Lecture One:
A “Bench by the Road”: The Forgotten Slaves
Introduction to Beloved
 Brief biography of Morrison
 Morrison on the writing of Beloved:
a deliberate act of re-membering and
re-inhabiting a traumatic past and
the African roots of African-American
culture.
 Some facts about slavery: the focus on
the people who were slaves versus
Slavery with a capital ‘S’
 The transnational fusion of forms in the novel
Toni Morrison
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Born 1931 in Lorrain, Ohio
Chloe Anthony Wofford
The Bluest Eye (1970)
Sula (1973)
Song of Solomon (1977)
Tar Baby (1981)
Beloved (1987)
Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1988
Jazz (1992)
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Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)
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Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993
 Paradise (1998)
 Love (2003)
 Mercy (2008)
 What Moves at the Margin (non fiction) May 2009
 Home (2012)
 Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012)
 God Help the Child (2015)
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Beloved belongs on the highest shelf of our
literature even if half a dozen canonised Wonder
Bread Boys have to be elbowed off. I can’t now
imagine our literature without it…. Where was this
book that we’ve always needed? Without Beloved,
our imagination of America has a heart-sized hole in
it big enough to die from.
(John Leonard, Toni Morrison
Past
Critical Perspectives Past
and Present, 45)
Reading Beloved as a transnational text –
focused on the historical and cultural entanglement of Africa and America
http://www.unc.edu/wrc/maps/08-Map.png
Transnational fusion of
forms/genres
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Historical accounts of slavery
First-person slave narratives
Psycho-analysis: the theoretical understandings
of the processes of mourning, repression,
repetition, remembering
African retentions in African-American culture –
folktale, songs, call and response, the role of art
in the community.
The musical language of African-American
culture: spirituals, the blues, the language and
music of the church, uses of dialect.
“The Pain Of Being Black”
TONI MORRISON, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her
gritty novel Beloved, smolders at the inequities that
blacks and women still face.
Interview with BONNIE ANGELO,
Time Magazine.
5/22/1989, Vol. 133 Issue 21, p120. 4p.
(RU LIB: Ebsco Host Academic Search Premier)
I thought this has got to be the least read of all
the books I'd written because it is about
something that the characters don't want to
remember, I don't want to remember, black
people don't want to remember, white people
don't want to remember. I mean, it's national
amnesia.
Slavery wasn’t in the literature
at all. Part of that, I think, is
because on moving from
bondage into freedom which
has been our goal, we got
away from slavery and also
from the slaves, there’s a
difference. We have to reinhabit those people.
Interview with Paul Gilroy in 1993,
quoted in Linden Peach p. 95
813.54 MOR/PEA
I will call them my people
Which were not my people
And her beloved
Which was not beloved
Romans 9:25
There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not
think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the
absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who
made the journey and of those who did not make it. There
is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park
or skyscraper lobby. There’s no 300 foot tower. There’s no
small bench by the road. There is not even a tree scored, an
initial I can visit or you can visit in Charleston or Savannah
or New York or Providence or, better still, on the banks of
the Mississippi. And because such a place does not exist
(that I know of), the book had to.
Toni Morrison,
“A Bench by the Road” (1989)
Quoted in Casebook p. 3
A Bench by the
Road
Sullivan’s Island
South Carolina
July 2008
Iziko Slave Lodge
Adderley Street, Cape Town
www.iziko.org.za
• Dutch East India Company
Slave Lodge built in 1680
• Home to 500 slaves
• In the 18th Century more slaves
than free people in the Cape
Elmina Castle, Ghana
photos: Nicky Ritchie (2007)
The Atlantic Slave Trade and
Slave Life in the Americas:
A Visual Record
Gate of No Return
Cape Coast
Castle, Ghana
Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr.
http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/index.php
The approximately 1,235 images in this collection
have been selected from a wide range of sources,
most of them dating from the period of slavery. This
collection is envisioned as a tool and a resource that
can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and
the general public - in brief, anyone interested in the
experiences of Africans who were enslaved and
transported to the Americas and the lives of their
descendants in the slave societies of the New World.
The Middle Passage
One of the most famous images of
the transatlantic slave trade. After
the 1788 Regulation Act, the
Brookes was allowed to carry 454
slaves, the approximate number
shown in this illustration. However,
in four earlier voyages (1781-86),
she carried from 609 to 740 slaves
so crowding was much worse than
shown here.
The Illustrated London News
(Sept. 27, 1845)
Results of Severe Whipping,
1863
Harper's Weekly, July 4, 1863
Iron Mask, Neck Collar, Leg
Shackles, and Spurs, 18th cent.
Thomas Branagan, The Penitential
Tyrant; or, Slave Trader Reformed (New
York, 1807)
The Life of Olaudah Equiano the African (1789)
The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to
the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had
scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. The air soon
became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and
brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died… The
shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the
whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.
http://www.brycchancarey.com/equiano/index.htm
Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an
American Slave (1845)
I do not recollect ever seeing my mother by the light of day. ... She
would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I
waked she was gone.
Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction-block. She
knew that some of them would be taken from her; but they
took all... She begged the trader to tell her where he intended
to take them; this he refused to do. How could he, when he
knew he would sell them, one by one, wherever he could
command the highest price? I met that mother in the street,
and her wild, haggard face lives to-day in my mind.
Twelve Years a Slave (1853)
“12
Years a Slave and the roots of America's
shameful past”
Interview with the historical consultant, Harvard
academic Henry Louis Gates
“12 Years a Slave: in our 'post-racial' age the
legacy of slavery lives on”
Paul Gilroy
theguardian.com 10 November 2013
“Why I won't be watching The Butler and 12 Years
a Slave”
Orville Lloyd Douglas
theguardian.com 12 September 2013
Andrew Anthony
“12 Years a Slave fails to represent black
resistance to enslavement”
Carole Boyce Davies
theguardian.com 10 January 2014
The Observer, 5 January 2014
 “Torture porn” - Armond White, NYFCC
Over and over, the writers pull the narrative
up short with a phrase such as, ‘but let us drop
a veil over these proceedings too terrible to
relate’. In shaping the experience to make
it palatable to those who were in a position
to alleviate it, they were silent about many
things, and they ‘forgot’ many other things
… But most importantly ― at least for me
― there was no mention of their interior
life. … [The writer’s] job becomes how to
rip the veil drawn over proceedings too
terrible to relate … to find and expose a truth
about the interior life of people who didn’t
write it…. to fill in the blanks that the slave
narratives left, to part the veil that was so
frequently drawn … to implement the stories heard.
Toni Morrison: “Site of Memory”
Toni Morrison: “Site of Memory”
I [am] deadly serious about fidelity to the milieu out
of which I write and in which my ancestors actually lived.
Infidelity to that milieu - the absence of the interior life, the
deliberate excising of it from the records that the slaves
themselves told - is precisely the problem in the discourse
that proceeded without us. How I gain access to that
interior life is what drives me …. It's a kind of literary
archeology: On the basis of some information and a little
bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains
were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these
remains imply. What makes it fiction is the nature of the
imaginative act: my reliance on the image - on the remains
– in addition to recollection, to yield up a kind of a truth.