Paradise

Paradise / by Toni Morrison; performed by Lynne Thigpen.— Prince Frederick: Recorded Books, p1999.

12 sound discs (14 hrs.) : digital ; 4 3/4 in.

ISBN: 0788737287

1. African Americans -- Oklahoma -- Fiction. 2. City and town life – Fiction. 3. Oklahoma – Fiction.

After the end of the Second World War, the returning veterans of Hope, Oklahoma decide to take their families and move together. They plan to start a new town, and leave behind the failures of the dustbowl, just as their forefathers had trekked from Mississippi and Louisiana to leave behind slavery and start a new life as freedmen. Burned deep in their memory and the memory of their children is the bitter rejection that they faced along the way. Rejection because of the darkness of their skin, all the more bitter because it came from other newly liberated African Americans of a lighter complexion.

In the new town of Ruby the veterans and their families built a prosperous, if isolated, town on the bedrock of family, church and community. So why three decades later were their children questioning and rejecting these values? Where had this contagion entered their peaceful utopia?

A few miles up the road was the Convent. It wasn’t really a convent, it was a former school for American Indian children run by nuns, but the last nun had died their years ago, and the Indian children had left years before that. Now there was only an odd assortment of women living in the old building, women who had drifted there because they didn’t fit in. They were fleeing unhappy and abusive relationships, and they ending up just a few miles outside of Ruby.

Sometimes a resident of Ruby, needing to escape the strictures of small town life, would end up coming to the Convent. Could the Convent be the source of the contagion? A few men from Ruby think so, and they plan to do something about it.

Morrison’s probes the tensions between men and women, order and freedom, personal reputation and reality, between races, and between generations. Her fluid prose—matched by Thigpen’s smooth mellow narration—does not shy away from harsh scenes of physical and emotional brutality, nor does it fail to portray the redemptive love of friendship and compassion. This is a rich and brilliant book; it is a literary masterpiece.