I could kill my child. I am not talking about that thing you say when your kid leaves his skates in the doorway and you stub your toe. I mean kill as in slay, murder, smother, drown, end. I do not want to feel my child’s warm blood slick on my hands, but if I had to, if the choice was between her living in hell or dying in my arms, I want to believe that I could kill my child.
This is the choice at the heart of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The central character, Sethe, escapes slavery, only to be chased down by the men who claim to own her and her children. Faced with letting her children be taken back into slavery, Sethe attempts to kill her children. She succeeds in killing one: “If I hadn’t killed her,” she says, “she would have died.”
Before I had children, I had read and taught Beloved over a dozen times, and I thought I knew what it was about. I taught it not because it was my favorite Morrison novel (it was not) but because after reading every contemporary book I could about slavery, I found nothing better to capture that mammoth gap in humanity.
It wasn’t until I had children that I realized that I was wrong about Beloved. It is not a book about slavery. Ask me now—as I pack the school lunches and walk my child to school—and I will tell you that Beloved is above all else a book about love, the ferocious and sometimes dangerous love of a mother whose right to mother is never promised and whose children are not children but instead reflections of a nation’s greatest fears.
Beloved, more than any other book, captures the glorious and terrible condition of black motherhood in nineteenth-century America and now. Sethe’s choice between the horrific and the unimaginable presents the central question of black motherhood: How do you love a child whose body, whose flesh and value, will be defined by someone else?
My first experience in the contradiction that is black motherhood came when my first child was still in my belly. I had decided on a drug-free birth and began searching for a doula, a woman who serves as a birthing coach. At the time, there weren’t many choices in my area, not a black doula to be found, but I was relieved when I called Astrid, a relaxed hippy with a soft voice like a lullaby without the singing. As we talked about the kind of birth I was planning, everything she said was calm and reassuring, and I invited her to my home.
The following week, Astrid, pale and petite with a dark shiny bob, arrived at my house smelling faintly of patchouli. We sat on my sofa smiling and talking about ourselves for a few minutes—the so-where-are-you-from conversation. And in that moment, I could see our twelve-year-old selves sitting on that sofa—me, a barefoot working-class black girl from Alabama, hiring her, a middle-class white girl from New Jersey. Fifty years ago, I might have been her maid; another hundred and fifty and she might have owned me. But now we were peers.
Some people would call this progress. But the fact that I could not find a black doula suggests something much more complicated—that peculiar way that progress and regression are always simultaneous. With my baby on its way, there was no time to ponder these issues. I pushed the thoughts out of my head and we started on the birth plan. At the end of our meeting she warned me of one thing: She would be attending an important yearly conference the week after my due date. If I didn’t go into labor by that time, she would refer me to her back-up doula, but judging by the size of my belly it didn’t look like this baby was going to be late.
My due date came and went without a single sign of labor. As the days passed and the conference neared, Astrid emailed to say that it was time for me to meet her back-up doula. I called Kate, a warm, velvety-voiced woman, and she came to my house the next day. When I opened the door, I faced a taller version of Astrid, with a peculiar smile she could not suppress. By the time we reached the sofa, she was laughing out loud.
When you are over nine months pregnant, you don’t want anyone laughing at the sight of you. But it wasn’t my belly Kate was laughing at.
“It’s just—Astrid,” she said, still laughing. “Oh, these crazy doulas,” she said. “She—well—she gave me her client notes, and—they say you’re white. And, you’re obviously not white.”
I gave her a confused look.
“See, right here,” she said, pointing to a tattered page in the folder. And there it was scrawled in messy blue ink, “White.”
While I was trying to understand why a doula needed to make note of the race of a client, Kate asked, “Didn’t you two meet?”
I nodded, still staring at the page.
“So how did she manage to get that wrong?” Her hands flew into the air as if she were ready to catch a large pillow and her laughter grew louder, as she dropped her arms and watched my eyes still on the page.
“Our first meeting was by phone,” I told her. “Maybe she wrote it down then.” My words came out sounding more like a question than a statement. My mind was racing.
