Critical Responses About the Black Family in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child: Conflicts in Comradeship

This book shows the integral role of the “conscious African family” in developing commercial success stories such as those of Morrison’s protagonist, Bride. Bride’s accomplishments are an extension of a superficial “cult of celebrity” until a significant journey helps her redefine success by building a community and family.

Coming at the issues from the inside, the collaboration between Rhone Fraser, Natalie King-Pedroso & Company, Conflicts in Comradeship, provides a timely and useful contribution to studies on the African American family along with analyses of Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child.

In 1937, Margaret Walker wrote, “For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way/from confusion from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, / trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, / all the faces all the adams and eves and their countless/ generations…” Toni Morrison’s 11th novel, God Help the Child rings with Walker’s sentiments, and Natalie King-Pedroso and Rhone Frasier’s Critical Responses about the Black Family in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child: Conflicts in Comradeship does as well. This important collection of essays tackles the novel as a culminating moment in Morrison’s thought, a grief-filled extension of The Bluest Eye, and as a vessel sailing the African Ocean of mysteries. The text, like Morrison’s own, reaches out to the “shackled and tangled among ourselves” with the aim of letting a “beauty full of healing” come forth. Conflicts in Comradeship offers a unique and brave approach to criticism, collaboration, and reading Morrison’s under appreciated final work of fiction.

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