In the first week of January I was flying home from a short break in the States. One of the in-flight movie selections was a documentary about Toni Morrison. I listened with awe, not just at her extraordinary life of survival, but at her capacity to express it, verbally and on the page. I noted the Pulitzer and that she was a Nobel laureate. She also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In short, a literary giant. And, I had not read a word of her’s.
And so, eyes dancing between Baldwin, Michelle Obama and ‘Beloved’, I knew it was time for a little Toni Morrison. And, I am still recovering from the emotional punch. For those, like me, to whom this is unfamiliar, it tells the story of an escaped slave girl just after the Civil War, in Ohio in the 1870’s. She has escaped her persecutors, but is now persecuting herself as she realises that she cannot escape her past.
Plenty of the novel is harrowing, even when it is being utterly compelling. What really affected me was to learn subsequently that Morrison based it on a true account. The protagonist, Sethe, having been raped whilst pregnant, and whipped so badly that her back is decorated with open wounds and scars that resemble a tree with many branches, has managed to cross the Ohio River. She is seeking refuge with the mother of her partner, who has had her freedom bought by the son’s sacrifice of his own liberty.
Three of her children have gone ahead. She is heavily pregnant. Her partner never arrives. As she makes her way, she gives birth to her youngest with the help of a white girl, Amy. She makes it to 124, the place where ‘Baby Suggs’, the freed grandmother to her new baby, is now retired and preaching, to join her other children, a two year old girl and two boys. All seems well until her brutal owner tracks them down and comes with accomplices to reclaim his human property. What then follows is the act upon which the tale hangs.
It will be revisited but we spend much of the rest of the novel in a time eighteen years hence. Sethe is living with her surviving baby daughter, Denver. They live in the house “124”, that had been home to Denver’s grandmother, Baby Suggs, who is now dead. The house, once a happy refuge for escaping slaves, is now haunted by Denver’s dead sister. Sethe had managed a headstone for her grave. She could not afford ‘Dearly beloved’ which she had heard in church, and so, paying with her body, she has a stone memorialising ‘Beloved’. Beloved is the spirit haunting them.
Paul D had been a slave at ‘Sweet Home’, where Sethe had worked and been abused and had partnered with Halle, Denver’s father. After eighteen years he has found her and we learn that he had always carried an image of her in his mind and always felt that she was the girl he would and could love. His own experiences have been brutalising and harsh, including the lynching that took place at the time of her escape. He manages to exorcise the ghost at 124, and to persuade a highly sceptical Denver that they could all live together as a family, after a successful social outing.
On their return they are greeted by a remarkable young woman, with no knowledge of her own history, and remarkably unmarked and unlined skin and hands. She cannot account for her new and good footwear. Sethe takes her in, but Paul D is bothered by her presence. We come to know her as ‘Beloved’ and we have to suspend our disbelief. She is a very physical presence, but is clearly a manifestation of the adult that the baby spirit who had haunted 124, would have grown into. Denver is convinced she is her sister, and Sethe comes to see her as the dead daughter. Paul D is too unsettled. He loses a battle of wills with the new arrival and leaves.
As time passes Beloved, little more than waif and stray, grows fat. She feeds on Sethe’s pain and as the older woman declines in physical health, the young woman thrives but becomes more demanding. Sethe refers to her sexual abuse at ‘Sweet Home’ and how they “took my milk”. Beloved takes her milk, metaphorically, at the end of the story. Denver breaks from the claustrophobic household and attempts to engage with the world outside the house. She is on the point of succeeding when the dreadful denouement plays out. Paul D has returned to the area, and Stamp Paid has told him about the dark past that is associated with the house. He shows him a newspaper cutting but Paul D cannot read.
Nonetheless his reaction sears itself on the reader’s memory. It shouts out the differences between the oppressed and what we are coming to understand and weigh as ‘white privilege’. He is alarmed by the picture on the old newspaper cutting because “there was no way in hell a black face could appear in a newspaper if the story was about something anybody wanted to hear”.
We learn that when the ‘Schoolteacher’, the sadistic slave owner, had come for Sethe and her children, she had attempted to kill them all rather than have them returned to slavery. The boys were injured and subsequently ran away. The two year old was killed by use of a saw blade on her throat. Sethe was about to dash the baby’s brains out by swinging her against a wall, when the elderly black, Stamp Paid, grabbed the baby.
The novel is like an extended exam course for psychotherapists. It obviously deals with trauma, but also projection, through ‘Beloved’s’ arrival, and the significance of the maternal tie. It introduces the need and the problems with ‘othering’, both in skin colour and gender. It damns a sinner and gives her no redemption, and it explores the problem of repressed memory and how the unconscious forces its needs and drives into the conscious world. Morrison creates a verb – to ‘rememory’.
Brutalising experiences have caused the repression of memory. They cannot be simply remembered. However, the magic of the verb is we understand that Sethe is recovering a memory, rather than simply remembering. And, she is not sure she wants to recover it. We see the intrusion of the past into the present, which is the foundation for most people’s needs to have therapy or analysis – to break out of ‘stuckness’ and to stop recurring cycles of behaviour. We see this through the device of the supernatural, and the character of Beloved.
Sethe’s pain is exquisitely but agonisingly portrayed. Any part of her true self could be used. It could be her body, her offspring, her love and as she understands, even her mind. To her the whites could “not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you.” It creates the madness that allows her to contemplate and execute infanticide. “Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were”. She can see only one solution, “she could never let it happen to her own. The best thing she was, was her children.” As Stamp Paid tells Paul D when he finally accepts what had happened at ‘124’ and what Sethe had done to her daughter, “she ain’t crazy. She love those children. She was trying to out hurt the hurter”.
Reading ‘Beloved’ is to get ready for some emotional bruising, and to shudder that this was not an implausible tale, nor were several of its worst elements uncommon. It chills me to recall that it was based on a true story. I am very glad, after all this time, that I have read it and discovered Toni Morrison’s work.
Second Innings 