Why was it important to note my race? If there was a medical reason for a doula to record race, why didn’t Astrid correct her assumption in the notes?
I still don’t know if there was a reason to write down my race, but I think I know why Astrid assumed that I was white. To imagine me black was just too crazy. If there is an official list of “stuff white people like,” hiring a doula might be squeezed in somewhere between pumpkin spice lattes and farmers’ markets. In fact, this whole world of planned birthing, with its expensive prenatal yoga classes and at-home birthing pools, was ultra white.
Though the natural birthing industry sprang up as an alternative to medicalized birthing, liberating women—at least theoretically—from institutionalized medicine, both birthing worlds have one thing in common: they were both designed with white women in mind. Black women for so long were excluded from medicalized births because of the common view that black women were animal-like and gave birth with ease.
Morrison captures this beautifully in The Bluest Eye when a doctor points to a pregnant black woman and explains to his medical students that “these here women you don’t have any trouble with. They deliver right away and with no pain.”
This view of black women as birthing machines has always been inseparable from its inverse: the idea of the delicate white woman in need of protection from everything, including birth. The gynecological medicine and surgical procedures that were intended to relieve the pain of white women were tested on enslaved black women, most of the time without anesthesia.
In a recent documentary on her life, Toni Morrison describes being born in the attic of her family home. (“My mother said it was very cold up there.”) But this home birth is not unusual among African Americans. My father and all his siblings were born at home, not because their mother chose home births over hospital births but because many hospitals barred black people, even black mothers seeking help. While the natural birthing movement on the surface might seem more inclusive, a midwife-assisted home birth is $5,000 plus the cost of birthing classes, an impossible price for many black women to pay.
Astrid assumed I was white because I was seeking her services, and her assumption was probably a pretty safe one, except I was not white—just accidently passing. I liked Astrid immensely and I think she liked me. But as we sat there that day trying hard to know each other, summarizing our personal histories, we never mentioned the larger history that was hanging over us. I never told her that my brother and sister were born in the colored ward of a tiny hospital in Alabama, and I never said how much I wished she was black so that I would not need to say these things.
History hung thick in the quiet awkwardness of our meeting because it was not just history. Despite our similarities—she was already a mother and I would soon be one—the middle cushion on my beige sofa may as well have been the muddy Mississippi flowing between us. Our lives as mothers would be vastly different because the lives of our children would be dramatically different.
When her little boy brings home a note from school, she’s never going to worry if he is being expelled for a minor infraction as so many black boys and girls are. When her teenage girl attends a pool party, Astrid will never wonder if a policeman might throw her ninety-pound bikini-clad child to the ground, like fifteen-year-old Dajerria Becton, who was brutalized by a policeman at a pool party in McKinney, Texas. Though neither of us would ever let our children play with toy guns, Astrid’s reasons are purely an ethical stance against violence, and while I agree with these ethics, I am far more worried that my child holding even a water gun would be shot and killed like twelve-year-old Tamir Rice.
When I think of these differences, some part of me also thinks that perhaps it is fitting that in the end I had my child without a doula present at all, no Astrid, no Kate, and no Amy Denver, the white woman who delivers Sethe’s child in the woods and for whom she names her daughter. As I underwent an emergency C-section, the idea of a doula who would see me and guide me through a process as daunting as birth, using a plan that the two of us had concocted, seemed completely absurd. On a surgical table, surrounded by people whose faces were hidden behind masks—one of them holding a knife, I felt like the lines of demarcation between me and the rest of the world had never felt more solid.
In the predominantly white neighborhood where I live, I feel my difference most at the playground. Here, when mothers admonish their children and sometimes other people’s children, they calmly say, “No thank you.” It always seems so strange to me that a misbehaving child, including one who might be endangering themselves or someone else, is supposed to stop because someone says, “No thank you.” It is as if these mothers are saying, “Please do not put little Jimmy’s eye out with that stick,” but, “Thank you for offering to make shish kabob out of his eyeballs.” When I mentioned this strange custom to my friend Piper’s mother, she indicated that while she had never heard of such a thing, she could remember plenty of times when she encountered white mothers who did not correct their children at all. And it hits me: as strange as it is to us that a mother watching her child preparing to jump headfirst from a jungle gym onto another child’s head could not think of anything stronger to say than “no thank you,” perhaps these gentle words seem appropriate to someone who lives in a world where no correction at all could also be acceptable and where the worst thing imagined for a child is a fall.
