Toni Morrison, Beloved & the legacy of slavery

1. Toni Morrison, Beloved & the legacy of slavery

2. Redefining African American Identity • Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931 • Family part of great 20th century migration of African Americans away from the oppression of the Jim Crow south to northern cities. • Morrison was important in rise of African American literature, both as teacher at Howard University, as an editor at Random house • Her work has helped redefine African American identity and experience. Whites defined those before.

3. Her Body of Work Morrison has won the National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature for a body of work that includes. • The Bluest Eye, 1969 • Sula, 1974 • Song of Solomon, 1977 • Tar Baby, 1981 • Beloved, 1987 • Jazz, 1992 • Paradise, 1999 • Love, 2003 • A Mercy, 2008

4. America & the Scars of Slavery • Though Morrison’s work focused on black experience, and particularly on the experience of Black women, she long avoided subject of slavery. • Considered taboo in the Black community she grew up in. Too big, too traumatic, too embittering, too hard to face. • Morrison has said that America too has willfully repressed the memory and shame of slavery, leaving the millions of slavery’s victims “disremembered and unaccounted for.” • But the “ghosts of the dead,” as she refers to the millions lost to slavery, “haunted” her.

5. Slavery in America: • In 17th Century Colonial America, slavery included white indentured servants, Native Americans, and African Slaves. • Laws passed that differentiated between the groups, and removed all legal protection and human rights for African Slaves. • The cotton and tobacco trade explodes in the American South, bringing with it an insatiable need for cheap, forced labor. • Mass captures and kidnapping of African tribesman—millions brought across the Middle Passage to the Americas.

6. An Unprecedented Brutality • In its scale and scope, slavery in 18th Century America becomes a soul-destroying brutality unprecedented in human history. • Slavery became a life sentence. • Worse yet, it became generational • Young women valued as breeding stock. • Loss of children, confiscated from mothers and sold at auction, became the hardest burden of all to bear. • Hundreds of thousands risked all to escape to North.

7. A couple of relevant particulars • The Middle Passage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Passage • The Fugitive Slave Acts, and their effects • The Ohio River and Cincinnati, Ohio.

8. Back to Morrison & Beloved • Inspired by Margaret Garner case (more on that later). • Haunted by ghosts of slavery’s past. • Beloved appears to Morrison “out of the water” • “Trying to make the slave experience intimate