Beloved by Toni Morrison

 

Toni Morrison says she intended her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel Beloved to be disorienting. And she succeeded.  She throws readers into the internal chaos faced by former slaves, who live in a constant state of grief, anxiety, and determination. This book is the ultimate definition of showing rather than telling. As we read, our minds try to make sense of a story that is non-linear to the extreme, that is usually unclear and unexplained. But Morrison wants us to experience, at least to a small degree, what it felt like to be a slave.

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another,” says the main character, Sethe, late in the book.

The details of what happens in the book can be difficult to determine empirically, especially for people who want all the pieces of a puzzle to fit. In Beloved, Morrison leaves us with pieces we have to imagine ourselves. This is a sensual book, not a logical one.

The story begins with Sethe living at 124 Bluestone Road, on the outskirts of Cincinnati. She’d escaped the Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky with her two boys and the baby she was still nursing. She’d sent her children ahead and had a fourth baby on her way to Ohio, helped by a young white woman named Amy Denver; she named the baby Denver, after the mysterious woman.  With the help of another former slave, Stamp Paid, she made it to 124, where her mother-in-law Baby Suggs lived as a free woman, bought by her son Halle, Sethe’s husband.

Sethe has a month of freedom before Schoolteacher, who took over Sweet Home, finds her. In terror and rage, she kills her baby to keep her from slavery, slitting the child’s throat. She is briefly jailed and then returns to 124, which is now overcome with the spirit of the dead baby. She has only enough money for the word “Beloved” to be placed on the baby’s gravestone–not enough to add “Dearly.”

The first line gives a solid clue about where we’re going: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”

The house is a character in this complex work, a haven, a protector, but also a prison and a keeper of secrets. Baby Suggs has since died and Sethe and teenage Denver live in the house alone. The two boys have run away, pushed out by the house’s violent spirit. Sethe works in town, cooking at a restaurant.

Paul D., who was a slave at Sweet Home with Sethe, shows up early on. He feels the mood of the house and calls it evil. “Not evil, “Sethe says, “Just sad.” Denver disagrees, saying the ghost “is not evil, but not sad either.” What is it? “Rebuked. Lonely and rebuked,” Denver says.

Paul D. may or may not be the catalyst for the arrival of a young woman who calls herself Beloved, who emerges out of the river shortly after Paul D. shows up. It’s more than 20 years since Sethe escaped the plantation, where, as slaves, both faced horrors neither can forget, or live with.

Who is Beloved? Is she actually the spirit of Sethe’s murdered child, come back to seek revenge? The clues are there—she’s the right age, she speaks with a raspy voice because she had died of a slit throat, her feet are like a baby’s, and she behaves like a toddler—an angry, spiteful one.

To Sethe and Denver, who have lived with Beloved’s ghost, it’s a given that the young woman who showed up on their porch one summer day is the baby who died in the shed behind their house.

But to Paul D., Beloved is a threat to his happiness with Sethe, whom he has loved for decades.  And she’s a vestige of what he left behind. But Sethe’s strong feelings worry him. It’s not safe:

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, 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.”  

Beloved’s control over Sethe builds until it nearly kills her. Denver, originally under Beloved’s spell, sees her as a danger and an aberration and finally leaves the house and goes to town, seeking help. She finds a community to support her, especially the women who come to 124, singing and praying in an attempt to rid 124 of the ghost. When the women see Beloved, they “surprise themselves by feeling no fear.” Mr. Bodwin, basically a good guy and protector of slaves, drives up. But he’s white, and Sethe thinks he’s coming after her “best thing,” her child, Beloved. This sets her into another rage. This time, Denver and the women constrain her.

Beloved disappears and a boy says he saw a woman walking into the river with fish for hair. Are we to make sense of this? We can try, but whatever it means, Beloved is gone.

Later, Sethe tells Paul D. that Beloved was her “best thing.”

“No,” Paul D. replies. “You your best thing, Sethe. You are.”

— Pat Prijatel

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

In her massive, beautifully written and masterly account of the Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the greatest untold stories of American History – the exodus of almost six million black citizens who fled the south for northern and western cities in search of a better life – forever changing the United States, especially the makeup of big cities.

The Warmth of Other Sunsis Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wilkerson’s first book. The title is borrowed from the black writer Richard Wright who fled Jim Crow Mississippi in the 1920s.

