“Sixty Million and more…”
Inspired by the devastating true story of an antebellum enslaved woman named Margaret Garner, Toni Morrison’s magnum opus Beloved is a postmodern ghost story that reorients readers forces us to confront, rather than forget, the monstrous legacy of American chattel slavery. In the novel, we are invited to consider not merely facts and statistics about slaves, but rather the sheer personal gravity, familial toll, agony, and the damaged psyche that individual people were actually saddled with under a barbaric regime like American slavery. Beloved does not hold back nor does it take shelter in simplistic sentimentality or romanticism. And yet Beloved is also partly a fantasy –it is a folkoric, magical realist, gothic horror story about a runaway slave who believes she is being haunted by the spirit of her dead child, a daughter she tragically killed in order to save her from a lifetime of enslavement. This fragmentary, nonlinear book about memory, trauma, and overcoming is an immensely challenging novel, and also an immensely powerful and worthy American classic at the same time. Further details about the inspiration for Beloved (the life of Margaret Garner) can be found below.
The Life of Margaret Garner (1833/1834-1858)
A seldom told story in a dark chapter of American history, the biography of Margaret “Peggy” Garner was first discovered by Toni Morrison in an old newspaper clipping. Margaret Garner was a mid-nineteenth century house slave, owned by the Gaines family of Maplewood plantation located in Boone County, Kentucky. She was described as a “mulatto” at the time and therefore she may very well have been the daughter of plantation owner, John Pollard Gaines, a Whig politician who served a single term as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1847-1849) before losing re-election. That same year in 1849, Margaret was allowed to marry Robert Garner, a slave of a neighboring plantation. Then Gaines left Kentucky to become governor of the Oregon Territory from 1850-1853 (a political decision that would ultimately prove tumultuous for him and his family). He sold Maplewood and its enslaved people to his younger brother Archibald K. Gaines. Margaret was among these slaves. Notably, of Margaret’s four children, two were characterized as “mulatto,” leading many contemporary observers to suggest she had been raped by Gaines (her pregnancies of lighter-skinned children coincided with the times in which Gaines’s wife was pregnant, and perhaps sexually unavailable to him). At the time, “mulattos” like Margaret and her children were often harshly persecuted. They were regarded as repulsive and threatening to the established order –reminders of racial impurity and immorality on the part of slaveholders.
On January 28, 1856, Robert and Margaret Garner (who was pregnant) decided to flee from the plantation together with a group of family members and other enslaved families (seventeen people in total), to Storrs Township, a rural area just west of Cincinnati. Robert Garner had stolen his master’s horses and sleigh along with his gun. It was reportedly the coldest winter in sixty years and the Ohio River had frozen over, allowing the group to cross the ice to the home of Margaret’s uncle Joe Kite (who was a former slave himself) which was situated along Mill Creek below Cincinnati. The other nine people in their party eventually managed to reach safe houses in Cincinnati before escaping via the Underground Railroad to freedom in Canada. However, Margaret and her family were trapped in Ohio and before they could find a route northward through the famous abolitionist Levi Coffin (the unofficial “President of the Underground Railroad”), a band of slave catchers and U.S. Marshals discovered the Garners barricaded inside Kite’s house. They surrounded and stormed the property in a dramatic conflict. Robert Garner fired several shots at the men, wounding at least one deputy marshal’s arm, while Margaret made the fateful decision to kill her two-year-old daughter Mary, slitting the child’s throat with a butcher’s knife, sparing her from a lifetime of degradation as a slave. Margaret also wounded two of her other children (bashing them in the head with a shovel) while attempting to kill them and she fully intended to commit suicide herself before the men busted in and captured her.
Margaret’s case became a sensation in the press and it eventually went to trial, lasting more than two weeks, one of the longest fugitive slave trials in history. The legal tension at the heart of the cases was over whether or not the federal fugitive slave law could take precedence over a state trial for murder (in which Margaret would likely be pardoned by the governor of a free state). Instead, she was indicted on charges of damage of property.
During the trial, Margaret was described as a sullen woman with a large scar on the left side of her face, a wound sustained long ago when a white man struck her. Observers were shocked to find that she seemed entirely sane, with a sound mind, and not the profile of an unhinged maniacal killer. She was simply a mother who had been gravely wronged her entire life and who could not bear the same for her children. Her mother-in-law, who was in the room when Margaret committed infanticide, said she likely would have done the same thing to prevent the young girl from facing a lifetime of violent abuse as a slave. Margaret’s mother-in-law was a mother of eight children herself, most of whom had been forcibly taken, never to be seen again, and her own husband was once separated from her for a period of twenty-five years. She explained to the press that as she got older and feebler, her master’s brutality only grew worse. Hence, why she also made the risky decision to escape from the plantation in the dead of winter despite being of advanced years (the corresponding character of Baby Suggs in Beloved is somewhat distinct from her historical analog). On the closing day of the trial, the celebrated antislavery activist Lucy Stone took the stand and gave an impassioned, erudite defense of Margaret (I recommend reading the full transcript of her commentary).