I do not want to suggest that white children never face dangers, or that white mothers love their children less because they are at less risk. I know that there is a big world waiting beyond that playground. Most mothers want to protect their children from all sorts of very real dangers. But black mothers would be foolish to only worry about the real when the imaginary may be the greater threat. I am as worried about my child being mistaken for someone who does drugs as I am about my child doing drugs. I am far more afraid of my child being mistaken for a criminal, a menace, a threat, than I am of my child actually becoming any of these things. My child will go through the world chased by a dark shadow of someone else’s creation, and much of the world will see that dark fiction first, long before my child ever steps foot in the room.
Black mothers are not fierce because they are black but instead because they know that the dangers that all mothers worry about will come to their children hand-delivered in wrapped packages that have their names written on them by Hollywood screenwriters, lawmakers, and overeager “good samaritan” neighbors with the police on speed dial. If white mothers were faced with the barrage of dangerous possibilities that dog black mothers, I have no doubt that they would abandon the polite “no thank you” and put on new fierce selves designed to make the world know what they are willing to do to protect their children.
But I am already living in that world. I don’t have to imagine it. It is in the news everywhere around me. And it comes to me in my dreams despite my best intentions: someone who believes he is protecting himself from an unarmed seventeen-year-old in a hoodie could kill my child. And here is where “no thank you” just won’t do. I walk through the world, my children’s tiny hands in mine, and I am thinking very different words from “no thank you.” Every time a cop turns the corner with his eyes hidden behind mirrored shades, every time I have to give side-eye to a store clerk who is following a little too close, every time a white person asks us where we live when we are clearly standing in front of our own house, I hear it loud ringing from my head to my feet, like thunder in the dead of night: “Not today, motherf#@$.” Yes, all these indignities happened to me before my children were born too, and they were annoying, an inconvenience, and a threat, but now when they happen with my two brown children standing next me, I am burning like the mighty phoenix and preparing to rise from every death to protect my babies.
I have heard many white parents joke about children not coming with instructions, and I always think to myself that my brown babies may as well have come with a warning label, Warning: Blackness May Cause Sudden Death by Gunshot Wound. I know this fear will sound alarmist to some, but before you doubt me, let me tell you their names: Latasha Harlin, an unarmed fifteen-year-old girl shot by a store clerk in LA; James Brissette, an unarmed seventeen-year-old boy shot by police; Aiyana Jones, just seven years old when she was shot by police. And as I sat in a rocker nursing my first-born child, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teen shot by a lone gunman, would also die.
It might seem ironic and perhaps strange to talk about Beloved, a novel about a black woman who kills her child with a handsaw, in relation to my desire to keep my own children alive. But Beloved is concerned not only with the real but with the power of the imaginary to shape the meaning of black lives. Morrison’s rendering of Sethe’s infanticide in the shed is not about the murder but the white imagination that makes that murder necessary. In this scene, Morrison makes what may be the strangest decision in all of literary history: she tells the story through the eyes of the slave owner and the slave catcher. And thus, Morrison offers us a terrifying glimpse of the dehumanizing power of the white imagination.
There are four men who come for Sethe and her children: a man the slaves call schoolteacher, his nephew, a paid slave catcher, and the sheriff. They find her in a shed, holding a dead baby to her breasts and a living baby by the heels. Her two sons lay bleeding on the ground near her feet. Sethe attempts to finish the job by dashing the head of the infant she holds by the heels against the wall. She misses and on the second attempt, Stamp Paid, a friend and former slave, runs into the shed and grabs the child from her.
