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- [00:01]
Dominic
I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well, that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong.
- [00:09]
Tabby
So what's the problem?
- [00:11]
Dominic
That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch.
- [00:14]
Tabby
Maybe there's no catch.
- [00:16]
Dominic
That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.
- [00:18]
Tabby
Wow. You need to relax.
- [00:20]
Dominic
I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood?
- [00:22]
Tabby
I think it's laminate.
- [00:23]
Dominic
Okay. Yeah, that's good. That's close enough.
- [00:25]
Tabby
Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up. Fees may apply.
- [00:31]
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- [02:07]
Tabby
124 was spiteful, full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years, each put up with a spite in his own way. But by 1873, Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead and the sons Howard and Bugler had run away by the time they were 13 years old. As soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it. That was the signal for Bugler. As soon as the two tiny handprints appeared in the cake, that was it for Howard. No. Each one fled at once. The moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be born or witnessed a second time within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, baby Suggs, Sethe, their mother, and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the grey and white house on Bluestone Road. So that was the opening passage of Toni Morrison's Beloved, published in 1987. And it's set in the 1870s, but looks back at an earlier time. And it's a book about an African American family, formerly enslaved, now living in a very fragile state of freedom in Cincinnati, Ohio. But they are haunted by the memories of both their collective suffering and their individual suffering. And in fact, the house that we described in that opening reading, 1, 2, 4, is both metaphorically haunted, but also literally haunted. There's this line, it's the plaything of spirits, and the main character, Sethe, and her daughter, Denver, they are convinced the house is haunted by this dead baby, Sethe's daughter, Denver's sister, Beloved, who, it turns out later in the book, returns in physical form to live among them, or so it seems. It's. It's ambiguous on that front. So it is a ghost story. It's also described as a horror story, but there's far, far more to it than that. It's a book about memory and forgetting, about rebuilding a fractured identity, about terrible trauma and above all, the appalling legacy of slavery, of course. So it's obviously kind of a book that provokes very kind of strong feelings of disturbance, I think, in any reader.
- [04:36]
Dominic
Yes. So, hi, everybody. Toni Morrison wrote Beloved because she wanted to say something about the specific experience of being an African American woman. And obviously, Tabby, neither of us is an African American woman, and we'll come on to this. And the experience of reading it, obviously, as a. As a white, in my case, a white British man. You know, Morrison said herself when she wrote the book in the 80s that, you know, she was almost daunted, frightened was her word, about tackling the enormous subjects of slavery in its aftermath and the implications of that for the people who had been enslaved. She said, it never occurred to me to go into this area. I never thought I had the emotional resources to deal with slavery. Anyway, she wrote the book and it was a colossal hit. So it was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than six months in hardback and then another six months in paperback. It didn't win a National Book Award, and there was a huge controversy. There was dozens of black writers and intellectuals signed a kind of open letter saying this was a disgrace. Then it did win the Pulitzer Prize. And then she, Toni Morrison, won the Nobel Prize for Literature six years later. She was the first black woman to do so. And Beloved has now become an absolutely canonical work of modern American fiction. So in 2006, the New York Times did this big poll of writers and critics to judge basically the best book of the generation the last 25 years. Now, beloved won by a mile, ahead of books by people like Cormac McCarthy or Philip Roth or John Updike or whoever. So it's now enshrined as a kind of touchstone, a totemic work of modern American fiction. There was a film with Oprah Winfrey, actually, who's a great champion of this book. She's got her own book club, of course.
- [06:15]
Tabby
I think it was something like Toni Morrison said that there was kind of only one person who she'd allowed to. To make the film, and it was
- [06:20]
Dominic
Oprah Winfrey, which I haven't seen, I have to say, because I think sometimes I can't really imagine how it work as a film because so much of it happens in the writing. Anyway, we'll come on to this. Now, I'd never read it before we did this episode, but, Tabby, you read it, I think, when you were a teenager. No.
- [06:36]
Tabby
Yeah, I did. I read it on my gap year when I was about 17. And I have to say, even then being, you know, a sort of pretty unintellectual 17 year old, I was pretty bowled away by. I remember the sensation of reading it this one night in this room. I was appalled by it. I remember so well kind of the way that it makes you feel. And I also remember kind of the colors of the language. I love the way that she writes. And it's kind of these deep purples and like deep reds. And that massively stayed with me. And I think it's kind of one of the books that I've been most affected by. And this time rereading it was no different, as we will see. But let's give people a bit of a sense of the story before we kind of dig into it.
- [07:26]
Dominic
So, Sabbath, you already set out the house. There's a house and there's a family living in the house is 1, 2, 4. And Sepha is the main character. Isn't she?
- [07:34]
Tabby
Yeah. So she is an escaped slave. She and Denver was bor over the course of her escape on the Ohio River 18 years earlier.
- [07:43]
Dominic
The border between freedom and slavery.
- [07:45]
Tabby
Exactly. There's this bit where Seth is, you know, when her water breaks, it pours into the Ohio river, which is very kind of symbolic. And then obviously their house, as opening reading revealed, it's been abandoned by Sethe's two sons. And then now baby Suggs, their grandmother, has died. But also there's this baby that haunts it, Beloved. And we know that she died 18 years earlier, but we don't know how, we find out later. But we also know that these two women, Denver and Sethe, they live in unusual isolation. And the implication is that they are isolated because of some terrible decision Sethe made 18 years earlier, some heinous act that she committed. Again, we don't know what it is. And the past is crucial to the entire book. And it gradually gets unraveled as we go on and you don't really know and not even Denver really know what has happened. So their lives are kind of built around the idea of forgetting. And then something happens to kind of begin to bring the past back up. And this is the arrival of this guy called Paul D. Who it turns out was also a slave on the plantation Sweet Home that Sethe worked on as a girl alongside her husband Halle. We don't know what's happened to Halle, but we know that when they all try to escape Sweet Home, he didn't make it. So he starts in telling Sethe what happened to him. After their escape, he forces Sethe to start remembering things. And then this other shadow from the past emerges. So Paul D. Kind of exorcises the ghost of the baby from the house. And then one day, walking back from a carnival, they come across this young girl. She's soaking wet. She's literally walked out of a river and she's dressed all in black and she has kind of this sleepiness to her. And she says that she is called Beloved. And they take her in Denver, this lonely teenager absolutely adores her and quickly comes to believe that she is her dead sister come back to life. Paul D. Is very unsettled by her. And Sethe gradually comes to believe, as Denver does, that this is her long lost daughter come back. But Beloved has this strange like effect on people where she forces them to remember the horrific things that happened to them when they were slaves. So gradually we discover, you know, who is Beloved. Is she a ghost or is she just a Young woman confused, you know, assumed to be this ghost. And we also learn the terrible thing that Sethe did 18 years earlier.
- [10:09]
Dominic
Yes. So the book's on two different. There are two different time periods, really. There's the 1870s, when the narrative is happening now, and then there's what happened in the 1850s, 18 years before. And the two sort of narratives kind of inform each other, don't they? They kind of play off each other and they both. We discover more things about both time periods as the book progresses. But let's talk a little bit. So that's the plot. Well, that's the setting, but we should say a bit about the historical context, because this is, of course, a historical novel and it is a book above all about slavery, I guess. So to give people a sense of. And we're not a history podcast, but to give people some sense of the context. So the first African slaves arrived in North America in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia. And in total, probably 12 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic in the kind of colonial period would say the 16th and 19th centuries. Most of them actually went to the Caribbean or to Brazil, but probably half a million were transported to North America. And obviously their descendants lived in slavery in North America. So that's about 10 million people in total working in tobacco and cotton plantations. They're treated as property or as regarded as animals, little better than animals forbidden, for example, to read and write, subjected to horrendous violence, flogging, torture, rape, all kinds of kind of brutalization, women used as sexual commodities, children sold off, families broken up, people even used as for medical experimentation and so on. And actually, me giving the historical summary of all these terrible things does not approach the power of a novel like Beloved in the way that it immerses you in this world and makes you see by taking individual, intimate stories, what that actually meant in practice. And actually that's. That's part of, I think, the power that probably affected you when you read it as a teenager, that it. It catapults you into that world as an outsider and makes you feel in a way that a history book, I would argue, can never really do.
