Thomas C. Holt, Unpublished & forthcoming work
"'To Make the World Anew' The Black Role in Reconstruction," keynote speech at Conference: Remembering Reconstruction at Carolina, Center for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, October 1, 2004.
"Sambo à Paris" [available in French translation upon request]
"A Story Not to Pass On: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Our Historical Imagination," talk delivered to Mid-West Faculty Seminar, University of Chicago, October 31, 1998.
I wish to invite your examination of Morrison’s Beloved as a meditation on history. I do so realizing that on one level, of course, such an invitation may seem fairly simple-minded, even banal. This talk, coming this late in your proceedings may well have already been preempted in earlier discussions of the relation of the novel to its historical sources—the real Sethe, Margaret Garner—or in even more abstract discussions of the problematic relation between history and memory as such. And even if this is not the case, it’s no secret that Beloved is somehow about history. Staring out at the reader as she turns the title page is the dedication “Sixty million and more.” This is a book dedicated to those many thousands gone, the African peoples who perished in slave coffles trekking their way to western and central African slave forts and baracoons, those dying and surviving the middle passage, and those African Americans mangled and marked by four centuries of slavery in the Americas. It is a book committed to deciphering the experience of slavery. Understanding not simply what it did to people—to their bodies--but what it did to their souls, to the very possibility of living a human life not only during slavery but after slavery as well. You hardly need a historian to tell you that this book. . .is about history.
I hope you will indulge me, nonetheless, because I am frankly using this occasion to try to think out loud about aspects of this book that have puzzled me. Obviously this is a book inspired by an actual historical event, which serves as a kind of synecdoche for the black historical experience writ large. But what precisely are we to draw from this story? I don’t mean anything so crude as “what is its message?” Clearly, Morrison leaves much undecided and perhaps even undecidable. Like the ghost story at its center, the novel itself is in many ways somewhat indeterminate, indistinct, and even ambiguous. Still, I don’t think we are meant to get off that easy. When we finish this novel dedicated to sixty million gone, we are meant to understand—or to be on our way to understanding, to have the tools for achieving understanding—something important about their struggles, something, a story—to invert one of the memorable last phrases--to pass on.
It might be helpful if we began with the harrowing, real life history that inspired the novel. On January 29, 1856, the Cincinnati Daily Gazette ran a story about what it called “great excitement” in the city the previous day, “in consequences of the arrest of a party of slaves, and the murder of her child by a slave mother, while officers were in the act of making the arrest.” There were 17 fugitives involved, men, women and children, who had escaped from Kentucky across the frozen river (like Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin). The owners of the slaves (there were 3 different owners in this case rather than one), with the aid of a Deputy U.S. Marshall and others, sought to serve a warrant for their arrest under provisions of the recently passed Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. When they broke into the house, however, the slaves put up a fierce resistance, wounding one of the Marshalls (shot off two fingers). “In the house were found four adults, . . .: old Simon and his wife, and young Simon and his wife and four children of the latter, the oldest near six years and the youngest a babe of about nine months. One of these, however, was lying on the floor dying, its head cut almost entirely off. There was also a gash about four inches long in the throat of the eldest, and a wound on the head of the other boy.”
Much of the rest of the story in this and subsequent issues of the paper revolved around tensions between city, state, and federal authorities over jurisdiction in the case and efforts by abolitionists to free them—all of which were ultimately unsuccessful as far Margaret Garner and her husband and children were concerned. However, 9 of the original 17 fugitives actually did manage to escape, and there was a later report that Margaret later succeeded in killing yet another of her babies, by letting it slip overboard into the river as she was being transported back into slavery.
This story was quickly picked up by the abolitionist press, becoming a featured exhibit in their on-going attack on slavery in general and the operation of the Fugitive Slave Act in particular. One gets a sense of this use of the tragedy in Morrison’s account, in the final climatic scene when Edward Bodwin, the abolitionist who owns the house at 124 Bluestone Road, reminisces about these “good old days” and heady successes of the abolitionists (as he makes his way to pick up Denver): “The Society,” he observes, “managed to turn infanticide and the cry of savagery around and build a further case for abolishing slavery.” What’s involved here, in much of the contemporary coverage and later remembrances of this incident, then, is not just the telling, but the reconstruction of a story. Reconstruction not in the sense of outright distorting or fictionalizing it, but of interpreting it, of giving signs and shadings that point the reader to its salient points, that tells the reader how this story should be understood. It drives home to us how history is also story, in the sense that it is not just an accounting but a process of rendering meaning to the past.