The scene sounds like an egregious spectacle of children bleeding, dying. But oddly, we are not so much watching the violence as we are fixated on the spectacle of the men’s misinterpretation of everything that they see. Schoolteacher, wallowing in the loss of five pieces of property, recalls admonishing his nephew for overbeating “the woman [he] bragged about, the one he said made fine ink, damn good soup, pressed his collars the way he liked besides having at least ten breeding years left.” He compares her to a maltreated horse and a beaten dog.
Even in the midst of this carnage, Sethe is still property, profoundly damaged property, “gone wild.” Meanwhile, the nephew, shaking with fear, is completely flummoxed by Sethe’s murderous act. Recalling having been beaten himself, he cannot understand why Sethe has attempted to kill her children: “What she go and do that for?”
Both men believe that the scene they witnessed is about a beating: “See what happened when you overbeat creatures God had given you the responsibility of—the trouble it was, and the loss.” They have no idea that the problem lies in the second half of that sentence, the idea that black people were “creatures [that] God had given you the responsibility of.”
Faced with a dead baby, another about to have its head dashed against a wall, and two little boys bleeding in the sawdust, the men, blind as bats, see something else altogether. Their blinded vision remains true to what they imagine: valuable, lost property. And so, they go back home without Sethe and her children.
The men’s blindness, their inability to see Sethe’s humanity, echoes in the present, sometimes seemingly benign, like Astrid assuming that I was white because she could not imagine me any other way. Other times, blindness is fatal, like when a policeman mistakes a wallet for a gun because the person reaching for it is black.
This inability to see black humanity leads to Sethe’s startling description of her actions, “I took and put my babies where they’d be safe.” Her framing of death as the only safe place for a black child is chilling, not just because the novel is based on the story of Margaret Garner, who did in fact kill her daughter in order to rescue her from slavery, but because it reminds us of the impossibility of a safe place other than death for a black child now. It is the conundrum of black motherhood, the reason why a black mother’s love can come in the form of a handsaw.
We saw this strange love rain down on sixteen-year-old Michael Singleton when his mother, Toya Graham, found him in the streets during the violent chaos of the Baltimore protest of 2015. The crowds had gathered in response to the death of Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old black man who died of injuries to his neck and spine while in police custody.
Graham was walking down the street, watching as youth began throwing rocks at the police, when she spotted her son among the crowd. A news camera caught the exchange between mother and son. Graham curses and slaps her son before chasing him away from the crowd altogether. The video went viral. The police commissioner and news commentators praised Graham for being a responsible mother, while using this tragic occasion to admonish all the supposedly irresponsible black mothers who were not chasing their children out of the streets that day. Others called for Graham’s arrest for child abuse. None of them seemed to understand the dire choice that Graham was facing. She summed it up: “He gave me eye contact. And at that point, you know, not even thinking about cameras or anything like that—that’s my only son and at the end of the day I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray.”
Graham’s son was wearing a mask, but when his eyes met hers, she knew him. And in that moment she realized that she had to put him somewhere where he would be safe and violence was the means of getting him there.
I do not endorse or condemn Graham’s choice. Judgment is futile in the face of a mother who chooses between her child’s humiliation and abuse at her own hands or humiliation, abuse, and potentially death at the hands of the police. Neither is optimal. But Graham didn’t write the script; she just chose which part she would play in it. She came for her child and told him and the world: “Not today, motherf#@$.”
Paul D, Sethe’s lover who was formerly enslaved on the same farm that she escaped, does not get it. His response to Sethe may be the harshest judgment anyone could deliver in six words: “You got two feet . . . not four.” And just that quickly, he reduces Sethe to the very thing that slavery had reduced her to: a beast.
He accuses her of forgetting her own humanity. Morrison’s description of this moment hauntingly captures the distance between the lovers: “Right then, a forest sprang up between them; trackless and quiet.” Paul D’s response still shocks me. He knows what happened to black people on that farm. I attempt to find a reason for his response, and land on just one unsatisfying answer every time: Paul D has no children. He cannot see a child wearing a mask in a crowd and recognize that child’s eyes. And though I want to believe that this should not matter—that one should not have to be a parent to accept that one cannot judge a mother faced with Sethe’s choice—maybe sometimes, it does matter.
