For MLK Day: "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, annotated

Read this book and be grateful if you believe in forgiveness
and the potential for Beloved Community. 

To commemorate Martin Luther King Day, I'm pleased to post my annotation of the book Beloved, by Toni Morrison:  

Beloved by Toni Morrison is a novel set in Cincinnati the immediate years following the civil war, centering on a former slave, Sethe, and her family. “Family,” defined by slavery standards as family didn’t exist for slaves; would-be loved ones were bought, sold, rented, burned, hanged, or otherwise lost. Sethe’s family was her mother-in-law, her daughter, her new lover who was an old co-slave (for total lack of a better word), her two runaway sons, her vanished husband and her ghost daughter, Beloved, who forms the center of the plot line. The book demonstrates why it was nearly impossible for a slave to form bonds of love, and the reader understands how love could be best shown through infanticide. Yes, read that last sentence again slowly. Love through infanticide. I won't give away the spoiler, the method.

I wanted to read this book for two reasons. First to further my quest to read the classics. In 2006 The New York Times Book Review deemed this book as “the single best work of American fiction in the past 25 years.” The original NYT review was written in 1987 by Margeret Atwood who wrote this about Toni Morrison: “If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest. In three words or less, it's a hair-raiser.”

What would I give to find a nonfiction story like this to write (and I have to believe they exist). Or better yet, I only wish there were no nonfiction stories like this. This is a story of our American heritage and it’s really hard to read. Just as Sethe and her lover, Paul D., wanted to “unremember” their horrific past—perhaps they had most severe cases of post traumatic stress—so do we as a country. Perhaps this book could help serve a national truth and reconciliation effort, to tell stories of our slave history and collectively heal. Idealism.

The second reason I wanted to read this is to see how Toni Morrison writes the supernatural. (My writing and research interests include writing nonfiction supernatural.) Morrison writes the narrative like a conch shell—circling wide with big open holes in the story and rotating the prose inwards, winding towards a tight ball of tension and providing details to the circumstances of Beloved’s past and present. Slavery is horrible, yet is also just a word that cannot in itself evoke the complexities of what it did to people, white and black, and to our society. Morrison puts flesh and bones to slavery; not only to its enormous injustices, but also to its tragic nuances. The inwardly spiraling accounts of chronic and severe abuse suffered by all of the characters seem to beg for a supernatural telling as the haunting seems almost as expected as killing your own baby in order to save it. It seemed a person enslaved lived constantly on the border of life and death, and so to accept a ghost into your household, to accept existence as a straddling of the present world and the next, wouldn’t be out of the ordinary.

The book opens with the supernatural: “124 was spiteful. Full of baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims” (3). Yes, indeed, Morrison is writing about ghosts of the poltergeist-type, including incidents such as “a mirror shattered” and “two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake” (3). Yet the way Morrison writes the supernatural, it could also be referring to the super traumatic. Would not anyone who murdered their own child be haunted, and thus negatively influence everyone around them?

As part of the inward spiraling of the narrative, Morrison tells the story through different characters in their own voice, in a non-linear fashion. The disjointed style of prose emulates the jarring uncertainties faced by its characters, yet it all works together to tell a thick, multi-layered story of attempting to love in a nightmare.

With love, T