Toni Morrison’s Beloved, one of the most celebrated books in American literature and one of the most frequently banned, is a book about reckoning. The main characters are haunted by an unspeakable event that occurred many years before: Sethe, a woman who escaped from slavery, killed her own daughter in order to prevent her from experiencing the horrors of enslavement. That child, the toddler that Sethe killed so that she would not have to live the unlivable, now haunts her mother’s household with a fury that no one can name or put an end to.
It’s a terrifying story. When a Virginia parent complained recently that her son, a high school senior, experienced “night terrors” after reading Beloved, I wanted to congratulate the woman on having raised such a profoundly sensitive son. Here was a person who could feel the horrors of that book in his own body and soul. What a gift. If he could feel that, then maybe there is hope for all of us, as we try to reckon with American history, with slavery and the world it bequeathed to us. As a culture, we are going through a period of important retelling. Haunting us is a question of reckoning: Can we rebalance the books? Should we even try? Maybe this young man’s feelings could be drawn into the account balances. Morrison and this reader, I thought, were actively helping us to reckon.
That’s not how his mother saw it, of course. She wanted the book banned from schools so no other child would have to experience what hers did. This recalls Morrison’s own words when she wrote that attempts to ban Huckleberry Finn were “a purist yet elementary form of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children.”