Paul D is focused on right and wrong, human and animal, life and death. Sethe’s experience as a slave and a mother slices through these neat boundaries and captures all the powerful, contradictory emotions that they cannot contain: grief, fury, and love. But Paul D’s willingness to judge points to something larger: here in America we are and always have been a culture that judges mothers. And if you don’t believe me, just take a trip to a retail store after school lets out and listen to preteens talking to their mothers about everything they failed to do: “You forgot to pack my uniform.” “Why didn’t you put chips in my lunch?” “You should have gotten me up on time!” “You should have grown wings and flown me to school so I would not be late.”
In the nineteenth century, women’s magazines were so filled with directives on how to be a good mother that scholars have given these expectations a name, the Cult of True Womanhood. Women were expected to be pious, pure, submissive, and domestic. And motherhood was synonymous with womanhood. Even advocates for women’s education focused on how education could make women better mothers. Written between the lines of these ideas was a handbook of how to be a bad mother: If you are not white, if you had to work to support yourself and/or your children, or worse if you were property and thus had no power over your children, you had not only failed to meet the standard but you were outside the realm of womanhood all together.
While the nineteenth century seems so long ago, these ideas have chased black women since slavery. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the popular imagination has cast black mothers as irresponsible black women who reproduce but fail to mother. As the recession of the 1970s lingered into the early 1980s and manufacturing jobs that had once been the base of the U.S. economy disappeared, the so-called welfare queen became the punching bag of U.S. politicians. Everything that was wrong with America was her fault. She was black, poor, single, had too many children, and she was sucking the life out of the American economy by living on the hard-earned taxes of others. And without Ronald Reagan ever saying it, we all knew that she was black. In one speech, Reagan described her as driving a Cadillac and cashing her checks in the liquor stores of Chicago—invoking every stereotype of black people he could think of in case listeners did not know the complexion of whom he was talking about.
Growing up in a town filled with poor and working-class people, I did not know any actual welfare queens. I did not know any poor people who had figured out how to buy a Cadillac or a Hawaiian vacation with food stamps. There was, however, Miss Neely, a woman in her seventies with soft eyes, freckles, and jet-black hair. Every month, she rang our doorbell and my mother would greet her and yell for me to bring her purse to the door. My mother nodded as Miss Neely complained of the rising cost of her blood pressure medication and her glaucoma eye drops. Then she would count some bills from her wallet, and Miss Neely would hand her a huge block of government cheese.
Miss Neely had spent her life working hard in white people’s homes, cleaning their toilets, ironing their clothes, wiping their children’s asses, and after all that work she had no retirement to speak of. The last thing she needed was another giant block of government cheese. So, she sold it. And my mother bought it, not because she loved the strange hard cheese that turned to liquid at the slightest sign of heat but because Miss Neely would not have taken her money any other way.
But the fact that the welfare mother is not real has never mattered because she made an appearance in every political speech, the TV news shows, newspaper articles, and comedy acts. By the early 1990s, she had become a major motion picture, Bebe’s Kids, based on a popular routine by comedian Robin Harris. The monkey-like children are miscreants, destroying public and private property and terrorizing whole communities with their antics, while their mother Bebe is nowhere to be found. She has pawned her children off on a friend, while (we imagine) she has gone to pick up her welfare check. It was a powerful joke and one more nail in the coffin of the American welfare system. By 1996, Bill Clinton would sign the biggest welfare reform bill since the beginning of welfare in the U.S., making massive cuts to funds available to welfare recipients.
The myth of the welfare mother emerged in the same context as the mommy wars, the debate about whether mothers (insert “white mothers” here) should work or stay at home, bottle-feed or breastfeed, wear babies or use strollers.
At the end of the day, the central opposition here is not between the white mothers who buy organic vegetables and those who don’t but instead the mythic irresponsible and lazy black mother and the white mother who agonizes over what year to introduce peanut butter to her toddler. Never mind that white women make up the biggest number of welfare recipients. Pay no attention to the fact that the very Cadillac-driving woman whom Ronald Reagan was referring to in his infamous campaign speech was a white woman. I say this not to suggest that women in need of financial assistance are white and lazy but to point out that the mommy wars are not only destructive to white women who are encouraged to judge each other as mothers but also to black women. This mythology of white motherhood’s ugly flipside is the idea of the lazy-ass, no-good black mother who needs to be regulated by the state.