Following the trial, Margaret was quickly kidnapped and sent back to Kentucky before being dispatched even further south to Gaines’s brother’s plantation in Arkansas. But the boat she was traveling aboard crashed and Margaret’s baby drowned (Margaret then tried to drown herself). But after being rescued, Margaret was retrieved and taken to Arkansas before ultimately being taken on to New Orleans where records of her are scant.
Years later in 1870, a reporter from The Cincinnati Chronicle managed to track down her older husband Robert Garner. He explained that he and his wife were in New Orleans for a period of time, before they were sold to Judge Dewitt Clinton Bonham in 1857 for plantation labor at Tennessee Landing, Mississippi. Robert announced that Margaret had died in 1858 of typhoid fever. He said that before she died, Margaret urged him to “never marry again in slavery, but to live in hope of freedom.” Notably, the life of Sethe in Beloved deviates from the real life of Margaret Garner in interesting ways. For one thing, Sethe successfully escaped and became a free woman in Ohio in the 1870s, while Margaret Garner died a slave in 1858.
Aside from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the story of Margaret Garner has inspired numerous works of art over the years, such as Frances Harper’s 1859 poem “Slave Mother: A Tale of Ohio” and N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel The Fifth Season (2015). In 2019, The New York Times published an obituary for Margaret Garner as part of a broader project to highlight the overlooked lives of important African Americans throughout American history who had never received mention in the paper of record in the past.
About Beloved
It is the 1870s, the Civil War has ended, and a black woman named Sethe (pronounced “Seth-thuh”) reflects on how she escaped enslavement eighteen years ago. She was previously a slave on a Kentucky plantation called “Sweet Home” but now she is a free woman, living in a remote gray and white home at 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, Ohio with her teenage daughter Denver. Strangely enough, they are not alone. Their home is haunted by a malevolent spirit, the angry ghost of Sethe’s other daughter, the one who was killed years ago. This enigmatic haunting casts a strange, dark pall over the household, and it adds an otherworldly element of magical realism to the novel. At one point, Denver thinks she spots the ghost in the form of a white dress kneeling beside Sethe while she prays. Is it real? Or is it imagined? Answers are deliberately obfuscated.
As the story unfolds, we learn of a deeply horrifying, unresolved trauma that Sethe carries with her. She remains furtively haunted by her past “But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day” (83). Sometimes we are given stream-of-consciousness passages that suddenly emerge in a rich colorful river depicting Sethe’s past, other times we are offered a present-tense memory (or “rememory” as Sethe calls it) as her past becomes unrelentingly alive in the present.
Like piecing together a quilted patchwork, Sethe’s life comes to light as an incredibly harrowing, tempestuous story in a pathological world where human beings are considered mere property. While Sethe was enslaved at Sweet Home, she was violently whipped, a punishment that ripped open her back and left a huge scar in the shape of a chokecherry tree, though the wound has left her with no sensation in her back –it is a permanent reminder of her trauma. Indeed all the slaves at Sweet Home were horridly abused, especially by their owner known as “Schoolteacher,” a terrifying, authoritarian figure in the novel.
For Sethe: “every mention of her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost.” Sethe explains that she was once married to a kind man, a fellow slave named Halle, but he disappeared one day and she hasn’t heard from him since. They had two older sons, Howard and Buglar, who also fled from home when they were thirteen-years-old; Sethe has no clue what has become of them. Sethe’s mother was hanged when she was young, an era when lynchings were commonplace. Sethe recalls in vivid detail how she tried to escape one day to Boston (in search of beautiful velvet) and gave birth to her daughter Denver in a canoe thanks to assistance from a friendly white girl named Amy Denver. Sethe named her daughter “Denver” after Amy Denver. She remembers running away across the frigid Ohio River before she finally arrives at “124,” the home of her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs (Halle’s mother). She was given help by a local black man named Stamp Paid who serves in a critical background role throughout the novel (his wife was raped by white men and now he resents her for it). We are also treated to the fragmented recollections characters have of Baby Suggs, a lively older woman who once lived at “124” with Sethe and Denver (she had eight children from six different fathers) but she died several years ago after spending years exhausted to her “marrow,” and lying down in bed where she finally learns to appreciate color from her bedridden window. But years ago, 124 had been a house full of life and people.
“Before 124 and everybody in it had closed down, veiled over and shut away; before it had become the plaything of spirits and the home of the chafed, 124 had been a cheerful, buzzing house where Baby Suggs, holy, loved, cautioned, fed, chastised and soothed” (102).
