Beloved by Toni Morrison
“Something that is loved is never lost.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved
In observation of Banned Books Week 2023, I decided to treat myself and reread Beloved by my favorite author, Toni Morrison. In 1988, Beloved received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award, the Melcher Book Award, the Lyndhurst Foundation Award, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award. When the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Toni Morrison in 1993, it was said that her novels were characterized by ” visionary force and poetic import” and that she “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” In 2006, a survey of writers and literary critics compiled by The New York Times ranked Beloved as the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved has been the object of challenges in school districts and public library systems across the country. For instance, in 2022, the Protect Nebraska Children Coalition brought an extensive list of books to the Wauneta-Pallisade (NE) Public Schools board meeting and wanted the books removed from both the elementary and high school libraries. This list of more than 30 titles includes Beloved. All books were subsequently removed for evaluation. In 2016, Beloved was challenged but retained as an optional summer reading choice in the Satellite Beach (FL) High School Advanced Placement classes. A parent admitted that he had not read the entire book when he addressed the committee, but wanted the book banned because of what he called “porn content.” In 2013, Beloved was challenged but retained as a text in Salem (MI) High School Advanced Placement English courses. The complainants cited the allegedly obscene nature of some passages in the book and asked that it be removed from the curriculum. District officials determined the novel was appropriate for the age and maturity level of Advanced Placement students. In reviewing the novel, the committee also considered the accuracy of the material, the objectivity of the material, and the necessity of using the material in light of the curriculum.
Scholars say one of the reasons Toni Morrison’s books are controversial is because they address dark moments in American history that can be uncomfortable to talk about for some people. Beloved, for example, was inspired by The Margaret Garner Incident of 1856. Margaret Garner was born into slavery on June 4, 1834, on Maplewood Plantation in Boone County, Kentucky. Working as a house slave for much of her life, Garner often traveled with her masters and even accompanied them on shopping trips to free territories in Cincinnati, Ohio. After marrying Robert Garner in 1849, Margaret bore four children by 1856. At this time, the Underground Railroad was at its height in and around Cincinnati, transporting numerous slaves to freedom in Canada. The Garners decided to take advantage of such an opportunity to escape enslavement. On Sunday January 27, 1856, they set out for their first stop on their route to freedom, Joseph Kite’s house in Cincinnati. The Garners made it safely to Kite’s home on Monday morning, where they awaited their next guide. Within hours, the Garners’ master, A.K. Gaines, and Federal marshals stormed Kite’s home with warrants for the Garners. Determined not to return to slavery, Margaret decided to take the lives of herself and her children. When the marshals found Margaret in a back room, she had slit her two-year-old daughter’s throat with a butcher knife, killing her. The other children lay on the floor wounded but still alive. The Garners were taken into custody and tried in what became one of the longest fugitive slave trials in history. During the two-week trial, abolitionist and lawyer, John Jolliffe, argued that Margaret’s trips to free territory in Cincinnati entitled her and her children to freedom. Although Jolliffe provided compelling arguments, the judge denied the Garners’ plea for freedom and returned them to Gaines. He relocated the Garners to several different plantations before finally selling them to his brother in Arkansas.
Emily Knox, author of Book Banning in 21st-Century America, states of Toni Morrison’s body of work, that: “What she tried to do is convey the trauma of the legacy of slavery to her readers. That is a violent legacy. Her books do not sugarcoat or use euphemisms. And that is actually what people have trouble with.” Dana A. Williams, President of the Toni Morrison Society and Dean of Howard University’s graduate school says: “Toni Morrison’s books tend to be targeted because she is unrelenting in her belief that the very particular experiences of Black people are incredibly universal. Blackness is the center of the universe for her and for her readers, or for her imagined reader. And that is inappropriate or inadequate or unreasonable or unimaginable for some people.”
Toni Morrison often spoke out against censorship, both of her work and more broadly. Her comments in the introduction of Burn This Book, a 2009 anthology of essays she edited on censorship issues, are especially appropriate for today. “The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.”
In September 2022, as part of New York Public Library’s Banned Books Week celebration, the NYPL honored Toni Morrison. Her words printed below are engraved on one of its walls at its flagship location on 42nd Street.
Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. No committee decides who may enter, no crisis of body or spirit must accompany the entrant. No tuition is charged, no oath sworn, no visa demanded. Of the monuments humans build for themselves, very few say ‘touch me, use me, my hush is not indifference, my space is not a barrier.’ If I inspire awe, it is because I am in awe of you and the possibilities that dwell in you.
Resources
Toni Morrison on writing ‘Beloved’ (1987 interview)
Toni Morrison talks to Peter Florence
Toni Morrison on Beloved | Hay Festival
Why should you read Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”? – Yen Pham
“Beloved” – Banned Books Week 2021
Readout: Beloved – Banned Books Week 2020
Banned Books Conversations – Beloved by Toni Morrison
Beloved was recently added to Everyman’s Library with a new introduction by A. S. Byatt.