The debate over Margaret Garner, the real-life woman whom Sethe is based on, was not about whether she was a good or bad mother. For abolitionists she was a tragic symbol of what was wrong with slavery—a woman so degraded by sexual abuse that she chose to save her female child from that degradation by killing her. For pro-slavery advocates she was proof that blacks with their unpredictable violent impulses needed to be kept in check by slavery. But both groups saw Garner as someone requiring protection and/or supervision to be a mother.
Beloved, on the other hand, is no pity party. Morrison emphasizes that Sethe makes a choice, and, lest we fail to understand this, Paul D reminds us that “there must have been another way.” Sethe chooses to kill her child. Her choice means losing a great deal. For a time, her lover and her community abandon her. Her living children fear her. Her dead child haunts her. And still, she never retreats from her decision.
In a New York Times interview soon after the novel’s publication, Morrison said of Sethe’s choice, “It was absolutely the right thing to do, but she had no right to do it.” For so long, I could not understand this circle of a sentence. How could something you have no right to do also be the right thing to do? Now, I think I know what she means. She’s talking about dangerous love, that love that can come in the form of a handsaw—love so boundless that it consumes differences of right and wrong, self and other, life and death, terror and tenderness. Dangerous love is a chilling, godlike power born only in the midst of powerlessness.
How many times have we been told that love just happens, that it is natural, or that it is strange and unpredictable? Even the phrase “fall in love” suggests something curious, accidental, and yet welcome, like tripping and landing in a vat of warm, sweetened chocolate.
But in Morrison’s world, our world, love is a series of choices, some small, others dire. It is Ella, a minor character in Morrison’s novel, also a former slave, who delivers the most heartrending advice: “Don’t love nothing.” Paul D, who also addresses the problem of love for black people, tells Sethe that her love is “too thick,” that she has to learn to love just a little. Sethe still chooses, instead, to love full force: “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”
Though many would deny it, we choose how much to love all the time. I am the product of a mother who chose to love just a little bit. Her love was custodial love—love with duty, abiding commitment, but entirely without intimacy. She changed diapers without ever burying her head in rolls of luscious baby belly fat. She never shed a tear in front of her children over anything, whether it was a stubbed toe or the death of her child.
She once told me about a woman coming to her house to express condolences over a loss: “You know, she was blubbering everywhere.” My mother said these words without malice. Her point was that this woman loved the deceased and felt terrible about our loss. But the derision of the word “blubbering” said far more. It said her love is too much, for her and for me. It is spilling over and threatening the small space where I keep my love.
In contrast to my mother, I had an aunt who loved to make her grief visible at the funerals of people she loved and those she hardly knew, throwing herself on caskets, threatening to jump in open graves at burials, wailing, and generally, as my mother put it, acting a fool. We alternately complained and joked about her wailing dances. Was my aunt just a drama queen? Or was her love simply too thick, and thus, for some of us, intolerable? We dreaded family funerals not because of our own grief but because we feared the power of hers. We worried that her love was dangerous enough to break through our own performances of respectable stoicism and set something terrible loose in us and in the world.
I do not miss my aunt’s frightening drama, but still I long for dangerous love—love that makes people suck their teeth, shake their heads, and say, “Lord, she crazy.” I spent my childhood unable to name it but looking for it nonetheless. I lingered outside closed doors with phone cords snaking through the crack to hear my mother talk softly on the phone. I rifled through an old leather briefcase where she stored family papers, searching for birth certificates, proof of a past, a history that might reveal her to me. I wanted to drown in thick, dangerous love.
In Beloved, it is dangerous love that kills a baby and nearly kills Sethe too. As she tries to meet every need of the dead baby who has returned in the body of a young woman called Beloved, Sethe’s health takes a dramatic turn for the worst. But somehow the same fierce love that is killing her saves her when the women of the town who had previously abandoned her return to send Beloved back to the past she came from.
