In last month's ExcitingWriting Advisory I described how I found my way into Toni Morrison's Beloved. As you may remember, I didn't have an easy time of it, at first having to reread certain passages numerous times. Now in a private moment I ponder and compare the Beloved story to the Biblical Binding of Isaac story. I'll say more about that in a moment. But consider this wisdom: You can become a better writer by becoming a better reader. My method may have a touch of madness to it, but still, by refusing to read one word farther into Beloved than I was able to understand and appreciate, I have managed to become the recipient of a treasure trove of gifts. A careful reader could not ask for more. It's no wonder Toni Morrison's Beloved is ranked as one of the top one hundred best-loved novels in America by The Great American Read, a television show on PBS.org.
Since I began reading Beloved, I've made an emotional passage. Characters like Baby Suggs, Sethe, Denver, Halle, John D., Paid Stamp and the cruel, demented plantation overseer, Schoolteacher, are not just characters to me; they've become real. In my soul Beloved has transformed into a nonfiction work, although I know very well that it is fiction.
I've glimpsed what it might have been like for the ancestors of our African-American brethren when an escaped slave who by outrageous fortune somehow managed to make it north of the Ohio River, to Cincinnati, Ohio, was then subsequently tracked down by a bounty hunter determined to take the slave south of the Ohio, back into slavery.
The novel provides an extraordinary number of instances where careful readers can discover for themselves the horrible realities of slavery in authentic, non-exploitative ways. We understand the horrors without becoming jaded by them. That's an accomplishment.
Perhaps because I invested so much time in making the novel understandable to myself, those times when I put together insights based on hard-won understandings, they come off to me as very private moments even though there's nothing private about them at all; they are very public moments all readers can enjoy for themselves if they wish.
Here's a fact that will help you to understand and enjoy the novel, Beloved. Before the Civil War, if an escaped slave were caught by a slave bounty hunter in a northern, non-slave state, the bounty hunter could legally capture the escaped slave and forcibly return him or her to servitude. The laws of the time allowed an escaped slave one "out." As an alternative, the slave could "choose" to remain in jail for an undefined period of time.
Can you imagine what the mother of a newborn child might do to her child if she hated slavery worse than death itself and knew that a slave bounty hunter was about to return her and her newborn back back to slavery on a plantation ironically named, Home Sweet Home? (Everything I'm describing here was completely legal at that time.) If you haven't read Beloved, you probably can't imagine what a mother faced with this circumstance would do. Morrison read several personal accounts of bondage written by former slaves during the Reconstruction period. She also read actual articles published in the Cincinnati newspapers of the time recounting the story of what actually happened when one mother of a newborn confronted with this stark choice acted to see that her newborn would never be recovered as a slave. (The newborn baby, born into slavery, would also became the "property" of the slaveholder.) This is why on the first page of Beloved we learn that the spirit of a murdered newborn baby by the name of Beloved has possessed the entire household at 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. As you read Beloved for yourself, I'll bet the private moments you discover for yourself will cause you to witness the tremendous power of love that, in turn, is powered by Morrison's Nobel Prize-winning imagination. That imagination of hers splays open the cruel institution of slavery and expresses it in terms that are unforgettably vivid and moving. A good example is the description of Sethe's back: Whipped as many times as she had been for willful slave infractions, Sethe's back finally healed into a "chokecherry tree."
Here's the moment when Amy Denver, the "whitewoman," sees Sethe's back for the first time: "Amy unfastened the back of her dress and said, "Come here, Jesus," when she saw. Sethe guessed it must be bad because after that call to Jesus Amy didn't speak for a while. Sethe felt the fingers of those good hands lightly touch her back. She could hear her breathing, but still the whitegirl said nothing. Sethe could not move. She couldn't lie on her stomach or her back, and to keep on her side meant pressure on her screaming feet. Amy spoke at last in her dreamwalker's voice.
"It's a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here's the trunk—it's red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here's the parting for the branches." It goes on like that. It can be argued I believe that the chokecherry tree image, with its leaves and blossoms as Amy describes it in dialogue, formed out of scar tissue on Sethe's back, allows us both to appreciate the amount of beatings Sethe survived, and "see" the healed damage done in the form of scar tissue while, at the same time, allowing us to begin to comprehend the amount of beatings and pain Sethe must have endured while a slave.
About one-third through the novel Beloved, a character named Beloved appears who is the same age as the baby girl Beloved would be if her mother had not murdered her as a newborn. Beloved helps other characters channel back through the past, for example, in this passage where Beloved "recalls" what it was like to be on a slave ship coming to America:
"Beloved closed her eyes. "In the dark my name is Beloved."
Denver scooted a little closer. "What's it like over there, where you were before? Can you tell me?"
"Dark," said Beloved. "I'm small in that place. I'm like this here." She raised her head off the bed, lay down on her side and curled up.
Denver covered her lips with her fingers. "Were you cold?"
Beloved curled tighter and shook her head. "Hot. Nothing to breathe down there and no room to move in."
"You see anybody?"
"Heaps. A lot of people is down there. Some is dead."
"You see Jesus? Baby Suggs?"
"I don't know. I don't know the names."
In my view when Morrison introduces the character of Beloved she rolls the dice and risks her entire novel by introducing an obviously magical character that allows her to move around in history at will. Morrison not only makes it work; in her hands it becomes a brilliant move. When the character of Beloved appears, Morrison suddenly has a magical figure at her disposal capable of channelling the past to us. Without the character of Beloved ever appearing, the novel would have been mediocre. Once Beloved is introduced, I sense the novel beginning to build toward what I imagine in the end makes this truly a great work. (No, I still haven't finished reading Beloved.)
But already I've happened upon yet another one of those gifts, the similarity between a mother slitting the throat of a newborn baby so as not to return the baby to slavery and the Biblical story of Abraham following God's instructions to bind and sacrifice his child Isaac to God. What could be learned by making such a reckless comparison? In both stories we have a "parent-cide," or near-parent-cide. Don't both stories suggest a divine intervention? Ah, but could they? Just mull that for a moment. You'll see why Beloved for me has become the gift that keeps on giving.
Next month: Describing Toni Morrison's Descriptions
