The Source of Self-Regard

by Toni Morrison

  And I thought, well then, there is not only perhaps a hunger for the information, maybe the book is a kind of substitute and a more intimate version of history, and in that way becomes serviceable in a way in which, perhaps, other novels that I have written have never become. Song of Solomon is not read that way, Sula’s not read that way, but Beloved is read that way and perhaps that’s why it was distributed so widely on a campus that could accommodate many, many disciplines and genres and approaches. So my feeling was that it was kind of intimate but perhaps also kind of a shortcut to history. So I want to talk about how history is handled, or I had to handle it, in the writing of Beloved. And then segue from the impact of history on this fictional form, for me, into the culture of a later period, the twenties, and how that influenced my construction of the new book, Jazz.

  In trying to think through how one deals with something as formidable and as well researched as history, and how one can convert it, or ignore it, or break its bounds or what have you in order to develop the novel, I was talking a couple of years ago to an audience in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and that audience was made up of librarians and people from the community and students and many teachers, high school teachers and private school teachers, and during the question-and-answer period following my reading and talk, one of the teachers asked me a question. She wanted to know whether as the author of Beloved, I could give her any information on how to teach that novel when, as she said, there were no CliffsNotes available. Well, I was a little astonished by her question. I mean, I would not have been astonished if a student had asked me, but I was a little astonished because she did, and so I said, “Well, I don’t really know how to teach Beloved, and I certainly don’t know how to tell you how to teach it, but since you say there are no CliffsNotes, maybe one of the ways to teach it is to have your students make some.” And she sort of smiled and looked as though I had not treated her question seriously, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances.

  But what’s interesting is that later, six or seven months later, I got a large package from her, and in that package were three issues or editions, I guess you could call them, of CliffsNotes. And what she had done is taken my answer to heart and given her honors students the assignment of producing CliffsNotes for the novel. She divided them into three teams, and each team produced a booklet with a cover and preface and acknowledgments and table of contents and then that long, so-called analysis that you see in CliffsNotes. And each one had received a prize—one through three—and the students sent me their pictures of their team, holding their names up. And they wrote letters.

  Clearly, in order to do that, they had to read the book very carefully, they had to do secondary source readings, they had to make literary references and cross-references and so on. So it turned out, I’m sure, to be a very interesting project. I read their letters very carefully, and most of them were complimentary, but you know the nice thing about high school students is that they are not obliged to be complimentary, and particularly after they have done all that work they feel very authoritative and they don’t have to compliment you at all. And so they asked me questions that they had not been able to answer sufficiently to satisfy themselves. I am leading up to what I found to be one of the principal complaints they had. The consistent one, the one that if you took all the complaints and rolled them into one, that they were really expressing, was that they were either alarmed or offended by explicit sexuality in Beloved and the candor with which some of those scenes were described, and they didn’t understand the necessity for the use of that kind of candor. On the one hand, it was reassuring to find students still shockable in terms of sexuality being described, so I felt pretty good about that, but on the other hand it was very disturbing to me because nobody was offended or confused or unable to understand the context in which the story is set, which is slavery. The sexuality troubled them. But the violence and the criminality and the license in that institution did not alarm or offend them.

  I thought this pointed to one of the problems of writing novels that have a historical basis: that is, you don’t question the history. Or really analyze it or confront it in some manner that is at odds with the historian or even the novelist’s version of it. One sort of takes it, swallows it, agrees with it. Nothing is aslant. Although in fact, the reason I had written the book was to enter into that historical period from some point of view that was entirely different from standard history, not in terms of data or information but in terms of what it was able to elicit from the reader. It seemed that everything came under review in the text by these very clever students, except the major assumptions of the text. So either I did it very well, or I did it very badly.

  But in truth, the problem lay in the nature of the beast itself—in the nature of trying to marry a certain kind of terribly familiar but at the same time estranging history. The question being, how to elicit critical thinking and draw out some honest art form from the silences and the distortions and the evasions that are in the history as received, as well as the articulation and engagement of a history that is so fraught with emotion and so fraught and covered with a profound distaste and repugnance. Because I would assume that everybody would either understand it, rationalize it, defend it, or be repelled by that history. So my job as a novelist was to try to make it palatable and at the same time disenfranchise the history, in a sense. The embrace of history and fiction is what I was concerned with, or rather the effort to disentangle the grip of history while remaining in its palm, so to speak. Especially this particular piece of history and this particular novel.

  For the purposes of the rest of this talk I want us to agree that in all of our education, whether it’s in institutions or not, in homes or streets or wherever, whether it’s scholarly or whether it’s experiential, there is a kind of a progression. We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. And separating one from the other, being able to distinguish among and between them, that is, knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence, is generally what serious education is about. And if we agree that purposeful progression exists, then you will see at once how dispiriting this project of drawing or building or constructing fiction out of history can be, or that it’s easy, and it’s seductive, to assume that data is really knowledge. Or that information is, indeed, wisdom. Or that knowledge can exist without data. And how easy, and how effortlessly, one can parade and disguise itself as another. And how quickly we can forget that wisdom without knowledge, wisdom without any data, is just a hunch.

