Summary
Narrated in the first person as a monologue delivered by Sweetness, the story’s title character and protagonist, “Sweetness” opens with Sweetness saying, “It’s not my fault.” Sweetness rejects any blame for her daughter Lula Ann being born with black skin.
Sweetness says Lula Ann’s skin was so black when the baby came out of her that she was scared. Sweetness and the baby’s father are light-skinned African Americans, considered “high yellow,” while Lula Ann was born “midnight black, Sudanese black.” No one in Sweetness’s family is as black as Lula Ann, whose skin Sweetness likens to tar. Sweetness’s grandmother passed for white and married a white man, and eventually rejected any contact from her own children. Sweetness says almost all "mulatto" and "quadroon" people used to pass if they had “the right kind of hair.” Because of this, Sweetness guesses twenty percent of white people have “Negro blood hiding in their veins.”
Sweetness’s mother Lula Mae could have passed, but chose not to. As a result, she and Sweetness’s father had to put their hands on the Bible reserved for black people when they got married at the courthouse. Sweetness expresses mild outrage, saying Lula Mae worked as a housekeeper for a rich white couple, and would cook them every meal and scrub their backs while they sat in the bathtub, but she wasn’t allowed to touch the same Bible as them.
In a second-person address to the reader, Sweetness says "you" probably think it is bad for black people to group themselves according to skin color in a way that means lighter skin is better. Sweetness suggests it is the only way to hold on to dignity; otherwise, she would risk being spit on, elbowed, or having to walk in the gutter to make room for whites on the sidewalk. Sweetness’s mother’s light skin meant she was never stopped from trying on hats or using the ladies’ room in department stores, and her father could try on shoes in the front room, not the back room. Neither would drink from a “Colored Only” fountain even if dying of thirst.
Sweetness says Lula Ann embarrassed her from the beginning in the maternity ward. The pale birth skin all babies are born with changed fast; Sweetness thought she was going crazy to see her baby turn blue-black before her eyes. Sweetness admits that she held a blanket over the baby’s face and pressed for a moment, but she couldn’t smother Lula Ann, no matter how much she wished the baby wasn’t such a dark color. Sweetness considered adoption but was scared to be one of those mothers who leave babies on church steps. Sweetness says nursing Lula Ann was “like having a pickaninny sucking my teat” and she turned to bottle-feeding as soon as they were home.
Sweetness’s husband Louis looked at Sweetness like she was crazy and at Lula Ann like she was from Jupiter. Sweetness says the fights that followed broke their marriage to pieces, because he blamed Sweetness for Lula Ann’s skin color and treated the child as if she was an enemy. He never touched the baby. Sweetness was unable to convince him that she had never cheated on him. Sweetness argued that Lula Ann’s blackness must have come from his family.
After Louis left, Sweetness had to find a cheaper place to live. Sweetness made sure not to take the baby with her when meeting landlords. She often left Lula Ann with a teenaged cousin to babysit, because whenever she took Lula Ann out people would lean in to the baby carriage to say something nice and then jump back with a start. Sweetness says it was hard enough being a colored woman, even a light-skinned one, trying to rent in a decent part of the city. There was law in the nineties, when Lula Ann was born, against discrimination in who landlords rented to, but Sweetness says few landlords followed the law; they would invent reasons to keep colored people out. Sweetness says she got lucky with Mr. Leigh, even though she knows he raised the rent seven dollars from the advertised amount.
Sweetness says she told Lula Ann to call her Sweetness instead of Mother or Mama because it was “safer.” Otherwise, Sweetness says, a baby so dark and with such thick lips would have confused people. Sweetness comments that Lula Ann has crow-black eyes with a blue tint, and that there is “something witchy about them.” Sweetness says that after Louis abandoned them, he eventually must have felt bad because he found their address and mailed them monthly checks for fifty dollars. The money from Louis combined with Sweetness’s night job at the hospital got Sweetness and Lula Ann off welfare.