What happened to 124? Why did the whole community effectively excommunicate Sethe? She explains that it all happened years ago when she was tracked down by her former enslavers. A group of four horsemen –including the fearsome Schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher, and a sheriff—all showed up at 124 to take Sethe back to Kentucky. But in the ensuing scuffle, Sethe tried to kill herself and her children, but she only succeeded in slitting the throat of her young nameless daughter with a handsaw. The poor girl was never given a name, so Sethe only had the word “Beloved” inscribed on her tombstone (a nod to Romans 9:25 which Toni Morrison uses as the novel’s epigraph, as opposed to the name “Dearly Beloved” since Sethe never had a proper wedding ceremony). It was this horrid fateful act that led to all of Sethe’s troubles, including the haunting of her house. It led to her being shunned by the local community as Baby Suggs died in bed, leaving behind only Sethe and Denver to live together.
Then one day, a familiar arrives at 124. He was another Kentucky slave at Sweet Home with Sethe named Paul D (most of the men at Sweet Home were named Paul). He and Sethe were always friendly with one another back then. And despite initial reservations on his part after sensing a malevolent spirit haunting the house, Paul D decides to move into the house with Sethe. He then chases away the angry, lingering spirit of Sethe’s dead baby and the household returns to some semblance of normalcy. As time passes, Sethe and Paul D reflect on their lives during and after their escape from Sweet Home. They soon become romantically intertwined as Sethe manages to open Paul D’s “tobacco tin” heart inside which he has concealed many painful “rememories” of his past. He attempted to escape Sweet Home, but before he could get away, he and another slave named Sixo were caught. Sixo was burned alive and subsequently shot while kept alive for his value, his head was placed in an iron bit with a three-spoke collar so he couldn’t lie down –a symbol of great shame and embarrassment to him, his sense of confidence and masculinity being shaken to the core. As he was led out of town, he spotted a rooster in the grass, and he noticed that even a rooster enjoyed more freedom than he did: “Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub” (86). Paul D was then put into a ruthless chain gang and sent off to Georgia. Amazingly, along the way he managed to escape and head northward thanks to assistance from a group of local Cherokee. This was the way Paul D eventually made his way to Ohio.
From here, the three people (Sethe, Denver, and Paul D) form a kind of family together and they return home one evening from a local carnival to find a mysterious young black female stranger sitting on their doorstep. She is perhaps nineteen or twenty years old, feverish, and strangely unmarked – she has no lines on her palms and neither her feet nor her clothing show any signs of hard travelling. She is wearing a silk black dress and has a gravelly voice with a certain musical cadence to it. Who is she? Where did she come from? This poor girl remembers very little of her past, but she calls herself “Beloved” –a name which strikes deeply into Sethe’s soul. She has deep, expressionless eyes, and her clearest memory is of standing on a bridge (though there are no bridges nearby) and she claims she knew only one “whiteman.” Sethe wonders if she was perhaps a kidnapped girl who had recently been locked up and raped by a white man before he recently turned up dead. However, Beloved seems to know strange things about Sethe, such as her personal jewelry (diamond earrings) and even little sing-songs Sethe sang to her children. Beloved bears a striking scar stretching ear-to-ear “the little curved shadow of a smile in the kootchy-kootchy-coo place under her chin.” Needless to say, Sethe comes to believe Beloved is indeed the ghost of her murdered daughter come back to torment her in the flesh.
“Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. She comes back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing. I didn’t have time to explain before because it had to be done quick. Quick. She had to be safe and I put her where she would be. But my love was tough and she back now. I knew she would be. Paul D ran her off so she had no choice but to come back in the flesh. I bet you Baby Suggs, on the other side, helped. I won’t never let her go. I’ll explain to her, even though I don’t have to. Why I did it. How if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her. When I explain it she’ll understand, because she understands everything already. I’ll tend to her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter” (236).
Beloved’s presence also tortures Paul D. She places him into a kind of trance and seduces him: “I want you to touch me on the inside part and call me my name” (137). But this causes a conflict between Paul D and Sethe, and after Stamp Paid informs Paul D of Sethe’s troubled past (i.e. her notorious act of infanticide as reported in the newspaper) and Sethe confesses it all to Paul D, he decides to leave the house for good –but not before he admits to Sethe that he saw her husband, Halle, one final time after Sethe last saw him. As Paul D was being led away, he saw that Halle appeared to have lost his mind, he was covered in butter after likely witnessing his wife being sexually assaulted in a barn by white men, her milk being stolen, while he was forced to hide. His powerlessness ruined him and led him to take flight from his family without warning. Under the system of slavery, characters like Halle, Paul D, and Stamp Paid have all been dehumanized and emasculated but they have each responded in their own unique ways. Halle went insane, Paul D repressed it all, and Stamp Paid blames his wife.
