Beloved

A novel about things that come back, and that never go away. Troubles you can't avoid, bad memories that resurface. Beloved is a ghost story, but first it is a story about black slavery and the lives it stole, the alternative could-have-beens and should-have-beens that would never be for those who struggled under it, who survived with what little life they could make or else did not. By extension it is a story about how much one person can tolerate before they reach a breaking point, and the forms that breaking can take. Paul D endures more and longer than anyone, has seen all of his fellow slaves' fates play out before him. He is left with only the unanswerable repeated question, "Why?"

Some brilliant passages toward the end reminded me show more of the last chapter from James Joyce's Ulysses, in which everything is made clear and not clear simultaneously - the tumult of thoughts stitched through with emotion. It's followed by an oddly conventional denouement and I think Ella should have been introduced sooner, but it works to demonstrate a community's power to heal wounds which individuals cannot. show less

I don’t have very much to say about ‘Beloved’, as it’s gruelling, painful, and horrifying. It deals with the trauma of slavery in a devastatingly effective manner. The writing is beautiful, but only very rarely is there a glimmer of hope amid the horror. This is only fitting, as any novel about slavery will by definition be horrific. Yet the most memorable passage for me was this one:

She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, 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

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eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O 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, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you!”

The impact of this seemingly uplifting speech come from its context: loving oneself and imagining grace is woefully inadequate in the face of white people’s poisonous hatred and cruelty. Baby Suggs, who gives the speech, becomes exhausted and jaded by terrible events.

‘Beloved’ reminds the reader how horrible it is to dwell on slavery and its legacy, how uncomfortable a thing it is to remember, and how easy it is to ignore. It doesn’t let you do something so convenient and cowardly. show less

This is the story of a formerly enslaved woman named Sethe who makes an incredibly difficult and shocking decision upon being faced with the possibility of being taken back to Kentucky. We don’t learn the full details of what she did until about two-thirds of the way through the book, but really early on we know that it involves the death of one of her children. She gets a pink gravestone for this daughter with the world “Beloved” cut into the stone.
Fast-forward about 18 years and her youngest daughter is still living at home. Her two sons have long ago left to make their own way in the world. Paul D, whom Sethe knew back the Sweet Home plantation, drops by for a visit and encounters the anger of the ghost that haunts the house. show more It is generally understood that this ghost is Sethe’s dead daughter. A few days later, Beloved arrives on the doorstep. She is about 19 or 20 years old and has no history and no family. She just shows up and there’s something very odd about her.
I really loved this book. I had not realized at the start that it would be a ghost story, but it works really well. It makes sense that the horrors of slavery and its many casualties would manifest in new horrors. It also serves as a good argument against the notion of “good” slaveowners. Sweet Home as run by Mr. Garner was not as cruel as other plantations. Yet when Baby Suggs gets her first taste of freedom in her 60s, she can’t imagine anything better. She realizes that she had never truly lived before that moment.
Beloved tells the history of slavery from the perspective of those hurt most by it. It can be a difficult read at times, but it’s well worth it. This is history that needs to be told, and doing so in this manner, in a novel where we sympathize with each of the protagonists, the emotional impact of this history can be keenly felt by the reader. I really enjoyed this book and look forward to discussing with my book club later this week. show less

whew. wow. this is hard. and gorgeous. she does something really really special here. both in the writing/storytelling and in the head-on look, without blinking, she requires of the reader. this first came out in 1988 and the way she doesn't look away, and doesn't let us look away, is revolutionary.

as morrison usually is, this is so layered and i'm sure i'm missing a number of those layers. but what i did understand i found utterly heart wrenching and just so powerful and powerfully done. the back of my book says she and this book are "extraordinary" and "a masterwork" and "a triumph" and that she has "shocking talent" and i think that about covers it. all true and not enough.

"They were not holding hands, but their shadows were."

"I'll show more explain to her, even though I don't have to. Why I did it. How if I hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her."

the part that makes me sit the longest in my discomfort is how she gives us this visceral ugly story about murder and blood and grief and how she then tells us that this isn't the hard part. that white people need to understand that the everyday awfulness is the hard part. that she is making us look at the terror and the thing that is supposed to make us shiver and cringe for the purpose of telling us no - this isn't what i need you to see. i need you to feel about the everyday things the way you feel about this baby covered in blood. is it here:
"...[her] greatest fear was the same one Denver had in the beginning--that Beloved might leave. That before Sethe could make her understand what it meant--what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin; to feel the baby blood pump like oil in her hands; to hold her face so her head would stay on; to squeeze her so she could absorb, still, the death spasms that shot through that adored body, plump and sweet with life--Beloved might leave. Leave before Sethe could make her realize that worse than that--far worse--was what Baby Suggs died of, what Ella knew, what Stamp saw and what made Paul D tremble. That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up." i hope i never forget this message. show less

[My Antonia] by Willa Cather and [Beloved] by Toni Morrison

Life is filled with remembrance, honeyed with nostalgia or seasoned with sour regret. Some of the best books tap into the yen to look back at a time that has lost reality’s sharp edges, glowing in our collective memory as a better or simpler time. Others seek to shine hindsight’s harsh light, to expose any such wistful longing as a distorting toxin. The truth, as always, probably lies somewhere between.