And, indeed, the abolitionist press and spokespeople were quite successful in this work—so successful, perhaps, that we now have to work our way back toward visualizing a very different framing, or shading than in the story, the meaning of the incident we have inherited. Abolitionist Lucy Stone provided one of the most compelling contemporaneous renditions of how to think about what Margaret Garner did.
“When I saw that poor fugitive, took her toil-hardened hand in mine, and read in her face deep suffering and an ardent longing for freedom, I could not help bid her be of good cheer. I told her that a thousand hearts were aching for her, and that they were glad one child of hers was safe with the angels. Her only reply was a look of deep despair, of anguish such as no words can speak. I thought the spirit she manifested was the same with that of our ancestors to whom we had erected the monument at Bunker Hill—the spirit that would rather let us all go back to God than back to slavery…. Rather than give her little daughter to that life, she killed it. If in her deep maternal love she felt the impulse to send her child back to God, to save it from coming woe, who shall say she had no right to do so?”
She goes on to argue that such an impulse is part of human nature, of black as well as white, that she herself would “with my own teeth…tear open my veins and let the earth drink my blood, rather than to wear the chains of slavery.” What Margaret Garner did, according to Stone, was both heroic—like the American patriots memorialized at Bunker Hill, and natural—natural as a mother’s love for her children.
Therefore, Lucy Stones’ propagandistic rendering of Margaret’s story is no less a refashioning than Toni Morrison’s fictional account. There are, as one might expect, many details in this story that differ from Morrison’s more economical account, and most of those differences are of little significance to us here. But interestingly enough, on one point both Morrison’s fiction and Lucy Stone’s propaganda agree: both move Margaret—and the maternalist theme—to the center of the story. The father of the children is barely visible, having already dropped out of Morrison’s story at the time of the killing and scarcely part of the abolitionist accounts at all. And this despite the fact that it is Margaret Garner’s husband who leads the resistance and fires the shots when the Marshalls break in, and that it is he and other adults present who join in the grisly work of trying to kill the children. But for contemporaries and for us, the relevant headline for this story remains, as it appeared in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette more than a century ago, “A Slave Mother Murders her Child rather than see it Returned to Slavery.”
As you know, of course, Morrison’s novel actually complicates that simple storyline. Sethe pays a heavy price for her crime. Her penalty is less a matter of legal, official punishment—which is much lighter than that Margaret Garner actually suffers—but entails the ostracism of her community and the suffering and death that follows in the wake of what she and other characters call “The Misery.” One of the puzzles of the novel for me, in fact, has been how to think about the community’s harsh rejection—indeed, even betrayal—of Sethe. If the community is right, then is Sethe a monster (the image, ironically, that the abolitonists fought so hard to supplant and reverse). And if a slave cannot be proud, then how can they ever be heroic.
The novel also refuses to allow us to adopt a much too easy maternalist line—the heroic, loving mother who lives and dies for her children, a love that is the rock on which family and community must rest. By contrast, this novel is full of tortured mother-child relations. Mothers accept, nurture, and bask in some children, but others they discard, push away, and forget. Sethe can’t remember her mother and seems to almost casually forget her sons, Howard and Buglar after they run off. Baby Suggs bears eight by six fathers, but loves only Halle, Sethe’s husband and the son of the only man she loved. Ella lets the child born of her forced sexual relations with a white man, pine away and die. Indeed, she explicitly recognizes the kinship of her own callous act with Sethe’s crime—and the possibility that she, too, could be haunted by a grieving, angry child-past.
Lucy Stone’s neatly framed story of heroic matrydom and mother-love just won’t do. This story, this history does not have a simple, linear trajectory. Like the structure of the novel itself, time and meaning double back upon themselves. Questions are often answered with other questions?