  In writing Beloved, all of that became extremely acute. Because I resisted the data at my disposal and felt that I was quite fully informed. I didn’t have to know small things, I could invent them easily—I’d read all the same books you have about slavery, the historical books, the Slavery to Freedom and Roll, Jordan, Roll and Slavery and Social Death and the Aptheker collections of documents, etc. I’d read Gutman’s Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, but particularly I had read the autobiographies of the slaves themselves and therefore had firsthand information from people who were there. You add that to my own intuition, and you can see the shape of my confidence and the trap that it would lead me into, which would be confusing data with information and knowledge with hunches and so on. I thought I knew a great deal about it. And that arrogance was the first obstacle.

  What I needed was imagination to shore up the facts, the data, and not be overwhelmed by them. Imagination that personalized information, made it intimate, but didn’t offer itself as a substitute. If imagination could be depended on for that, then there was the possibility of knowledge. Wisdom, of course, I would leave alone, and rely on the readers to produce that.

  So here I am appropriating a historical life—Margaret Garner’s life—from a newspaper article, which is sort of reliable, halfway unreliable, not doing any further research on her, but doing a lot of research around her. What things
were like from 1865 to 1877 within Reconstruction and so on in that part of the country, so that all of the details would be there. But also realizing that part of the imaginative process in dealing with history was that in the article this preacher who was interviewing her and telling her story with a great deal of shock refused to make any judgments about her. He withheld judgment. And this was sort of the way everybody was, although they all wrote these powerful editorials that were anti–Fugitive Slave Law and so on, there was this sort of refusal to judge. And that little scrap of information seemed key to me—the inability to judge what this woman had done. The withdrawal from judgment, the refusal, not to know, but to conclude. And there seemed just a little kernel of something in that.

  Why not judge her? Everybody else had. It was clearly terrible. That was a judgment. It was obviously unconscionable. It was harrowing, what she had done. It was monstrous. But the interesting thing was, harrowing as it was, monstrous as it was, outrageous and inhuman as it was, it was not illegal. It was everything but that. The law did not recognize the relationship, so there was no legal language to hold it. Margaret Garner wasn’t tried for murder; she was tried for what the law could accommodate, what the law could judge, what the law deemed “outlaw,” which was the theft of property.

  The question for me then became, well, if the law is unwilling to judge, and her mother-in-law can’t judge, who can? Who is in a position to condemn her, absolutely, for the thing the courts would not even admit susceptible to litigation? The accusing finger would have to have a lot of weight if it were to be a finger that Margaret Garner pays some attention to. And that would only be, of course, her daughter, the one she managed to kill—successfully, if that term is applicable—before they stopped her. While I wasn’t anxious or eager to get into those waters, I thought, well, if she could do it, then I could sort of imagine it, or think about it, and see what would happen when the dead daughter was introduced into the text. And of course what it did do was it destabilized everything, reformulated its own history, and then changed language entirely.

  The other problem—that is, in addition to the history, the actual outline or plot of Margaret Garner’s life, and my alteration of it to suit my own purposes—in trying to do this, is the problem of slavery. It would have been wonderful for me if she had done this some other time, like ten years ago, and then I could deal with it, but it happened in slavery. So the question is how does one handle it? How do you inhabit it without surrendering to it? Without making it the major focus of the novel, rather than the slaves themselves. The problem is how to take the imaginative power, the artistic control away from the institution of slavery and place it where it belongs—in the hands of the individuals who knew it, certainly as well as anybody, and that would be the slaves. And at the same time, not to dismiss it or denigrate its horror. Because the problem is always pornography. It’s very easy to write about something like that and find yourself in the position of a voyeur, where actually the violence, the grotesqueries and the pain and the suffering, becomes its own excuse for reading. And there’s a kind of relish in the observation of the suffering of another. I didn’t want to go into that area, and it was difficult to find out—difficult and important to find out where those lines were, where you stop and how you can effect a kind of visceral and intellectual response without playing into the hands of the institution and making it its own excuse for being. I didn’t want to chew on that evil and give it an authority that it didn’t deserve, give it a glamour that it didn’t really have; I wanted to return the agency into the hands of the slaves, who had always been fairly anonymous, or flat, it seemed to me, in much, although not all, of the literature.

  Now of course here’s three to four hundred years to peruse, and it is indeed a humbling experience. You find that the sheer documentation—the history—is too long. It’s too big, it’s too awful, too researched, too ancient, too recent, too defended, it’s too rationalized, it’s too apologized for, it’s too resisted, it’s too known, and it’s too unknown, and it’s too passionate, and it’s too elusive. And, in order to explain other kinds of oppression, such as women’s oppression, it was also very much appropriated.

