Beloved, horror

I read Beloved by Toni Morrison this weekend. I haven't read a novel in quite a while, other than for teaching, just plays and screenplays these days. I picked it up because a roundabout chain of events (discussing Oprah's film career leading me to look it up) making me realize that it was inspired by the case of Margaret Garner, who's been in my mind for years but I never knew was connected to this book.

Margaret Garner was an escaped slave who, when confronted with the possibility of recapture for her and her children, killed her two-year-old baby rather than allow it to be taken. The act shocked everyone involved to such a degree that no one knew what to do with her, and she was taken away to jail, while some argued for her punishment and some people argued there was a justification for her act. It stuck in my mind powerfully because I have never been able to decide what to make of it. On one hand, how could you kill your child? How could you cut off all hope of possibility for that child's future? But on the other... she knew what slavery was, and she decided that it was better for her child to die than live that life. She would know how bad it was. But, still, was it her RIGHT to take away all possibility for that child, even with her maternal responsibility, even with the weight of her knowledge? So I've never been able to forget this case for my complete inability to assess it.

The book is beautiful and brutal, told in fragments of memories amid the unfolding of a horror story in their present lives. It is all about the enduring mark of horror that has been left on these people's lives by having been owned. And it makes you realize just what that means in a way that, in the absence of the details of narrative, I think we don't usually grasp. At least, as a white person like me.

I did not, thank God, have an education that pretended slavery was less awful than it was. I do think it's sometimes presented as just, like, analagous to English service you just don't get a choice about, but I was not under that illusion. I think primary education glosses over the specifics sometimes, though I understand why, but just telling you, for example, about the rampancy of sexual assault doesn't really make it clear what that means. The book makes you see the depths of the horror and degradation in a way simple facts do not.

But there's one undercurrent in the story that troubles me. One thing that is mentioned over and over that in the condition of being a slave, you cannot afford to love anyone because they could be taken away or destroyed, at a whim, at any moment. I certainly understand how difficult it can be to put your heart out there when there's so much tragedy it could be subjected to. But the book seems to suggest even that it dulls the ability, not just the opportunity, to love. Like, the mothers lost even the ability to really love their babies because of the knowledge that something terrible could happen to them.

Is that really so? Can even something so abjectly awful as chattel slavery take away the ability to love? Loving your child is natural. Like, how could you stop it? How could anything turn off the human capacity to love your children? I mean, maybe that's it. Maybe that's the whole point, that's just part of how horrifying it was. But to me there's something kind of offensive in that— to suggest that the victims of this horror were turned into people who could not love. Like, they were still human beings! No matter how you treat a person like an object, they never become an object! Does torture really take away such a fundamental aspect of humanity? That idea seems... racist, almost. To suggest those people were rendered into something less than human.

I don't know. Of course I know nothing. I can't begin to relate to or understand these ideas. Maybe that's it! Maybe that's the horror! I've heard people say that if you treat somebody some way long enough, they're likely to become it.

But I don't feel like that's an assessment I could ever make. Maybe Toni Morrison could— or somebody could argue that even she couldn't —but not me. I don't feel like I could ever believe that without being incredibly racist. I can't believe that a human being could be ROBBED of their capacity to love and made into something that can't love without believing that person isn't human anymore. I can't believe a human being can be made less than human by the actions done to them by another human. Maybe by their own actions. But not something somebody did to them.

I will never truly understand. And that's why this book rocked me.