In time, despite initially favoring her new playmate, Denver soon grows skeptical of Beloved –in particular, she grows resentful of her mother’s close relationship with Beloved, and at the same time Beloved seems to be physically torturing Sethe. So Denver ventures out to the local community looking for work and connection: “Denver thought she understood the connection between her mother and Beloved: Sethe was trying to make up for the handsaw; Beloved was making her pay for it. But there would never be an end to that, and seeing her mother diminished shamed and infuriated her” (295). When she visits the nearby Bodwin house looking for work, Denver decides to explain the situation to a black woman named Janey Wagon who then spreads it to others in the community. Before long, a crowd of thirty people arrive at 124 Bluestone Road, singing and praying, hoping to exorcise the demonic presence within. And then Mr. Bodwin shows up on horseback but Sethe rushes at him, attacking him with an ice pick, perhaps fearing he might be in league with her “rememory” of Schoolteacher.
“Sethe feels her eyes burn and it may have been to keep them clear that she looks up. The sky is blue and clear. Not one touch of death in the definite green of the leaves. It is when she lowers her eyes to look again at the loving faces before her that she sees him. Guiding the mare, slowing down, his black hat wide-brimmed enough to hide his face but not his purpose. He is coming into her yard and he is coming for her best thing. She hears wings. Little hummingbirds stick needle breaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thinks anything, it is no. No no. Nonono. She flies. The ice pick is not in her hand; it is her hand” (308-309).
Almost instantaneously, a smiling Beloved (who is swollen and apparently pregnant with Paul D’s child) stands on the doorstep and suddenly vanishes. Some say she disappeared. Others say she just went into hiding in the trees, waiting for her chance to return. And a little boy claims he saw a naked girl running through the woods. Regardless Beloved is now gone. Was she a real apparition? Or was she just a confused amnesiac who found her way to 124? Either way, her ambiguous identity is a central issue in the novel; her fleshy presence awakens past trauma in the characters in a way that the distance and vagueness of long forgotten history could never achieve. Beloved’s corporeal presence brings a sense of nearness and immediacy to their problems.
Like Hamlet who is confronted with the ghost of his father, or Medea who is faced with the prospect of murdering her own children, Beloved overflows with an abundance of rich, beautiful folklore and the markers of classical mythology as well as magical realism. The characters in the novel (and consequently the real historical people) were surely some of the most complex figures in human history, all of them plagued and possessed by an otherworldly sense of anguish, a fountain of suffering that was never properly recorded, an anxiety and trauma that was merely snuffed out of living memory. What would it have been like to go on living the life of Margaret Garner? What sorts of dark memories were buried deep in her soul? Was she haunted by the presence of her own Beloved?
The novel ends as Paul D finally returns to 124 only to find the house in disrepair (Mr. Bodwin plans to sell it soon) and Sethe is found upstairs in Baby Suggs’s old bedroom, steadily losing her mind, and still distraught over losing her “best thing” (Beloved). But Paul D tells her: “‘Sethe,’ he says, ‘me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow… You your best thing, Sethe. You are’” (322). Sethe questions him, and starts to consider herself. But out in the community, people begin to forget about Beloved. Why? Because “this is not a story to pass on,” and “remembering seemed unwise,” and eventually all trace of Beloved was gone, and “they forgot her like a bad dream.”
“By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what it is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather. Certainly no clamor for a kiss.
Beloved” (324, closing lines).
In many ways the metaphorical ghost of Beloved remains ever-present in American culture today, even though Margaret Garner’s is hardly a household name, her remains long forgotten. A century and a half later, how many Americans today are really familiar with Margaret Garner? Is she just another nameless slave whose life has been lost to time? And what of the countless other slave narratives that will never be heard? Where does all this suffering go but into the pages of fiction? And to what extent do we still have our own cultural ghosts in need of exorcising today? These difficult questions are left open-ended, though Toni Morrison later commented: “In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietude of everyday life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way.”
Lastly, Morrison dedicates Beloved’s epigraph to “Sixty Million and more,” a reference to the staggering number of people who were dehumanized, uprooted, kidnapped, and brutalized as a result of the African slave trade. Some estimates suggest that approximately half of each slave ship’s “cargo” (i.e. enslaved people) died while en route to America on the Middle Passage, leaving behind a dark legacy of barbarism. Who were all these people? The world will never know them. But novels like Beloved help us to remember.
Notable Quotations
“124 was spiteful. Full of baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims” (opening line).
“Baby Suggs didn’t even raise her head. From her sickbed she heard them go but that wasn’t the reason she lay still. It was a wonder to her that her grandsons had taken so long to realize that every house wasn’t like the one on Blue Stone Road. Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn’t get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present –intolerable—and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color” (4).