- [12:16]
Tabby
Yeah. So, I mean, you obviously are aware of the historical fact. I was kind of aware of the history, but I don't think I'd ever sort of thought about it from the personal perspective. You know, the book Beloved puts you in their minds, so it doesn't just describe what happened. It makes you feel as they felt what happens. And I think. And Toni Morrison actually said that. She said she Wanted to translate the historical into the personal. So the book kind of painfully like, forces you to experience the psychological impact of slavery on individuals rather than kind of a people, if you see what I mean.
- [12:52]
Dominic
Agree completely. And two other things worth noting about this. So, first of all, there was obviously an abolitionist movement in the north, and this is reflected in the book. There are the characters of abolitionists who play a sort of small supporting part in the story. Mr. And Ms. Bodwin, they're called.
- [13:07]
Tabby
Quite a telling part, though, as well, don't you think?
- [13:10]
Dominic
Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think completely. And Toni Morrison is very good, actually, on the complexity of their attitudes. They're abolitionists, so in a vertical, they're goodies, but at the same time, they are. There's something patronizing about them and something they are still. Then they can never be part of the world of the. The slaves that they are rescuing, I guess. And then the other thing is escape, because obviously this plays a massive part in the story. And the historical reality is that between fifty and a hundred thousand people probably escaped and fled to the north or to Canada. So in this book, a crux of the story you've already mentioned, it is the flight across the Ohio river, which lies between slave states, Kentucky, and a free state, Ohio. So crossing this river and the idea of water and rivers and so on carries enormous kind of symbolic power in the story, doesn't it?
- [14:06]
Tabby
Yeah, I mean, because it's the border between freedom and slavery. So it's almost like. It's like the metaphorical River Jordan. So Sethe crosses it to freedom.
- [14:18]
Dominic
So one other important thing. So if you did cross and you crossed to Cincinnati, Cincinnati is massively important in the story of slavery because it was basically the first free city that people got to. But under the Fugitive slave law of 1850, all escaped slaves were meant to be returned to their owners. This was a concession that the Southern states extracted from the Northern ones. So basically, slave catchers could go north. And the Northern authorities were enjoined to they legally bound to help the catchers if they can. So when Sethe and her children escape, they can never be free from the terror that the slave catchers will catch up with them and drag them back to their former lives on the plantations. And so that's the context for the first of the two time periods, the 1850s, the one we're looking back to in flashbacks. This is when Sethe and Paul D. Were living on the Sweet Home Plantation in Kentucky as slaves. And then the other time period is the present, which is 1873. And now that's after the American Civil War. And it is just after. So it's 10 years after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. So the slaves are now free, but their lives are very far from sweetness and light. And the book really is excellent at capturing this. The fact that they're still living with the trauma of having been enslaved and all the violence they've suffered, but also the fact that white people, lots of millions of white people, still regard them with hatred and contempt. And there's still an enormous amount of violence towards black people. Yeah.
- [15:48]
Tabby
And how kind of pointless and sort of hopeless, you know, the end of the Civil War really was. How little is achieved for the real kind of sufferers of it. Because there's this quote that this character Paul D. Says basically sums up the hopelessness of their situation. Those heady days were gone. Now what remained was the sludge of ill will, dashed hopes and difficulties beyond repair. A tranquil republic. Well, not in his lifetime. And then he talks about working on both sides of the Civil War, even though obviously his interests were very much on one side. He was forced to work for the Confederates.
- [16:19]
Dominic
Exactly. And later on, he's thinking about the countryside around the house. Territory infected by the Klan. That's the Ku Klux Klan, desperately thirsty for black blood, without which it could not live. The dragon swam the Ohio at will. And the dragon is kind of the Klan, but it's also kind of white racism. And this sort of theme of the fear of white people and the fear of what white people will do to you, that they could snap at any moment. They will turn on you. I mean, some of the characters say at times, you know, they don't behave like normal people, white people. You can think you're okay with them, but suddenly they'll. You'll do something wrong and they will snap and they'll hit you or they will do terrible things to you. And there are a few direct references, aren't there, to. Not many, but a few references to kind of historical. To sort of grounded, historical political realities.
- [17:05]
Tabby
It's rare that the book plants you in the real world, but. But then when it does happen, when it does come along, it's. It's quite kind of shocking because it kind of wakes you up in a funny way from this strange, mystical reality that it sort of guides through. So, for instance, at one point, this character called Stampade, another former slave, says 1874, and white folks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes. 87 lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky, full colored schools burned to the ground. Grown men whipped like children, children whipped like adults. Black women raped by the crew. Property taken next broken. And then kind of later, this. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, who is officially a freed woman. Even so, you know, the white folks still managed to get her and she says the white folks had tired her out at last. And she kind of gives up and sort of goes to bed.
- [17:56]
Dominic
Exactly. She dies almost of weariness at the terrible toll that racism and slavery and then the legacy and what that's meant for her family and so on, that all this is kind of exacted on her. So the backdrop is quite a bleak story, obviously. Of course, how could it not be? But arguably the most affecting detail of this is the one historical story above all that inspired the. And this is the story of a particular woman called Margaret Garner.
- [18:22]
Tabby
I had no idea that this was based on an actual person, an actual historical event. I couldn't believe it when I, when I came across it. So Margaret Garner, she was a real life slave who escaped from Kentucky across the Ohio river to Cincinnati before the Civil War. So, like Sethe, and these are the details kind of of her life. So she's born probably in 1833 on the plantation of a guy called John Pollard Gaines in Boone County, Kentucky, to a slave named Priscilla. And she may well have been Gaines's daughter because she is mixed race.
- [18:54]
Dominic
Yeah. And Gaines was the only white man on the plantation, so exactly. Realistically, he's probably her father.
- [18:59]
Tabby
So it's kind of the logical conclusion. And then in 1849, she married another slave from a nearby plantation. This is a guy called Robert Garner. And then Gaines sold his plantation, including the slaves, to his brother, Archibald Gaines. Margaret has four children, the first probably to her husband, but then the younger three, who were described as being lighter skinned, were probably the children of her owner, Archibald Gaines, again the only adult white male at the plantation. So then in January 1856, Margaret and her husband decide to escape, probably because of ill treatment on the plantation with their four children. And they decide to escape along with some other slaves. There are about 17 of them in total. And they cross the frozen Ohio river and head towards Cincinnati. And then there they split up to avoid capture and they're aiming to get to Canada. But the Garners go to a relative's house first, and here they're cornered by Archibald Gaines, slave catchers and U.S. marshals. And, you know, Robert Garner has a pistol. He fires several shots, but they are totally cornered. And Margaret picks up a butcher's knife. There's actually a famous painting of this that you can look up online called the Modern Madeir. But she picks up a butcher's knife and she cuts the throat of her two year old daughter Mary, and then she stabs her other children, Thomas, Samuel and Priscilla and herself, you know, trying to kill them all. But they don't die, they're all captured and they're put in jail. There's a two week trial. It's the longest in the history of the Fugitive Slave Law. Margaret's defense team argue that she's a free woman and should therefore be tried for murder. And then that way she and her family can be considered free. It's unsuccessful. The prosecution argues that under the federal Fugitive Slave Law, she is property and she should be returned to her owner. And this is exactly what happens.
- [20:48]
Dominic
And she's tried not as a underground the Fugitive Slave Law. She's tried not for murder, but for destruction of property.
- [20:54]
Tabby
Exactly. So she's just a commodity.
- [20:56]
Dominic
Exactly. Who's destroyed. And she's destroyed another commodity meaning her daughter.
- [20:59]
Tabby
And even though this story was widely circulated in the kind of pre Civil war anti slavery press as an example of the kind of the unnatural consequences of slavery and she became this kind of cause celebrate in the fight against the Fugitive Slave Laws, it kind of was more or less lost to public memory. And you know, once she returned to the Gaines plantation, she kind of disappeared from sight. And as far as we know, she probably died still a slave of typhoid fever in Mississippi in 1858.
