God Help the Child

“Sweetness” might sound like a tender for Bride's mother to adopt, but she does so for racist reasons, not wanting her dark-skinned child calling her "mother" in public. By going by "Sweetness," then, she actually distances herself from her daughter because she has internalized racist ideas about skin color. With this in mind, her name becomes rather situationally ironic, since her name change isn't done out of "sweetness" at all—it's done out of bitterness and racism.

Meanwhile, Bride's real name is Lula Ann Bridewell, but she decides to go by "Bride," partly because this name is more appealing and simpler—two aspects that play into her aspirations in the beauty industry. By pairing these two self-namings, the novel highlights the ways in which names can protect, distance, and advertise—but they cannot, by themselves, heal.

Jeri effectively comments on the fact that Blackness is coveted in certain commercial circumstances even if those very same circumstances are still quite racist. Jeri urges Bride to lean into this dynamic, or at least to accept whatever benefit she might be able to get out of the otherwise bleak reality of race relations in the United States. In keeping with this, she tells Bride to wear white, thus emphasizing the darkness of her skin. And it works: Bride gets the promotion. By calling attention to this commercialized—and ultimately superficial—version of empowerment, then, the narrative ultimately shows how market forces exploit Black culture even as they devalue Black lives.

This passage makes clear that, when they were together, Booker made Bride "feel safe, colonized somehow." This metaphor is somewhat situationally ironic, considering that colonization isn't usually seen as a good thing. To the contrary, one would expect Bride to dislike the fact that she feels "colonized" by Booker, since it would suggest that he has impinged upon her sense of personal agency. Nonetheless, though, she indicates that she feels "safe" because of his colonizing influence, thus illustrating how close she feels to Booker—so close, it seems, that she actively likes the extent to which he is (or was, when they were in a relationship) tangled up in her life. 

The phrase repeats the novel’s title while emptying it of accountability. By letting Sweetness speak first and last, Morrison refuses to let the story end in a redemptive and satisfying way, like the reader might expect or hope it would. In this way, the line is an example of situational irony, as the novel’s final perspective returns to Bride’s “first punisher” to show how trauma can endure over time. Importantly, Sweetness distances herself: she says “the child” instead of “my grandchild.” Instead of acknowledging how she neglected and mistreated Bride, and instead of actively helping Bride or her child, she outsources that help to higher powers: “god” and “luck.” Even as Bride tries to heal from trauma, the social and familial forces that warped her childhood remain. The novel’s title and closing line thus act as bookends that show how little has changed: Sweetness abdicated responsibility as Bride’s mother, and she now echoes that same abdication of responsibility as the grandmother of Bride’s child.