Dirty Stories

No, it's not an easy read. Like the Book of Job, the novel is dark and often dreary and depressing. But then, so is its world, the world of institutional slavery. When Toni Morrison wrote Beloved, she deliberately and defiantly chose to take on what many historians of culture call America's "original sin." Beloved is the story of a woman who did the unthinkable because the unthinkable was worse than the unimaginable.

Morrison based her story on a horrific event recorded in a religious magazine in 1856, the account of a woman so determined that her children would not return to slavery that she decided to kill them rather than have them submit treachery she herself had experienced. It's the story of Sethe, the mom who murdered a daughter when the Fugitive Slave Law was just outside her door ready to drag all of them back to chains. Denver, a second daughter, escaped death only because Sethe had time to kill only one of her children. 

Morrison's story is complex and moves in strange directions. The Civil War is over now, but the child Sethe murdered haunts their house and their lives, and most people in the community know it and avoid them. What happens isn't pleasant, but then, to say the least, neither was slavery. When, eventually, the ghost, Beloved, disappears, Sethe is heartbroken, because ghost or not, Beloved was her deceased child after all.

At the end, Denver, Sethe's living daughter, sits with her mother and her mother's grief and insists, in a moment I've always felt triumphant, that Beloved wasn't her mother's "best thing," as her mother's tears insist, but that she herself is her "best thing."

Sophie's Choice, a Holocaust novel by William Styron, left a permanent record in my soul. It's a difficult novel I'd love to take a shot at editing myself. It's the work of a mind I don't always understand, but nothing I've ever read about the Holocaust has left the mark Sophie's Choice has in a horrific moment when a woman stands on the platform, having just arrived at Auschwitz, and is told by Mengele that one of her two children will go to the gas chamber. It is her job to determine which of her children will live and which will die. 

No moment in anything I've ever read detailed as excruciatingly the horror of death camp suffering than the moment Styron created right there on the platform. 

For me at least, Morrison's Beloved, has a place in my soul as permanent as Styron's Sophie's Choice. If someone wanted to understand the horrific legacy of the institutional slavery, I'd recommend Toni Morrison's Beloved. And I am not the only reader so taken. In 1988, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 

So this weekend the Republican candidate for the office of governor in Virginia released an ad that featured a brave woman--that's her up top--who took on the evil liberals of her son's high school English department when she picked up Beloved and found, well, bad stuff. She complained to the school's board, told them her son was being forced to read really bad things. 

I'm a liberal. I'll confess. I hope the Democrat, Terry McAuliffe wins the gubernatorial race in Virginia; but the issue that new ad prompts is bigger than an election because it has to do with how we understand and value our own past.

That woman, the Republican candidate suggests, is a hero for policing her son's assignments and clearing him from having to read Beloved for an advance placement class during his senior year in high school. 

I can't help but think she's wrong. She doesn't want her 18-year-old son, who's taking an advance placement--which is to say "college" class--reading the filth millions of her countrymen and women say is one of America's all-time greatest novels, a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Twenty years ago maybe, Christianity Today asked me to participate in a story they were doing on writers' favorite works. I've never been fond of answering questions like that because they force judgments I can't make. But I agreed to participate. I don't remember the whole list, but I do remember telling CT that my all-time favorite novel was Toni Morrison's Beloved.

One of us wrong. Sorry, lady, but in my mind and heart and soul, it's you.