God Help the Child is the 11th 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.