Love is difficult: Rarely does it come in the form similar to a fairy tale where everything just makes sense. Quite often, it takes patience, struggle, and work for love to blossom into the radiant, beautiful energy that overtakes the soul with warmth. The difficulty with love comes not from what to do following the fall, it comes at the realization where you must walk away from that same love for your own sake. Although Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo uses the relationships of a mother and her children, a little girl and her love of the world, and a families love for the arts to portray just how beautiful love can be, she contrastingly shows that blindness to love may actively contribute in the prevention of reaching one’s potential in her usage of Sassafras’s relationship with Mitch.
In introducing Mitch as a character who “thought of himself as a god, and he was always telling Sassafras not to succumb to her mortality; to live like she was one of God’s stars,” Shange immediately keys the reader in on Sassafras’s first mistake of entering this particular relationship: Mitch is unwilling to accept that he is imperfect thus making him a partner who is unable to accommodate for anyone’s needs other than his own. Shange recognizes that the very concept of love is imperfect. Love, while an aspect of the divine, is not eternal, it is not unchanging, and it is certainly not perfect. Love is entirely mortal, which is perhaps what makes it so special, so powerful, and so sought after.
Mitch does not see Sassafras as an equal, prompting him to “always” remind her not to “succumb to her mortality,” when in reality Sassafras has the power to bring “good vibes from a whole lot of spirits to everything she touches” (Shange 95). After letting “whole worlds, dreams, and kisses, fall from her eyes” following Mitch’s drug use, “she stroked his cheek with her hand; she loved him” (Shange 122). Sassafras loves Mitch at the cost of failing to fully tap into her potential to connect with the spiritual world.
Even after finding another man who offered to “make a song” with her, perhaps a callback to the introduction of the relationship when Shange wrote “Sometimes you could hear a man and a woman arguing, but almost always some kind of music (Shange 95), and to “see what we can be. Sassafras kept holding her breath, looking through the back of her head for Mitch. Where was he? Didn’t he want her at all?” (Shange 145). Shange uses this scene to not only show the rawness of difficult connection but perhaps poses a question to the reader: why is it sometimes so hard to walk away from love?
Question: Why does Shange use the idea of “music” in describing Sassafras’s relationship with love? (Particularly when Leroy says he wants to “make a song” with her)