Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 28

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Popular Culture Review
dancing . . . the City . . . danced with them, proving already how much it loved
them” (32). Like a welcoming hostess, the City was sending out its invitation “to
come.”
The voice of the City travels on the multiple voices of its people. “It
uses city idiom; its language is simple and colloquial, but not quite clear”
(Rodrigues 260). It is in the gossip of the women at the hair salon and ladies’
society. The City speaks as the internal conscience condoning or condemning
the individual, distributing worldly wisdom and laissez-faire guidance.
The City’s contrary voice whispers anarchy to the orphans it makes and
the orphans it takes. Harlem killed Dorcas’ parents, burned them in their beds
while Dorcas slept at a friend’s house (57). The would-be surrogate parent, Aunt
Alice, had been mind-controlled by Harlem’s power and therefore became a
castrated guide for the orphaned Dorcas. Essayist Graham Hodges discusses this
phenomenon, elucidating on the transitions African Americans were making by
moving to the North. They were leaving their communal villages, each an exile,
only to coagulate with people they had never met before. Each became
disconnected from filial ties and roots, the result of which was to feel entirely
separated from history and from family (Hodges 111). Having no community
structure, one could assert little authority. Thus, Dorcas was left to be raised by
the negligent mindset of the City, which could be all-permissive and all-
denying.
While the City made Dorcas an orphan (and absorbed her into itself), it
welcomed the already-orphans, Joe and Violet. Joe who never knew his mother,
Wild, nor did he ever truly know his father. Meanwhile, Violet suffered
similarly, as her mother, Rose Dear, committed suicide and her father was a
drifter. The last parental force she had was her grandmother, True Belle, who
always spoke so favorably of Golden Boy. Because of True Belle’s favoritism
for this ideal, golden-haired, golden-skinned boy, Violet never felt completely
accepted. She was always in search of his perfection. So Harlem took them in; it
voiced its greeting and soothed their bruises with its massaging, vibrating
reception. Harlem has breath too.
Breath synchronizes with the movement of blood in the veins. “There is
no air in the City but there is breath, and every morning it races though him like
laughing gas brightening his eyes, his talk, and his expectations” (34). The
breath of the City is the pulse of its dwellers. Harlem can frame any person in
just that way to “pump desire” and “chum a man’s blood” (34). Consequently,
its breath is like the wind: it rises and falls without being seen, but its effects are
all over the place. Morrison notes here that sexual desire does not always
indicate love and Rodrigues writes that, “The City pumps desire and transforms
love into a soaring ‘love appetite’ (67). “Only a nameless parrot in a cage can
utter an ‘I love you’ in the City” (259). Consequently, the City’s breath
heightens the senses, catalyzing them to reach ecstasy quickly. This rate seems
to parody a slow-rising constant love.