- [21:31]
Dominic
Yeah, so that's Margaret Garner's story. It's a terrible story. A mother who's driven by her fear and hatred of slavery to kill her own daughter. Her husband Robert said later she tried to kill their children because she believed, quote, it would be better for them to be put out of the world than to live in slavery. And an Abelist, Lucy Stone, spoke at her trial and said the faded faces of the Negro children tell too plainly to what degradation the female slaves submit. In other words, they're mixed race, they're light skinned. That's telling you exactly the nature of the sort of sexual abuse that women have to face. Rather than give her daughter to that life, she killed it. If in her deep maternal love, she felt the impulse to send her child back to God to save it from coming woe, who shall say she had no right not to do so. And so this argument about whether, you know, the fact that Margaret Garner was driven to kill her own child rather to spare her the horrors of Slavery. What does that tell us about slavery? Who are we to judge her? How could a mother do that to her own child? All of this kind of thing. I mean, obviously, this real life story raises all kinds of questions. And it was reported at a time. And then Toni Morrison, more than a century later, comes across it, doesn't she, when she's preparing an anthology? So Toni Morrison is from Ohio herself. Her parents. She was born in 1931, and her parents had grown up in the. In the Deep south, in, I think, Georgia and Alabama. And her parents are part of a generation who grow up in an extremely unequal country where the legacy of slavery is never far away. Her father supposedly hated and feared white people so much he wouldn't allow them in the house, which tells its own story. But Tony grows up. She's obviously an extremely bright child. She grows up reading kind of Jane Austen in school and Tolstoy and stuff. She goes to Howard University in Washington, D.C. historically, kind of African American university. She ends up doing a master's, didn't she, about Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, two writers that you see massively reflected, I think, in her style in this book. And then she became an editor at Random House, and she worked well. She was the first black woman to be a senior fiction editor at Random House, I think. And she did a series of these kind of landmark projects, one of which was called the Black Book in 1974, very much of its time. An anthology of essays and documents, you know, born of kind of black power and the black arts movement and stuff. A sort of revival of interest in African American culture. And she has this great compilation of stuff about the black experience from slavery to the present. And this is when she comes across the Margaret Garner story. And it obviously lodges in her head. And she thinks, you know, one day I will turn this into a novel.
- [24:10]
Tabby
Yeah, she wrote that she was kind of fascinated by what she calls, like the ferociousness and the willingness to risk everything for what was, to this woman, kind of the necessity of freedom. So, yeah, as you say, it lodged in her mind. But by this point, she's already a published author. So she published, most famously the Bluest Eye in 1970 and the Song of Solomon in 1977, both books about the black experience in a kind of magical, realist vein. But then she decides to turn this Margaret Garner story into a novel. So the Margaret Garner story kind of serves as a bridge between her two other books. Books, and therefore allows her to kind of charter the whole experience of black people in America. And, you know, As I said, what is it that appeals to her about this story? What happens internally, emotionally, psychologically when you are turned into a slave? What happens to your identity? What happens to your mindset? And what would it mean to be a mother who's never really been allowed to be a mother because you and your children belong to someone else? So I think that's what Ghana represents to her, this kind of unapologetic acceptance of shame and terror. You know, choosing infanticide, which is, you know, surely one of the most kind of transgressive acts there is, into kind of a form of freedom. Claiming your freedom.
- [25:29]
Dominic
Well, we'll see it. Sethe, in the book, who is the sort of Margaret Garner character, she says multiple times that effectively she wants to save her child. What she wants to do is put her children where white people can't get them, where slavery as a system will not engulf them. Which, when you understand the reality of what slavery meant for her, you can see why to a mother, that might seem the most liberating thing you can possibly do for your children, as awful as that may be. It's worth saying, of course, that she didn't. I mean, we mentioned this right at the beginning. Toni Morrison very deliberately did not write this book for us. Tabby.
- [26:04]
Tabby
Yeah.
- [26:05]
Dominic
So she said specifically she was interviewed in 1984 for a book called Black Women Writers at Work. And she said, when I'm writing about the world, I'm writing about black people. It's not that I won't write about white people. It's that the people who basically manifest the themes that I'm interested in are black people. And she went on to say, didn't she, I want to write for people like me, which is to say black people, curious people, demanding people, people who don't need to be patronized, which I think most of us write for people like ourselves deep down. So I think that's completely understandable, particularly
- [26:36]
Tabby
if you're climbing into the heads of the people you're describing. You know, it's much easier to do that if they're like you.
- [26:43]
Dominic
Well, I mean, this is a whole different subject about how much writers, characters are merely reflections of the writer and so on. But I think obviously the nature of writing fiction is that as soon as you send it out into the world to some degree, you lose control of it, and people you don't expect end up reading your books. And actually, one of the joys. We've talked about this before. I think one of the joys of reading fiction is that it Allows you to step into someone else's shoes, if only very fleetingly and in a kind of very sort of transitory way. And to experience what it might have. Some sense, I guess, of what it might be like to be somebody else. Which actually is one reason why I think fiction is much more powerful than history at conveying what it might have been like.
- [27:22]
Tabby
Well, we discussed this, didn't we, before this episode? Because obviously you've just been getting ready for episodes all about the kkk. And we spoke about how, you know, you can know all the facts and not really kind of feel it deep down. And then actually you climb into someone else's head through a novel and you really feel it. This guy. There's this guy called Russell Banks, and he wrote the introduction for the Folio Society edition of Beloved. And he, I thought, summed up so well, you know, reading something like this. Something that lets one know how it feels to be American and, yes, black and female, and ultimately how, at the deepest and most inclusive level, it feels to be human. Knowledge that if one is a late 20th century white American male, as he is, as I was, is obtained with, let us say, undeniable, if not understandable, difficulty.
- [28:11]
Dominic
So, yeah, so in other words, you have to make an imaginative leap. You have to work at it. But it will give you a sense more powerfully, fiction will give you a sense more powerfully than anything else of what it would be like to have slavery in your head, to be invaded, you know, in every atom of your being, your soul, your mind, whatever, by this incredibly repressive, intrusive system that treats you as not fully human. And actually, we'll talk about this when we get into the book.
- [28:38]
Tabby
The epigraph of the book was quite controversial, though, wasn't it? It's dedicated to 60 million and more.
- [28:43]
Dominic
Yes, exactly. So this is Toni Morrison's estimate. She said she got this from historians of Africans who died thanks to the slave trade. And we don't massively need to get into this. But some critics who are hostile to the book said, well, this is a massive exaggeration. You've just made this figure up. And indeed, some critics went further and said, you've deliberately chosen a figure that kind of echoes the number of people who died in the Holocaust, but it's tenfold.
- [29:05]
Tabby
Harold Bloom was one of them. Actually, I read a piece he wrote
- [29:08]
Dominic
about this, and there are some critics who don't like the book. So there's a. I read a review online in the New Republic by a critic called Stanley Crouch, Black Himself, but a kind of more conservative black writer who felt that Beloved was too ideological, which I actually don't think it is. I think you can read it and not feel that you're being patronised or lectured or preached to. I certainly didn't. I certainly didn't feel that the book was. I felt that it had its own internal life and consistency and that it wasn't. You know, I didn't find it a preachy book, frankly.
- [29:35]
Tabby
No, not at all. Because it's actually infinitely readable as well. Like, it's. It's a good story. It's a bit of a page turner, funnily enough, as well, because of the mysticism of it and the dark horror at the heart of it. And I don't feel like it's pointed. I don't think. I don't feel like she's pouring in unnecessary quantities of violence in order to make a point, because of the way that she writes, the manner of the writing, the kind of. Sort of the almost magical realism of it, which we'll get onto later. It kind of protects you. It never says it directly. It comes to the point Sideways, which is very clever, and I think saves it from ever being a kind of a doctrine.
- [30:15]
Dominic
The violence is there, but it's not. The danger with this is the violence becomes kind of pornographic, it becomes voyeuristic and it indulges in horror, which she acknowledged. But the book doesn't do this. Cause, as you say, it always comes to it slightly obliquely, but it leaves you in no doubt about what that violence meant and the effects that it had on the people who suffered from it.
- [30:34]
Tabby
I completely agree. But speaking of that, let's actually get into the book itself. And mainly let's get into the characters. So the heart of the book is this character, Sethe, and her experience. So, as we've said, born into slavery. And you learn, quite touchingly, I think, bits and pieces about her past, her early life, her life on Sweet Home as the book progresses. So you learn about, like, her mother, or lack of a mother. This woman, you know, she remembers this woman, Nan, telling her about it on a plantation. She threw them all away. But you. This is about her mother, the one with the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites, she also threw away without names.