“Counting on the stillness of her own soul, she had forgotten the other one: the soul of her baby girl. Who would have thought that a little old baby could harbor so much rage? Rutting among the stones under the eyes of the engraver’s son was not enough. Not only did she have to live out her years in a house palsied by the baby’s fury at having its throat cut, but those ten minutes she spent pressed up against dawn-colored stone studded with star chips, her knees wide open as the grave, were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil” (5-6).
“‘Leave off, Sethe. It’s hard for a young girl living in a haunted house. That can’t be easy’” (17).
“Would there be a little space, she wondered, a little time, some way to hold off eventfulness, to push busyness into the corners of the room and just stand there a minute or two, naked from shoulder blade to waist, relieved of the weight of her breasts, smelling stolen milk again and the pleasure of baking bread? Maybe this one time she could stop dead still in the middle of a cooking meal –not even leave the stove—and feel the hurt her back ought to. Trust things and remember things because the last of the Sweet Home men was there to catch her if she sank?” (21).
“But maybe a man was nothing but a man, which is what Baby Suggs always said. They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely that was, they studied your scars and tribulations, after which they did what he had done: ran her children out and tore up the house” (26).
“Not since Halle had a man looked at her that way: not loving or passionate, but interested, as though he were examining an ear of corn for quality. Halle was more like a brother than a husband. His care suggested a family relationship rather than a man’s laying claim. For years they saw each other in full daylight only on Sundays. The rest of the time they spoke or touched or ate in darkness. Predawn darkness and the afterlight of sunset. So looking at each other intently was a Sunday-morning pleasure and Halle examined her as though storing up what he saw in sunlight for the shadow he saw the rest of the week. And he had so little time. After his Sweet Home work and on Sunday afternoons was the debt work he owed for his mother. When he asked her to be his wife, Sethe happily agreed and then was stuck not knowing the next step. There should be a ceremony, shouldn’t there? A preacher, some dancing, a party, a something” (30-31).
“‘I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place –the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened… Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm –every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there –you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can’t never go there. Because even though it’s all over –over and done with—it’s going to always be there waiting for you. That’s how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what’” (43-44, Sethe talking to Denver).
“For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love” (54).
“‘What might your name be?’ asked Paul D.
‘Beloved,’ she said, and her voice was so low and rough each one looked at the other two. They heard the voice first –later the name” (62).
“He [Paul D] wanted her out, but Sethe had let her in and he couldn’t put her out of a house that wasn’t his. It was one thing to beat up a ghost, quite another to throw a helpless coloredgirl out in territory infected by the Klan. Desperately thirsty for black blood, without which it could not live, the dragon swam the Ohio at will” (79).
“‘Hey! Hey! Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside’” (81).
“Beloved closed her eyes. ‘In the dark my name is beloved’” (88).
“She knew Paul D was adding something to her life –something she wanted to count on but was scared to. Now he had added more: new pictures and old rememories that broke her heart. Into the empty space of not knowing about Halle – space sometimes colored with righteous resentment at what could have been his cowardice, or stupidity or bad luck—that empty place of no definite news was filled now with a brand-new sorrow and who could tell how many more on the way. Years ago –when 124 was alive—she had women friends, men friends from all around to share grief with. Then there was no one, for they would not visit her while the baby ghost filled the house, and she returned their disapproval with the potent pride of the mistreated. But now there was someone to share it, and he had beat the spirit away the very day he entered her house and no sign of it since” (112-113).
“When he [Paul D] stood up from the supper table at 124 and turned toward the stairs, nausea was first, then repulsion. He, he. He who had eaten raw meat barely dead, who under plum trees bursting with blossoms had crunched through a dove’s breast before its heart stopped beating. Because he was a man and a man could do what he would: be still for six hours in a dry well while night dropped; fight a raccoon with his hands and win; watch another man, whom he loved better than his brothers, roast without a tear just so the roasters would know what a man was like. And it was he, that man, who had walked from Georgia to Delaware, who could not go or stay put where he wanted to in 124 –shame” (148).
“Perhaps it was the smile, or maybe the ever-ready love she saw in her eyes –easy and upfront, the way colts, evangelists and children look at you: with love you don’t have to deserve—that made her go ahead and tell him what she had not told Baby Suggs, the only person she felt obliged to explain anything to” (190).
“…to get to a place where you could love anything you chose –not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom” (191).
“Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken” (212).
“‘You know as well as I do that people who die bad don’t stay in the ground’” (221, Stamp Paid speaking to Ella).
“Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under ever dark skin was a jungle. Swift, unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he [Stamp Paid] thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own” (234, the reflections of Stamp Paid).