Sweetness comments that she wishes the government would go back to calling welfare “relief” like they used to because it sounds better. Sweetness says the welfare clerks were “mean as spit,” and that their harsh attitudes compensated for their skimpy paychecks. She figures this is why the clerks treated welfare recipients like beggars—particularly when they saw her holding Lula Ann, and proceeded to treat her like she was cheating the system.
Sweetness says things got better, but she had to be strict and careful with Lula Ann, teaching her to keep her head down and not make trouble. Sweetness says she doesn’t care how many times Lula Ann changes her name, because “her color is a cross she will always carry.” Sweetness repeats three times that it isn’t her fault.
Analysis
Toni Morrison opens “Sweetness” by establishing the protagonist and eponymous narrator’s characteristic defensiveness and introducing the theme of denial. Although the context is initially unclear to the reader, Sweetness insists that “it” isn’t her fault. The issue she alludes to is purposefully ambiguous, creating a sense of intrigue but also a sense of intimacy, as Sweetness assumes the person to whom she is addressing her narration knows what she is referring to. There is also an irony inherent to Sweetness’s vociferous defensiveness: by denying any blame before she has been accused, Sweetness appears to wrestling with her own guilt, suggesting that there is indeed something for which she knows she is responsible.
Narrating from a point in her old age, Sweetness recounts how the first thing that isn’t her fault is Lula Ann being born with “midnight black” skin—a physical trait that frightens Sweetness, who has light skin, as it does her husband. The situational irony of light-skinned parents giving birth to a dark-skinned daughter is the inciting incident that leads to the major conflict of the story: Used to living with the privileges of light skin, Sweetness cannot see past her daughter’s blackness and truly love her.
With this conflict, Morrison highlights the theme of colorism—i.e. prejudice against those with darker skin tones, usually coming from people of the same ethnic or racial group. Sweetness justifies her extreme negative reaction to her daughter’s skin by explaining how several members of her family had passed as white in order to avoid the many daily abuses and humiliations of Jim Crow laws. The anti-minority laws were in effect from after the Civil War until pressure from the civil rights movement resulted in the repeal of the laws in the 1960s. In the Jim Crow era, public and private spaces in many areas across the Southern United States were segregated as “Colored Only” and “White Only,” and African Americans were denied full access to voting, employment, and education. Sweetness recognizes the seeming illogic of black people organizing themselves according to a hierarchy of skin tone that privileges light skin, but she justifies the colorism she has inherited as having been born from the need to maintain dignity in a systemically racist society.
In a moment of extreme honesty, Sweetness admits that for a moment after Lula Ann was born, she wanted to smother her with a blanket, but couldn’t bring herself to go through with it. Similarly, she couldn’t go through with giving the baby up for adoption. Nonetheless, she remained frightened of the darkness of her daughter’s skin and eyes, seeing in Lula something evil or ominous, likening her eyes to the color of crows and ascribing “something witchy” to them. Sweetness also uses the racist term “pickaninny” to describe Lula Ann while breastfeeding.
While Sweetness’s reaction towards her newborn daughter involved fantasies of abandonment, abandonment doesn’t announce itself as a theme explicitly until Louis, Lula Ann’s light-skinned father, walks out on the family. Unable to accept Lula Ann as his own, he accuses Sweetness of having had an affair with someone darker. The argument that ensues leads him to leave her to raise the baby alone.
Sweetness finds herself similarly abandoned by the state, represented by welfare clerks whose cruel and suspicious attitudes toward her and Lula Ann induce such shame in Sweetness that she stops collecting welfare and finds a job. While Sweetness reports that things in her life stabilized, she made sure to teach Lula Ann to act deferentially toward others and to more or less conceal herself in public life because of the burden of her dark skin—another form of abandonment that Sweetness tries to disguise as care. By having Sweetness return to the repeated “it isn’t my fault,” Morrison ends the section by expanding the definition of “it” to include the way Sweetness raised Lula Ann.