- [31:15]
Dominic
Those are children. Other children that her mother had that were the product, presumably, of rape during the voyage.
- [31:22]
Tabby
Yeah, you. She gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around. Never. Never telling You, I'm telling you, small girls. Sethe. So, I. E. This woman kind of made Sethe feel like she had a special connection in some way to this mother who she only really remembers as kind of an outline in a field.
- [31:44]
Dominic
Yeah. And like all the slaves, she has lost her own identity. We'll talk about this maybe in the second half. Her identity is fragile and sort of provisional almost, because everything depends upon their. The white people who control them and own them. Your identity can be taken away at any moment. Your name can be changed. There's a sort of thinness to it.
- [32:09]
Tabby
But you can see her constantly throughout her life clutching at some form of an identity. So, for instance, there's this bit when she gets married to this guy Halle, when she's young. And she kind of, you know, she thinks of herself as a bride. She tries to be a bride. She makes a dress for herself and stuff. But actually, even that is meaningless. And there's this bit where she says she doesn't know where she stops and the world begins. And so what she does is she pours all of her identity into her children with this kind of ferocious, heavy love. The character Paul D. Calls it thick. He says, sethe, your love is too thick. And then she says, love is. Or it ain't thin. Love ain't love at all.
- [32:47]
Dominic
Exactly. So she lives for her children. But again, one of the horrors of slavery is that she's not allowed really to live as a mother. I mean, the nature of the slave system was a family could be broken up at any moment. And often they were. That the owner would break up a family for financial reasons. He would. I mean, effectively, they would rather like, you know, as if you were as horrific as it sounds, as if you were breeding pets.
- [33:12]
Tabby
Yeah, they breed them.
- [33:13]
Dominic
They would breed them and then sell them off or whatever, trade the children, which are without any sense whatsoever that the slaves would have feelings themselves, would have familial relationships, all of this kind of thing.
- [33:26]
Tabby
But Sethe clings onto her children. She's determined at any cost not to let them be taken from her. Or rather to be put into bondage to be slaves.
- [33:37]
Dominic
Yeah. And the tragedy is that she's ended up with just one child left, which is Denver, hasn't she? So Denver is 18 years old. And Denver was born on the. At that sort of transition point between freedom and slavery on the Ohio River. She's named after a white girl who helped the one white character in the book who is unambiguously, kind of kindly, I suppose, who is a Character called Amy Denver, who was on her way to Boston, came across Sethe helped her during her labor. Sethe gives birth on the boat, and Denver has grown up in isolation in this very weird household. Haunted, literally, a haunted house.
- [34:18]
Tabby
She starts off as quite a bitter girl because she is so very lonely. And she's watched everyone that she love leave. And we tragically discover that she idolizes her absent father, who she's never met Hallie, and keeps expecting him to turn up, which, of course, you know, he won't. We don't really know what happens to him, but he certainly won't be turning up. And I thought so. Sadly, she lives in fear of her mother because of some. This terrible choice that her mother made when she was a baby, this terrible act that Sethe committed, which Sethe never repents, by the way. You know, she sees it as kind of the obvious choice, as almost like an act of resistance. And then Denver also is hungry, ravenous for Beloved's love when Beloved arrives and seeks to protect her from Sethe.
- [35:05]
Dominic
And then the third character we should just talk about before we go into the break, the one who really sets the narrative moving is this guy who's a reminder of the past, who's called Paul D. And Paul D. Is somebody who was also a slave on the Sweet Home plantation with Sethe, with Sethe's husband, Hala. And Paul D. He. You know, he has suffered the most horrendous abuse in slavery and its aftermath. He talks about how his heart is now a tobacco tin. In other words, he suffered so much that his heart is hardened. But also he's. It's like he's locked away his.
- [35:40]
Tabby
He sealed it all in.
- [35:42]
Dominic
Yes, exactly. Now, he's always had a great fondness for Sethe, going back to their days on the plantation. He has a lovely expression. I think it's one of the. Really. Anyone who doubts that Toni Morrison is a brilliant writer, she has these. These phrases that really lodge in your head that are so beautifully judged. So he talks about his love for Sethur as follows. He says, she's a friend of my mind. The pieces I am, she gathered them and give them back to me all in the right order. And I think that's a lovely way of talking about kind of your relationship with somebody, that they're a friend of your mind.
- [36:12]
Tabby
Yeah. It's so simple. It's so unadorned, and yet it cuts to the quick.
- [36:17]
Dominic
Yeah. But he arrives anyway at the house, and with him comes this kind of rush of memory. I guess he's a reminder of the past. He arrives at the house and he discovers that they're haunted by this ghost who appears to be this ghost of this girl who. This Denver's sister and Sethe's daughter who died 18 years earlier. He physically exorcises the ghost. Basically throws furniture at it.
- [36:42]
Tabby
Yeah, he kind of fights it. Yeah.
- [36:45]
Dominic
And the ghost is. Is. Is defeated. They all go off to a carnival. But when they return, as you described at the beginning, there is a woman, a strange woman sitting there on the steps of the house. This is beloved. And at least two of them soon decide that this is actually the ghost returned in physical form. Now is beloved the ghost or is beloved somebody else? Or a metaphor or what? I guess we should decide all that tabby after the break.
- [37:16]
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- [38:15]
Tabby
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- [39:23]
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- [40:26]
Tabby
A fully dressed woman walked out of the water. She barely gained the dry bank of the stream before she sat down and leaned against a mulberry tree. All day and all night she sat there, her head resting on the trunk and a position abandoned enough to crack the brim in her straw hat. Nobody saw her emerge or came accidentally by. If they had, chances are they would have hesitated before approaching her. Not because she was wet or dozing or had what sounded like asthma, but because amid all that she was smiling. Welcome back to the book club. Now before the break, Dominic, we promised that we would be unraveling the truth behind the character Beloved herself. And that there that reading is our first introduction to Beloved, sort of third first quarter of the book, we meet her and when Sethe first sees her walking back from this carnival, as you say, her bladder fills and she rushes to relieve herself. So it's almost as though her water is breaking and she's giving birth. And obviously Beloved has come out of this river and the river has always been kind of pregnant with kind of symbolism of giving birth. Cause that's where Denver is born. And she's there's so much about Beloved that kind of implies that she is indeed this baby, this ghostly baby brought back to life. She has smooth skin, hands with no lines. She's exactly the age of the elder daughter, the age that she would have been. And she has this question, tell me your diamonds. So you know, is she asking about Sethe's other children? Is she asking Sethe to bring forth to memories? If so, why does Beloved know Sethe's memories? So many question marks about her and her name.
- [42:09]
Dominic
You see, Sethe, when her eldest daughter died, she didn't have Money enough for the tombstone. So she bartered with the guy doing the tombstone with the Reverend Pike. And the Reverend pike used the phrase dearly beloved. And she said, well, I've only got space for one word, basically, and that's the word I will use, which is beloved. So beloved is the name that was on the tombstone. Beloved is the name that this character has who has suddenly come out of the river that is going to end up living with them. And so the question on our mind as a reader is this very childlike, sort of greedy. I mean, she is very greedy. She's very unlikable in lots of ways.
- [42:47]
Tabby
Literally greedy.
- [42:48]
Dominic
Yes, exactly.
- [42:49]
Tabby
She always wants sweet things like, you know, like a child would, or maybe someone who hasn't, you know, had sensation for a long time. She likes shiny things. And Sethe once says of the ghost of the baby that she. She was a greedy ghost and she needed a lot of love. Well, beloved, like, watches Sethe with, like, an animalistic hunger. She's desperate for her love, for her face, for her touch.
- [43:12]
Dominic
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's three possibilities, I think, that strike you as a reader. So number one, which is the one that I actually started the book with or read the first half of the book with. Now, I know you and I don't agree on this, Tabby, or we read it differently. So my starting position was that she didn't exist at all. That she's a kind of. That they're in hallucination or that she is just a metaphor for haunting and for memories and for trauma and all of these kinds of things, and that they kind of imagined her. That's number one possibility. Number two, which I'm thinking is yours, is that she is another person who they've mistaken for the ghost.
