“Unspeakable Things Unspoken”: Reflections on Teaching Beloved

She said, that when the officers and slave-hunters came to the house in which they were concealed, she caught a shovel and struck two of her children on the head, and then took a knife and cut the throat of the third, and tried to kill the other,—that if they had given her time, would have killed them all.

P. S. Bassett, “A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child,” 1856

A young escaped slave woman kills her baby girl and would have killed her other children if she had not been stopped. When I read the initial reviews of Beloved, Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, my own response was that this is not a story I wanted to read. Indeed it seemed “this was not a story to pass on.” For me, after reading Beloved and especially after teaching it, the idea of stories that were not to be “passed on” took on a much more profound meaning about choices and responsibilities, the consequences of forgetting, and the need to come to terms with the past in the present so that such stories are not endlessly repeated. Also, we should not forget how controversial this novel was when it first appeared. Stanley Crouch denounced the novel as a melodramatic blackface holocaust story; it was not deemed worthy of the National Book Award, which led to forty-eight black writers and scholars signing a letter of protest in response to this lack of recognition. Although it went on to win the Pulitzer, Beloved remains on the banned books list in a number of U.S. school districts, presumably because of its depiction of brutality and sexual violence. Yet how else can such a story be told? After years of teaching this novel, it is ever more apparent to me not only what a literary achievement it is but also how important it has been for our rethinking of the history and legacy of slavery. It dares to tell what many of us don’t want to remember or know. Like Sethe, we are a people and a nation that still hasn’t come to terms with the historical debt of slavery.

Beloved is a text that goes beyond statistics and ledger accounts and effectively imagines the profound psychological cost of slavery to the men, women, and children for whom no one was held accountable and for whom no debt is recognized. It not only belies the seemingly ever resurgent myth of slavery as a benign institution (Sweet Home) but also interrogates the deepest existential meaning of freedom (Denard 2008, 44–45). Teaching this novel in a class made up of a diverse group of students, of whom many are immigrants or children of immigrants, can create an underlying tension about issues of identity: belonging and not belonging, anger that is righteous or not so righteous. The subject matter of Beloved is emotionally charged, deliberately so. Some readers see themselves as outsiders; others lay claim to the text as part of their own personal history; many feel defensive about what they perceive as suggestions of racial complicity. For me as a native-born African American who spent her earliest years in the Jim Crow South, the classroom dynamics can be difficult to negotiate. Like Morrison’s earlier novels, Beloved has personal resonance for me. It evokes a past that neither I nor my parents’ generation experienced but that seemed to live on in the people and places we knew and had been told about. My great-grandmother was the daughter of parents born in slavery. She kept her Bible close but never went to church. As a child I wondered why, but never asked. What conflict did she feel about the power of salvation for descendants of slaves? Like Stamp Paid in Beloved, my great-grandfather changed his name, but in his case the new name was associated with a notorious outlaw, in an act of defiance by my great-grandfather against laws that were never intended to protect him or his family.

How then should I assume my own relationship to the...