Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter IV

“Claiming Ownership of That Freed Self”

Remembering the Unspeakable in Toni Morrison’s

Beloved

White Literacy as Dis-Membering: “This Ain’t Her Mouth”

In Beloved, a neo-slave narrative about the pre- and post-Civil War era, Morrison pays attention to an apparently footnote event in African American history, which nonetheless becomes essential in a broader historical context. The act in itself is radical and charged with suffering: a slave mother kills her baby daughter rather than let her be taken into slavery, in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Law (that was reinforced in 1850). Writing about Sethe’s crime, Morrison challenges former historical and literary representations, since “the institutionalized parameters of guilt and responsibility do not provide the vocabulary to ‘tell,’ legally or narratively, the anomalies of a slave mother’s infanticide” (Levy 1991, 117).

The main source of the novel should be found in the biography of Margaret Garner,⁶ which was included by Morrison in The Black Book (1974), a collection of documents about African American experience. Morrison quotes here an article entitled “A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child,” published in The American Baptist in 1856:

She [Margaret Garner] said that when the officers and slave-holders came to the house in which they were concealed, she caught a shovel and struck two of her children on the head, and she took a knife and cut the throat of the third, and tried to kill the other—that if they had given her time, she would have killed them all—that with regard to herself, she cared but little; but she was unwilling to have her children suffer as she had done.

I inquired her if she was not excited almost to madness when she committed the act. No, she replied, I was cool as I now am; and would much rather kill them at once, and thus end their sufferings, than have them taken back to slavery, and be murdered by piecemeal.

There are common points between the historical event and Beloved: both Margaret Garner and Morrison’s Sethe are slaves living in Kentucky, who attempt to escape slavery by crossing the Ohio River to the free Ohio state. Even if they escape together with their four children, their freedom is short-lived, as they are caught by the slave hunters. In order not to allow their children to be taken back into slavery and thus experience the same ordeal as they did, both Margaret Garner and Sethe attempt at killing their four children, and manage to kill one daughter—for which they are taken to jail and put to trial.

To gain imaginative freedom, Morrison departs in her novel from the real story. If in reality the event takes place in the winter, and Margaret Garner crosses on foot the frozen Ohio River (together with her husband, in a party of seventeen runaway blacks), Sethe’s journey takes place in the summer, and the only person who takes care of her is a white girl, Amy Denver. If the Garners take refuge in a black man’s house named Kite, Sethe arrives at the house of her mother in law, Baby Suggs, where the rest of her children were sent in advance with another party of runaway slaves.

While rewriting Margaret Garner’s story, Morrison wanted to reshape it in an emblematic way. The writer has no sympathy for Sethe’s deed, which is left “without comfort or succor from the ‘author,’ with only imagination, intelligence, and necessity available for the journey” (Morrison 1989, 29). Aware of her tricky task, the writer knows how to disclose the truth about the narrated events and not to fall into the trap of prosaic militantism, offering the reader a naked lunch of documentary texts.

True to the nineteenth century reality, Morrison consciously creates Sethe as an illiterate slave, whose access to literacy has been denied. She emphasizes accordingly that orality and storytelling are skills that Sethe and other (ex)slaves know how to master, while reading and writing are part of the white world. Missy Dehn Kubitschek aptly suggests that “in the world of the novel’s setting, print literacy is white-controlled, it often damages the black community” (1998, 135). In Beloved, the newspapers that relate the official variant of Sethe’s (Margaret Garner’s) infanticide promote a distorted representation of a black woman’s desire to escape. As part of the official history of the white people, newspapers are instances of textual dis-membering, of assembling the real events into written pieces that mislead the audience and present the African Americans in accordance with the Negrophobic versions of the official regime. In this context, Sethe’s act of killing her child is solely an exemplification of an animalic violence, of the savage part of the African that could not be tamed by the “civilizing” process of slavery.

Such stories as that of Sethe (Margaret Garner) were used by official supporters of racist ideology as an example for the blacks’ lack of moral standards. At the time, a rhetoric of the blacks’ inferiority was promulgated in order to represent the African Americans as “a permanently alien and unassimilable element of the population” (Fredrickson 1987, 1).⁷ The pro-slavery fraction in the first half of the nineteenth century strove in this way to construct theories for validating a thorough justification of slavery in the South. One of the pro-slavery supporters, Professor Thomas R. Dew wrote:

The slaves have now all the habits and feelings of slaves, the whites have those of masters; the prejudices are formed, and mere legislation cannot improve them… Declare the Negroes of the South free tomorrow, and vain will be your decree until you have prepared them for it… The law would make them free men, and custom or prejudice, we care not which you call it, would degrade them to the condition of slaves (Dew 1852, 435-36, in Fredrickson 1987, 45).

Moreover, another pro-slavery theory claimed that the “savage” nature of the blacks must be “civilized” by slavery. The slave had to be domesticated, because the slave’s submissiveness was not inborn in his or her natural character, but it was an artificial creation of slavery. While the notion of the “civilized Negro” was a product of slavery, it found its antithesis in the free slave as a monster, an uncontrollable creature ruled by wild instincts. One of the promoters of this theory, Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright of Louisiana, claimed that “the negro must, from necessity, be the slave of man or be the slave of Satan” (Cartwright 1861, 651, in Fredrickson 1987, 55). ⁸