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grace. [The bed] is the oldest, friendliest thing in anybody’s marriage, the first used and the last left, and no one can praise it enough.
    But there is mystery in it too. It is a strange piece of terrain, and finding ourselves in it is as unlikely as it is marvelous. We marry on attack or rebound. We come at each other for an assortment of pretty thin and transitory reasons. We ask, and are taken in matrimony; and in the haste of charge or retreat, we find ourselves thrown down into a very small piece of ground indeed. The marriage bed is a trench; adversity has made us bedfellows. I turn over at night. I try to see where I am and who is with me. It is not what I imagined at all. Where are the two triumphant giants of love I expected, where the conqueror smiling at conqueror? There are only the two of us, crouched down here under a barrage of years, bills and petty grievances, waiting for a signal which shows no sign of coming. Most likely we shall die in this trench. There is really no place else to go, so in the meantime we talk to each other. The sum and substance of what we manage to say, however, is “Well, here we are.”
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    TONI MORRISON
    JAZZ , 1992
    Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and numerous other honors, Toni Morrison (1931–) is a literary icon. Her sixth novel, Jazz, is set in Harlem during the twenties, tracing a story of love, adultery, and murder. In this passage, Morrison’s narrator reflects on the main characters, Joe and Violet, as the dramatic storms in their marriage come to a seemingly quiet close.
    It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. The pears they let hang on the limb because if they plucked them, they would be gone from there and who else would see that ripeness if they took it away for themselves? How could anybody passing by see them and imagine for themselves what the flavor would be like? Breathing and murmuring under covers both of them have washed and hung out on the line, in a bed they chose together and kept together never mind one leg was propped on a 1916 dictionary, and the mattress, curved like a preacher’s palm asking for witnesses in His name’s sake, enclosed them each and every night and muffled their whispering, old-time love. They are under the covers because they don’t have to look at themselves anymore; there is no stud’s eye, no chippie glance to undo them. They are inward toward the other, bound and joined by carnival dolls and the steamers that sailed from ports they never saw. That is what is beneath their undercover whispers.

BEGINNINGS
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    JULIA WARD HOWE
    LETTER TO ANN ELIZA WARD, 1846
    The future author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) had been married only three years when she sent these words of wisdom to her younger sister.
    My poor dear little Ante-nuptial, I will write to you, and I will come to you, though I can do you no good—sentiment and sympathy I have none, but such insipidity as I have give I unto thee. . . . Dear Annie, your marriage is to me a grave and solemn matter. I hardly allow myself to think about it. God give you all happiness, dearest child. Some sufferings and trials I fear you must have, for after all, the entering into single combat, hand to hand, with the realities of life, will be strange and painful to one who has hitherto lived, enjoyed, and suffered, en l’air , as you have done. . . . To be happily married seems to me the best thing for a woman. Oh! my sweet Annie, may you be happy—your maidenhood has been pure, sinless, loving, beautiful—you have no remorses, no anxious thought about the past. You have lived to