Summary
The children are annoyed by the old woman’s silence, and interrupt her reverie with improvised words. They have no bird in their hands, they tell her. They ask her why she didn’t even try to answer; why she couldn’t engage with them; why she avoided discussion with tricks and riddles in her language. They tell her they are young, and their inheritance is a catastrophe. They want to see the world differently, and they want answers.
The children implore the old woman to give them a narrative that will help them solve life’s mysteries. They do not expect solutions, they tell her, but they want her to try to show them what the world means to her. Only she can do it because she is “blessed with blindness” and therefore knows language best.
The children want the old woman to tell them about what she knows: what it is like to be a woman, to be at the margin, to live in isolation. They also want to know about her people’s history—slaves singing in a wagon. As they press on with their insistence that the old woman speak, they begin to tell a story themselves. The wagon of slaves stops on the snowy road at an inn in the dark. The driver and his mate go into the inn. Then, a boy and a girl step out from the inn and join the slaves in the wagon. They offer bread and meat and a jug of warm cider. Most importantly, the children imply, they look into the eyes of the slaves, one by one, as they pass the food around.
The children finally stop speaking and the silence resumes. Then, the old woman speaks again. She tells the children that at last she trusts them. She trusts them with the bird that is not in their hands—with language. Then she says, “How lovely it is, this thing we have done—together.”
Analysis
In this second half of her Nobel Lecture, Morrison reveals that there is no bird in the children’s hands. They are there only to ask the old woman for her stories. In reading the bird as language, and then removing the physical bird from the scene, Morrison shifts the focus of the fable from the quality of the language itself to the act of creation. It is through their narration that the children build a relationship with the old woman—not by bringing any bird to her house, whether alive or dead. In this way, Morrison seems to be arguing for the importance of the ongoing process of working on language, rather than the classification of it from a distance. This was Morrison’s role as a writer: not to offer language as a static object to her readers, but to build language as a bridge between people.
The children’s monologue exposes another important theme in Morrison’s speech: that of storytelling as intergenerational connection. For example, the children view their “inheritance as an affront,” and ask for guidance from the old woman, “the old one, the wise one.” Indeed, they indicate that they cannot fix the “catastrophe” their present world has become without looking to the past. By asking for the old woman’s stories, they place emphasis on the power of history and the stories who came before them.
In an unexpected shift towards the end of the fable, the children's monologue abruptly transitions into a slave narrative. As they share a narrative about a wagonful of slaves and the kindness of a young boy and girl who feed them one snowy night, they transform into storytellers in their own right. Their tone becomes solemn and instructive, telling the old woman, “The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed.” In this moment, the group of young people who arrive at the old woman’s cottage to trick her become wise sages. This ending collapses the divide between the old woman and the young people that was so stark at the beginning of the fable, and suggests that they both have the same potential for the powerful use of words.
