Beloved REVIEW
(I wrote this in July of 2008. It had some formatting and spelling errors and a few typos and so I am reposting it now)
The last few days, in between exams and final papers, I have managed to read Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved. Needless to say, you won't get the final word on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel from me. But I mean to outline a few things that Morrison’s novel speaks to me.
One of the themes of the book has to do with how long it can take to process abuse and trauma. All of the characters in Beloved have been traumatized and physically and emotionally abused by slavery. In that sense, Beloved is a second Uncle Tom's Cabin, gnawing away at the lie in the National consciousness that slavery could be a humane institution. Morrison makes it clear that it destroyed lives, whites and blacks.
Every person that came out of slavery was a survivor and everyone would have to have pieces of them put back together. With any luck, they found people that could help them, some related, some not: “She is a friend of mine,” one of the characters says about someone he refers to as “30 Mile Woman,”
“She gather me. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” (p. 273)
What is particularly interesting to me is that as a result of the way that Morrison writes, you have to put pieces together yourself. You, as a reader, have to do what the characters have to do: work out what happened and what it means. Sometimes, you are inside people's heads. Sometimes, you are watch what happens to them through the floorboards. Memory and "rememory" are incessantly present, as if the memories of these slaves are scabs that have to be peeled off to be healed, and peeled off again to be healed again, - all one can hope for is that in each round of the painful process, a little less gravel will be found in the wound. Morrison makes use of a set of characters that had lived on a "humane plantation" to make it clear that even there, abuse, psychological, emotional, sexual, and economic was rampant. As Baby Suggs puts it, “Not a house in the county ain't packed to its rafters with some Negro’s grief. . . .”
In all of Baby's life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. There wasn’t anybody Suggs knew, let alone loved, “who hadn't run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized.”. . . what she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that “nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.” (p.23)
And the emotional impact would take generations to work out, not just in the time it took to announce an Emancipation Proclamation. So many of the characters in this novel have scars - they have broken trusters and frozen passions. In so many ways, their ability to form bonds and to love was crippled. And clearly, as one of the characters so eloquently puts it, "Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”
Trauma taught slaves that they should put as many emotions into hibernation as possible:
"Sethe looked at her hands, her bottle-green sleeves, and thought how little color there was in the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way Baby did. Deliberate, she thought, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl. After that she became as color conscious as a hen. Every dawn she worked in fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest. And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or yellow squash. Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color. There was something wrong with that. It was as though one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it."
Slavery taught them to bond to nothing and no one:
“Risky, thought Paul D., very risky. For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.” (p.45)
“So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see a loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Steal shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, Beatles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother -- a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose -- not to need permission for desire -- well now, that was freedom.” (p.162)
Clearly, everyone got disconnected by the institution of slavery and needed help getting put back together. Sethe needs Paul D to provide a sense of safety. Paul D needs Sethe to affirm his ability to create a place of safety - something he could never do for anyone before. It is because of him that she begins to see colors again:
" . . kneeling in the keeping room the morning after Paul D. came, she was distracted by the two orange squares that signaled how barren 124 really was.”
“He was responsible for that. Emotions sped to the surface in his company. Things became what they were: drabness looked drab; heat was hot. Windows suddenly had view. And wouldn't you know he'd be a singing man.” (p.39)
It is because of her that Paul D begins to assemble his disconnected self, unpacking the emotions that he had for so long slammed shut in the tobacco can that sits where his heart used to be.
“He would keep the rest where it belongs: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents that would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister’s comb beating in him. . . . working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past.” (p.73)
As I said, all of the main characters are having to suck out the venom of slavery from their veins and memories. Even the saintly, Baby Suggs, holy. “Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,” she said, “and broke my heart strings too.” “There is no bad luck in the world but white folks” she says. . . . but . . . "Bit by bit, at 124 and in the clearing, along with the others, she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that free self was another.” (p.95)
Perhaps one of the most moving and powerful passages in the book is a sermon (Call'in) given by Baby Suggs, holy in the camp meeting, calling these former slaves to combat the abuse they experienced with love.
“Here in this here place, we flesh; Flesh that weeps, laughs; Flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick them out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And all my people, they do not love your hands. Those they only use, Tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, add them together, stroke them on your face as they don't love that either. You got to love it, You! And no, they ain't in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give the leavins instead. No, they don't love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feed the need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong-arms I'm telling you. No, my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So, love your neck; Put a hand on it and grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver -- love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb or your life giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. This is the prize.” (p.88-89)
One of the greatest traumas that slavery inflicted on people caught in its web, as Morrison portrays it, was the ways in which it drove slaves to inhumanity themselves. In Beloved, Sethe kills one of her own children to keep that child from being taken back into slavery. Forgiving whites was one thing but how did one forgive themselves for the many ways that slaves had to compromise themselves?
“You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” Paul D says to Sethe when he learns of what she did, “and right then a forest sprang up between them; trackless and quiet.” (p.165)
Can one forgive a person for doing something like that? Can one forgive themselves? Baby Suggs, holy is left in a moral paralysis over it.
". . . she could not prove or condemn Sethe’s rough choice. One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed. The white folks had tired her out at last.” (p.180)
Paul D puts his finger right on the heart of the dilemma when he says that “just beyond his knowing is the glare of an outside thing that embraces while it accuses.” (p.271) I can only assume that he is referring to God who, if the Gospels say anything, knows exactly what it is like to “kill a child to save a child."
I close this review of what I got out of this book with a passage that expresses ever so clearly how we eventually create in reality what we project in imagination:
"White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more colored people spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled jungle grew inside. But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other livable place. It was the jungle white folks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. And, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them everyone. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboons lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”
(p.199)
The world owes a debt to Toni Morrison, holy for helping us all work through our traumas.
Incidentally, the house number in which the story takes place is 124. Sethe has four kids and the third one is dead which is why the three is missing I suspect. It has been "disremembered"
Question for Comment: In the novel, Beloved, Baby Suggs, holy insists that the work of reclaiming our sense of dignity and self-worth must come from within us. We cannot wait for someone to affirm our worth to us. And yet, it seems, that no one in this novel recovers without the love and affection and support of others. When you look at the distance between where you are and where you would like to be in terms of loving yourself, do you see a need for more internal initiative or external help in the process?
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