I am white as can be, Irish white, freckled white, burn under clouds white, my people travelers from above 52 degrees North, so how am I to enter Beloved, Toni Morrison’s great novel of slavery, memory and endurance?
If we take her invitation to meet her people – Sethe, mother, wife, murderer and the central figure of Morrison’s book; Baby Suggs, matriarch, visionary, healer; the men of Sweet Home, especially Paul D, survivor; Stamp Paid, as close as a human being can come to sainthood; Denver, the daughter who escaped; Beloved, the daughter, murdered, who returns – we also accept her invitation to meet a white history in the persons of these characters, one savaged by run of the mill monsters like Schoolteacher or any of the nameless many “of the skinless ones” who lynch, beat, rape and sell black human beings. When Stamp Paid lifts the scalp of a black woman out of a river – a scalp – he shouts, “What are these people?” What are we to make of this sentence: “White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle (234).” Tell me that idea has not echoed down the length and breadth of our history.
However, I cannot believe that the sins of the father should be borne by his children. To do so makes history a club and every person both victim and abuser, both the one who delivers the blows and the one who receives them. Find me a person whose ancestry does not include both violence delivered, and violence received. But a great American novel like Beloved also calls us to witness in the imagined lives of its characters the wound that slavery opened and one that remains unhealed down to this present day. It calls us to reflection, to meditate on our own actions and thoughts, and to change to become better.
I believe this may be the best novel by an American since 1945 – so detailed in its creation of precarious lives, so observant of all the ways that small communities under assault might draw together through hospitality and generosity of spirit, so acute in it drawing of characters who are wholly believable – mad with pain, weighed down by a past filled with atrocities, and yet men and women who strive, fight, keep their humanity, escape, search for family, for sanctuary, for a home absent bondage. It is beautiful.
At the end of the book, Morrison’s creations do more than endure. In spite of all their shortcomings, their imperfections and sins, they very deliberately choose paths that are illustrations of goodness. The women of this small community gather to rescue Sethe from her past and in gathering also save Bodwin, Sethe’s white benefactor, from death, thus preserving not only Sethe’s life, but the lives of everyone they know. Denver, grown up, clear-eyed, tempered by the madness of others, cares for Sethe who once tried to kill her and who came close to abandoning her for the spite of Beloved. Paul D, without any sexual interest, also comes to care for Sethe, his last connection to Sweet Home, and now his only family. He says of Sethe, “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them back to me in all the right order (321).” And to Sethe, he says, “You your best thing, Sethe. You are (322).” Sethe, perhaps disbelieving that her guilt and all the other ballast of suffering she has borne have now been lifted off her, says, “Me? Me?”
This is how we both enter and leave this book — as pilgrims arriving in a place of truth and renewal and as witnesses who are charged to testify to others what we have seen and felt.
