The Bottom of Heaven Blogging Postmodern Blackness

In the prologue of Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel, Sula, the narrator describes how a small black neighborhood in the hills of Medallion, Ohio came to be known as the Bottom.

It began cruelly, we are told, as a “nigger joke” set during slavery. When the slave in the story asks his master for the bottom land he had been promised for his labor, the white farmer dupes the slave into taking the scrubby land in the hills, insisting, “That’s bottom land, rich and fertile.”

“But it’s high up in the hills,” said the slave.
“High up from us,” said the master, “but when God looks down, it’s the bottom. That’s why we call it so. It’s the bottom of heaven – best land there is.” (5)

Of course, the land that the Ohio slaves acquire is of the poorest quality. But by the 1920s when Sula takes place, the Bottom has developed into a fertile community of people who are accustomed to life’s contradictions, the inexplicable evils, and pain disguised as laughter and song. So while the black residents may envy the white folks nestled in the valley, Morrison encourages us to consider that something more precious may be taking root beneath their feet:

Still, it was lovely up in the Bottom. After the town grew and the farm land turned into a village and the village into a town and the streets of Medallion were hot and dusty with progress, those heavy trees that sheltered the shacks up in the Bottom were wonderful to see. And the hunters who went there sometimes wondered in private if maybe the white farmer was right after all. Maybe it was the bottom of heaven. (6)

Morrison’s fiction illuminates black American culture in transcendent places like this, where ingenuity meets the absurd. To be “up in the Bottom” suggests a means of finding possibility, hope, and creative energy in moments of galling powerlessness. Black people certainly aren’t the only ones who have lived under such circumstances. Nevertheless, much of our literature, art, music, language, social and religious life — even in this postmodern, postracial age — is distinguished by an ability to make a way out of no way, to turn the backbreaking soil of the hills into “the bottom of heaven.”

We hope you’ll find the same unexpected insight (and a dash of humor) on these pages. We can’t take credit for the photograph in our profile; the image of African American students in a Washington, D.C. classroom was taken by Marjory Collins in 1942. But we’d like to think that we share something special in common with those determined faces. So take a look around and while you’re here, subscribe to our feed.