Beloved.

So I know that Toni Morrison is the Black writer we love, if we love a Black writer. She is somehow the quintessential one, the go-to, which is strange to me because of how weird she is. Her work is experimental and odd and sometimes so poetic as to become poetry itself, slipping into stanzas. Almost all of the nonfiction I’ve read this year on Black literature has mentioned not just her, but Beloved specifically. This book about a runaway slave who kills her baby so that she doesn’t have to grow up in slavery, a book based (maybe loosely) on the real life story of Margaret Garner. We love to talk about this book, and I don’t know if I have any new takes, but I can tell you that the first time I read it, I was twenty-two, and I didn’t get the hype. 

I had just graduated from college and was going to Iowa in the fall, and the more I learned how important this was to some people, the more nervous I got. A heavy dose of what they call imposter syndrome because what was I going to do there? I didn’t even know that much about this school. When I got in, my teachers congratulated me, but I felt disappointed that I’d be living in Iowa for the next chunk of my twenties. I didn’t even write every day. Did I even know how to write? I bought Writing Fiction for Dummies and tried to teach myself before I got there and they realized that they’d made a big mistake. I read Writing Fiction for Dummies and I read as many Black classics as I could get my hands on to see how other people had done it. I read The Color Purple and felt uncomfortable with how the queerness of it spoke to me. I read The Bluest Eye and thought, Okay? I read Beloved and thought, This is fine?? I wanted structure and I wanted a story I could follow and as much as I read (even now), I get jittery if I don’t know where the ship is landing. I closed Beloved and thought, So that was her daughter then? And she came back from the dead? And where did she get a body? If this was what I was supposed to be doing, then I knew in the fall, I was doomed. Writing Fiction for Dummies could never prepare me for writing like this.

Miraculously, I made it through Iowa, and it, in a number of ways, changed my life. Now, I’m reading all the Black classics again, this time for the exams I’m taking for my PhD, and so here we are, with Morrison again, with Beloved, this book that is itself so loved, and this time, I listened to the audiobook and read along—a quick fix for my reading jitteriness—and it’s Morrison who reads the book, and her voice is as poetic as the words she’s saying, and I get it now. I get why she’s so popular, and I get why, when people need a writer of color for their lists, they reach for her. She’s a weirdo (an Aquarius), and somehow has been able to pull it off again and again, to write politically without losing her strangeness. I listened to her read The Bluest Eye and found myself crying often because the way she writes is simultaneously gorgeous and original and true. I get it now. I get the hype. And this time, when I listened to her read Beloved, I thought, Oh my god, it’s a ghost story, and it might be about how sometimes we return to the people who loved us once, even if that love got twisted and turned into something ugly, something violent. And we want to heal from our pain, but here we are, returning anyway, and that’s what Sethe does, in her mind, and that’s what Beloved does too: she comes back to her mother loosely fleshed and awkward with words, but there, to look her in the eyes again, the woman who birthed and then killed her.

Of course, it’s a ghost story, and even if it is rare and difficult to write a story about our country’s history, rich with ghosts, in a register that rings true, we are still surrounded by them. We are surrounded by the people who have come before us, even if we can’t always look them in the eye. 

I read recently how so many of the plantation tours that people run in the South don’t mention the slaves that much. It’s more about the nostalgia of a time where White Southerners had big bucks and big houses and drank tea and fanned themselves while the work around them magically got done. These tours don’t mention the slaves, but of course everything else existed because of them. Then, if not now. I love Beloved for not only looking for the slaves, centering them, but also bringing them back from the dead, a daughter with hands out looking for her mother in a way that is messy and chaotic and obsessive and intense and violent, very violent, because the world they lived in did not allow them to relate any other way.

Image: Everyman’s Library Classics