Love by Toni Morrison

First published: 2003

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Domestic realism; social criticism

Time of work: 1930’s-1990’s

Locale: The fictional town of Silk, on the East Coast of the United States

Principal Characters:

• Bill Cosey, a charismatic African American entrepreneur who ran a successful beach resort on Sooker Bay during the 1940’s and 1950’s, died in 1971, and continues to influence his widow and granddaughter
• Heed the Night Cosey, Bill’s bride, who swaps the poverty of her childhood for a different class of life at the resort, although her illiteracy makes her defensive
• Christine Cosey, Bill’s granddaughter, who was best friends with Heed until the latter married Bill
• Junior Viviane, a gorgeous, sassy delinquent who talks her way into Heed’s employment and lives with the elderly women, Heed and Christine
• L, a ghost who narrates several sections of the novel, was a cook at the Cosey resort, and holds the key to several mysteries
• Sandler Gibbons, an astute, working-class man who knew Bill and whose grandson Romen does odd jobs and gardening for Heed

The Novel

Love is a carefully structured novel with a prologue and nine chapters devoted to the characters’ stories and their different, often contradictory, perceptions of Bill Cosey. Together, these chapters span a sixty-year period and represent the way racial segregation and the process of desegregation shape the lives of the Cosey family. To the local African American community, Cosey’s Hotel and Resort, catering exclusively to African Americans with its procession of famous jazz musicians and wealthy guests, offered a fairytale image of success during the Jim Crow period. While Bill himself was a role model of African American achievement to his guests and the locals, the different chapters in the novel suggest the tensions, bitter resentments, and misunderstandings brewing in Bill’s immediate family, and they question Bill’s roles as a husband, father, grandfather, friend, and benefactor.

Alhough he died over twenty years earlier, Bill’s influence upon Christine and Heed is still palpable in the 1990’s. They may have loved each other as children, but now they are enemies. Bill’s will, a note scribbled on a menu from 1958, is not specific enough; it leaves everything to that “sweet Cosey child,” and both Cosey women have a claim to that title: Christine is Bill’s granddaughter, while Heed was his child bride and called him “Papa.” Heed employs Junior to find a later will, and Christine visits a lawyer after pilfering the housekeeping money. The two women live at war in their Monarch Street house, while Junior establishes a sexual relationship with Romen, who is fourteen.

Behind the novel’s tight focus on the personal history of the Cosey family lies the public history of U.S. segregation and the movement toward desegregation. Working under the Jim Crow laws that separated African Americans and white people in public places such as schools, trains and buses, theaters, and resorts, Bill necessarily made some concessions to the white power structure to keep his establishment open and thriving. His friendship with the local sheriff, Chief Buddy Silk, resulted in morally dubious deep-sea fishing excursions and eventually in the sheriff developing and naming a town after himself.

The novel incorporates historical events of the 1950’s and 1960’s, including the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) outlawing segregation in public schools, the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, sit-ins, the murder of fourteen-year-old African American Emmett Till in Mississippi, and the Freedom Riders who fought the segregation of buses in the South. These events shake the security of the Cosey family, as white people in the South react violently to the quest for African American equality. After race riots and the death of a mixed-race couple at the resort, May Cosey, Bill’s daughter-in-law, is terrified that the hotel will be closed and someone will be lynched. Once African Americans achieve legal equality in the 1960’s, the resort begins to allow local African Americans to visit it, as its more wealthy patrons from other regions have acquired a wider variety of potential vacation spots. Heed must pay the sheriff’s son, Boss Silk, more protection money and finally resort to blackmail in order to keep the business afloat, until it finally closes in the 1980’s.

The Characters

Characters in the present time frame of the novel range in age from the fourteen-year-old Romen; to Junior Viviane, who is in her late teens; to the middle-aged Sandler and Vida Gibbons; to Christine and Heed, who are in their early seventies. There are obvious generational differences among the characters and their environments, but human nature does not change. Some characters have similar backgrounds despite being separated in age. These similarities aid readers’ interpretations, as individual stories mirror one another in part. Heed and Junior share similarly deprived and unloving childhoods, which they react to in the present. Heed and L think of Celestial, Bill’s mistress, when they look at Junior. Bill and Romen have similar attitudes toward what connotes masculinity, but Romen has a sensible grandfather in Sandler to give him advice. Christine, Heed, and Junior all feel unloved and unwanted despite their differences in class and education. Bill and Junior take lovers who are very young, with Junior thinking of Romen as a gift or toy.

Through various points of view the novel reveals that during the 1940’s and 1950’s, Cosey’s Hotel and Resort was an exciting, exclusive gathering place. Bill was its figurehead, while May, L, and later Heed took on the daily practicalities of running a successful business. Relationships between characters are fraught with tensions that are due to jealousy and misunderstandings, despite or because of the resort’s success.

Critical Context

The critical reception of Love was mixed. Darryl Pinckney in The New York Review of Books admired Toni Morrison’s “effortless” ability to “merge the threads of her story” and her rich but accessible prose, while another reviewer criticized the use of certain metaphors as “garnishes” and found the historical background gratuitous. Laura Miller of The New York Times linked the female friendship in Sula (1973) to that between Heed and Christine, as did others. Miller argued that Morrison writes best about “bad people,” as in Love. Other reviewers admired the mystery plot, snappy dialogue, and use of language generally, although a few found the interwoven stories difficult to follow. Many reviewers noted that Morrison continued to focus on love as paradox, as she had in Beloved (1987), in which maternal love during slavery results in infanticide.

Bibliography

Morrison, Toni. Remember: The Journey to School Integration. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. In her foreword to this pictorial history covering the years from 1954 through the 1990’s, Morrison refers to “a time in American life where there was as much hate as there was love; as much anger as there was hope; as many heroes as cowards.”

Pinckney, Darryl. “Hate.” Review of Love, by Toni Morrison. The New York Review of Books 50, no. 19 (December 4, 2003). Outlines the novel’s plot and points to Morrison’s “straightforward” but rich prose, her warring characters, and her evocation of African American history.

Roynon, Tessa. “A New ’Romen’ Empire: Toni Morrison’s Love and the Classics.” Journal of American Studies 41, no. 1 (2007): 31-47. Links the representation of rape in literature and history to classical works from Greece and Rome and classic American texts. Argues that the representation of rape in Love reveals and critiques the representation of traditional heroic masculine acts in literature and history as empowering colonization.

Rymer, Russ. American Beach: How “Progress” Robbed a Black Town—and Nation—of History, Wealth, and Power. New York: Harper Perennial, 2000. Provides a history of one of the many African American resorts that, like Morrison’s fictional one, flourished prior to integration and collapsed when schools and vacation spots were desegregated.

Wardi, Anissa Jane. “A Laying on of Hands: Toni Morrison and the Materiality of Love.” MELUS 30, no. 3 (Fall, 2005): 201-218. Analyzes the abstract concept of love as practical, healing action in the novel, focusing particularly on the materiality of touch, compassion, healing, and nurturing.