- [43:52]
Tabby
Halfway through the book, I think I thought this because there are these references to an escaped slave girl who lived on a nearby farm or plantation or something, was kept in isolation under horrific circumstances, and therefore would be, you know, very damaged. She maybe would be a bit like a child. And beloved, as you say, is such an unlikable character. And she behaves like someone that's been kept, you know, in a house, cold and hungry by herself for a very long time. So I thought, oh, well, she's just the escaped slave girl. And then I gradually changed my mind. But then there's another possibility, isn't there?
- [44:25]
Dominic
Yeah. So this is what Sethe herself thinks and indeed, almost all the characters in the book think, which is this is genuinely the ghost of Sethe's dead daughter. Come back to life. And Sethe says this herself. Beloved. She my daughter. She mine. She come back to me of her own free will, and I don't have to explain a thing. And then she. She hints at what had happened to beloved 18 years earlier. I didn't have time to explain before. It had to be done quick, quick. She had to be safe. And I put her where she would be. But my love was tough, and she back now. I knew she would be so. So Sethe had put Beloved somewhere where she would be safe. And now she has returned. And actually, Toni Morrison, in interviews, is surprisingly straightforward and explicit about it. She says, this is definitely the ghost of the dead daughter. And she says, basically the core of the book is this terrible decision that Sethe made 18 years earlier. And Toni Morrison said, I decided that I couldn't judge that properly whether what she'd done was right or wrong. So I had to make a living ghost called Beloved, who would then react mournfully, desperately, lovingly, or furiously as a baby would if they had been involved in this decision that we'll come to in a second because it's one of the great revelations.
- [45:41]
Tabby
Yeah.
- [45:41]
Dominic
Probably a lot of listeners who haven't read the book can guess what this decision was because we've talked about the history. But basically, the way that the book unfolds is that thanks to Beloved being back at the house in physical form, the past starts to kind of enter the present so that the memories that have been suppressed for the last 18 years start to come out again. And we as readers learn a series of things about what happened to Sethe and to Paul D. And to the other characters on the plantation and afterwards. So, basically, as with quite a lot of the books that we've done on this podcast, the way the narrative works is that you get this slow, very carefully judged reveal of information that has not yet been disclosed to us. You know, things we suspect start to become explicit as the book goes on.
- [46:28]
Tabby
Yeah. And it's not just Sethe, though, that she has this effect on. It's all the characters who come into contact with her except Denver, a child born, you know, born out of slavery, which is kind of interesting. Anyone else who's been enslaved is forced to remember these terrible things. So, as you say, there are these big revelations that we learn after kind of Beloved's arrival on the scene. So the first thing is what happened to Sethe at Sweet Home, the plantation that she once worked on. And it's a really. It's a horrible scene. It's kind of quite rare in this book that things, you know, like we said, that things are said outright. But we learn that basically these two boys get her and they kind of hold her down and they take her milk from her. She's pregnant. This is a really horrible scene, I have to say. So she says, I am full, goddammit, of two boys with mossy teeth. One sucking on my breast, the other holding me down. Their book reading teacher watching and writing it up. And the most tragic thing about this is. I mean, a. It kind of takes her motherhood from her, but also she feels guilty. She actually feels complicit in this terrible, terrible action. She says, I made the ink. Paul D. He couldn't have done it if I hadn't made the ink.
- [47:41]
Dominic
So basically, the person who was running the plantation is a character they call schoolteacher.
- [47:47]
Tabby
He comes in after the fact. He comes in to take over from the old owners who were, you know, comparatively benevolent.
- [47:54]
Dominic
Yeah, he's a terrifying man. We only glimpse him very obliquely in their memories. He's clearly an educated man. He's been teaching the white children and he has decided effectively to conduct an experiment on Sethe. They are literally kind of milking her while he is writing it down with ink that he got her to make for him, which is why she feels guilty and complicit. And this scene, which we only glimpse in fragments, you know, sort of a fragment here, a fragment there a few pages later or whatever, that clearly is incredibly traumatic for her. Her husband, Halle, he was watching. He was hiding in the loft of the barn. And he saw this happen. And it drove him literally mad. Because the last we see of him, he's, and I quote, squatting in butter, greased and flat eyed like as a f. This is. I mean, that's part of Toni Morrison's genius as a writer. No one really. You're never told what that means. It's never really spelled out. All you know is that it's like it drove him literally mad to see his wife being treated in this way. And the last that's ever. People say they saw him churning butter or they saw him covered in butter or something. And that's the last we see of him.
- [49:11]
Tabby
It's never clear.
- [49:12]
Dominic
It's never clear.
- [49:13]
Tabby
And then Sethe is whipped for telling
- [49:15]
Dominic
Mrs. Garner, the owner of the plantation.
- [49:17]
Tabby
Yeah. Who owns the plantation, about having her milk stolen. And she's horribly, brutally whipped. And she describes the scars from that whipping as a chokecherry tree on her back. And this way of describing her scars is Typical of the book because, like I said, it's, you know, a chokecherry tree is a nice thing. It's a nice image. So if you're really battling with facing up to a truly traumatic thing that has happened to you, you're gonna try and find a nice way to describe it, a way to look at it sideways and not be, you know, and able to live with the scars, if you see what I mean. So Sethe tries to turn it into a beautiful thing. But then there's this passage later on where she, you know, states it. She states the reality, the actual horrible, violent reality of what happened. This again, is horrible. So she says, bit a piece of my tongue off. When they opened my bag, it was hanging by a shred. I didn't mean to clamp down on it. It come right off. I thought, good God, I'm going to eat myself up. They dug a hole for my stomach so as not to hurt the baby. Denver don't like me talking about it. So treated appallingly. And this is what inspires them to try to run away.
- [50:28]
Dominic
Exactly. So she's not the only character who tried to run away. Paul D. Also tried to run away, who was a slave with her. He was caught with his friend Sixo. His friend Sixo was burned, wasn't he? In front of him, they kind of make a pile of hickory sticks. They hang Sixo and the. They burn him. Paul D. Was made to wear a bit. There are constant references to the fact that the wearing the bit and then the fact that he's later been chained up have left him with kind of scar again with physical scars and a really hideous part of the book. He ends up in a chain gang in Georgia. And the men in the chain gang are kind of buried alive at night. They're made to sleep in things that are almost like coffins dug into the. The earth. And then when they get up every morning, yeah.
- [51:12]
Tabby
Just to say this is probably. I don't know. For me, this was the worst part of the novel.
- [51:16]
Dominic
So, yeah, they're sexually assaulted at dawn every day by their guards. And he recalls this again in quite an oblique way. And it takes you. When you read the paragraph, at first you're like, I'm trying to puzzle out exactly what this means. Then as soon as you do puzzle out what it means again, it kind of stays with you because it's so horrible in almost the matter of fact way that the guards do it. The kind of mundane, routine abuse that is part of this sort of. Part of this system.
- [51:45]
Tabby
As you say, it's oblique, but it's so visceral and like, I don't want to sound kind of, you know, sanctimonious or anything, but I remember, I remember reading this on the tube, going back home and then walking home and feeling like almost kind of just like sick, like, like I needed to be purged or something just from having read that.
- [51:59]
Dominic
Of course, that's the effect of the book, right? That shows that the. It's, it's. What a brilliant book it is that it lives with you. You don't just dismiss it. And again, it's not done kind of voyeuristically. You have to kind of. The nature of Toni Morrison star, which we'll talk about in a little bit, is you have to work at it. So it takes you a while to figure out what's going on. And then when you do, the effect is all the greater.
- [52:19]
Tabby
This is kind of the truth hidden at the heart of the novel that you only realize later. And again, it's like you read the scene, we both said this. I remember when we were talking about it, you read the scene, you're like, wait, what actually happened? And then it hits you.
- [52:34]
Dominic
Yeah. So Sethe had escaped. She'd escaped with her children and she's in Cincinnati. And then, and I quote, the four horsemen came. Schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff. So schoolteacher is the guy who had conducted experiments on her, this terrifying figure from the plantation, one of his nephews who was involved in that incident. And interestingly, this is one of the only moments in the book where we see a scene through the eyes of a white character. We see it actually through the schoolteacher's eyes, don't we? His slight confusion as he realizes the lengths to which Sethe will go to save her children from slavery. And effectively, you know, massive spoiler alert. Though the listeners will surely have guessed what is coming. She does what Margaret Garner did. She picks up a, in this version, basically a hand saw and cuts the throat of her daughter, beloved and then stabs her other children and herself, but doesn't kill them. So she's killed her then, I think two year old daughter.
