"You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet": Beloved, the American Chain Gang, and the Middle Passage Remix

This article offers a reassessment of Toni Morrison’s most acclaimed novel, Beloved, a text that has been consistently described by critics as a “neo-slave narrative.” This generic tag denotes a set of modern—usually latter twentieth century—novels that offer retrospective narrations of chattel slavery from a “post” slavery context. I challenge this prevailing view of the novel by describing it as a narrative of neoslavery, a term that I use to describe texts in which the institutional, legal, and spatial survivals of chattel slavery after de jure emancipation are thrown into relief. I offer analysis of Morrison’s graphic depiction of three of the most horrific penal architectures in US history—the slave ship, the plantation, and the chain gang camp—contending that Beloved is as concerned with “future” racial traumas, i.e. those occurring after the Civil War, as it is on those of the chattel slavery past. When read in relation to Morrison ’s portrait of the Middle Passage, the chain gang scene focalizes the intimate connections of ante- and postbellum formations of racial and spatial terrorismsystems of abjection that have culminated in the modern prison industrial complex which currently encages well over 2.3 million people. The living entombment of Paul D and 45 other black men in a chain gang “box” in Alfred, Georgia, represents a forward haunting intrusion of a postbellum spatial formation of penal terror into the action of a novel ostensibly fixated on the antebellum past. I consequently read the chain gang scene—and Beloved as a whole—as a narrative articulation of what I describe as the Middle Passage carceral model, a system of racial and spatial terrorism that belies liberal notions of historical progress while bringing into focus the long-standing criminality of the racial capitalist state.