Book: Beloved by Toni Morrison

Just finished Toni Morrison's Beloved. I had read Song of Solomon before and discovered how powerful Morrison's writing was. Her stories are unreal but taken from something larger than life, and thus appears to be more real. Of the two, Beloved is a more intimate book. It is an epic story about American slavery through the lives of three generations of women (and ghost). I am once again captivated by the power in Morrison's language, imagination, emotion, and depth of history. It is as if the whole history of American is inside of her and the book is just one explosive explosive imaginary after another and never ending. How much suffering and history are inside of her to write a book of such weight and scale?!

"It was a kind of selfishness I never knew nothing about before. It felt good. Good and right. It was big, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide. Look like I loved em more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn't love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn't mine to love. But when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon--there wasn't nobody in the world I couldn't love if I wanted to. You know what I mean?"

Paul D did not answer because she didn't expect or want him to, but he did know what she meant. Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon--everything belonged to the men who had the guns. Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if he wanted to. Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them. And these "men" who made even vixen laugh could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Glass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother--a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now, that was freedom.

"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. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."