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Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Jul. 24th, 2006 02:46 amI thought long and hard about what to write in honor of International Blog Against Racism Week. As a Nebraska-born girl of German descent I cannot claim extensive knowledge of the subject of racism, and as the saying goes it is usually better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open up your mouth and prove it. But on Friday afternoon it occurred to me that this would be a reason to talk about Beloved, and any reason to talk about Beloved was a good reason.
Beloved is usually referred to as being a novel by Toni Morrison, but I think it would be better described as a horror story with a malevolent ghost. The ghost is not the source of the horror, it is one of its victims--the horror is generated entirely by slavery and the effects of slavery. You see, once upon a time in the period before the Civil War a pregnant and extremely desperate black woman gathered her three children and ran north to escape from slavery. She made it, but sometime later the slave catchers came to town looking for her and she--I had mentioned she was desperate, yes?--decided that it was better to die than be a slave. She managed to kill the baby before they caught her, and when it was buried the tombstone had only one word carved on it: BELOVED.
Beloved was a revelation to me--great novels explain something about humanity and it explained many things to me. How it felt to live in a society that had an arbitrary dividing line between "human" and "non-human" and how it felt to be on the wrong side of that line. The choices we make when desperate, and how we live with them. How we blame, and how we forgive. It is an exquisitely painful book, and when I finished reading it I knew two things. I was never going to read it again--not that I needed to, as it was now seared into my brain; and I was never going to get rid of my copy. I couldn't bear the idea of not having it.
Beloved is usually referred to as being a novel by Toni Morrison, but I think it would be better described as a horror story with a malevolent ghost. The ghost is not the source of the horror, it is one of its victims--the horror is generated entirely by slavery and the effects of slavery. You see, once upon a time in the period before the Civil War a pregnant and extremely desperate black woman gathered her three children and ran north to escape from slavery. She made it, but sometime later the slave catchers came to town looking for her and she--I had mentioned she was desperate, yes?--decided that it was better to die than be a slave. She managed to kill the baby before they caught her, and when it was buried the tombstone had only one word carved on it: BELOVED.
Beloved was a revelation to me--great novels explain something about humanity and it explained many things to me. How it felt to live in a society that had an arbitrary dividing line between "human" and "non-human" and how it felt to be on the wrong side of that line. The choices we make when desperate, and how we live with them. How we blame, and how we forgive. It is an exquisitely painful book, and when I finished reading it I knew two things. I was never going to read it again--not that I needed to, as it was now seared into my brain; and I was never going to get rid of my copy. I couldn't bear the idea of not having it.
