Slavery, Ghosts, and “Beloved” #22

Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course Literature, and today we're going to
talk about Beloved. MFTP: Mr. Green, Mr. Green! I actually like this book.
Yeah, I know you do, me from the past, because I'm you. So you read Song
of Solomon in class the year that Tony Morrison won the Nobel Prize and
that summer you read Beloved, the first, like, proper good book you ever
read for fun. Although in the case of Beloved, I suppose one uses the term
'fun' loosely. So Morrison says in a foreword to the novel, "I wanted the
reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the
first step into a shared experience with the book's population." And that
worked for you, me from the past. You were scared and upset and also
suddenly turned on to the idea that good novels were not just hurdles that
you had to jump over in order to get a high school diploma. Good books
could also be, like, ways into better understanding of the lives of others and
history and race and consciousness and what the real difference is between
those who walk on two legs and those who walk on four. MFTP: Yeah, I
don't know, it was pretty good. Wasn't that good. Aauugh you're ruining it,
me from the past, we were having a moment there. MFTP: It's just kind of
confusing, like, I couldn't figure out, like, if Beloved was a real ghost or
not...? Ugh, you just have this special gift for asking the least interesting
possible question about everything we read! If you take a hard line on the
question of Beloved's quote unquote 'realness', or even spend too much
time thinking about it, you're missing the point. I mean there are clues in the
book that speak to each perspective. Some that suggest that Beloved is the
ghost returned in human form, and others hinting that she is a woman who
has recently escaped sexual slavery and exploitation who happens to just
call herself Beloved. We're not supposed to know definitively whether
Beloved is really real, I mean isn't that the nature of ghosts? And it is her
ghostliness that makes her such a brilliant embodiment of all those
disremembered and unaccounted for. Ultimately, Beloved is a symbol for
the 60 million and more lost in slavery whose stories and names we will
never know. So critics often call good novels, like, 'beautiful' and 'haunting',
but Beloved—both the character and the novel—are actually haunting. For
me at least, when I'm reading this novel, my pulse begins to quicken as I feel
the presence of unsettled wronged souls beneath and around me. I mean,
there are so many untold fates and stories in this novel, right? There's the
14-year-old boy who lives alone in the woods and never remembers living
anywhere else; there are the other Pauls, the men on Paul D's chain gang;
Sethe's mother; Halle. Beloved embodies the disremembering that is woven
into life and art in the United States. I mean Morrison's story is fiction, it's
full of improbabilities and ghosts, but it's also one of the most powerfully
convincing depictions of slavery I've ever read. Because in the process of
what Sethe and Paul call 'rememory', we're confronted with the reality of
what love looks like in a world of twisted conscience, and we're finally left
with the unassailable resiliency of human beings to continue in the face of
all attempts to dehumanize them. "Definitions belonged to the definers, not
the defined," we read in Beloved, but in a world where slaves were defined
as inhuman—I mean, in this story they're compared to hogs and cattle and
horses—they find ways to humanness anyway. And that is what made
slavery untenable, not Abraham Lincoln, not Harriet Beecher Stowe, but
slaves themselves, unnamed and unknown, who resisted and persevered,
and therein lies the hope in this very, very sad novel. So let's start with
mothers. The mother-child relationship is mythologized as, like, the most
important among humans and most other animals, but in the context of
slavery, as Morrison writes, "Unless care free, mother love is a killer," and
that is not meant figuratively. So, the central character of Beloved is Sethe,
and she was raised basically motherless in a system of slavery that
intentionally disrupted mother-child relationships. Like baby Sethe is fed by
another woman's milk, for instance, which is one of the reasons that having
her own milk stolen by the white men who abuse her is so horrifying to her.
Children were often sold separately from their mothers, marriages were not
recognized, and in the era of the Fugitive Slave Act, even in freedom Sethe's
children were still claimable property. And when your children literally do
not belong to you, what does it mean to be a mom? Sethe's main mentor for
mothering is her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, but her life has also been
profoundly disrupted by slavery's breaking of family. In all of Baby's life, as
well as Sethe's own, men and women were moved around like checkers.
Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn't run off or been
hanged got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up,
mortgaged, won, stolen, or seized. So Baby's eight children had six fathers.
