So wrote Kathy Ryan in the 2000 edition of the African American Review, and my hat's off to her excellent presentation of suicide in Toni Morrison's fiction. Readers of Morrison recognize Morrison as a Post-Modern author pressing the envelope between language, understanding, and the individual's place between the two. The power of language in words and gestures has a master handler in Toni Morrison.

Would we seek the sociological understanding of society's repressive conditions in Richard Wright, we must seek our mind's understanding in Toni Morrison's presentation of language and power in her characters' world.

The ship brought to, a man was placed in the main chains to catch him which he perceiving, made signs which words cannot express expressive of his happiness in escaping. He then went down and was seen no more." (qtd. in Cowley and Mannix 108) In this recollection of a 1788 slaveship, Dr. Ecroide Claxton admits the inadequacy of language to convey the escaping man's happiness: He "made signs which words cannot express." Suicide often provokes the rhetorical impasse here encountered; the sign is clear but incommunicable. Claxton cannot translate the joy of the man who, "flying to the place" of escape, found the way out of the horror and defied the captain's command that the Africans remain onboard. During the Middle Passage, some people fought back physically; others survived in more covert ways; still others jumped overboard. On several ships, "there was an epidemic of suicide at the last minute"