Brown Ecology and Fertility

Abstract

This chapter offers a treatise on brown, the color of soil and compost. Though seemingly a hue consigned to decay, brown matter, the very substance that allows for growth and fertility, is life. Specific attention will be paid to The Bluest Eye and Paradise as Morrison deftly ties soil fecundity and biodiversity to race. It is of note that Morrison frames The Bluest Eye, a novel that explores the devastation of racism, with a discourse on soil health and marigold seeds. In Paradise, Morrison again returns to dirt, specifically compost, which she analogizes to the rich lives of a multigenerational group of women. In prioritizing brown as the first chapter of Toni Morrison and the Natural World, this book begins, as Morrison does, by centering African Americans. The universe of color in Morrison’s fiction is inside a palette of browns.