When distinguished and beloved writer Toni Morrison died in 2019, her longtime publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, printed new editions of all of her books in hardcover and paperback. According to Publishers Weekly, in the weeks following her death, Morrison’s best-known book, Beloved (1987), sold over 13,000 copies.
It almost goes without saying that Beloved is anything but unknown. And yet, as a long-time English student, I picked it up for the first time in the fourth year of my undergrad from the public library. Truthfully, neither Beloved nor Morrison herself were fully on my radar until then. In case Beloved hasn’t yet made it onto your reading list, here’s why you should bump it to the top.
Set in 1873 Cincinnati, Beloved recounts the life of a formerly enslaved woman named Sethe who escaped from the horribly named Kentucky farm “Sweet Home” to 124 Bluestone Road — her late mother-in-law’s house in a tenuously free Black community.
I’ve often heard Beloved referred to as a “heavy read”. And while the text certainly doesn’t glorify the violence of enslavement, it does not shy away from the documented realities of Black life either, offering and imagining a stunning portrait of life during and in the wake of enslavement.
When my partner’s mother asked me about what I was writing about last semester, I told her I was looking at sound work as a form of community restoration in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Though she knew the name “Toni Morrison” sounded familiar, she had never read any of her books. She immediately asked if I had a copy she could borrow. When I later asked her how she was finding the book, she said “You didn’t tell me it was this intense!” I realized that I probably hadn’t. I had been spending so much time with the moments in the text that register community healing and restoration that I hadn’t described Beloved as a “heavy text” to her. I had described it as portraying the life of an enslaved and formerly enslaved mother. And it does. But it is so much more nuanced and textured and alive than that.
When I talked to my professor, Dr. Kristin Moriah, about writing about this novel for my final project in her class last semester, I prefaced my proposal with a gap I had noticed in the scholarship on the book. Since it was published almost 40 years ago and was the winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for American fiction, there is no lack of reviews, articles, or essays on Beloved. Since graduate students are encouraged (if not expected) to produce work notably different from what has already been published, I felt I had to justify myself. And yet, Dr. Moriah’s response, which I share with her permission here, was that writing about “Toni Morrison is never out of style.” And she’s right. Morrison’s work is endlessly resonant and insightful. It is no less worth reading now than it was upon its publication.
Just ask the 13 or so thousand people who bought the novel just a few years ago in 2019.
As Morrison described in a 1989 interview with Charlie Rose, her books are not addressed to white readers. “My sovereignty, my authority, as a racialized person,” she describes, “had to be struck immediately with the very first book” by “making sure that the dominant gaze was not the white one.” Even so, she notes that she “hopes” “everyone,” regardless of gender or race or nationality, would read her books. As someone who has learned and unlearned so much from Morrison’s work, I, too, hope that everyone reads her books.
As I sat down to edit this article, a quick and curious Google search revealed that perhaps not everyone shares my feelings toward Beloved as a crucial fixture of any and all reading lists. And yet, as the back cover of the novel suggests, many (if not most) literary critics recognize Beloved as the skillful and deeply culturally impactful literary work I know it to be. Los Angeles Times critic John Leonard, for example, says of Beloved: “I can’t imagine American literature without it.”
So, as we think about what it means to celebrate and live in solidarity with Black writers, artists, and people across the country and the world for Black History Month, Morrison — a prolific writer who published so much rich fiction, non-fiction, and literary criticism — is an author we should all be reading and listening to. Whether you start with Beloved (a good place to start) or with one of her many interviews on YouTube (I recommend the interview with Charlie Rose on the white gaze), Morrison — to me and many others — is an author we should all be thinking alongside, every month of the year.