- [53:41]
Tabby
She's two. Yeah, they call her. When Sethe first arrives at baby Suggs house when she thinks she's free at last and she's so relieved. It's very humanizing and it makes it all the more. More kind of appalling because she's delighted by the fact that this little girl that she sent off to escape is already crawling so she's not just like the outline of a baby. She's very much a little girl.
- [54:04]
Dominic
Yeah, exactly. And Sethe explains why she did it. She says, I couldn't let all that go back to where it was. I couldn't let her nor any of them live under schoolteacher that was out. And so the narrator tells us she collected every bit of life. She'd make all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out away, over there where no one could hurt them, over there, outside this place, where they would be safe. That's her rationale for killing her own daughter. So it's exactly modeled on the Margaret garner story from 1856.
- [54:40]
Tabby
Yeah. And the horror of this act, you know, in Fanticide, is such a, you know, repulsive thing. It's. It's really kind of. It makes you flinch. But the fact that Sethe takes it so sanely, so unashamedly, it allows you, as the reader, to some extent, kind of penetrate and understand the degree of dread that she feels, you know, of enslavement that she feels from the perspective of a mother, utterly terrified that her child will also be dehumanised, commodified as she has been, that her child's future will be totally obliterated, too, that it will also be made into an animal. And she has heard herself described as being an animal. And she calls her children her best thing, you know, her dearest treasures. I suppose she's keeping her best things free, you know, that basically to die is to be a slave is a fate worse than death. And that in killing them, she's allowing them to be free. And. Yeah, so you really comprehend just the horror that she is seeking to shield them from by committing an act that is horrific, of course.
- [55:59]
Dominic
And I think that listeners who haven't read the book may think, well, how can you, you know, how could you ever justify such an act? But actually, once you've read the book and you realize the dehumanizing effects of slavery and the depth to which Sethe and the other characters have been condemned, you can. I think it's perfectly possible to understand why a loving mother would decide that the best thing to do for her child was to take this most drastic and horrendous act, don't you, Tubby? And the fact that it is done in this non. That the language is deliberately elusive and as you say, it's kind of coming at it sideways, makes it all the more powerful, I think, because it's not you know, if you'd done it in just a very explicit way, it would be almost pornographic and voyeuristic. But it's not like that at all.
- [56:45]
Tabby
No, not at all. Toni Morrison wrote, it seemed important to me that the action in Beloved, the fact of infant. Infanticide, be immediately known but deferred unseen. I thought that the act itself had to be not only buried, but also understated, because if the language was going to compete with the violence itself, it would be obscene or pornographic. So, yeah, there you go. And as you say, in terms of, you know, how could any reader read this without loathing Sethe and thinking that. That, you know, there was no. There was no world in which you could justify her actions? Actually, you kind of do. That's the extraordinary quality of the writing. Even Baby Suggs says at one point she could not approve or condemn Sethe's rough choice. You actually. You don't judge Sethe at all for what she does. Yeah.
- [57:31]
Dominic
And I think that's partly because behind this one act of shocking violence lies an entire system of violence from which. Which Sethe is trying to spare her daughter. And part of that is. I mean, one element of that that comes up again and again throughout the book, and it's very much there in the writing, is that the enslaved characters are systematically denied their humanity by the system. So Sepha. I mean, the fact that the. The great act of kind of sexual abuse against her is that she is being milked. That's because the. The white characters don't see her as human. They see her as an animal. She's often described as a cow and likened to a cow. And in one of the most traumatic incidents in her life, she overhears the schoolteacher instructing his pupils. And he says, remember, she doesn't know what has come before, but she just hears him saying, remember, put her human characteristics on the left, her animal ones on the right, and don't forget to line them up. And that really shocks her.
- [58:35]
Tabby
Yeah, more than the violence that shocks her.
- [58:38]
Dominic
The fact that all the time these people have viewed her as not human like them, but they view her as livestock, as an animal. And actually, I said that the scene where you realize about her killing her daughter, that's one of the only times you see something from a white person's perspective. And in that we're giving. Given it through the school teacher's eyes. And he thinks to himself, God, this one has gone mad. She's killing her own daughter. And the reason for this is because of the quote, the mishandling of the nephew who'd overbeat her and made a cut and run. He had chastised that nephew, telling him to think, just think, what would his own horse do if you beat it beyond the point of education. Suppose you beat hounds past the point. That way you can't miss handle creatures and expect success. He views her as an animal who has been beaten beyond the point of endurance. There's no part of him that views her as human. That's the really, really shocking thing. The cold blooded way that he thinks about her.
- [59:39]
Tabby
Yeah. And Sethe's kind of ultimate kind of breakdown, her moment of kind of total crisis and collapse is when Paul D. Learns what she did, you know, that she killed her daughter. And he goes to her and he reprimands her and he reminds her that she is human. He says, you got two feet, Sethe, not four. And she's genuinely kind of confused and staggered by this and it angers her. But then she says later, as I said earlier, she says later, no baby of hers is gonna have four feet, not two. And the other thing about the four feet, not two is because she doesn't see herself as a singular individual. She sees herself as multiple people because she pours herself into her children. So she comes to totally, totally define herself by her role as a mother. And yet another aspect of this novel is that the women in it, the enslaved women or formerly enslaved women, are totally denied their role as mothers. As we said, they're more like animals for breeding a lot of the time, if that. So Sethe has her milk stolen, as you said. And then also another obvious example, the grandmother, baby, son, drugs. She's lost all her children except Halle, whose life was spent working himself to the bone to buy her freedom. And then when she is freed, she kind of thinks, yeah, but you freed me, but you're also separating me from you. The last of my children. And it's heartbreaking because she, unlike Sethe, who fights, you know, tooth and nail for her children, she kind of refuses to acknowledge their existence because it's just too painful. So she says seven times she had done that. Held a little foot, examined the fat fingertips with her own fingers. She never saw become the male or female hands a mother would recognise anywhere. She didn't know to this day what their permanent teeth looked like or how they held their heads when they walked. Did Patty lose her lisp? What colour did famous skin finally take? All seven were gone or dead. And then there's this really heartbreaking bit later when she tries to track them down town and you know, she's had no education. She doesn't, she doesn't know how the system works. But you realize how kind of cold and, and unapproachable it is because she. All she has is little scraps of information. So she'll say, oh, well, he went west. And then the people who are meant to be helping her are like, that's no good to us. We can't find someone that went west.
- [62:05]
Dominic
Yeah. Or she knows them just by one name. She'll say, you know, their name is Patty. And I know she went up north somewhere or whatever and exactly that. That she'll never find those children again. Her role as a mother has been totally denied her. That's how slavery worked. Families were broken up, as we said. And the sort of matter of fact way with which the slave owners and slave traders implemented that system makes it again, all the more shocking, I think. So there's that. I mean, it's not just a book about women. I mean, obviously it's a book in which women play a massive part. You know, Toni Morrison very much a book of the 1980s. So women at the forefront of it. But there's also the men. Slavery denies the men their masculinity, doesn't it? So Paul D. Often says, you know, his manhood was dependent upon the goodwill of his owners. It was only his having a good owner that basically allowed you to become a man. So you never feel like you can properly be a man as a. As a. You never have autonomy, you never have any agency, all of that kind of thing.
- [63:05]
Tabby
And Paul D. Says he partly loves Sethe because she allows him to be a man to her.
- [63:10]
Dominic
She's a friend of his mind. I think that's one of the lovely things about their relationship is he feels exactly that he can be himself. And being yourself is so important. You're not even allowed your own name under slavery. So the characters often try to rename themselves. So Baby Suggs. Her name is not Baby Suggs originally. It's Jenny Whitlow. And her owners say to her, you should call yourself Jenny Whitlow. Baby Suggs ain't no name for a free neighbor Negro. And she says, no, I don't want the name you gave me. I want my own name. There's a character called Stamp Paid. He used to be called Joshua, but he was made to give his wife to his master's son. What a shocking and terrible detail that is. And when he did that, he said, I no longer want to be called Joshua. He takes the Name stamp paid.
