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.
He wants to tell me, she thought. He wants me to ask him about what it was like for him—about how offended the tongue is, held down by iron, how the need to spit is so deep you cry for it. She already knew about it, had seen it time after time in the place before Sweet Home. Men, boys, little girls, women. The wildness that shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back. Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye.
Sethe looked up into Paul D’s eyes to see if there was any trace left in them.
“People I saw as a child,” she said, “who’d had the bit always looked wild after that. Whatever they used it on them for, it couldn’t have worked, because it put a wildness where before there wasn’t any. When I look at you, I don’t see it. There ain’t no wildness in your eye nowhere.”
“There’s a way to put it there and there’s a way to take it out. I know em both and I haven’t figured out yet which is worse.” He sat down beside her. Sethe looked at him. In that unlit daylight his face, bronzed and reduced to its bones, smoothed her heart down.
“You want to tell me about it?” she asked him.
“I don’t know. I never have talked about it. Not to a soul. Sang it sometimes, but I never told a soul.”
“Go ahead. I can hear it.”
“Maybe. Maybe you can hear it. I just ain’t sure I can say it. Say it right, I mean, because it wasn’t the bit—that wasn’t it.”
“What then?” Sethe asked.
“The roosters,” he said. “Walking past the roosters looking at them look at me.”
Sethe smiled. “In that pine?”
“Yeah.” Paul D smiled with her. “Must have been five of them perched up there, and at least fifty hens.”
“Mister, too?”
“Not right off. But I hadn’t took twenty steps before I seen him. He come down off the fence post there and sat on the tub.”
“He loved that tub,” said Sethe, thinking, No, there is no stopping now.
“Didn’t he? Like a throne. Was me took him out the shell, you know. He’d a died if it hadn’t been for me. The hen had walked on off with all the hatched peeps trailing behind her. There was this one egg left. Looked like a blank, but then I saw it move so I tapped it open and here come Mister, bad feet and all. I watched that son a bitch grow up and whup everything in the yard.”
“He always was hateful,” Sethe said.
“Yeah, he was hateful all right. Bloody too, and evil. Crooked feet flapping. Comb as big as my hand and some kind of red. He sat right there on the tub looking at me. I swear he smiled. My head was full of what I’d seen of Halle a while back. I wasn’t even thinking about the bit. Just Halle and before him Sixo, but when I saw Mister I knew it was me too. Not just them, me too. One crazy, one sold, one missing, one burnt and me licking iron with my hands crossed behind me. The last of the Sweet Home men.
“Mister, he looked so … free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher. Son a bitch couldn’t even get out the shell by hisself but he was still king and I was …” Paul D stopped and squeezed his left hand with his right. He held it that way long enough for it and the world to quiet down and let him go on.
“Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you’d be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn’t no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or dead. Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub.”
Sethe put her hand on his knee and rubbed.
Paul D had only begun, what he was telling her was only the beginning when her fingers on his knee, soft and reassuring, stopped him. Just as well. Just as well. Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn’t get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of its contents it would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister’s comb beating in him.
When I moved away from that project, which I thought was sort of incomplete, I began to think about another important point in American life that was also an extremely important point in African American life that I wanted to write about, but this time my problem was not how to deal with the history, but rather how to deal with the culture. There wasn’t a great deal of history that had been written about the twenties, the period I call jazz, or we call jazz. There’d been lots and lots of books, lots and lots of movies, lots and lots of images, lots and lots of everything, but there was still this huge, powerful, amorphous kind of understanding of what that culture was.
If I say the word “jazz,” I’m sure something comes to mind, something very concrete or maybe something that’s unspecific, maybe just the music, a certain kind of music. And if I pursue that image of jazz music, you know, a sample might surface or a musician
or arrangement or a song or something, or maybe just clubs, radio, whatever comes to mind. And places where that particular kind of music we call jazz is played. Or maybe just your own like of it or your dislike of it or your indifference to that particular music. But whatever you’re thinking about that music, in the background of the word “jazz” is the recollection, if not the main feature of your memory, or your association, that jazz is music black people play, or originated, or shaped. But that it’s not exclusively played or even enjoyed by them, now, or for even a long, long time. And also the fact that the appreciation of jazz is one of the few places where a certain kind of race transcendence or race-transcendent embrace is possible. Which doesn’t mean there was no exploitation, but even the exploitation was possible only because of the interest in it, and the passion for it, and the embrace that did take place interracially, so to speak.
The dictionary definitions of “jazz” list usually three or four entries relating to the music—where it originated in New Orleans around the beginning of the twentieth century, and then they usually go on to characterize the music in very interesting words. “Compulsive,” for example, is used a lot. “Intricate.” “Freely improvised.” And then they sometimes chart the course of jazz from diatonism to grammaticism to atonality, and then they go on to list some other entries in which jazz is not music, it’s a kind of dance done to such music and having some of the characteristics of the music. But it’s distinguished by violent bodily gestures and motions. And then following those definitions are slang definitions, including “vigorous,” “liveliness,” “spirited,” and “insincerity,” “exaggeration,” or “pretentiousness.” All that jazz. Don’t give me all that jazz. You know, something you don’t have to pay any attention to because it’s overstatement. But something that is jazzy is highly energetic and wildly active.
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