SPOILERS FOR LOVE BY TONI MORRISON
Love by Toni Morrison is a novel about many betrayals, but three betrayals in particular stand out. I have dubbed these the floral betrayals. I pictured Toni Morrison designing these pivotal moments with flower details for a very specific purpose: so her readers could pick them out, so her readers could gather the scenes together, and so her readers could then engage in making a literary bouquet. I think these scenes were meant to be arranged and studied in the vase of our minds, and making the literary bouquet is exactly what I’ve tried to do in this blog post and in the annotating guide below.
The flowers at the center of these pivotal moments are forget-me-nots, foxgloves, and a collection of stylized flowers that are never named.
We learn the details of the forget-me-not betrayal slowly and mysteriously at first. In the text, it’s hinted at four times before the full story comes to light. Here’s the story: Heed and Christine are playing on the beach, but they forgot their jacks in Christine’s room, which is decorated with forget-me-not wallpaper. Heed goes to get the jacks, but never makes it to the room. Mr. Cosey molests her. She is 11 years old. After, he heads directly to his 12-year-old granddaughter Christine’s bedroom and masturbates. Christine, outdoors looking in the window for Heed, sees him. Her beloved room with the forget-me-not wallpaper, the safe space where she and Heed have sleepovers, is never the same for her again. In short order, Mr. Cosey destroys not only the sanctuary of her room, but the friendship too when he ends up taking Heed (at 11 years old) as his child bride.
The second betrayal is with foxglove flowers. These poisonous, beautiful blooms grow wild around the hotel’s gazebo. L tells the reader about this location in the prologue, which is a big foreshadowing moment. Because, in the final chapter, she confesses that these gazebo foxgloves are what she used to poison Mr. Cosey. What’s more, she destroyed his original will and testament, replacing it with a forgery of her own. L’s aim was to reduce further harm, to stop Mr. Cosey from more “ruination,” which she defines for us in Chapter 4:
“It was marrying Heed that laid the brickwork for ruination. See, he chose a girl already spoken for. Not promised to anyone by her parents. That trash gave her up like they would a puppy. No. The way I see it, she belonged to Christine and Christine belonged to her.”
Chapter 4: Benefactor p 104
L got wind that Mr. Cosey was planning to leave nothing in his will to the girls he harmed the most. His wife and his granddaughter were going to be destitute. L stopped his plans by killing him, destroying his real will, and creating a fake one with an ambiguous beneficiary, the “sweet Cosey child.” L knew that Heed and Christine would argue over the meaning of “sweet Cosey child.” The words could mean either of them, his granddaughter or his child bride. L’s intentional ambiguity brought Heed and Christine back together in a hateful battle for property. They even ended up living together under the same contested roof. L orchestrated their reunion almost perfectly.
The final betrayal comes from Junior. She lays a floral carpet over the rotting hotel attic floor, making it safe for her and Heed to walk on. Junior later nudges that floral carpet out from underneath Heed’s feet, sending Heed crashing into the room below. That room happens to be the old forget-me-not-wallpapered bedroom, and Junior’s heinous act happens to be a catalyst for a tragic reconciliation. It ends up bringing Heed and Christine together for one final sleepover in the forget-me-not bedroom. They heal their friendship lying together on the floor of that room, holding1 each other, before Heed dies of her injuries.
TIME TO ANNOTATE
To annotate the forget-me-nots, the foxgloves, and the stylized carpet flowers that emerge in Love by Toni Morrison, see the guide below.
Annotate The Forget-Me-Not Betrayal
You will need 5 tabs to mark all the quotes about what happened in Christine’s bedroom, the one decorated with forget-me-not floral wallpaper.
TAB 1 Chapter 4: Benefactor p 95
“Once there was a little girl with white bows on each of her four plaits. She had a bedroom all to herself beneath the attic in a big hotel. Forget-me-nots dotted the wallpaper. Sometimes she let her brand-new friend stay over and they laughed till they hiccuped under the sheets.”
TAB 2 Chapter 6: Husband p 133
“Who had to leave her bedroom, her playhouse, the sea? The only innocent one in the place, that’s who.”
TAB 3 Chapter 8: Father p 177
“There in a little girl’s bedroom an obstinate skeleton stirs, clacks, refreshes itself.”
TAB 4 Chapter 9: Phantom p 183
“Drawing a ribbon of breath, she blocks any tears that may be lurking like memories behind her eyelids. But the forget-me-nots roaming the wallpaper are more vivid in this deliberate dark than they ever were in daylight and she wonders what it was that made her want it so.”
TAB 5 Chapter 9: Phantom p 192
“Christine looks up toward the window of her own bedroom, where Heed would be looking for the jacks. The window is open; pale curtains lift through it. […] her grandfather is standing there, in her bedroom window, his trousers open, his wrist moving with the same speed L used to beat egg whites into unbelievable creaminess.”
Annotate The Foxglove Betrayal
L’s betrayal with the foxgloves only requires two tabs.
TAB 1 Prologue p 7
“Foxglove grows waist high around the gazebo…”
Note: Talk about foreshadowing! L hints at her culpability with this detail in the prologue.
TAB 2 Chapter 9: Phantom p 201
“Foxglove can be quick, if you know what you’re doing, and doesn’t hurt all that long.”
Annotate The Floral Carpet Betrayal
Just two tabs are required for this final betrayal too: one for when Junior lays down the floral carpet in the attic for Heed and a second for when she rips it out from under her.
TAB 1 Chapter 8: Father p 175
“Over cracked and slanting floorboards she tosses a yard of flowered carpet and rights a carton of men’s shoes.”
TAB 2 Chapter 8: Father p 177
“Carefully, with the toe of her boot, Junior eases the piece of carpeting toward herself. She does not watch or call out. Instead, she turns to smile at Christine, whose blood roar is louder than the cracking, so the falling is like a silent movie and the soft twisted hands with no hope of hanging on to rotted wood dissolve, fade to black as movies always do, and the feeling of abandonment loosens a loneliness so intolerable that Christine drops to her knees peering down at the body arching below.”
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- See Toni Morrison’s Foreword where she emphasizes their desire to hold one another. Read the full quote from Chapter 4: Benefactor page 74 here: “More on the mark was their unspoken realization that the fights did nothing other than allow them to hold each other. Their grievances were too serious for that. Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself. The first fight, interrupted in 1971, signaled the will to claw each other.” ↩︎
Annotate With Sara 