book ends with Sweetness having received the news of her grandchild with no return address. She reflects that she was not the best mother, but she argues times were different and since blue-black women were not represented in magazines, she did not think anybody would receive Bride well. She believes that Bride will mess up as a mother in a different but equal way with her child, commenting, "God help the child."

Reception

Morrison and her publishers announced they were publishing the book in December 2014, causing Gawker to jokingly proclaim it the best novel of 2015 based on the synopsis and Morrison's previous work alone. The novel was listed by publications including The Globe and Mail, Publishers Weekly and The New York Times as one of their most anticipated book releases of 2015.

Upon release, the novel received mixed reviews. Artist Kara Walker writing for The New York Times negatively compared the novel to previous works by Morrison, saying that “the abundance of first-person confessionals does little to invite actual intimacy.” Ron Charles writing for The Washington Post compared the novel unfavorably to Morrison's debut novel The Bluest Eye (1970), criticizing the characters in her latest work as people with "no interior life". Similarly the review by Razia Iqbal for The Independent complained that the characters were "too didactic on the page: prototypes for an idea rather than real people."

In a review for The Guardian, writer Roxane Gay concluded: "God Help the Child is the kind of novel where you can feel the magnificence just beyond your reach. The writing and storytelling are utterly compelling, but so much is frustratingly flawed....Yet still, there is that magnificence, burning beneath the surface of every word. The language, shifts in point of view and the audacity of the novel’s premise are overwhelming. Morrison remains an incredibly powerful writer who commands attention no matter the story she is telling."