  So I’m dealing in an area that I know is already overdone and underdone—attractive in an unhealthy sense, and repulsive and hidden and repressed in another. What I needed then, to deal with what I thought was unmanageable, was some little piece, some concrete thing, some image that came from the world of that which was concrete. Something that was domestic, something that you could sort of hook the book on to, that would say everything you wanted to say in very human and personal terms. And for me that image, that concrete thing became the bit.

  I had read references to this thing people put in their mouths. Slave narratives were very much like nineteenth-century novels, there were certain things they didn’t talk about too much, and also because they were writing for white people whom they wanted to persuade to be abolitionists or to do abolitionist-type work, did not dwell on, didn’t spend a lot of time telling those people how terrible all this was. They didn’t want to call anybody any names, they needed their money, so they sort of created an upbeat story: I was born, it was terrible, I got out, and other people are still there and you should help them get out. They didn’t stay and talk a great deal; there was a lot of hinting and a lot of reference but nothing explicit that you could see. So sometimes you might read that Equiano goes into a kitchen in New England and he sees a woman cooking, and she has this thing in her mouth and he says, “What is that?” And somebody says, “Oh, that’s a brake,” b-r-a-k-e, and he said, “I have never seen anything so awful in my life,” and he leaves and doesn’t talk about it anymore. And then I had seen many references, such as some entries, very selective entries, from William Byrd, in Virginia, in the early part of the eighteenth century, 1709, 1712—and his editors describe him, quote, as “Virginia’s most polished and ornamental gentleman, a kindly master, who inveighed in some of his letters against brutes who mistreated their slaves.”

  February the eighth: Jenny and Eugene were whipped. April: Anna was whipped. May: Mrs. Byrd whips the nurse. May: Ma was whipped. June: Eugene [who was a little child] was whipped for running away and had the bit put on him. September: I beat Jenny. September: Jenny was whipped. September: I beat Anna. November: Eugene and Jenny were whipped. December: Eugene was whipped for doing nothing. Then the next year in July: The Negro woman ran away again with the bit on her mouth. July again: The Negro woman was found, and tied, but ran away again in the night. Five days later: My wife, against my will, caused little Jenny to be burned with a hot iron. Next month: I had a severe quarrel with little Jenny and beat her too much, for which I was sorry. Same month: Eugene and Jenny were beaten. October: I whipped three slave women. November: The Negro woman ran away.

  And there are three or four more pages of that. And it is true that taken into consideration with other kinds of behavior, this was not all that bad. But the two references to the bit, none of which he explains or describes, were similar to many others I had read. I had a lot of trouble trying to find descriptions of this contraption, pictures, what did it look like, what did it do, and so on. And it was very, very difficult, though I did end up being very lucky, in a way—I found some pictures.

  But I felt, ultimately, that it wasn’t something that really needed to be described. If I had described it exactly the way it was, and found language to say exactly what those things looked like, it would have defeated my purpose. It was enough to know that you couldn’t order them from a large warehouse, that you had to make them yourself. It was enough to know that they—these handmade things—were not restrictive in the sense that they were not like docks, which made it so you couldn’t work. You were supposed to go on and continue to work. It was important that it was not only used for slaves, it was also used a lot for white women, who sometimes, I suppose, needed, or someone felt that they needed, the same sort of thing, because
the bit is just something that goes in your mouth and it hurts, I suppose, it’s inconvenient, but you know what it does? It makes you shut up. You can’t move your tongue. And for women, we know, that would be a torture instrument that would be primary.

  Not describing it technically, physically, became more important because I wanted it to remain indescribable but not unknown. So the point became to render not what it looked like, but what it felt like and what it meant, personally. Now that was the parallel of my attitude toward the history, toward the institution of slavery, that is, I didn’t want to describe what it looked like, but what it felt like and what it meant. So I eliminated all the data from the inquisition records that I read—São Paulo and Harper’s Weekly and Equiano and slave owners’ diaries—and tried to form language that would help me and, I hope, the reader, to know it. Just know it. Nowhere in Beloved is this contraption described. But this is what I ended up with when I tried to make it completely known or convey a sense of how it felt and what it meant.

  At this point, in this short little passage, Sethe has found out that probably her husband never left that farm, Sweet Home, and that he probably saw what happened to her, because Paul D thinks so. And she’s angry when she hears it, because she wants to know of Paul D, why didn’t he, if he saw her husband collapsed in this way, why didn’t he help him, and why didn’t he say something to him, why did he just walk away without saying anything, and he said he couldn’t because he had this thing in his mouth. And eventually she asks him to tell her not about what she’s feeling about her husband, her ex-husband, but what that must have been like for him.