Beloved

Beloved
by Toni Morrison
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

If you want to understand race in America in modern times, you have to go back.

You have to go back to the period after the Civil War.  The slaves weren't immediately given equal rights after the Emancipation Proclamation.  They weren't given jobs, or money, or land, or instructions on how to live in a white-dominated world.  They weren't put in schools, or taught to read, or educated.    If ex-slaves wanted to move to areas with more opportunity and less racial prejudice, they had to do it themselves.  If they could find such a place.

There was little family structure.  Husbands were sold from wives, mothers were sold from children.  There were few grandparents to advise parents on how they had done things.  Men and women were bred together like horses.  Many children were products of slave women raped by their white masters.  Any community the ex-slaves had, they had to build themselves.

Slavery itself had destroyed the culture blacks had left behind in Africa.  They had names given to them by the white man, religion given to them by the white man, language given to them by the white man, and any attempt to continue or recreate their African traditions was stamped out.

Is it any wonder African-Americans are still disadvantaged?  The seeds were sown in the America five or six generations ago, and it is the world in which Toni Morrison's Beloved is set.  The characters have "freedom" but still depend on white people for work.  Sethe, a runaway slave, lives in terror of whites and being sent back to that world.  Sethe and Paul D are shamed by the scars from the abuses they suffered while slaves.  Sethe's daughters Denver and Beloved suffer for the sins of their mother, sins brought on by the fear, shame, and terror of slavery.

Morrison has a gift for playing with morality.  Sethe commits a horrid crime but comes off as almost saintly.  The largesse of white people is shown to be fool's gold.  When characters Beloved and Paul D appear, disrupting the home shared by just Sethe and Denver, we go through the feelings of distrust, happiness, anger, rejection, and acceptance the characters have for one another.  Morrison's style adapts, shifting from folkiness to poetry, taking us into characters' heads in stream-of-consciousness sections, in and out of the past, beyond the wall and death and back.  Beloved is a powerful work, with some devastating sections but also real optimism.  It's the best book I've read in 2012.