Beloved by Toni Morrison

This is a novel with a lot of layers to it. And I’m not sure I can really do justice to it. Frankly, there were times when I had some difficulty understanding who was who and what was going on. All I think I can do now is share my reactions to the words that are there, and try to pull them together into something universal, something we can all understand.

And, that, I think I can do.

Sethe had given little thought to the white dress until Paul D came, and then she remembered Denver’s interpretation: plans. The morning after the first night with Paul D, Sethe smiled just thinking about what the word could mean. It was a luxury she had not had in eighteen years and only that once. Before and since, all her effort was directed not on avoiding pain but on getting through it as quickly as possible. The one set of plans she had made -- getting away from Sweet Home -- went awry so completely she never dared life by making more.

Yet the morning she woke up next to Paul D, the word her daughter had used a few years ago did cross her mind and she thought about what Denver had seen kneeling next to her, and thought also of the temptation to trust and remember that gripped her as she stood before the cooking stove in her arms. Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?

Beloved, it turns out, is a novelized version of real events, and it centers on a slave woman, called Sethe in the novel, living in northern Kentucky in the 1850s. Sethe wants to flee to the freedom of the Ohio River and the Underground Railroad, but is held in place by her relationships with her children and the men who have and have not fathered them.

In this early passage we get a glimpse of what her life -- and the lives of the sixty million and more to whom Morrison dedicated her novel -- was really like. It was an aborted life, absent the luxury of planning, the ability to hope for the future, to even count on the permanence of the present.

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.

But despite this oppressive reality, Sethe does love, does love her children more than she probably should, knowing that they, like everything around her and everything given to her, were owned not by her nor by her heart, but by someone and something else; her master, yes, but also the whole of the society in which she helplessly swam.

Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.

In this world, white and black are inexorably linked, linked not just by ownership, but by blood as well, because, of course there is miscegenation, and some of Sethe’s children are the products of these recognized and unrecognized acts.

And when the truth is against the wall, when Sethe has fled to Ohio with her children, and when she has been cornered in a dark place waiting for those with kind hearts to save her while those with dark hearts closed in, she does what might seem unthinkable, but was in fact the only thing she could do, the only path that existed in the dark, tangled jungle of the white people’s creation. She begins to murder her children, taking from them a lifetime of pain and taking from her owner the value that they represent, openly in the market, and, guardedly, within his heart.

These are the facts of the case on which the novel is based, but the novel uses them primarily as its launching pad -- in fact, obscuring this truth until deep within the narrative. The bulk of the novel focuses not as much on these facts, but on Beloved, the ghost of Sethe’s murdered child that reappears and competes for Sethe’s love and attention with Denver, Sethe’s living child. 

Denver thought she understood the connection between her mother and Beloved: Sethe was trying to make up for the handsaw; Beloved was making her pay for it. But there would never be an end to that, and seeing her mother diminished shamed and infuriated her. Yet she knew Sethe’s 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 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. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful magical best thing -- the part of her that was clean. No undreamable dreams about whether the headless, feetless torso hanging in the tree with a sign on it was her husband or Paul A; whether the bubbling-hot girls in the colored-school fire set by patriots included her daughter; whether a gang of whites invaded her daughter’s private parts, soiled her daughter’s thighs and threw her daughter out of the wagon. She might have to work the slaughterhouse yard, but not her daughter.

And in this respect, Morrison, I think, is helping us understand that this pain and this love is eternal -- this pain of not having what one loves, and this love that surpasses even that limitation -- that not even the passage of time can erase it from Sethe’s being, just as not even the eventual passage of emancipation and reform can erase it from our consciousness and our understanding of who and what we are.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.