A Review: Beloved

Title of Work: Beloved
Author: Toni Morrison
Dates Read: April 30th - May 20th, 2024
Format: Audio, library

Posted: Goodreads, May 21st, 2024
Rating: 4/5
Review:

I’m ashamed to admit it but I didn’t much care about slavery.

I remember hearing stories about the commodification, the mistreatment, the dehumanization of black folks in America. I remember that it did not end with the man in the big hat’s Proclamation. It didn’t end with the War and it didn’t end with the Bus Ride or with Ruby or with the Speech or with regicide, the slaying of any King. Did it end when 44 ascended to the biggest desk, was voted in and voted again to that highest office?

I remember watching a PBS documentary about Harriet Tubman on a CRT TV wheeled in from somewhere else. Do you remember how the static popped when we put our hands on the glass? Her scarred palms searched for moss on the free side of trees faintly glowing in southern moonlight. This light falls indiscriminately upon both emancipation and bondage, illuminating in equal radiance the path to deliverance and the path to reclamation of a fugitive property as unconscionable in its lawful possession as it was in its original deeded sale. Avert your gaze and cover your ears because it happens in a fit of snarls, ripped garments, and torn flesh, indiscernible sounds from man and beast, the same language born of fear and unknowing. What right did one ever have to own another? What law can permit the suspension of man’s innate desire to find his own way home?

I remember seeing those black and white photos of Emmett Till. There was a smiling boy then a thin border of glossy white then something unrecognizable above the starched collar of a casket suit. I remember thinking it looked melted and I remember wanting to look away, to shut the book, to erase it from memory. There was also a mother just below, frozen forever in sacrificial anguish.

I couldn’t bear the thought of people being horrified by the sight of my son. But on the other hand, I felt the alternative was even worse. After all, we had averted our eyes for far too long, turning away from the ugly reality facing us as a nation.

Let the world see what I’ve seen.

-Mamie Till Bradley

A ruined face, a ruined boy, a ruined people driven to rebirth again and again, out of fire and from beneath the surface of muddy waters ever flowing.

I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t much care about slavery.

It was a description of a system that seemed impossible to me, I didn’t understand it, didn’t have the right context. The ghosts of generations didn’t speak to me when I looked in the mirror. But I listened to the stories and I watched the images and I felt in immeasurable fragments, I understood something in the accumulation. Like a hundred thousand knocks on a door shut tight to the howling reality outside, I was marked and warped. My veneer, the stain, is scuffed away there in smallest flakes and a patch of fleshy wood bares its grain to harsh sun and incessant wind bearing rain and all manner of dust and erosive grit carried in from all distances and all times.

This novel is a ghost story. It is a historical account. It is a love story and a hate story and a magical story. This novel is a program for an operating system that we all share but can’t very well operate yet. It is one of many. When its commands and characters and codes are read in through willing ears and eyes and hands, the system is prompted to write empathy to memory. We are prompted and in a moment, like magic, we are superimposed with all ghosts, all the living and the long since dead.