Haunted by History
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison is one of the best-known authors in American history. If you weren’t assigned one of her novels for English class, perhaps you’ve seen her being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey or on The Colbert Report. She’s the recipient of high-profile awards and accolades, including the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and the 2016 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. She’s one of the most written about authors, up there with the two Wills, Shakespeare and Faulkner.
Toni Morrison is awesome. But is she a horror writer? Is she part of the tradition of weird fiction?
Our answer is yes, and our proof is her fifth novel, Beloved, published by Knopf in 1987.
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio. Her parents, George and Ramah, were migrants from Southern states. She studied the classics and humanities at Howard University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree, and Cornell, where she earned a master’s. She gained critical attention with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1970, and she hasn’t slowed down since. She has published ten additional novels and worked as an editor for Random House and then as a professor at several universities. She has influenced numerous writers, including Angela Davis, Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Gloria Naylor, Amy Tan, and Louise Erdrich. Morrison retired from teaching in 2006, and her papers and manuscripts are archived at Princeton University. But Morrison maintains an active literary life through writing and speaking and by recording audio book versions of her novels.
Toni Morrison may not be a horror writer in the vein of Shirley Jackson or Anne Rice or Tananarive Due. But in addition to being a great historical novel of twentieth-century American literature, Beloved is a horror tour de force that evokes every trope of the genre while peeling back the bandages from the wound of slavery on Americans’ collective psyche. Writing within the horror genre affords authors an opportunity to show the most violent and terrifying parts of real life, and Beloved is a master class in that technique. Morrison tells a ghost story that makes visible the gut-wrenching true horror of slavery, especially as experienced by African American women, and forces readers to reckon with an often-ignored part of U.S. history and its haunting effects.
Morrison is also no stranger to the supernatural. Several of her novels, including Song of Solomon (1977), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997), Love (2003), and Home (2012), feature ghosts of the past. Her play Desdemona (Oberon Books, 2011) focuses on the ghost of Shakespeare’s character, giving her a voice (finally!) to explore what went wrong in her relationship with Othello; in letting this character speak, Morrison calls attention to the issues of race and class that Shakespeare glossed over in his play.
Beloved, however, is a full-on ghost story from top to bottom. Morrison centers the story on the title character, the ghost of a deceased girl called Beloved, in order to explore the effects of trauma. It is a fictionalized reimagining of the life of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who, in 1856, attempted to escape her northern Kentucky slaveholder, along with her children, husband, and in-laws. The family crossed the frozen Ohio River into Cincinnati, where they were ambushed and recaptured. Because Garner believed that death was preferable to slavery, she tried to kill her children, and succeeded in slaying one of them.
The subsequent trial, and accompanying fiery speeches, protests, and violence, presaged the Civil War. Testimony revealed that Garner’s owner had physically and sexually abused her. Ultimately she was returned to enslavement but sold to a planter in Louisiana. She and one of her children were traveling there by riverboat when their vessel sank in a fiery crash with another boat. Her child died but Garner survived; she died two years later in Louisiana of typhoid fever. Her husband recalled that her last words to him were: “live in hope of freedom.”
Chains of Memory
Morrison read a news clipping about Margaret Garner while doing research for another book, and she decided to try to imagine what caused a woman to commit infanticide. What does it mean to be a mother to children who literally belong to another person? What does it mean to face, every day, the possibility that your loved ones could be abused, tortured, maimed, killed, or sold away? What she created was a novel in the tradition of ghost stories, but in which the ghost represents more than just a person returning from the afterlife. The spirit also stands for the estimated sixty million people who died in the so-called land of the free during the time of enslavement.
Beloved begins with the protagonist, Sethe, and her daughter Denver living in a home troubled by an angry ghost-child, whose torments prompted Sethe’s two older sons to run away. Mother and daughter attempt to communicate with the spirit because they believe it belongs to Sethe’s youngest daughter, whom Sethe killed, as Margaret Garner had done, after the family escaped slavery and was faced with recapture. Both Sethe and Denver find comfort in the haunting presence of the lost two-year-old child. Then the ghost comes back in physical form.
Or does it? Like all good supernatural fiction, Morrison’s story can be explained one way or the other…or both. Regardless, as the women interact with the seemingly full-grown Beloved, each is gripped by memories of a past full of trauma—physical, emotional, and sexual—experienced and witnessed. Ultimately, Denver learns about the painful past despite her mother’s attempt to protect her by refusing to speak about slavery.
Reading List
Not to be missed: After Beloved, turn to Song of Solomon (Knopf, 1977), which is probably Morrison’s next most spectral read; it features a protagonist who is haunted by his parents’ and aunt’s pasts. By facing the ghosts, he learns where he came from and who he is. Love (Knopf, 2003) is a story of the strength of female relationships in the face of trauma and abuse, in which at least one of the narrators is a ghost.
Also try: Beloved (1998) was adapted to the screen in 1998 by Akosua Busia and directed by Jonathan Demme, starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. It was not well received, perhaps because there’s something special in Morrison’s prose that can’t quite be translated to film. We think it’s worth a watch nonetheless.
Related work: Steven Weisenburger’s Modern Medea (Hill and Wang, 1998) outlines the events surrounding Margaret Garner’s escape, recapture, and trial. It’s history that is as riveting as any modern-day drama. For more fiction centered on strong African American women living in a world tinged with supernatural possibilities, read Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (Ticknor & Fields, 1988). Like Morrison, Naylor also explores the haunting past of slavery and how it ruptures family histories.
Tananarive Due’s novel The Good House (Atria, 2003) is on our required reading list. Due explores how family histories haunt homes by focusing on the titular residence and its place in the nexus of African American and Native American history. As in Naylor’s Mama Day, the story’s paranormal elements may have roots in an ancestor’s curse. Due’s story collection Ghost Summer (Prime Books, 2015) is an exemplary group of varied paranormal and apocalyptic tales; the title novella is a great follow-up to Beloved. In it, Due explores how we are haunted by history, whether we learned about it or not. She doesn’t shy away from violence; like the protagonist of Octavia Butler’s Kindred (Beacon Press, 1979; reprint, 2009), Due’s characters are physically injured by encounters with the past.
Speaking of Kindred, if you haven’t read Butler’s time-travel novel about slavery, what are you waiting for?
