2012 Book Review #46: Beloved

[jethrien]

Title: Beloved
Author: Toni Morrison
Genre: Historical literary horror
Thingummies: 5

Synopsis: A former slave and her daughter are haunted by the ghost of a baby she killed to keep from being enslaved.

Thoughts: This book earned its Pulitzer and then some. Lyrical, heartbreaking, beautiful, and incredibly powerful, Morrison's novel tries to give voice to people who were denied voices and probably succeeds about as well as we'll ever be able to. The searing images remind us of exactly how horrifying slavery was, and why people would risk so much to be free. But it's the tiny details that make this ghost story a masterpiece.

There's more than enough horror here, half-obscured by people who don't really want to remember it. From the hole dug to protect the valuable belly of a pregnant woman while she is beaten so badly that the skin on her back is twisted into the scar of a "choke-cherry tree", complete with blossoms of pus to a runaway slave roasted alive to a chain gang forced to beg for their own sexual abuse, enough is hinted at to make anyone's stomach crawl. The things that are really heartbreaking, though, are the smaller details. The schoolteacher who teaches his students about opposing characteristics by having them list protagonist Sethe's "human" characteristics against her "animal" ones. The fact that Sethe is shocked at how fast her third child learns to crawl in freedom because her first two children, weaned in captivity, had not had anything but milk because she did not know they could have food until their teeth were in (and didn't have food for them anyway). Perhaps most devastating of all is the change dish kept at the abolitionist's house. He had fought for his entire life for freedom for slaves, risking his own life and freedom to help them escape, showering Sethe and her family with kindness. But this incredibly warm-hearted, enlightened man still keeps a ceramic black boy, on his knees, with his mouth open to form the bowl for change and a little placard emblazoned "At Yo Service". It's the casualness of the racism even from the people who dedicated their lives to helping black folk that's both shocking and shaming.

This story is only indirectly about the horrors of slavery, though. At its heart, it's the story of a woman forced to make and then live with an unbearable choice, and how her guilt slowly strangles her and her family. It's a beautiful story about decent people undone by pride and jealousy and shame, and how they come to move on despite their wounds. Here, too, it's the little things that make the novel--the ill-fated blackberries, the patched color quilt, the all-too-human snideness of the neighbors and their grudging rescue.

In the end, we can be relieved that such an inhumane (but still shamefully human) system has been dismantled. But Morrison does not let us pat ourselves on the back. Can we really say that we've eradicated racism just because we no longer breed other humans and beat them to death? Or are we still as blind as the old abolitionist, racist despite his completely noble intentions? How many of our practices today will our descendents look back upon us for and condemn us as savages? And on a smaller scale, how many of us allow our closest neighbors to suffer because we feel they somehow deserve it, for their pride, for their mistakes, for their failure to be sufficiently gratifying?

I'm afraid we already know the answers to these questions.

But while scars cannot be erased, they can be survived, and love can rekindle even in hopeless places. Beloved condemns us for our failings, for we have many and always will. But it answers that we can survive, and love, and hope despite them.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I had to read this in school and I hated it. It might have been the particularly toxic English class I was in that year, though. Our teacher (a man named Meredith, who had taught my father) was going through some sort of personal crisis, I still don't know what, but I knew by reputation he was a great teacher, and that year he was falling apart. And there was the kid who wrote essays for class about how to make water bongs. And Austin Van, the boy who spit a cough drop on my head, who sat in silence most of the time, and then, in one of the discussions of Beloved, suddenly burst into laughter then suddenly stopped.

It can't all be the English class's fault, though, because we also read The Things the Carried, which I loved and 1984, which I wanted desperately not to like but couldn't help.

It could just be a certain lack of empathy of youth, though. I remember resenting at that age the number of slave narratives we had to read, and Beloved was just one more in a long list.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough, I read all three of those books around the same time, too, only The Things They Carried was for AP US History, which gives it a very different context. I hated Beloved when I read it because I didn't like my teacher, a, and it was read in my hyper-white high school like a guilt-trip book, b. (As in, we were reading it to prove how hip/diverse our reading list could be.) I wonder if I'd like it better now, like I did with Catcher in the Rye.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

a guilt-trip book
Yes, I think that's it. When you're told you're supposed to have a profound reaction to the book because you need to understand The Other, it's very hard to actually like it. The Things They Carried and 1984 spoke to me. Beloved didn't, but that may have been a result of how it was framed--emphasizing the difference of that experience rather than the universality. (I mean, Sophie's Choice spoke to me, and it's not like the experience of a Holocaust victim is any closer to my own.) It ended up feeling like I was being lectured.

I also remember just not liking Toni Morrison's prose.

I don't know. Beloved was the only book of hers I've read. I suppose I need to go back to it at some point. That and Their Eyes Were Watching God, a book which fourteen-year-old me didn't get at all.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I've also read Song of Solomon, Sula, and Tar Baby. And can remember nothing of any of them except vague incomprehension. I think I was too young.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I've still never read Catcher in the Rye. I'm not sure if I want to or not, to be honest.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's going to be hit or miss. People love it or they hate it. They think the narrator is secretly speaking to them or they think he's a whiny bitch. In high school, whiny bitch won out for me. Since then, I've softened and seen that a lot of the insights of the character are cutting and genuine. It probably helps that I wasn't in English class where people were making specious assertions about the book to look smart.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I read that in college, not as part of a class. I hated it. Possibly because it was written by an attendee of my rival (and very similar) high school. So I knew kids like Holden Caulfield, an dI thought they were full of shit.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

There were an awful lot of slave narratives. The impact does wear off when you read too many in a row.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Also, it is this book that makes me go o.O every time I see those signs for the local charter school BelovED.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Yeeahh. I've had some issues there, too.

[mithras03.livejournal.com]

I too read Beloved in high school. Like ivy and trinity, I also read (and perhaps had more of a connection to) The Things They Carried and Catcher in the Rye, 1984, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and another of the greats of "helping us to understand the other," Things Fall Apart . We also read Morrison's The Bluest Eye, which I have to say had more of an impact on me than Beloved because it was about the internalization of all of that oppression and racism, and also knowing that that kind of thing is still around, and it doesn't affect just one racial group. I read Sula on my own, but I too cannot really remember it.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I really got Things Fall Apart. I just remember lots of stuff about yams.