Book Review: Beloved, by Toni Morrison | Novel Whore Book Review

Beloved by Toni Morrison

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Finally, I don’t know what has taken me so long to read Beloved by Toni Morrison, although I always believe books come into your life when they are meant to, just like friends. I’ve always loved Morrison’s writing style, and Beloved is no different. Centered around Sethe, an escaped slave, her children and the mother of her lost husband, Baby Suggs, we watch as a ghost takes over their lives. The story is so compelling, the trials of slaves that make the bile rise to your throat, and the way Morrison slides the scales of suspense, literally had me up until 3am to finish reading. I couldn’t put it down.

The one thing that I kept thinking though was why in the hell Oprah thought this book would make a great movie. I honestly haven’t seen the movie, so I can’t say it didn’t live up to the book, but the power in Morrison’s words, the scenes she evoked in my head and heart, I just can’t see translating to the screen. Very few movies are able to capture the truth the way Morrison does in words.

One of my favorite “truths” that come out of Beloved is in a scene where Baby Suggs is preaching in the clearing:

She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.

She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

Doesn’t everything in life start with this truth? If you can’t imagine grace, you will never have it. If you can’t dream the life you want, you will never have it. How many slaves could ever dream of grace? Of being in charge of their own lives? When Sethe escaped with her children, when she thought it was better to murder them than to think of them being taken back to Sweet Home and a life as a slave, the ensuing years of living with the ghost of her daughter, did she dream of grace? I think she wanted grace, she was almost there making the plans to escape, but her past kept pulling her back under.

The other thing that struck me, as always in historical fiction, is how different whites really believed blacks were. Of course this can still be seen today amongst many different cultures, not just white vs African American:

They unhitched from schoolteacher’s horse the borrowed mule that was to carry the fugitive woman back to where she belonged, and tied it to the fence. Then, with the sun straight up over their heads, they trotted off, leaving the sheriff behind among the damnedest bunch of coons they’d ever seen. All testimony to the results of a little so-called freedom imposed on people who needed every care and guidance in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred.

It still amazes me that whites ignored all of the violence they perpetrated on blacks, killing them for nothing, torturing them, holding them hostage, raping, taking their children from them, keeping them enslaved, (not to mention the violence they did to other whites). They actually believed that African Americans were more more violent, and that they needed protecting from themselves. It still makes me want to smack a few people around and knock some sense into them. Not in a violent way of course.

The Naked Review: