If Cosey is the enticing face of black success in "George Raft suits," then L. is the black woman downstairs stirring the pots, raising the children, keeping the secrets, who leaves his funeral walking the beach in three-inch heels. L., whose name no one can remember, knows love as mercy. She is a perfect rendering of those shadowy African-Americans--surrogates and enablers--Morrison describes in a collection of lectures, Playing in the Dark, as lurking, ignored, yet defining all others in so much American fiction. She is an invention of the later Toni Morrison, a compassionate mediator between warring extremes.

Love's setting evokes places in Florida or the Carolinas where black beach towns once flourished, but does not attempt any particular regional flavor or history. This resort was a cosmopolitan enclave where folks came from all over--sought out in part because it was for the select few and excluded the nearby African-Americans who might have brought in the local flavor. The fault lines of class difference and class pretension are carefully delineated. The regular folk lived in Up Beach, which of course was not by the beach, and worked in a cannery that sent the occasional bad odor toward the luxury hotel.

Morrison painstakingly describes the privilege of those with diamond stickpins, fine cigars and monogrammed silver, pointedly contrasting it with a world in which a child's bedroom is a luxury. Up Beach folk, she tells us, were viewed by the elite as "beach rats who bathed in a barrel and slept in their clothes," who "never used two pieces of flatware to eat." While less artful writers often produce caricatured upper-class blacks, Morrison creates a believable crew of upper-crust Negroes who send their kids to boarding schools, know how to "dress a bed," set a table and be discreet with their indiscretions.

Less successful is the attempt to limn Heed's struggle to elevate her Up Beach speech to leave an educated impression when she hasn't been to school. While the laughter over her mistakes is apt for those characters who hold themselves superior, some of the errors--saying "professionate" for professional or calling a man "very marriage-ing"--strain belief, like taking salad made with mayonnaise to the beach. The looming "police-head" ghosts that threaten reckless women and unruly children don't seem to fit or to be needed; the humans in a Morrison novel are much scarier. But these are quibbles.

Each chapter title names an archetypal male role, such as Friend, Benefactor, Lover, Husband, Guardian, Father. Fortunately, Morrison takes an oblique angle on these terms. Besides, her character Cosey rarely fulfilled any of those roles for anyone. Instead, one finds love confused with infatuation, lust, possession, masochism, delusion. There is love as substitution, love as mourning. Love as expecting abandonment and getting it. Love as habit, hate, charity and, just once, love as the real thing.

"Each story has a monster in it who made them tough instead of brave," L. says. "All over the world, traitors help progress" by strengthening the survivors. Morrison's traitors often liberate those around them, but seldom without high cost. If Cosey is Love's monster, then Love shows the many uses people make of such a person.

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