(Possible spoilers)
For the Banned Book Club discussion at Doyle's Public House on Tuesday, December 17, 2013 we selected Beloved by Toni Morrison over, I believe, Water for Elephants. We had chosen books over Beloved at times during the past year, such as Go Tell it on the Mountain for February 2013, The Kite Runner for July, and A Study in Scarlet for August. I think I first heard of Beloved when the when the movie came out in the late 1990's starring Oprah Winfrey. I never saw it. It looked like a horror movie or perhaps a suspense thriller. The book turned out to be more complex than that. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. The title is featured prominently in the book in a few different ways. It first appears in the epigram: "I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not my beloved."
Beloved is not an easy book to read. Much of it is told in flashbacks and it only slightly follows a linear storyline. Many flashbacks seem like stream of consciousness, though the book is written in the third person. The main character seems to be Sethe, the former slave from the Kentucky plantation, Sweet Home like many of the characters such as Paul D, and Baby Suggs. Several have colorful names such as Sethe's daughter, Denver, son Buglar, and the man who helps Sethe escape to freedom, Stamp Paid. Much of the story is not told directly but pieced together through the characters' memories. A few parts are never completely explained but still implied. Initially I found this difficult, but later I appreciated how this was similar to how stories are pieced together in real life. In real life there is no such thing as an omniscient narrator. I also found the story quite compelling and worth sorting through all the characters' flashbacks. It includes elements of the supernatural, some vivid descriptions of the setting such as the house on Bluestone Road and the neighborhood. Though I didn't enjoy reading the book, I'm glad I got through it.
The book portrays the experiences of slaves and former slaves in Kentucky and Ohio. They had difficult and very unstable lives since they had no or very little freedom until later in their lives. Morrison dedicates the book to "60 million or more" that I think are all the descendants of slaves in the U.S. The book does not hide from the indignities of slavery such as "That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you." (p. 289) It also explores former slaves' experiencing freedom for the first time and trying to figure out what it means: "Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another." (p. 80)
Some of Morrison's commentary, as illustrations of the characters' thoughts, seems like it describes experiences of contemporary African-Americans. The characters reflect how "There was no way in hell a black face could appear in the newspaper if the story was about something anybody wanted to hear." (p. 185) Later they reflect how even the educated African-Americans: "the long educated people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a long road to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that." (p. 232)
There were a couple of relatable references and an interesting one. Paul D is described as having done "manly things," though I'm not sure how many are mentioned on the Art of Manliness website. At one point he becomes acquainted with "a private called Keane" who "had been with the Massachusetts 54th." (p. 311) I don't think this is from where the band Keane got their name. I do think the Massachusetts 54th was the black regiment featured in the movie Glory. I saw the memorial for the regiment at Boston Common in 1991. One room in Sethe's house in Beloved is called the "keeping room." We can add this room to the list of rooms in our imaginary dream house that already has a morning room and a home management room.
I enjoyed a couple of descriptions of food in Beloved. Sethe "had beaten two eggs into yesterday's hominy, formed it into patties, and fried them with some ham pieces . . . " (p. 214) That sounds like a delicious recipe. Their first vegetable patch is "close to the house where quick things grew: beans, onions, sweet peas, …" (p. 225)
We had a good discussion of Beloved on Tuesday, December 17 despite sweet pea not being there. Beloved was challenged in 2008 but not removed from Salem (MI) High School advanced placement courses due to "obscene nature of some passages dealing with bestiality, gang rape, and an infant's gruesome murder." It was also pulled from a senior reading list in Kentucky in 2012-2013 because two parents complained that the book depicted the inappropriate topics of bestiality, racism, and sex. We talked about the story, writing, characters, and how some of the book was based on a true story. I ordered the spinach salad without cheese and a Cock and Bull ginger brew to drink. At the end of the discussion we chose for the next next meeting in February Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler over Tweak: Growing up on Methamphetamines by Nic Sheff. For January we planned to read Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. One participant mentioned that Good Omens by Gaiman was one of the funniest books he'd ever read. Other books mentioned by the group were House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski and The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.
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