Morrison explores untold story of black love and life in ‘Beloved’

Adam Myren, Sigma Tau Delta

What is it like to be a black person in the United States? A black woman? A black woman in the mid-19th century?

There have been countless authors who attempt to portray this struggle and scholars who try to explain it anthropologically, but if you ask Toni Morrison, there is a side being ignored.

In her 1987 novel, “Beloved,” she lifts the veil revealing the untold side of “sixty million and more” African-Americans’ struggle.

The novel was immediately recognized as a profound piece of American Literature.

The year it was published, it was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the following year won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In a New York Times survey, literary critics and writers honored it as the best piece of American fiction from 1981 to 2006.

“Beloved’s” critical success comes from the new light it shed on the already existing slave narrative.

Questions of what is a black woman to society, what is a woman to her children, was life worth living as an African American in this time period, and ultimately, is a black life worth taking, are explored by Morrison.

The protagonist, Sethe, is the mother of multiple children, however only one child remains living with her. Sethe’s mother, Baby Suggs, is the matriarch of the family who spends almost a lifetime in slavery until her son buys her freedom for the final eight years of her life.

The present plotline begins with Sethe and her daughter living in freedom, which ought to be a peaceful existence. However, it was ruined by the haunting spirit of Sethe’s first daughter, who she killed.

The novel flashes back between multiple time periods to convey the treacherous past that slavery has imposed on these women.

The concept of slavery is best conveyed by Morrison as a fate so evil that a mother would rather saw her daughter’s neck to death, than allow her to live the life of a slave.

This is the choice that haunts Sethe and Denver in the form of the baby that was killed – Beloved.

This baby is reincarnated in the most recent plotline and searches out the Suggs family, Sethe in particular.

The character of “Beloved” can be seen as a personified portrayal of the psychological torture that a black mother goes through to avoid the terrors of slave-life.

Working on the basis of being a slave narrative with the historical evidence of Margaret Gardner (a slave who was in a similar position and chose to kill her baby in 1856), Morrison tackles the question of how black love differs from the love that exists in unoppressed society.

The love experienced by people who live their lives in the margins is, as Sethe describes, “thick.”

This thick love is problematic, because rarely would a contemporary citizen of America accept the brutal murder of one’s child as an act of love.

But thick love implies the ability to endure. By enduring, Sethe teaches the reader how attacked black lives and love are.

The brave choice to descend into the grimy, blood-splattered, moral pits of slave-life was Morrison’s unveiling to the literary world a side of the black struggle that most were too afraid to acknowledge.

Morrison was rightfully awarded for her ability to give the world a portrayal of evil and oppression in an artistically genius way that included the historical, physical, familial, gender, and psychological pains of being a black woman in mid-19th century America.

To read “Beloved” is to have a new understanding of love, a new understanding of courage and ultimately a new understanding of pain.