I was leaving the South
To fling myself into the unknown ..
I was taking a part of the South
To transplant in alien soil,
To see if it could grow differently,
If it could drink of new and cool rains,
Bend in strange winds,
Respond to the warmth of other suns
And, perhaps, to bloom.  

— Richard Wright

Between the beginning of the First World War through the end of the Civil Rights Movement, 1915 and 1970,  millions of African-Americans summoned up the courage to leave their bleak lives in the Deep South in order to give themselves and their children hope for the future. Because this pattern of migration lasted for several generations and spread over many states, it was difficult to see it happening as it occurred and most of its participants were unaware that they were part of an important demographic upheaval and dynamic shift in residency.

Wilkerson is the daughter of migrants herself and showed empathy, profound affection and compassion toward her subjects, allowing the reader to share that connection. If nothing else, Wilkerson is thorough.  She interviewed approximately 1,200 people, reviewed hordes of official records, and took numerous road trips on her way to create this landmark piece of nonfiction – to tell a story she thought everyone should know.

With stunning historical detail to describe the migration, Wilkerson focuses on biographies of three very different migrants; each representing a different decade as well as a different destination and each carrying with them a different set of circumstances that factored into their decisions to leave. The details of routine racial discrimination that these people faced both before and after migrating are horrifyingly vivid and impossible to ignore.

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, born in 1913, was a sharecropper’s wife from Mississippi. They both were relegated to picking cotton.  They worked all day and all year, and at the end of it they usually broke even, which was considered lucky, because most sharecroppers ended up with nothing but debt to show for their labor, at least by the boss’s accounting. A woman was expected to pick a hundred pounds of cotton a day, and she hated it. Living in a Jim Crow society with no hope for the future, in 1937 she and her husband George, and their two children secretly boarded a midnight train to Milwaukee, where her sister lived. They decided to leave because a cousin down the road was almost beaten to death by a white posse that wrongly suspected he stole some turkeys.  Fearing he would be next, and tired of working dawn to dusk for pennies, George told Ida Mae to pack up the family.

Miss Theenie, Ida Mae’s mother, then drew them close to her, as she always did whenever anyone was leaving. She had them bow their heads. She whispered a prayer that her daughter and her daughter’s family be protected on the long journey ahead in the Jim Crow car. “May the Lord be the first in the car,” she prayed, “and the last out.”

They eventually settled in Chicago’s south side, where George found work in a soup factory and Ida Mae in a hospital as a nurse’s aide. Although blue collar jobs, the Gladney’s made the most of their opportunity, never missing a day of work, and even becoming long time home owners, and their children attended a desegregated school. Chicago became their home for the rest of their lives and they never regretted their decision.

Before setting foot on the streets of Chicago, Ida Mae had never even thought about voting. Indeed, no black person she had known back in Mississippi would have dared to talk openly about such a right. But in the Windy City she was free to vote for the first time — and did so in the 1940 presidential election, casting her ballot for Franklin D. Roosevelt, and later also voted for Barack Obama when he ran for the Illinois Senate. 

Isabel Wilkerson met Ida Mae in 1996, when Ida Mae was eighty-three years old. She was still living in the second floor apartment of the house that her family had bought in 1967. She lived with dignity and respect to be ninety-one. She died in her sleep, in 2004, at home.

George Starling, a bright and ambitious man was the valedictorian of his colored high school in central Florida, but dropped out of college when his money ran out. So he went to work picking oranges in the fields. Appalled by the working conditions, he tried to organize a work stoppage for higher wages and better working conditions, but was warned that the local growers, backed by a homicidal sheriff, were planning a “necktie party” for him. He also boarded a midnight train, which was bound for New York. He lived in Harlem where he was free to live his life as he pleased.

As fate would have it, he took a porter’s job on the same train that once brought him north. It had a route from New York to Florida, the very place where he had so longed to escape. That’s where he became an advocate for African American passengers. Surprisingly, though, given George’s intelligence and drive, he was never once promoted away from his boringly repetitious job, one that he endured for more than 40 years.Through his faith in God, he eventually made enough peace with the south to go back to live there as an old man.