“Shackled, walking through the perfumed things honeybees love, Paul D hears the men talking and for the first time he learns his worth. He has always known, or believed he did, his value –as a hand, a laborer who could make a profit on a farm—but now he discovers his worth, which is to say he earns his price. The dollar value of his weight, his strength, his heart, his brain, his penis, and his future” (267).
“Dark, velvety, its beauty was enhanced by his strong clean-shaven chin. But his hair was white, like his sister’s –and had been since he was a young man. It made him the most visible and memorable person at every gathering, and cartoonists had fastened onto the theatricality of his white hair and big black mustache whenever they depicted local political antagonism. Twenty years ago when Society was at its height in opposing slavery, it was as though his coloring was itself the heart of the matter. The ‘bleached nigger’ was what his enemies called him, and on a trip to Arkansas, some Mississippi rivermen, enraged by the Negro boatmen they competed with, had caught him and shoe-blackened his face and his hair. Those heady days were gone now; what remained was the sludge of ill will; dashed hopes and difficulties beyond repair. A tranquil Republic? Well, not in his lifetime” (306).
“Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts in her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her all away” (323).
The 1988 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1988 Fiction Jury consisted of the following three members:
- Chair: Julian L. Moynahan (1925-2014) was an American academic (at Harvard, Princeton, and Rutgers Universities), a librarian at Boston Public Library, and a noted literary critic whose work focused on D.H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov. He published numerous book reviews and literary criticism for The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post Book World, The Observer, New Statesman, and The Times Literary Supplement. He was also a poet and novelist. In 1966, Moynahan was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and in 1983, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was married and had three daughters. He died in March 2014 on his 89th birthday after a brief bout of pneumonia.
- Alice Adams (1926-1999), not to be confused with Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, was a San Francisco-based novelist and short story writer (as far as I can tell this is the same Alice Adams who served on the Fiction Jury). Her celebrated short stories led to her becoming one of four authors to receive the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement for her short stories (the others being John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, and Alice Munro). The New York Times obituary for her in 1999 read: “In 10 novels and five collections of short stories, Ms. Adams created richly textured, artfully constructed novels about women’s lives that sometimes mirrored and sometimes anticipated changes in the society as a whole. Admirers particularly praised her ability to capture place and voice and the deceptively artful craft of her writing… her writing in many ways fused the seductive intimacy of the South, the intellectual sophistication of New England and the sense of adventure and openness to new experiences of the West.” She was the only child of Agatha Erskine (Boyd) Adams and Nicholson Barney Adams: her father was a Spanish professor at the University of North Carolina, and her mother was a frustrated writer full of unfulfilled literary aspirations. She described her family as “three difficult, isolated people.” She was married, divorced, and struggled to raise her only son Peter while working a variety of oddjobs to support her burgeoning writing career. She died in her sleep in 1999 at her San Francisco home at the age of 72 following a brief heart condition.
- Richard Eder (1932-2014) was an American film reviewer and a drama critic who spent nearly three decades working for The New York Times in various jobs, including as foreign correspondent in Latin America, film reviewer, and the drama critic. In later life, he was a book critic for The Los Angeles Times, winning a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and the National Book Critics Circle annual citation for an entry consisting of reviews of John Updike’s Roger’s Version, Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, and Robert Stone’s Children of Light. He died in 2014 at the age of 82 of pneumonia as a result of post-polio syndrome (a childhood disease he contracted before the advent of the polio vaccine).
The runners-up this year were Persian Nights by Diane Johnson, a book that was initially favored by Alice Adams, a friend of Diane Johnson, and That Night by Alice McDermott.
Each member of the jury wrote a one-page review of each of the three nominees. They were enclosed in Julian Moynahan’s letter sent to Bud Kliment in December 1987.
Of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the jury report stated: “Beloved is a work of assured, immense distinction, destined to become an American classic. Writing about the life of black slaves and ex-slaves in the era of the Civil War and early Reconstruction, and locating her story in a Border States setting –southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, along the Ohio River, near Cincinnati –Toni Morrison taps into a deep, central vein of our national experience and shame… The writing in Beloved is dense and rich, its structure brilliantly fragmented, discontinuous, expressive. To a remarkable degree the book captures new ground even while it is in dialogue with great American novels of the past.” The report goes on to liken elements of the novel to The Scarlet Letter, and even William Faulkner in Absolom! Absolom! And Go Down Moses “except that Ms. Morrison digs deeper, is more unflinching, and knows more than Faulkner could bring himself to face and acknowledge… As fiction by a black writer Beloved is at least as important as Ellison’s Invisible Man. It really has no other competition. In the year of James Baldwin’s death the publication of Beloved is a reassuring, moving, inspiring event in American letters.”
