If you think about what’s most frightening in a horror picture, what “gets” you, it isn’t the images but the soundtrack. The reason, perhaps, is that human beings listen in the womb, and hearing is one of the first sensory experiences—one of trust and connection but also, later, of helpless vigilance. The ear listens for the heartbeat, and the footstep, and to the dark—and, in literature, for a certain unwilled cry, to be heard in works as different as the poetry of George Herbert and the stories of Kafka.
That cry resounds from the void in which an infant endures its anguish, rage, yearning, hunger, and worthlessness. A writer can’t make a story of that experience, perhaps because language is a relation, and can only describe other relations. But a writer can make a story of the drama of that helplessness as it’s played out in and perpetrated upon the world; and it is through that drama that the best fiction engages us in history.
“Beloved” (Knopf; $18.95), Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, is such a piece of fiction. Her protagonist is a former slave woman named Sethe, living near Cincinnati after the Civil War with the last of her four children—a teenage girl named Denver, with whom she was pregnant at the time of her escape from a Kentucky plantation called Sweet Home. Sethe’s two sons have run away from her. Her formidable mother-in-law has just died. Her husband has not been heard from since the day that he and the other slaves attempted to board the “train” of the Underground Railroad. And Sethe’s house is haunted by the ghost of her fourth child, a furious infant called Beloved, who died there—her throat cut—eighteen years before.
Despite the richness and authority of its detail, “Beloved” is not primarily a historical novel, and Morrison does not, for the most part, attempt to argue the immorality of slavery on rational grounds, or to make a dramatic case for her heroine’s act of violence—the way, for example, Styron does in “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” She treats the past as if it were one of those luminous old scenes painted on dark glass—the scene of a disaster, like the burning of Parliament or the eruption of Krakatoa—and she breaks the glass, and recomposes it in a disjointed and puzzling modern form. As the reader struggles with its fragments and mysteries, he keeps being startled by flashes of his own reflection in them.
I would like to consider, for a moment, the relation of that fractured scene to the intact, glassed-over family portrait that is beamed into millions of living rooms on a weekly television program called “The Cosby Show.” Bill Cosby has become America’s ideal parent, and the household he heads is much the same as the one at which he aims his commercials for automobiles, cameras, computers, stocks and bonds, peppy soft drinks, and Jell-O. What he really pitches, though, is reassurance, and what is most distinctive about him, as salesman, is his amalgam of maternal and paternal qualities. Cosby is rich and powerful, unlike most mothers; he is tender and present, unlike most fathers. His main role, at least as an actor, is to instill trust in children while disarming their parents’ fears of them, and he does this so well that he fulfills what must be a vast yearning for the kind of perfect nurturing that almost no one gets, and that would permit the kind of self-mastery that almost no one achieves—most rarely, the children of poor, single-parent families in a ghetto.
Cosby has five children of his own, and he has published his thoughts on raising them in a book called “Fatherhood,” which restates a number of homely truths—basic articles in the implicit social contract of the middle-class family. “Even though your kids may not be paying attention,” he advises us, “you have to pay attention to them all the way;” “real fatherhood means total acceptance of the child;” “the most important thing to let them know is simply that you’re there;” “kids have one guiding philosophy, and it’s greed;” and their “baffling behavior . . . is the same today as it was when Joseph’s brothers peddled him to the Egyptians.” Cosby’s book contains no references to his own past, and there is nothing, except for his picture on the jacket, that identifies him as a black man—nor should there have to be. But his blackness, I think, italicizes his message—the way a contrasting typeface indicates that a passage has a double, an unconscious, an exotic, or a revealed meaning.
Cosby’s assimilated American family lives in a state of grace that he invites his audience to contemplate and to share, and it is in many ways an ironic counterpart of Morrison’s riven and haunted family. For who were the slaves but the selfless “ideal parents” of their white masters?
As “Beloved” opens, one of the former slaves turns up on Sethe’s doorstep near Cincinnati. Paul D. is “the last of the Sweet Home men,” and in the score of years since Sethe last saw him he has been a prisoner on a chain gang, a fugitive living in the wilderness, a laborer for both sides in the Civil War, and a vagabond. Sethe learns from him that his brother, Paul A., was captured and hanged; that their comrade Sixo—“the wild man” was “crisped” and shot; and that her husband, Halle, was last seen squatting next to a butter churn with expressionless eyes, smearing the clabber on his face:
“Did you speak to him?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why!”
“I had a bit in my mouth.”
She, in turn, recounts her story. After she put her children safely aboard the “train” and went back to wait for her husband, she was cornered in the barn by the nephews of her master. Inured as he is to the brutality of white men, Paul D. is still astounded that the boys would have “pulped” Sethe’s back when she was pregnant. Yet it isn’t the beating that she wishes to impress upon him:
“They used cowhide on you?”
“And they took my milk!”
“They beat you and you was pregnant?”
“And they took my milk.”
The scene in which the nephews force Sethe to suckle them is one of the most shocking in a novel stocked with savagery of every description, physical and verbal, and the point that doesn’t register as such for Paul D. is an important one. It is not because he lacks compassion—Morrison has endowed him with an almost mystical (perhaps even sentimental) tenderheartedness. But, as a man, his experience of slavery has been different from Sethe’s, as a woman, and if his hardships have been more extreme they have also been less damaging to his pride. That pride has been invested in his own attributes: his strength, his mobility, his manhood, his ability to survive. Hers has been invested in her maternity and confused with her maternity, and until that confusion is resolved, which is the real business of the narrative, she is still, and in every sense, a slave/mother.
Sethe and her two daughters, one flesh and one spirit, are trapped in void at the core of “Beloved,” trapped by a powerfully cohesive but potentially annihilating force—maternal love—that scatters and repels the male characters of the novel. Paul D. puts it one way when he tells Sethe, “Your love is too thick.” Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law, describes it another way when she says, “A man ain’t nothing but a man. But a son? Well now, that’s somebody.” What she also means, in the context of her own life, is “A woman ain’t nothing but a woman. But a mother? Now, that’s somebody.” What she also means, in the context of her own life, is “A woman ain’t nothing but a woman. But a mother? Now, that’s somebody.”