Robert Joseph Pershing Foster had the most privileged background of the three main characters. The son of demanding middle-class parents in Monroe, Louisiana, he was educated as a physician at Morehouse, the most prestigious black college in America. An accomplished surgeon, Foster had no rights to practice in the south, even as the son-in-law of the president of a prestigious black college. So he decided that he wouldn’t waste his time in the south being paid with “the side of a freshly killed hog”, and knowing that other Monroe residents had moved to Los Angeles, made the decision to travel there in his red 1949 Buick. Wilkerson writes of his long, hungry and lonely drive west where he could find no motel that would rent him a room or restaurant which would serve him—all because of the color of his skin.

One of my favorite quotes in the book, Robert said “How could it be that people were fighting to death over something as ordinary as being free to go and do as you please, like sitting in a diner with everyone else and eating a meal.”

After an initial struggle, he had established a private practice in Los Angeles and sent for his wife and daughters.After changing his name from Pershing to Robert, even Bob, he matured into one of California’s finest surgeons, with a successful medical career which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he threw exuberant parties. Revered by all of his patients for his entire career, Dr. Foster was the personal physician of Ray Charles who wrote a song about him.  Becoming addicted to gambling, Las Vegas became a second home. He lived a wild life and lost most of his wealth at the Vegas tables. Regrettably, something in his character prevented him from ever relishing the many blessings in his life.Still, at his funeral, he was mourned by his grandchildren enrolled in Ivy League schools.

Their stories are different and unique, yet they intertwine, and are interspersed with other stories of the South. They are gripping and full of life. Having spent many days and hours with the three and their families, it is clear that she became attached to them emotionally — personalized and humanized them – making the reader hope and root for them.

Wilkerson uses scholarship to quash the misconceptions that the migrants were uneducated, shiftless and promiscuous. She uses census data, stating that migrants from the South were on average better educated than those who stayed and soon would have a higher level of education than the blacks they joined in the North, and even more than the northern white population.  Or that migrants had higher levels of employment. And, contrary to common belief, the migrants were more likely to be married, remain married, and less likely to bear children out of wedlock.

The Great Migration shaped America’s urban cities, their culture, the geography of neighborhoods, and the beginnings of suburbanization and housing projects. Overall, this book did a lot to explain why some cities, and even some sections of those cities transformed from white to predominately black.  It did a lot to explain how those from Georgia and Florida migrated mostly to Boston and New York, and those from Alabama and Mississippi moved to cities like Detroit and Chicago, and those from Louisiana and Texas went to California. Wilkerson is superb at minding the bends and detours along the way.

The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable and riveting account of an unrecognized immigration throughout the United States, and nearly impossible to put aside. Through the beauty of writing, the depth of her research, and the fullness of the people and their lives portrayed, the book is a classic.  It serves as an important tool for better understanding of the trials and tribulations of black Americans in the 20thcentury.  At 622 pages, it is something of an anomaly in today’s shrinking world of nonfiction publishing, but so immensely readable as to, what one reviewer said, “would land her on a future place on Oprah’s couch.”

—Ken Johnson

The Road from Coorain, by Jill Ker Conway

The Road from Coorain revealed layer after layer of fascination. The cover notes let you know what to expect: young woman grows up in the Australian outback, goes on to a distinguished academic career, and ultimately serves as President of Smith College.

Jill Ker Conway is a thoroughly engaging writer.  She brings to this already exotic outline evocative description of time and place and penetrating analysis of herself and others.  She puts us on the sheep station where she grew up and makes us feel the landscape, the characters that inhabit it, and the highs and lows of life at the margins of the social and economic world of Australia in the 1930s and 1940s. She memorably describes the Australian national myth as exalting “epic failure,” typified by her family’s struggle against natural forces that would inevitably prevail.

Against that often bleak landscape, Conway shows the evolution of her family’s complex relationships and her own growth in awareness and competence.  When extended drought pushes her family to move into the city, she has already formed a solid base of independence and curiosity.  Building on that, Conway vividly describes her experiences through high school and university that impelled her into a distinguished academic career as a historian.  Ultimately the limited academic opportunities and sexual discrimination she encountered in Australia led her to leave for graduate school at Harvard.

The Road from Coorain is the first of three autobiographical works. It is followed chronologically by True North, covering a decade of academic work in Toronto, and A Woman’s Education, dealing with her time as the first female President of Smith College and a reinvention of women’s education.

— Bill Smith

[*]Full disclosure:  My mother, sister, and daughter attended Smith.