Note: Upon publication in 1987, Toni Morrison’s Beloved was widely hailed as a new American classic, surely the kind of novel that would win major literary prizes. However, when Beloved was merely listed as a finalist (rather than a winner) of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, a group of prominent black intellectuals found this to be unacceptable (this despite the fact that Morrison had already previously won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon). So the group (led by poet June Jordan and literary critic Houston A. Baker Jr.) published an open letter in The New York Times Book Review which was addressed to Toni Morrison praising her work and attacking the “oversight and harmful whimsy” of literary awards, though critics saw it as a brazen, strong-armed attempt to influence the upcoming Pulitzer Prize decision. Writers like Christopher Hitchens dismissed their efforts as part of a broader industry obsession with glitzy literary accolades, while proponents praised the letter for highlighting disparities in America’s literary prizes (and the ways they often overlooked great black authors of the past like James Baldwin). Among the signatories of the letter included Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, John A. Williams, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and others.
Did their letter influence the 1988 Fiction Jury? It’s anyone’s guess really, but it’s hard to argue that it didn’t. After all, at the 1987 National Book Award ceremony, wherein Toni Morrison felt confident enough to purchase three tables for her friends and associates, the prize shockingly went to Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story (and not to Toni Morrison’s Beloved) all eyes turned to the three judges, particularly black novelist Gloria Naylor (1950-2016) who faced considerable scorn from a great many commentators, including John Leonard who took a swing at her in Newsday: “…Most of the protesters also know who voted how on the NBA judges’ panel, which means they know that beautiful black sisterhood is not invariably abiding.” And June Jordan (1936-2002), then a teacher at Stony Brook University, declared it would now be “embarrassing and morally elliptical” for Naylor to take up residency in creative writing at Stony Brook in light of the National Book Award decision. Suffice it to say, the backlash was palpable and unpredictable. This whole furor forced fellow National Book Award judge Richard Eder (who was also a member of the Pulitzer Prize jury in 1988) to publish an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times defending the National Book Award decision. But the damage had already been done.
Almost undoubtedly, the jury members of the Pulitzer Prize watched all of this unfold, not to mention Richard Eder who was at the center of the maelstrom, and subsequently sought to avoid the same heat that was brought against sister prizes. And so the Pulitzer Prize perhaps unsurprisingly went to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a fitting novel that won under vaguely suspicious circumstances. Does this whole scandal diminish the Pulitzer Prize victory for Beloved? In my view it unfortunately gives fodder to the many critics of the Pulitzer Prizes who accuse the award of being too easily swayed by contemporary prejudices and too sensitive to outside political pressure. But none of this changes the fact that Beloved is still an American masterpiece.
Up until this point, only a small number of African-Americans had won a major American literary prize: Ralph Ellison won the National Book Award in 1953 for Invisible Man, James Alan McPherson won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1978, and Alice Walker also won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983.
In The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2005), James F. English writes “To take one further example of these new ways of playing the prize game, we might consider Toni Morrison, who since the 1980s has been perhaps the most active and enthusiastic collector of literary awards, lobbying for them and openly embracing them as a form of ‘redemption.’ Even by contemporary standards, she seems to have capitulated too fully to the awards mania, abandoned too completely the protocols of condescension. And this has left her vulnerable to the charge of having exchanged artistic integrity for cultural prestige” (237). In many ways, the politics and culture of the late 1980s saw a shift in the way the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was viewed. It went from being an annual award honoring American literature, to a fixed body of work, a ‘keystone to the canon of American literature,’ informed by capitalism’s expansive commercial enterprise to judiciously distribute cultural capital appropriately for future generations. The charge of racism against the major prizes was an attack on this very cultural canon; it served as both an attack on the prizes as well as a paradoxical acknowledgement of their importance. Almost as if to say: “We condemn these prejudiced prizes for failing to honor James Baldwin, and yet we insist that they now honor Toni Morrison.” For further commentary I recommend reading Christopher Hitchens’s writings on the matter as well as James F. English’s The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2005).
Who is Toni Morrison?
Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, Chloe Anthony Wofford “Toni” Morrison (1931-2019) was the second of four children in a family from Lorain, Ohio. Her father relocated to racially-integrated Ohio as a young man after witnessing a lynching of two black men in Georgia where he was raised. As a young woman, Toni Morrison converted to Catholicism and took the baptismal name of Anthony (as in Anthony of Padua) hence where her nickname “Toni” came from.
She attended Howard University, graduating in 1953 with a BA in English and a minor in Classics, she then earned an MA in 1955 from Cornell University. Her master’s thesis was titled “Virginia Woolf’s and William Faulkner’s treatment of the alienated.” She taught English at Texas Southern University and Howard University where she met a Jamaican architect named Harold Morrison. They were married in 1958 and had two sons before divorcing in 1964 when he returned to Jamaica.