What she called 'the nastiness of life' was the shock she received upon
learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces
included her children. So Sethe stands in this disrupted line, but she tries to
resist by holding onto her family. She gets all her children across the Ohio
River to freedom from the slave farm Sweet Home where they were born,
and she carries one in her womb on swollen feet to freedom, but when the
slave-owner comes to Ohio 28 days later to claim them, she takes them out
back to the woodshed to kill them all before he can take them. She only
manages to kill one, sawing through its neck. "If I hadn't killed her," she says,
"she would have died." When explaining this to the Beloved who has
wondered into her life in the flesh, she goes deeper into what she did and
the intergenerational destruction that slavery put upon the mother line:
"My plan was to take us all to the other side, where my own mam is. They
stopped me from getting us there, but they didn't stop you from getting
here. You came right on back like a good girl, like a daughter, which is what I
wanted to be and would've been if my mam had been able to get out of the
rice long enough before they hanged her and let me be one." Sethe never
got the chance to be a daughter, but she does get to be a mother, and the
intensity of her mother-love is incomprehensible to everyone else— to her
remaining daughter, Denver; to her lover, Paul D; to her entire community
who ostracizes her. "Your love is too thick," Paul D says to her. He feels that
she didn't have the right to decide her children's future, to deny them a
future; he thinks her inhuman. "You got two feet, Sethe, not four." But what
does it mean to have two feet in a system aimed at breaking families and
individuals apart, especially women, who were not meant to be mothers
and daughters, but cattle and calves? This is made very explicit early in the
novel when it's said that sex with a slave woman was not, for Halle, so
different from sex with a calf. To be a mother, and to allow her daughters to
be daughters, Sethe has to escape the system itself. First, for her, this means
escape to the north and then, when that fails, it means escape to the other
side. As Sethe responds to Paul D's accusation of too-thick love, "Love is or it
ain't. Thin love ain't love at all." So, what, ultimately, is the truly human
response to this oppression? What is the proper response of the two-footed
creature? Okay, let's go to the Thought Bubble. So when Beloved begins,
Sethe and Denver's house is haunted by the ghost of the dead baby, and
then Paul D, who lived with Sethe at Sweet Home, arrives and in short order
begins a relationship with Sethe, rids the house of the ghost, and takes
Denver and Sethe to a carnival. And then the adult Beloved wanders into
their house 18 years after the already crawling baby was killed. We slowly
learn of Paul D's past, including his horrifying time being abused in every
way imaginable on a chain gang, and of Sethe and Denver's isolated life in
the house they share, while Beloved consumes more and more of Sethe's
life. After Paul D finds out that Sethe killed her baby, the Sethe-Beloved-
Denver dynamic goes from somewhat weird to truly terrifying. They
consume each other and each others' stories, and as Beloved grows larger,
Sethe grows ever smaller. Even Denver is eventually locked out from
Beloved and Sethe's mutual obsession. The novel moves among many
perspectives: third-person; close in on Baby Suggs or Denver or Paul D or
Sethe; and then in moments, first-person from various perspectives. And it
also changes tense from past to present, as if the past isn't really past,
especially to the women in the novel. They cannot lock it away and move
on. Sethe's attempt to kill herself and her family saves them all from a
return to slavery, but she can't escape it. As Toni Morrison later said in an
interview about Beloved, "You can't let the past strangle you if you're going
to go forward. But nevertheless, the past is not going anywhere." Thanks,
Thought Bubble. So Beloved ends on a somewhat hopeful note. I mean,
there's an attempted murder, but in the context of Beloved, that's actually
fairly hopeful. Denver begins to care for herself and she sees clearly both the
value of holding on to the mother line and the danger of holding on to
trauma. And then there's Paul D, who once had less freedom than a rooster
called Mister, who's seen rape and death and dehumanization, who along
with his fellow slaves has been made to feel like quote "Trespassers among
the human race, Watchdogs without teeth; steer bulls without horns; gelded
workhorses whose neigh and whinny could not be translated in a language
responsible humans spoke." Paul D believed that to survive such a world,
you protected yourself and loved small. He picked the tiniest stars out of the
sky to own. "A woman, a child, a brother?" he thinks, "A big love like that
would split you wide open." "Anything could stir him," we read, "and he
tried hard not to love it." But Sethe helps him to see that quote, "To get to a
place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for
desire—well now, that was freedom." And he, in return, encourages Sethe
to imagine a future, saying to her near the end of the novel, "Me and you,
we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow." So
in the end, Denver has learned to stand on her own two feet and Beloved
has moved on, only after the entire community has come to Sethe to forgive
her. And Paul D opens himself up to big love, to thick love, to the love of
Sethe, because quote, "he wants to put his story next to hers." And in his
love, he describes what all the characters, who all love each other in their
own ways, do for each other. He says, "She is a friend of my mind. She
gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me
in all the right order." The novel itself is a dialogue with the American idea of
itself and with the original American sin of slavery, and it tells us something
about how to walk on two feet, not four. And yes, like any horror novel, it is
revolting. It's revolting because we are forced to look at ourselves as we
have been and as we still are in many ways. We've seen this from Oedipus to
Slaughterhouse Five—great books can show us the ways that man can be a
wolf to man. But they also show us something of how to go on and why.
Morrison's genius here is in taking the tragedy of slavery and giving it shape
for us to deal with it. So often, horrors feel overwhelming to us, and
formless, and that can make them unfathomable. Near the end of the book,
Morrison writes, "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?" But now we do have at least one name:
Beloved. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.