- [63:58]
Tabby
Because he says that basically that's, that's the like he's paid his debt, he's made that appalling sacrifice. So that's why he names himself and
- [64:06]
Dominic
Paul D. I mean, he's called Paul D. Because there were lots of Pauls at Sweet Home Plantation. The owners must have been very unimaginative. Just called them all the male slaves. Paul or a lot of them. Paul.
- [64:17]
Tabby
Yeah, there was a Paul A as well. Yeah.
- [64:19]
Dominic
And then just give them an initial to distinguish them.
- [64:22]
Tabby
Yeah. And this honing in on people's names, which is such a personal, you know, thing to everybody. That's another way in which Beloved always manages to focus on both kind of the individual characters as well as, you know, the historical impact of slavery.
- [64:38]
Dominic
Yeah. So. So sort of rebuilding yourself or creating yourself for yourself, as it were, is absolutely central part of the book. These people, the. The characters in the book have come out of slavery and they don't really know who they are. And they're trying to rebuild a sense of self. Their cells are very kind of fragile, which is why when Beloved finally comes to the house else she, with her sort of supernatural quality and the fact that she is kind of reawakening the trauma, their cells, particularly Sethe and Denver, kind of break down, don't they? And there's a bit in the sort of about 2/3 of the way through the book where you almost feel like they're. They've lost track of who they are and they're sort of melding into each other. The language starts to break down, the punctuation breaks down. They just start repeating, I am Beloved and she is mine. And they have these kind of streams of consciousness. Consciousness. And you just get this sort of sense that those things that are so precious to us, which is like our name, our selfhood, our personality, our individuality, that they have never properly developed. They're undermined by trauma and suffering and they're collapsing kind of as you turn the pages of the book.
- [65:49]
Tabby
Yeah. And it also teaches you the fragility of this hard won freedom. So there's this very touching moment when Paul D. Talks about kind of realizing for the first time that he can do what he likes and that he's free. And he says his first earned purchase made him glow. Never mind the turnips were withered and dry. So he buys a little bunch of turnips. That was when he decided that to eat, walk and sleep anywhere was life as good as it got. I. E. The very basic, you know, requirements of existence are for him a true pleasure and a privilege. If he is able to choose them for himself. And also the fact that baby Suggs basically kind of gives up at the end, even though she's an officially freed woman. Being a freed woman doesn't prevent, you know, these white men from coming into her free yard and, you know, threatening to take away Sethe for, you know, which results in Sethe's you know, harsh act. And so at the very end, she, you know, resorts to her bed and she focuses on colors. Cause they're the only things that can't harm her. Even though technically she's out of the system.
- [66:50]
Dominic
So you say about the bit where she takes to her bed and she focuses on the colors. And I was saying earlier about the bit where they're these kind of streams of consciousness that kind of meld into each other. And I guess that. So for people who haven't read it, maybe kind of raising their eyebrows and saying, this sounds like quite a peculiar book. And I guess the style of the book is obviously a huge part of the effect. So to somebody who. I'd never read Toni Morrison before I read this book. And a couple of things that jumped out at me. Number one is you mentioned magical realism earlier when we were talking. And I think that's obviously a huge element of this. So. So for people who are not familiar with it, that's kind of fantastical elements in an otherwise realistic setting. So the book appears to be set in, you know, in our world, in a normal world. But weird and unsettling things happen. And the characters kind of take them for granted. They don't question them. And this was very, very fashionable in the 70s and 80s, thanks to Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombian writer.
- [67:45]
Tabby
I mean, he's like the cornerstone, you think of magical realism. You think of him. And a lot of people have actually, when this book was first published, a lot of people compared Morrison's style to
- [67:55]
Dominic
Marquez's, I think completely, rightly. But one of my favorite writers, a writer I absolutely love, William Faulkner, who she wrote her masters about. So in William Faulkner's books, which are set in the south, slavery is a big part. And the spirit, race relations in the south and racism and all of that. That's a big element of Faulkner's writing. And in Faulkner's books, you have these. I mean, he's writing in the first half of the 20th century. He's a great modernist writer. And in those books, there are streams of consciousness, different narrative voices that kind of blend into each other. Different time periods, colliding, kind of memories, resurfacing in the present, all sorts of buried traumas, lots of stuff about Southern history and all this kind of thing. And people always would say of Faulkner's books, they're really difficult. You have to work at them. To me, that's one of the joys of them, that you have to work really hard as the reader. And it makes your experience much more immersive because you have contributed to it. And I think that's the brilliant thing about this book, is that you don't read it passively. You have to read it really, really actively. You have to work out what's going on. And once you do, you feel that you have invested so much more in it than you would if you. As a very detached narrator, telling you what to think.
- [69:05]
Tabby
Yeah, you're not allowed to basically be a detached bystander because you have to work out what you think Beloved is and who you think Beloved is. You have to kind of make a judgment about Sethe's, what she does. You know, what you think of that. And as you say, you have to piece together the fragments of the past. And in this, the style is very, very cleverly judged because it's neither entirely realistic nor is it entirely fantastical. So I actually think that to call it just definitively magical realism is a mistake. Because to read it in that way, to read it as purely kind of mystical and imagined and, you know, to see it as almost like a gothic, you know, made up south, you know, almost fairy tale like, is to distance yourself from the very real kind of flesh and blood events of the novel. So I think it's both. It's both. It's like mystical realism.
- [70:00]
Dominic
I think that's a good way of putting it. I think you're never sure, but at the same time, you never doubt that these things happened and that these characters are really experiencing them. You know, that there is a real history behind it. If it was purely kind of magical realism, you wouldn't believe it was true and it wouldn't have the emotional impact that it does. So you're conscious of the magical realism as a. As a vehicle for exploring something unbelievably traumatic and dark and whatnot. And I think the way the star works is so clever in that the two time periods are always informing each other. So we never told everything about one of them as we discover what happened in the 1850s. So the story in the 1870s is kind of motoring on. And the more things change in the 1870s the more we learn about what happened in the 1850s and know you and your views of the characters are constantly shifting. And every page I think you're learning something about what's happened to them. But you're also feeling something different. And I think that's a very rare feat of craftsmanship on the part of the writer to make you. The language is very sensual, but at the same time, it's as though the kind of the fog that surrounds the past is slowly beginning to clear.
- [71:08]
Tabby
Yeah, the language and the structure exactly as you say, plays very cleverly into the theme of memory in the book. Because the memories constantly change the kind of the flow of narrative time. So, like, memories are slowly and kind of agonizingly retrieved. And so we run forwards and backwards like this river, as you say, present and past. And also there is kind of something of like the melancholy emotional depth of blues to it. I read this really interesting piece again by Russell Banks, the guy that wrote the introduction, saying that in the way that it moves forwards and backwards, it's like jazz has, but in the kind of steady, relentless flow of it. It's very bluesy. And as we said, memory is central to the whole book. And this is, I think, is something that makes it slightly different from traditional slave narratives, which kind of generally plot a physical escape and a journey to freedom. This is also a linear journey to freedom, but it's so, so much more than that. You know, you're thrown sideways, you're thrown down. And through that, Morrison shows how the slaves survive this psychological trauma and the long term scars of slavery embodied by their efforts to forget.
- [72:17]
Dominic
There's an idea, isn't it, that lies behind all this sort of memory stuff, which is Rememory, which is a word that Toni Morrison uses a lot. So it's the idea that Rememory is more than memory. It is connected with suffering. It's something that's half buried. It's something that kind of reawakens despite you, almost.
- [72:37]
Tabby
Yeah. So it's like trauma that exists external to your mind. It's something you can't really control. And then kind of throughout Beloved, the characters are kind of forced to address this. So Sethe says, at one point, I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go pass on, some things just stay. I used to think it was my Rememory, you know, Some things you forget, other things you never do. And this is Beloved's kind of dark power. She embodies, like the collective experience of all slaves. She reappears in their lives. She forces them to unbury their past. She's very kind of elliptical in that sense. And the complexity of her character allows her to represent all sorts of different kinds of experiences, all relating to slavery. You know, Stampade, Puldee, Sethe. Even the women who gather at the end of the novel to kind of beloved. You get, you know, you get these passages of memory from all of them. And the pace of it picks up as you go on. As they're all forced to kind of confront the past, the narrative voice is less consistent. You're pushed far more rapidly between different mindsets, between different narrative voices.