Morrison then worked as an editor for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of Random House before she transferred two years later to Random House in New York City, where she made history as the first Black woman to serve as senior editor in the fiction department.
Notably, she turned to writing relatively late in life while a single working mother raising two children. She published her first novel The Bluest Eye (1970) at age 39. This was followed by Sula (1973) which was nominated for the National Book Award, and Song of Solomon (1977) which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Tar Baby (1981). From here the accolades only continued to come. Beloved (1987), the first book in the latter named “Beloved Trilogy,” won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but this was only after a group of forty-eight prominent black intellectuals heavily criticized both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in a letter published in The New York Times for collectively snubbing the book (even though both prizes nominated it as a finalist for the prize in 1987). The letter was billed as a collective praise of Toni Morrison, but critics viewed it as a brazen attempt to influence the upcoming Pulitzer Prize for Fiction award. Nevertheless, Beloved was hailed as an American classic, a moniker which has only increased in gravity. But that hasn’t stopped it from being one of the most banned books in U.S. schools. Morrison later returned to Beloved when she penned the libretto for an opera focused on the life of Margaret Garner in 2002 (it premiered in 2005). In the spring 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best work of American fiction published in the previous 25 years, as chosen by a selection of prominent writers, literary critics, and editors. Of the “Beloved Trilogy,” Toni Morrison said “The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved – the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you.” The second book in the informal trilogy was Jazz (1992), and before the third novel of the Beloved Trilogy was published (Paradise in 1997), Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from schools like Howard University, Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Rutgers, and others. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, she appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine, and in 1996 Oprah Winfrey selected Song of Solomon for her newly launched Book Club. Winfrey later told Morrison that her popular book club never would have happened without Toni Morrison.
From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. Her later novels included A Mercy (2008), Home (2012), God Help the Child (2015). She also wrote books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who was a painter and a musician. Slade died of pancreatic cancer in 2010 at the age of 45 while Morrison while still working on her novel Home (2012). In August 2012, Oberlin College became the home base of the Toni Morrison Society.
Morrison died in New York City in 2019 at the age of 88 due to complications of pneumonia. The Toni Morrison Papers are part of the permanent library collections of Princeton University, where they are held in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.
Film Adaptations
- Beloved (1998)
- Director: Jonathan Demme
- Starring: Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Thandiwe Newton, Kimberly Elise, Beah Richards, Lisa Gay Hamilton, and Albert Hall
Further Reading
The informal “Beloved” trilogy:
- Beloved (1987)
- Jazz (1992)
- Paradise (1998)
Other works by Toni Morrison:
- The Bluest Eye (1970)
- Sula (1973)
- Song of Solomon (1977)
- Tar Baby (1981)
- Love (2003)
- A Mercy (2008)
- Home (2012)
- God Help the Child (2015)
Literary Context 1987-1988
- 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature: awarded to Russian–American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity.”
- 1987 National Book Award Winner: Paco’s Story by Larry Heinemann. Note: The New York Times ran a piece about the 1987 National Book Award winner was a “stunning upset” since it was an antiwar novel and critics expected either Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Philip Roth’s The Counterlife to win.
- 1987 Booker Prize Winner: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1987 was The Tommyknockers by Stephen King. Other notable bestsellers included: Patriot Games by Tom Clancy, Kaleidoscope by Danielle Steel, Misery by Stephen King, Leaving Home by Garrison Keillor, Fine Things by Danielle Steel, and The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King.
- In 1987, K. W. Jeter coins the term “Steampunk” in a letter published in the science fiction magazine Locus.
- Chinua Achebe published Anthills of the Savannah.
- Peter Ackroyd published Chatterton.
- Douglas Adams published Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
- Iain Banks published Consider Phlebas.
- Saul Bellow published More Die of Heartbreak.
- T.C. Boyle published World’s End.
- James Ellroy published The Black Dahlia.
- John Gardner published No Deals, Mr. Bond.
- Ian McEwan published The Child in Time.
- James A. Michener published Legacy.
- Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons published the classic graphic novel Watchmen.
- V. S. Naipaul published The Enigma of Arrival.
- Michael Ondaatje published In the Skin of A Lion.
- Gary Paulsen published Hatchet.
- José Saramago published Baltasar and Blimunda.
- Gore Vidal published Empire.
- Kurt Vonnegut published Bluebeard.
- Gene Wolfe published The Urth of the New Sun.
Did The Right Book Win?
Unquestionably, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction made the right selection in 1988 by honoring Toni Morrison’s Beloved. This is a true American classic, regardless of the tactics used to ensure it would become a Pulitzer Prize-winner.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage International, a Division of Penguin Random House, New York, New York, 1987 (republished in 2004).