The Book Wench

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

There a lot of things I want to say about Beloved. It was beautiful. It was dark. It was a hard read yet also so easy to get into. It challenged me, not because of difficulty but because of what I thought I knew about myself.

Toni Morrison once said that she wrote to answer questions. The books that she wrote were in answer to questions that presented themselves to her. The books were her statement. Her wisdom. Her truth.

I feel much the same about books that we read that resonate with us. Or at least I did. I don’t know if I know my truth anymore. I know who I am and where I have been. But I don’t know what I would do if I were in Sethe’s shoes. I wish I did, but my history, and the history of my ancestors, all but precludes that. I have never and will never be in such a situation. How can I know what I would do? How can I ever understand?

I can’t and I won’t.

Read the book. It’s beautiful. It’s heartbreaking. It’s truth, whether or not we wish it to be.

I read the book for class, although I know I would have gotten around to it eventually otherwise. But now I regret that so much of my life has gone by before reading it. I feel, truthfully, changed all the while staying much the same.

I don’t know what I would have done in Sethe’s position (and once you read the book, you will know what I am referring to) but I do know that I move on from the book different than who I was.

It is, perhaps, my favorite Morrison novel, though I still have several more to read to complete her oeuvre.

There is so much in the novel that I can’t even extrapolate what exactly impacted me the most. But, by and large, I have been impacted. Please read it. It’s beautiful and thunderous and complicatedly simple. Read it.