They come not because of their love for Sethe but because their own lives in slavery helped them understand her actions, her love. As far as they are concerned, the ghost has no business taking its revenge on the mother who killed it. And then, there is Sethe’s daughter Denver, whose life is also being destroyed by the ghost who has been consuming her mother.
Without enough food to eat because her mother can no longer work, Denver turns to her community for help. In Denver’s face the women see “everybody’s child.” So they come to Sethe’s house, and they face Beloved without fear, singing to create a “wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees.” With the power of their voices alone, they send Beloved running back to her world. If you listen closely, you can still hear black women making that sound that recognizes the past and pushes back at the same time.
Nine mothers of slain black children added their voices to that rush of sound at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Like Morrison’s novel, they place motherhood, supposedly the purest and tenderest love, at the center of their protests, then they confront us with the contradiction between this romanticization and the dreadful realities of black mothers’ lives. They rallied for gun legislation, police reform, and equal protection under the law. They channeled their lost children to let their voices live once again on their mothers’ tongues. Geneva Reed-Veal, the mother of Sandra Bland, a black woman who died in a jail cell after a frivolous traffic stop, summed it up best: “What a blessing tonight to be standing here so that Sandy can still speak through her mama.” The mothers did not look like dangerous subversives standing onstage in elegant suits and gowns, with enormous glowing red corsages. But make no mistake—these mamas wore high heels to a fight.
In a world that usually says, “Move on,” “Get over it,” and “That was so long ago,” they gather not just to remember but to refuse to forget. Their love is not just a feeling but something that you do and live with the consequences. They are a circle of mothers, living and dying on dangerous love.
Ordinarily, they gather in less glamorous places, like community centers, churches, and fraternal halls, places that smell of pine disinfectant and bake sale muffins. Just before the DNC convention, they were at the West Volusia Shrine Club in Deland, Florida. Under a low ceiling, in bright fluorescent light, surrounded by walls covered in pictures of white men in fez caps, these mothers ate, talked, hugged, laughed, and listened to R&B. It might have been a family reunion. But the memorial T-shirts with pictures and the birth and death dates of their loved ones gave them away.
They gathered to mark the third anniversary of the death of Marlon Brown. In 2013 police attempted to pull Brown over for not wearing a seat belt. On probation for drug charges, Brown jumped out of the car and ran. Police pursued him in two cars. One ran over him. After being pinned underneath the car for four hours, Brown was pronounced dead.
The women who filled that room were mothers—mothers of the dead, mothers of their fatherless children, mothers of their nieces and nephews. Their gathering was a party, a memorial, and an act of political resistance—not just for Brown but for all those who have died at the hands of police. Among them were Geneva Reed-Veal, mother of Sandra Bland; Natasha Clemons, whose son Rodney Mitchell was shot by police after being stopped for failing to wear a seat belt; and Deanna Joseph, whose fourteen-year-old son, Andrew, was rounded up by police along with more than one hundred children at a school-sponsored day at the state fair and abandoned at a site near the interstate where he was struck and killed by a car.
These mothers meet again and again on anniversaries to rage and to remember, to comfort and to castigate, to demand that we see the usually invisible long road of a mother’s grief. They are a community and a movement. They relentlessly battle the forces that killed their children, like superheroes whose special power is dangerous love, love that is unwilling to stay quiet and hidden. They talk to reporters, post YouTube videos, sue police departments, speak at graduation ceremonies, lead marches, press legislators to make new laws, and when those laws are not good enough (and they never are), they take to the streets again to make us all say their children’s names. To those who believed that they would go quietly after the acquittals and the confounding failures to prosecute, they send a message in their every act of resistance: Not today, motherf#@$.
When I teach Beloved next I will ask myself if I am capable of this dangerous love that demands action. Would I put my babies somewhere safe if I had to? And, for a split second, I will say, please God, no, before I admit that yes, yes, I could. I am capable of dangerous love. And then, there will be no more words—just sound.