Chapter 3: Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks Summary and Analysis

In the third chapter, Toni Morrison opens with a quote by William Carlos Williams' "Adam" about the special hell where black women wait for boys. Race is used metaphorically more now perhaps than ever before. The metaphorical and metaphysical uses of race occupy definitive place in American literature and should be a major concern of the literary scholarship that tries to know it. Morrison wishes to trace the transformation of American Africanism from the simplistic purpose of establishing hierarchical differences to its surrogate properties as self-reflexive meditations on the loss of a difference to the existence in rhetoric of dread and desire. Africanism acquiring a metaphysical necessity is not the same as losing its ideological utility which is still intact. A common claim is that white America...