- [73:50]
Dominic
It's interesting. You get to the end of the book and we won't give the ending away. But you mentioned Tabby. There's the group of women who come together again. That's quite 80s. I think the idea that basically the resolution comes with Denver, reaches out to the community for help.
- [74:06]
Tabby
Who there's been exiled from all this time.
- [74:09]
Dominic
Yeah, that basically you can't. There are some things that you cannot deal with on your own that you have to do it collectively as a group. And she goes out and she gets the help of basically the black women who live in the area. And about 30 of these women come to the house and they're kind of singing. And so we get to the kind of the resolution of the book. And it ends actually in a very moving way. I love. There's a bit where Paul D. And Sethe, they kind of come together at the end. She's very damaged by what has happened to her and her experience with this ghost.
- [74:42]
Tabby
She's kind of gone back to bed like baby Suggs. She's kind of. She's almost. She's lost hope.
- [74:46]
Dominic
And Paul D. Is trying to tell her, no, there is a future and there is hope for you. And he says she has always said, you know, her children are her best things thing. And he says, you your best thing, Sethe. You are. And she asks me, me. And that kind of asking her to believe in herself and to. To realize that it's. It's herself that gives her life value. I think that's really moving for somebody who has all her life she'd been treated as property and as less than human and had no value in herself. I think it's obviously a really important thing for her to hear that she's never heard before before.
- [75:21]
Tabby
And she's simultaneously kind of gone back to being like a child in her helplessness, but also like a very, very Old woman who's also helpless. And, you know, lots of simple things are in her mind and in the way she speaks. But. But then she's also like someone that's. Can go no further, that's hit the absolute maximum of what they can endure. All of the terrible, tragic things that she remembers kind of come back to her in one go. And I found this. I find this very evocative too. So she says Howard and Bugler walked on down the railroad track and couldn't hear her. That Amy was scared to stay with her because her feet were ugly and her back looked so bad. That's Amy, the girl that helped her give birth to Denver, that her mom had hurt her feelings and she couldn't find her hat anywhere. So it's all kind of jumbled together. This bag of hurts that's kind of sitting on her.
- [76:12]
Dominic
Yeah. So at the very end of the book, we won't give the ending away, but Beloved, the implications that Beloved is somehow still there as a memory would be. Her footprints come and go, come and go. Should a child, an adult, place his feet in him, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there. But the last line of the book is Beloved. Like she's still there somehow in the way that memory is. And a way that the. The impact of this dreadful collective experience can never kind of evaporate completely. All right, do you know what, Tabby? We've made it sound. So. We've actually made it sound like a really harrowing book, which of course it is. But the funny thing is that a couple of days ago when we were texting about it, I said to you I'd really enjoyed reading it, if you know what I mean. And I remember you said, I do know what you mean.
- [76:59]
Tabby
I totally know what you mean. I think I wanted to pick this book up and take it with me everywhere that I went to the tube to work, I wanted to read it at lunchtime, whatever it was. It's so readable, you know, it's as like I said, it's a bit of a page turner. There's something of the thriller in it. Yeah. It's totally harrowing. But the brilliance of Morrison's language always slightly shields you from the molten core of the pain at the heart of things. And it's up to you to look it in the eye. She never says, look this in the eye. You have to choose to. That choice makes it even more of a thrilling read somehow.
- [77:36]
Dominic
Now, agreed. So we haven't actually decided what we're marking this out of. I know we've done ghostly apparitions, I
- [77:43]
Tabby
think, before, maybe just black dresses.
- [77:45]
Dominic
Black dresses. That's that what she's wearing.
- [77:48]
Tabby
That's what she's wearing.
- [77:49]
Dominic
So black dresses out of 10. I am going to give it 10 out of 10. Tabby. I think it's. I really, really enjoyed reading it. I think it absolutely deserves its place in the kind of literary canon. I think it's up there with the writers that she did in her masters, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. You can absolutely see the influence, the stream of consciousness writing, the way that the blend of different time periods, the way that the kind of narrative voices meld and collapse into each other. But I think it's a brilliant way of tackling an almost, you know, unfathomably horrific subject in a way that makes it so intimate and so personal. As I said, having spent a lot of time reading history books about this, I found that this more powerful than almost any other history book I'd ever read on the subject. So, yeah, definitely a 10 for me.
- [78:37]
Tabby
Yeah, I mean, I. I agree. I mean, it sounds so hackney to say, but it really does make you kind of think about and consider, you know, one of the most obviously appalling things that's ever happened in history. But really think about it. You know, the book's so intimate, so it forces you to confront, like, a different side of it, which isn't the great sweep of history. It's, you know, truly the individual lives. So, yeah, I'm also going to give it a 10.
- [79:00]
Dominic
10. 10 out of 2 tens out of 10.
- [79:02]
Tabby
2 tens out of tens. And also, I love the quality of. Of the writing. It's like you're caught in this, like, mesmeric nightmare, but you kind of want to be there. You kind of hate yourself for wanting to be there.
- [79:13]
Dominic
Yeah.
- [79:13]
Tabby
It's just beautiful writing. Yeah. And. And actually this is my second time reading it, and which I would only ever say of the very best books. But two, I mean, one time was not enough. The second time I felt like the first time reading it was just the beginning. The second time, all sorts of new meanings and layers come into view.
- [79:35]
Dominic
That's a brilliant recommendation for a book. And it's. So I mentioned William Faulkner. William Faulkner is just like that. Once you've read it once, you can't wait to read it again. Because the first time you were struggling to work out what was going on. Once you have worked out, because, you
- [79:46]
Tabby
know, you missed things.
- [79:47]
Dominic
Yeah. You know, you missed loads of things.
- [79:49]
Tabby
And the thing is, for people that are put off reading this because it sounds so, you know, horrific. The horror isn't what you remember, actually. It's this world. It's this web of lives. It's this shared. You know, it's the heartbeat of their experiences rather than kind of the. The scars above that.
- [80:07]
Dominic
And the book does end on a. I mean, the. The.
- [80:09]
Tabby
A really hopeful note.
- [80:10]
Dominic
A hopeful note. A hopeful note. Genuinely.
- [80:12]
Tabby
What do we have coming up?
- [80:14]
Dominic
We actually mentioned Virginia Woolf just now, and we've got Virginia Woolf coming straight up. So we're doing Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's great 1920s book. A much shorter book than. Thank. I mean, I need a break. So to do a short book is my idea of a break.
- [80:28]
Tabby
I'm gonna read Garfield for a while, I think.
- [80:30]
Dominic
A Garfield?
- [80:32]
Tabby
Yeah. I always feel like that's quite a good. Like, you know, you want pudding. You don't feel like a main course.
- [80:38]
Dominic
That's your palate cleanser.
- [80:39]
Tabby
I love Garfield.
- [80:41]
Dominic
Wow, that's a revelation.
- [80:42]
Tabby
Anyway, after that we have the Hunger Games, which you've also never read, so that'll be exciting.
- [80:46]
Dominic
That'll be thrilling.
- [80:47]
Tabby
But you love a dystopian odyssey, don't you?
- [80:50]
Dominic
I do, but I did feel weird buying it in the. I mean, I bought a mad combination of books when I last went to Waterstones, and I remember handing over, like, the Court of Thorns and Roses.
- [81:01]
Tabby
Yeah, you basically have morphed into a teenage girl.
- [81:04]
Dominic
I have, but that's always been a huge part of my identity, to be honest.
- [81:07]
Tabby
Definitely.
- [81:08]
Dominic
Then the Picture of Dorian Gray we're doing by Oscar Wilde. Then one of my favorite books, the Code of The Worcesters by P.G. wodehouse. Little Women by Louisa Moore, Mae Alcott, The 39 Steps by John Buchan, and then the Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham. So lots of fun things to come and a real variety of stuff. Right. So tons of things to look forward to. I can't wait. We'll see you all next time. Bye. Bye. Bye.
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