I don’t know who made the decision to make Memory Law legislation a part of the Republican party’s brand, but I’m hopeful that the appearance of Toni Morrison’s Beloved in Virginia’s governor’s race will send more people down the path of reading it. Beloved is like Moby Dick or Joshua Tree or Hamilton except more consequential. It’s deeply worrying that my governor and both my senators appear to have locked arms with others to militate against it. It’s even more worrying that their friends, family, and church organizations have allowed them to publicly succumb to a white supremacist terror campaign against literature. Friends don’t let friends miss out on Beloved. I have words.
Beloved is an extended midrash on the Apostle Paul’s citing of the prophet Hosea in a letter to his sisters and brothers in Rome: “I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved which was not beloved.” (Romans 9:25) The passage serves as the epigraph to the novel which is itself, by my lights, an essential prophetic text for Beloved Community. This is Morrison’s stated method: “I like to dust off these clichés, dust off the language, make them mean whatever they may have meant originally.” Her hope is “to restore the language that black people spoke to its original power” and to generate “peasant literature for my people.”
You can’t force-feed a recognition or download a memory or hand over a realization, but you can lift up a song and proffer a witness. Morrison manages this feat of attentiveness repeatedly, lending coherence to an otherwise despairing and debilitating chaos, the history that is the present. Beloved takes inspiration from the true story of Margaret Garner who escaped slavery with her husband and children by crossing the frozen Ohio river in 1856 and, when confronted by U.S. Marshals trying to seize them according to the Fugitive Slave Act, killed her own daughter to spare her the terror to come. At her trial, the abolitionist, Lucy Stone, famously rebuked the compulsion to remotely judge, condemn, or demand punishment for the action: “If in her deep maternal love she felt the impulse to send her child back to God, to save it from coming woe, who shall say she had no right not to do so?”
Like The Salt Eaters, Beloved is a work of remembrance that traces a lineage of terror and trauma coupled with a season of unbidden seance and long-haul exorcism. At its center is Sethe, a woman who tries to sustain a haunted household in Ohio after escaping a Kentucky slavery plantation called Sweet Home. Though some details differ, she shares with Margaret Garner a moment of decisive, tragic, and lethal decision out of which she tries to reassemble a life around and in spite of the repressed yet reverberating memory of a mortal wounding.
As a life of psychic negotiation, her existence is in sync with practically every other character in the novel: “The future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.” Each of them have known and continue to know the danger in loving too much, in treasuring other people too extravagantly, and in remembering any pleasure too specifically: “Unless carefree, motherlove,” for instance, “was a killer,” because carefree love is never as safe as it feels in a moment. There is a risk in treasuring for too long a newborn baby’s hands or feet in view of the likelihood that the infant in whom you delight will soon be stolen and sold. Despite these precautions, Sethe’s mother-in law, Baby Suggs, reminisces over her lost sons and daughters: “She didn’t know to this day what their permanent teeth looked like; or how they held their heads when walked.”
Living alone with her daughter, Denver, in a home constantly disturbed by the ghost of her slain child, Sethe continually struggles with her own buried memories: “She worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe.” But her success in this work is challenged by the arrival of her old friend Paul D, a beautiful man, long escaped from Sweet Home, whose inquisitive and kind nature invites, almost haplessly, a transparency among people in his presence: “Emotions sped to the surface in his company. Things became what they were.” Ever experienced a poetic presence like that? I have.
Paul D has yet to hear tell of what occurred when “schoolteacher,” the overseer at Sweet Home, caught up with Sethe and her children, but he senses the fact of an ominous presence just before he crosses her threshold.
“Good God…What kind of evil you got in here?”
“It’s not evil,” she assures him, “Just sad. Come on. Just step through.”
To begin to receive the witness of Beloved is to linger over words like these—they’re on every page—and consider the felicitous force with which they invite us to consider a community of people trying to figure out together what to do with their pain and their fear. It’s certainly a ghost story, but for Morrison, fantasy is a form of scrutiny, of examining and lifting up a culture of wit and endurance and long-suffering love, of humans engaged together in the long work of not being driven out of their minds by what they’ve seen and heard and experienced. If a toxic personality is a traumatized personality, their work is to act and imagine their way out of this grim cycle. The books moves back and forth through time from Kentucky and Georgia and even ancestors drowned in the Atlantic, but it also comes down to Sethe and Paul D and what love might remain possible between them. It’s one long probing between two souls who know that to love a person is to love a process.
It will take the length of the book for Paul D to know and hear from Sethe what became of her daughter, but what precedes that turn is a series of exchanges in which they take each other’s measure with love, frustration, and, sometimes, escalating despair. She tries to tell Paul D everything is fine. “What about inside?” he asks.
“I don’t go inside.”
“Sethe, I’m here with you…Go as far inside as you need to, I’ll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out.”
At one point, having long ago witnessed at Sweet Home the times men like Paul D. were forced to go for days with an iron bit in their mouths, Sethe carefully broaches the topic in the hope that, now that they’re together in free Ohio, he might be able to free something up within himself by saying what it was like.
“I never have talked about it,” he explains. “Not to a soul. Sang it sometimes, but I never told a soul.”
“Go ahead. I can hear it.”
“Maybe. Maybe you can hear it. I just ain’t sure I can say it. Say it right, I mean.”
