In the first paragraphs of the novel, Morrison satirizes another great American writer, William Faulkner, who began his book
The Sound and the Fury by bemoaning the disappearance of a golf course after the Civil War, and with it, Southern white plantation culture. Morrison turns this sentiment on its head, criticizing “white culture” for swallowing up a vibrant African-American community to build something as banal as a golf course.