A bunny cake, with coconut frosting is my earliest memory. I was obsessed with Bugs Bunny; his silly antics struck a cord with my as yet undeveloped brain. There was something special about that crazy animal, able to outwit man and beast alike yet still humble enough to not show more take himself too seriously. Believing she could work any miracle, in the kitchen or beyond, I begged for a Bugs Bunny cake, with coconut frosting, of course. These were the days before many specialty bakeries existed, before the country developed a sense of entitlement to purchase anything that could be imagined, when little boy’s dreams depended on a mother’s ingenuity and devotion. Baking a cake in such an unusual and intricate shape didn’t seem like too much to ask. He was a famous and heroic figure, after all – there must be cakes made in his likeness. Like all things I asked my mother to produce, the bunny cake appeared, furry with coconut and complete with black whiskers. I’m told that I can’t remember this event, as it was my second birthday, that I must have seen a picture that I’ve confused as a memory. But no one can produce the picture, and I remember the candlelight dancing across that bunny’s coconut fur. That event stands in my memory like a baptism of sorts, initiating me into the faith that my mother could do anything – she need only be asked. Of course, in later years, apostasy arrived with a teenaged fury. But like all prodigals, I returned as I grew to respect the love and devotion that produced the miracles of my youth – the middle ground between nostalgia and reality’s harsh light.

Willa Cather’s elegiac [My Antonia] is hazy with honeyed nostalgia. It is a book sitting atop a small rise in the plains and looking back over what has become of a way of life, of a place and people deeply rooted in the soil watching as the world careens off in a different direction. There is a truth to the remembrance, to freezing a place’s sensations in amber to look back on as encouragement against tomorrow’s severity. And that’s what [My Antonia] is about: Jim Burden, unhappy with his job’s mundanity, looking back on his childhood hero and love, Antonia. Her wildness, her steely determination, her beauty; all things that he associates with the vast prairie where they lived and things he longs for in his adult life. Listen to Willa as Jim remembers evenings with Antonia:
“All those afternoons were the same, but I never got used to them. As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prarie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero’s death – heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.”
As beautiful as Jim’s memory is, it is tainted by the place from where he views it all, as you can see in the next paragraph:
“How many an afternoon Antonia and I have trailed along the prarie under that magnificence! And always two long black shadows flitted before us or followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass.”
Those shadows that were sometimes ahead and sometimes chasing them are the events that cast them away from youth’s simple and enveloping beauty. It is these shadows that Jim speaks from as a man, longing for the childhood’s lost rays. They are the shadows from which I see the candlelight dancing on a cake in the shape of a bunny.

On the other hand, for the characters in Toni Morrison’s [Beloved], “Remembering seemed unwise.” Rather than looking back into soft amber light, Morrison’s characters speak from the shadows into darkness. Indeed, the fowl past is embodied in a specter that has seized flesh and blood to haunt Sethe and her daughter Denver. Having killed her infant rather than see it be enslaved, the child first haunts her home as a poltergeist, and then, when a threatening force arrives in Paul D, an old friend, the ghost takes on human form, pulling Sethe and Denver into an obsessive spiral. Though Beloved is the impetus for the plot, the story is really how Sethe and Paul D arrived at this point in their lives, how they survived brutal conditions to see freedom and how the choices that led to their freedom haunt their souls. Looking back for these two is to look into an abyss. And yet at the end of the book, Paul D rescues Sethe from a suicidal malaise, remembering what another of their friends said about the love of his life:
“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. 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.”
Even from the darkness, Paul D sees a faint light in the past, a salvation in his memory. That’s that candlelight I see dancing on a bunny’s coconut fur in my memory.

There are few books more beautifully written than [My Antonia] and few books more stark and difficult than [Beloved]. But they both stand for what remembrance holds, whether dark or amber, and that in the light of either, hope glimmers.

Bottom Line: The light and dark of memory.

4 bones!!!!! show less

This book is beyond praise - it is like watching an elaborate setup of dominoes falling backward up a hill, to the door of 124, a country house that is bombarded with metaphors of history, culture and race: every sentence is loaded. Brilliant.

...in all of Baby’s life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby 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. (pp 27-28)

Sethe grew up in slavery, raised more by a community of women more than by her own mother, and working mostly for the lady of the house. After Sethe’s husband Halle bought freedom for his mother Baby Suggs, and a new and much crueler master took over the Sweet Home plantation, a group of show more slaves begin planning their escape. Sethe and Halle send their three children first. Sethe is eventually able to get away but Halle doesn’t show. She makes her way across the Ohio River to join her three children and Baby Suggs, giving birth to her daughter Denver during the journey.

Beloved opens eighteen years later; Denver has grown up but the other children are mysteriously absent. Toni Morrison circles around “what happened” for most of this novel, moving between time periods and slowly fleshing out the narrative. Another former slave, Paul D, turns up and helps Sethe learn to love again. But their relationship is threatened by Beloved, a strange girl who appears one day out of nowhere, and Sethe begins to focus more on Beloved’s needs than on Paul D. Slowly, slowly, Beloved’s identity becomes clear and we learn her story.

Beloved is one of Toni Morrison’s best-known works. I first read it more than 20 years ago, and while I knew Beloved’s place in the narrative, I found I remembered very little else about the book so my reading experience was like discovering this work all over again. And it was amazing: beautifully written, emotional, and dramatic, describing through Sethe and Paul D the devastating impact of slavery on the psyche.

That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best thing she was, was her children. (pp 295-296)

This was absolutely brilliant, and has inspired me to read or re-read more books by Toni Morrison to fully appreciate her work and her literary legacy. show less