Pressed to the limit of what can be said or sung, to even try to recall aloud their lives under schoolteacher is to risk a creeping feeling of stupefaction from within. We’re given windows into all the ways the power he sought to wield over them was also the power of delineation, of decreeing, at every turn, what life itself meant. For instance, schoolteacher once accused their friend Sixo of stealing and eating a young pig. Confronted with evidence, Sixo denies the charge of theft but, upon interrogation, readily admits to taking and preparing and eating the pig. fs this isn’t theft, what is it? “Improving your property, sir…Sixo take and feed the soil, give you more crop. Sixo take and feed Sixo give you more work.”
Such feats of observational candor, however, were denied upon impact. “Clever,” one could concede, “but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show that definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined.” No other meaning allowed. And because the past is never past, the sacrosanct delineations of free Ohio only go so far: “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.” This is the inheritance of horror in which Sethe and Paul D try to see and imagine and love one another well, one embattled soul reaching for the other. Paul D wants to place his story next to Sethe’s but this possibility gives rise to hard questions: “Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?”
Through it all, we have the witness of Baby Suggs who, years before the novel’s action begins, left Sweet Home and eventually secured the house in which Sethe and Denver reside. This was made possible years before schoolteacher became Sweet Home’s overseer when her son, Halle, arranged to work extra days to gradually earn the money that would buy her freedom. By the time he’d worked off the agreed-upon amount and it was clear it would be seen through, she was well into her sixties and was faced with the difficult decision of whether or not to leave everything she knew and everyone she loved for an existence she could barely conceive. In the end, she accepted in the hope of making Halle less sorrowful: “She chose the hard thing that made him happy, and never put to him the question she put to herself: What for? What does a sixty-odd-year-old slavewoman who walks like a three-legged dog need freedom for?”
In her new life in Ohio, she came to notice for the first time—and had to work to not be frightened by--her own heartbeat. When she acquires a house, she also stumbles into a vocation of relentless hospitality to anyone in need and an honorific that comes to follow her name: “holy.” In her always “buzzing house…Baby Suggs, holy, loved, cautioned, fed, chastised, and soothed.” As a healer and storyteller, she conjures, inhabits, and invites her hearers into a space beyond “the nastiness of life,” namely “the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her own children.” As a free woman in Ohio, she serves as a herald and host of Beloved Community: “Accepting no title of honor before her name, but allowing a small caress after it, she became an unchurched preacher, one who visited pulpits and opened her great heart to those who could use it.”
In a wooded area that came to be called The Clearing, Baby Suggs, holy, leads a gathered throng in song and dance and revisioning of their own lives and the lives of others. The limits of recovery, redemption, and restoration, she tells them, are the limits of their imaginations: “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.” Their task as a coming-to-be-free people is to remember that which has been dismembered, and it is a bold, new-every-morning work that is never quite done:
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 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! This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, 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 and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.
Read it again! Read it aloud! Read it repeatedly in the presence of others! There are so many salvific imperatives here, a deep call to long-haul righteousness in the face of terror remembered and guaranteed to be visited upon kin again and even now. If sanity consists of loving and having compassion for your own body, that step that has to precede loving your neighbor in like manner, this is a liturgy that instructs a traumatized people in reversing the process which, left unacknowledged and unvoiced, settles within as a toxic sense of self. “Not evil, just sad,” Sethe assured Paul D concerning the spirit inhabiting her home. And here in the Clearing, Baby Suggs, holy, invites all hearers to slow the tape and contemplate, with industrial strength compassion, all the ways that mad is ever a form of sad, that rage is born of fear, and that love might yet be extended to our own beating hearts.
Literature is a call to consider again, with humility and humor and hope, our own creatureliness. Beloved itself undertakes the restorative work Baby Suggs, holy, conjures and facilitates “in this here place” and extends this communal labor of mourning and esteeming and loving what remains: Put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it, and hold it up. If the grace we have is the grace we can imagine, holding ourselves and others dear begins as a heart-mind work, a question of what we’re carrying and laying down and picking up again. Toni Cade Bambara offers a delineation of the order: “The dream is one piece, the correct picturing of impressions another. Then interpretation, then action.”
No word in the above formulation is disposable. This is how the work of Beloved Community gets done. As Morrison shows us, the question of how we imagine ourselves is at the core of our lives, how we relate (There is no escaping relationship), the way we dwell in the world. If we each dwell, as Martin Luther King, Jr. most famously assures us we do, in an inescapable network of mutuality, we dwell and will continue to dwell no matter what. What shall we do in light of what we know?
If someone you know is in the grip of the disinformation campaign that urges the banning of Black thought and books like Beloved under the words “Critical Race Theory,” please consider sharing all (or some portion) of this post with them in the hope of getting a helpful conversation going. The sermon of Baby Suggs, holy, for instance is, to my mind, gospel, and it’s dispiriting to imagine that it would be overlooked or vilified because of someone’s desire to hold elected office. Let’s not let that happen. Read, lift up, and share literature in the presence of those who fear it. Be the Beloved Community you want to see in the world.
Thank you David. Another post full and ripe with truth. I've not read Beloved, but now planning on it. God bring sanity, empathy and a sense of belovedness to our leaders.
I love the idea of starting helpful conversations. I’m in an “Evangelical” space, and those with whom I should be closest - mother and sister - tell me they’re “praying for my soul.” Likewise, I’ve had to walk a careful line at my job because of the WhiteSupremacistAntiChristPoltergeist (did I get that right?) that tried to get me fired.
Any suggestions on how to make helpful conversations possible?