Of course, as many of you are no doubt aware, there is a virtual cottage industry of studies that evoke the concept of “memory” these days. Some of that work seeks to draw distinctions between the concepts of “memory” and “history.” While there may be some merit to such distinctions in some contemporary contexts, my own reading of Beloved suggests that memory and history occupy the same conceptual space here. That is to say, what we learn from these characters’ struggles with “memory” (or “rememory” as Sethe calls it) is that it also reflects potential understandings of history and how to think about historical experience writ large. Like history, memory here is often not just an individual process, but a collective one, involving tellings and retellings. Paul D adds crucial details to Sethe’s rememory and she to his.
Put simply, what I see here are characters struggling to come to terms with the past, to live in a present exorcised of the demons of the past, and thus to build a viable future. This theme runs through the text in ways that are almost too numerous to list. We are told, for example, that “To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay (42).” That she starts in one morning kneading bread as a way of beginning “the day’s [more] serious work of beating back the past (73).” And at another point, that her task is one of “managing” knowledge of the past. “. . . if she could just manage the news Paul D brought,” we are told, “and the news he kept to himself. Just manage it. Not break, fall or cry each time a hateful picture drifted in front of her face (97).”
On and on it goes, with countless references to the need to forget, to not remember, or in the more active verb form, “to disremember.” For so many of these characters the present is a living struggle to contain the past before it devours ones soul, devours the very possibility of having a future.
But more than this thematic thread, built on scattered references, is the very structure of the plot. Beloved is the past, a past that returns in the flesh and threatens to consume Sethe and destroy all connected to her. Salvation for her, for those around her, for the entire community comes when that past is banished back to the murky waters from which it arose.
But what are we to make of all this. Is the past simply bad, to be shunned, forgotten, suppressed. Is it truly “unspeakable?” Is this really a story not to pass on? Just what should our posture to the past be?
Here I think we must engage yet another theme—separate but interlinked with the theme of time, memory, and history. In many ways it is the one that’s given me the most trouble—it is the problem of the relation between Sethe and her community. I trust that it’s obvious from even a cursory reading of the novel that Sethe is not cast out by the black community simply because she killed her child—horrible as that act was regarded. As I have already noted the novel is replete with images of mothers rejecting, forgetting, and casting aside their children. Such acts are clearly continuous with the horror of slavery itself. Women raped in front of their husbands or with their full knowledge (Halle and Stamp Paid); women violated with impunity and routinely (Baby Suggs, Sethe, and Ella); black men sodomized by white men (Paul D). For slaves, negotiating everyday life is to move through a chaotic maze in which the very integrity of ones psychic being is in constant danger of being smashing into pieces. This is a world in which “anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. (251)”
No, the other characters also act desperately, wildly, even irresponsibly. One senses that Sethe could have been forgiven her crime against motherhood. But what she couldn’t be forgiven was her pride, her excess—these are her crimes against the community itself. As she emerged from the killing shed covered with blood, was she carrying her head a bit too high, the crowd asks: “Her back a little too straight? Probably. (152).” And, indeed, Sethe herself admits to a kind of selfish pride in having managed—without the help of her menfolk—to escape slavery, pregnant, with a babe in arms. It was something she couldn’t give up, “a kind of selfish pleasure” in her accomplishment (162). And after she came out of jail, and at Baby Suggs’ funeral, she held herself aloof from the community, refusing to attend the funeral service or to eat with her neighbors.
But even more, it’s suggested that an act of pride sets off the whole train of events that leads up to the tragedy in the first place. Baby Suggs, beloved and respected benefactor of her community, hosts an extravagant celebration of her daughter and grandchildren’s escape from slavery. Recovering from the hangover the following day, the community--almost as on cue (Stamp Paid being the exception)--distances itself from her for this excessive display, one that seemed to suggest that she was apart from them, perhaps better, richer, more favored than they. “Maybe they just wanted to know if Baby really was special, blessed in some way they were not (157).” But it’s on that very day, on that fateful day, that Schoolteacher and his slavecatching party rode into town looking for Sethe. If Sethe had been warned, if she could have hidden or escaped, events would have unfolded differently. But no one came to warn her, Not Ella, not John, not anybody ran down or to Bluestone Road, to say some new whitefolks with the Look just rode in.” Caught by surprise, in her desperation, she killed her child.
