Toni Morrison For Beginners

Ron David, Dirk Shearer

• Publisher: For Beginners
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781939994547
• eBook ISBN: 9781939994554
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Many people consider Morrison’s novels difficult to read. Most of her readers have at least one book on their shelves that they couldn’t finish or, when they did finish one, just scratched their heads in confusion. And when we think we are sure we know what she’s writing about, it turns out we are half wrong or only getting the tip of the iceberg instead of the whole, beautiful, brooding thing.

Toni Morrison For Beginners is about the woman, her books, her mission, her word music, and all that subtext in her writings. Morrison’s books are like the ocean: the surface is beautiful but everything that gives them life lies beneath. She’s the kind of writer who can change your life and this book is here to help you navigate the words and the woman.

Denver picked at her fingernails. “If it's still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.” Sethe looked right in Denver's face. “Nothing ever does,” she said.

–Beloved

BELOVED

(1987)

SPOILER ALERT!

In many of her novels, Toni Morrison reveals critical information in the first few pages, so it makes no difference if you know in advance. In Beloved, it does make a difference. Morrison structured Beloved as if the reader had no advance knowledge of either the novel's central tragedy or the identity of the title character. So if you haven't read Beloved and you want to experience it exactly as TM wrote it, don't read past this page.

On the Other Hand...

Of all Toni Morrison novels, Beloved may be the one that readers abandon most often because they have no idea what's going on or they feel intimidated by the book's “literary” style. As original and innovative as her first four novels were, Beloved is a whole other world, reaching levels of almost impossible beauty. It's a shame if people give up on the book simply because they are confused or intimidated by the literary technique. Part of the unique spell that this novel casts is a powerful need to share it! So to those of you who have started Beloved and given up, read this chapter! Here's what you need to appreciate the book deemed “the best American work of fiction of the past 25 years.”

Background

In the early 1970s, while helping Spike Harris gather material for The Black Book, Morrison read an article she couldn't get off her mind. Titled “A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child,” the article was about a slave named Margaret Garner who escaped from a Kentucky plantation in 1856 and fled with her four children to Ohio. When finally tracked down by her master's slavecatchers, Garner tried to kill her children so they couldn't be forced into slavery. Only one of the children died, but Garner said she'd rather her children were dead than made slaves and “murdered by piecemeal.” What struck Morrison about the story was that even after being imprisoned for the murder of her own child, Garner believed she had done the right thing.

One of the characteristics of Morrison's genius is that she sees things in a unique way. Her take on Garner's suffering is a perfect example. It was, TM said, “a despair quite new to me but so deep it had no passion at all and elicited no tears.”

For years after reading the account, Toni Morrison wanted to write Margaret Garner's story—but it refused to happen. Morrison almost decided that the story couldn't be written, but in the end she found the power by surrendering to that of the Garner family: “In the end, I had to rely on the resilience and power of the characters—if they could live it all of their lives, I could write it.”

How do you tell the story of a woman who kills her own child? What can you say that isn't shrunk into insignificance by the terrifying logic of the act itself?

Help came as well from the lead character in a play Morrison had written in 1983, called Dreaming Emmett (1983). Based on a true story, the play was about a teenager named Emmett Till who had been shot in the head and thrown into a river for whistling at a white woman. In Morrison's play, Emmett came back from the dead to speak for himself. She would elevate that technique to a new level in Beloved.

THE KEYS

If you keep two facts in mind—

One, Beloved (the novel) is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, the mother who killed her child;

Two, Beloved (the character) is the dead child returned to Sethe (as if they have some unfinished business between them)—then the novel, despite all its complexity, is not confusing. Toni Morrison has rendered the changes in time and place with such elegant logic that the story unfolds as clearly as if it were told chronologically.

The Story

The year is 1873. The house, known by locals as “124,” is located on 124 Bluestone Road on the outskirts of Cincinnati. Sethe (the Margaret Garner character), formerly a slave on a Kentucky plantation called Sweet Home, has been free for 18 years. Eight years earlier, Sethe's two sons had run away from home. Two months after that, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, died. By the time the novel opens, only Sethe and her 18-year-old daughter Denver—along with the ghost of a dead baby girl—live in 124.

“For a baby she throws a powerful spell,” said Denver.
“No more powerful than the way I loved her,” [Sethe replies.]

Sethe flashes back 18 years to the time she traded a stone carver ten minutes of sex to carve the word “Beloved” on her baby's headstone. We aren't told how the baby died; we learn the details only in flashbacks. Throughout the novel, events in real time are interrupted by memory—but it's reluctant memory. Whereas other flashback novels resurrect the past, Beloved is an attempt to forget it. We get only what leaks through the cracks.

When the novel opens, the Civil War has been over for eight years and all the characters are trying to forget everything about slavery. Even Sethe tries to close off the past, but her “devious” brain lets though chunks of memory: “Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world.” Sweet Home, that hateful place, looked so beautiful it made her wonder if hell was pretty too.

On the tail-end of that memory, Paul D, another former slave from Sweet Home, turns up at 124. But when Paul tries to enter the house, he's stopped in his tracks by “a pool of red and undulating light.” He remarks on the feeling of evil, to which Sethe responds, “It's not evil, just sad.” Sethe asks Paul D to stick around—they (and we) have 18 years of catching up to do—and Paul chases the ghost away. A few days later, a beautiful woman—about the age Sethe's baby would have been if she'd lived—comes to the house. She calls herself Beloved. The novel that bears her name and tells her story shuttles back and forth in time, filling in the past, moving through the present, and connecting one to the other.

With apologies to the author for telling the story in a different sequence, perhaps the clearest way to recount the events from this pivot point between past and future—the arrival of Paul D and Beloved—is to go back 30 years and do the “catching-up” all at once.

In about 1840, a pair of “nice” slave owners had a plantation in Kentucky called Sweet Home. Paul D, his two brothers (Paul A and Paul F), and Sixo were slaves at Sweet Home when Baby Suggs, a limping old woman, arrived with her lastborn child, a son named Halle. The Garners treat the slaves with uncommon respect; they call the men “men,” value their opinions, and let them carry guns. Once they set foot outside Sweet Home, however, the slaves are “boys” to everyone else.

Garner does not free any of his slaves, but he does allow Halle to buy his mother's freedom. Baby Suggs wonders why he bothers to do so—what can a crippled old woman do with freedom? But when she walks through Cincinnati a free wo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• HER LIFE
• HER WORK
• THE BLUEST EYE
• SULA
• SONG OF SOLOMON
• TAR BABY
• BELOVED
• JAZZ
• PARADISE
• LATER NOVELS
• APPENDIX: WORKS BY TONI MORRISON
• BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR