Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 26

22 Popular Culture Review “city” of Harlem serves to model the transitory life it both represents and maintains, much like Biosphere II (in Tucson, AZ) is a reconstruction and miniature representation of Earth, a system sustaining life. Harlem is the primary environment and dominating force working on the key characters: Joe, Violet and Dorcas. The mass of the City—the thousands it holds, the power it wields, the impressions it makes—appears ominously greater then it is. Since it is built on transience, we have an equalizer between this entity and the characters. What divorces the City and its people, however, is simply this: The City knows itself and the power it wields, while the main characters in the novel must progress from being pawns to conquerors of their own lives—their own fate. Kimberly Connor explains that Morrison’s characters are usually in a liminal state, a state of “transition, journeying though mysterious circumstances and personal histories to the innermost dimensions of their psyches, often leading to a triumphant discovery of selfhood” (Connor 181-82). The journeys for Joe and Violet include their move from the rural South to the urban North, as well as their individual lifelong searches. For Joe, it is a spiritual hunt for his evasive, crazy mother, Wild. Violet, on the other hand, is seeking Golden Boy, “the golden-skinned baby that made her yearn to be ‘White. Light. Young again’ [Morrison 208], as she later confesses” (Rodrigues 257). The subconscious necessity for the fulfillment of these spiritual searches is what propels Joe and Violet to uproot themselves from their Southern community and move to the North. On the surface, the pressing social conflicts against Blacks in the South were what caused them to migrate north during the early twentieth century. Eusebio L. Rodrigues notes: Morrison extends the range of her fictional world by giving us rapid and vivid glimpse of their [Joe and Violet] life in the rural South after emancipation.. . . close up. The stories of Joe and Violet are set against the bleak conditions in the South at the time: segregation, the exploitation of labor by white landowners, the miserable wages paid, brutal eviction from lands and houses, the injustices and deceptions practiced on people deliberately kept illiterate (254). A long way from the walnut trees of Vesper County, Virginia, more then a train ride, “five times in four different cars” (127), where Joe and Violet dance unaware of the City’s call and lure and the dangers that await them. Initially, it is only excitement, excitement from long trips and the immense move from the “Southern Sky” to “a northern one” (127): The train shivered with them at the thought but went on and sure enough there was ground up ahead and the trembling became the dancing under their feet. Joe stood up, his fingers