Reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved was like watching a documentary that focused on the origins of a major phenomenon in the world around me. Never a slave and not even of true Southern white lineage, I trace my first awareness that something was very wrong with the way some people were viewed and treated to my own experience looking out a school bus window at the consequences of mischief taking place inside. I must have been in third or fourth grade at the time when a boy on the bus one or two years older opened the bus window and threw a rock at a small group of black schoolgirls as we waited at a stop light in New Orleans. He hit one on the side of the head and she wailed and put her hand to the side of her face. The boys on the bus, perpetrator and friends, just laughed. So her novel was kind of an answer to me as a little girl as I sat there and wondered: how can anyone act that way toward another person for no reason?
But of course I knew then that most white people in New Orleans looked down on “colored” people, and until I was some way on in grade school, there were separate restrooms, water fountains, and theatre sections, even a separate waiting room in the train station, for black and white people. And by the time I went to college in Massachusetts I knew I wanted to get away from the world of racism and segregation and the anti-intellectual environment in which it thrived. New England was a Mecca for me as a place of enlightenment and liberalism. And I was prone to equate every area north of a line drawn at the Mason Dixon. I was not sufficiently aware at that time of racism outside the south.
Beloved tells part of that story and the story of the horrific effects of slavery and how it degrades and changes a society. The injustice, cruelty, loss, poverty and frustration of Sethe and her family as well as their rich love of life and ability to cope somehow- the characters are touching, fun, and realized so that they feel like family to most readers, I should think.
After reading the psychologically complex and sophisticated story of mother love and regret, one is changed and enriched, even if saddened, by another layer of decay in the infrastructure of the American soul. I see it every day now in DC and experience frustration over the health care debate and the plight of the poor. I’m optimistic that there can be change, and the election of Barack Obama proved that. But the sense of threat, and the superhuman standard to which he will be held in dealing with the aftermath of an incompetent previous administration – one which in my view damaged our commitment to the rule of law- are palpable.
Sethe and the former slaves lived with a much more serious and physical threat, the constant threat of violence. Morrison shows in the glowing and poetic rhythm of language in the community of general terror how the semiotics of terror can be fraught with strange beauty in the words of the hunkered down and in the random acts of their tormentors. Law is a sign or order for me more than a form of narrative- it contains stories but much more: categories and abstractions as well, and so can be abstract as well as concrete and relates to both. Narrative and story has a sequence or pattern of events at its core and resists abstraction, consigning categories to allegory and systematic philosophy. Or to library catalogues.
Beloved, both the character and the novel- is a sleepy afternoon in which one remembers something terrible, and then it comes to stay with you for awhile as your houseguest,. But horrifically, as if in a dream, you know the terror of your own mistake is not a stranger; it’s family. You gave it being, and it lives here. Help us to love it back into innocence despite our primitive ways.
No comments:
Post a Comment