For Sethe—as she insists to Paul D and to Beloved—this was a supreme act of love, a mother’s love, a heroic love. Indeed she renders a defense not unlike Lucy Stone’s. But for Paul D it was an excessive love: “Your love is too thick.” Sethe cannot comprehend what he means by a love too thick. A thin love, after all, is no love at all. He can’t understand, she thinks, it’s because he is a man. But then, later on, Denver echoes his thought when she observes that her mother and sister are “locked in a love that wore everybody out.” Indeed, Beloved almost literally consumes Sethe, along with her stories of the past. She feeds off the stories and grows to enormous size while Sethe shrinks. In the final scene on the porch, we are told, she looks like a little child beside her daughter.
For Paul D, Baby Suggs, and the black community at large, Sethe’s prideful act and bearing go against the survival lessons embedded in the historical experience of black folk. Love small, because black folk are ever vulnerable to dispossession—dispossession of goods, of children, even of self. But Sethe, Paul D observes, doesn’t seem to “know where the world stopped and she began. Suddenly he saw what Stamp Paid wanted him to see; more important than what Sethe had done was what she claimed (164).” It is a hubris, perhaps, that approaches that of the whitefolks themselves.
As Baby Suggs rages bitterly, the white folks can and will take away everything you have at any moment, on a whim, carelessly, sometimes even without conscious intent. The task of black folk is not to die heroically, it would appear, but to survive. It is—as even Sethe says at one point, recalling an almost proverbial black retort--“to make a way out of no way.” And yet, even so, the question remains: “How much is a nigger supposed to take?” Paul D demands of Stamp Paid. “All he can,” he replies. “All he can.” “Why,” exclaims Paul D, “Why, Why, Why.” (235)
Is the theme here one of grace under pressure, of stoic resolution to move ahead despite the horrors of life? Perhaps. Perhaps this is the message in the novel’s final resolution, which is set in motion when Denver goes out of the yard and into the world beyond, making contact with the community and work. As she stands poised to do so, however, she recalls the fierce debates between her mother and Baby Suggs. The struggle between black life and white evil is not a war but a rout, Baby Suggs declares. There is no hope. And yet, as Denver stands fearful on the porch, she asks “But you said there was no defense.” “There ain’t,” answered her grandmother. “Then what do I do?” “Know it,” came the reply, “and go out the yard.” (246)
And with that first step, Denver escapes the clutches of the family’s past and moves to build a future. Rebuilding their links to a larger community, humbly accepting its help. Moreover her act of passing her family’s story on to the community through Janey Wagon is part of the healing process that makes escape from that past possible. And, with these gestures, the community turns to retake it’s own, led by Ella. Ella who declares that “Whatever Sethe done, [she] didn’t like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present (256)” “The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out. Slave life; freed life—every day was a test and a trial.” And with that she and 29 other women marched on 124 Bluestone Road, determined to exorcise “a grown-up evil sitting at the table with a grudge (257).” The last thing Beloved sees is Sethe and Denver running toward these women, who seem to envelop and absorb them, like a singular mass, a hill. It is then that she disappears.
The women we’re told forgot Beloved “like a bad dream.” But is Beloved the whole past or just an aspect of the past. “It [hers?] is not a story to pass on.” But then: “Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative—looked at too long—shifts, something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can touch it if they like, but don’t, because they know things will never be the same if they do. This [also?]is not a story to pass on.” But does story here refer to that of the relatives, the loved ones? Or, is it a reference to what lingers around the edges of their eyes, their mouths? Or, better still, is it something like what Paul D senses when he returns to 124 Bluestone Road in the final scene: something “just beyond his knowing . . . the glare of an outside thing that embraces while it accuses (271).” And, this past, this history is much like our loved ones interred in distant cemeteries, under stones bearing words like “Dearly beloved”; it/they must be disremembered so that life can go on, but can never be entirely forgotten lest we lose the very meaning of life, and the thread of our origins and history.
I would interpret those now famous last lines, therefore-—“it/this is not a story to pass on”—to mean it is not a story easily passed on, but that we must pass it on nonetheless—but carefully, with discernment, with discipline, with empathy. We should never let it obsess and immobilize us. After all, the novel itself is an act of passing a story on—but passed on not easily, not in a linear, neatly boxed narrative like Lucy Stone’s. Rather the story is passed on as it is—messily, troublesome, and troubling--for white folks and black folks alike. A story much like that of the African-American experience writ large. A story much like the history of America.