His name is Booker Starbern.īride is born to a high-yellow mother that rejects the infant just as she changes right in front of her eyes from a pale skin tone to “midnight black, Sudanese black.” She names her Lula Ann and insists that her daughter call her Sweetness, never mama or mother. When Bride heals, she begins anew the quest to find the other half of wholeness. Bride is a guest of this family for the six weeks it takes her broken ankle to heal, all the while creating a watershed of insight into what love and happiness might look like, even as the awareness is as foreign as any she has ever experienced. If this wanderer named Bride – aka Lula Ann Bridewell, the main character in Toni Morrison’s most recent novel God Help the Child – intended to jump-start an existential crisis of maximum effect, she couldn’t have chosen a better place to break her ankle as she crashes her Jaguar into a tree, spends the night in the forest, and is rescued by a married hippie couple and their “adopted” daughter Rain. Embedded in its forgiving presence, the wanderer fears the unknown that the forest unwittingly projects, and, in time, is caught in its uncomprehending silence, diminished in status and strength. The mysterious forest may be a threshold experience to the wanderer who recoils under its crowned canopy and scarcity of human life.
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