Thursday
First it was caravans, then it was wokeness, then it was Critical Race Theory, and now it’s Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Apparently, Republican candidates have one play and one play only for winning elections: scare your voters by pointing at people of color.
Morrison’s novel, which won her both a Pulitzer and a Nobel, is being used as the closing argument by Glen Youngkin, Republican candidate for Virginia governor. Apparently eight years ago the son of Republican activist Laura Murphy, then a high school senior, claimed to have had nightmares because of the book. What emerged out of his mother’s complaint was a bill that parents could exempt their sons and daughters from reading books with explicit sex scenes. While the bill was passed by the State Assembly, it was then vetoed by Governor Terry McAuliffe, who is running again this year. According to a Washington Post article on the controversy, the Beloved bill (as it was called) “would have made Virginia the first state in the nation to give parents that opt-out power.”
Youngkin is now using McAuliffe’s veto to turn voters against him. He is also playing on McAuliffe’s assertion that parents shouldn’t be telling teachers what to teach. Youngkin has framed this as McAuliffe wanting “to silence parents because he doesn’t believe they should have a say in their child’s education.”
In a Youngkin ad, Laura Murphy is seen saying, “When my son showed me his reading material, my heart sunk. It was some of the most explicit reading material you can imagine.” McAuliffe has replied that “Youngkin’s closing message of book banning and silencing esteemed Black authors is a racist dog whistle designed to gin up support from the most extreme elements of his party–mainly his top endorser and surrogate, Donald Trump.”
I consider Beloved to be one of America’s greatest novels—up there with The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby—but set that aside for the moment. I’ll say first that the Virginia situation is very familiar because I once found myself battling a school superintendent over another Morrison novel, Song of Solomon, in which some of the same dynamics were in play.
I write about the incident here but to sum up the highlights, a high school English teacher who was a former student of mine paired up Huckleberry Finn and Song of Solomon in an AP class, an inspired coupling given that both are coming-of-age novels involving young men grappling with race in America. (Indeed, Morrison admires and has defended Huckleberry Finn.) A student objected to three pages of explicit trash-talking between the protagonist Milkman and some country folk, who are testing his manhood. (Milkman passes the test and is accepted by the group.) The student’s mother photocopied the offending passages and took it to the county’s superintendent of schools, who decreed that St. Mary’s County school teachers could no longer teach the book in their classes.
I went to talk to the superintendent but was palmed off on two of her assistants. In our conversation, I noted (1) that parents should be thrilled that such a book as Song of Solomon was being taught as it is about a young man finding purpose in his life; (2) that they were sending a terrible message to the African American community by banning a work by the first African American author to win a Nobel prize; and (3) that if they banned Song of Solomon today, might they not ban Beloved tomorrow?
My visit didn’t do any good and, as far as I can tell, teachers are still forbidden from teaching Song of Solomon in St. Mary’s County schools. I haven’t heard about Beloved.
Back to the novel. Beloved is about an escaped slave who, to save herself and her children from being taken back into slavery, kills her eldest daughter and attempts to kill the others. That daughter comes back to haunt her, breaking up her family and driving her half crazy.
The novel, in other words, really is the stuff of nightmares—but then, much of literature is. Slavery was such a horrifying institution that it sometimes caused people, Blacks as well as Whites, to do dreadful things. When I wonder what traumatized Laura Murphy’s son, however, I wonder if what most oppressed him was race oppression making Whites look bad.
For although there are some good Whites in the book, there are some awful ones as well. For instance, there’s a scene where the slaveowner’s sons force Sethe, who is about to deliver, to suckle them with her breastmilk. When she informs on them to her horrified mistress, she is beaten so badly that a permanent tree pattern appears to be etched into her back. As she recounts the episode,
“After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em. She had that lump and couldn’t speak for her eyes rolled out tears. Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still.”
“They used cowhide on youds?”
“And they took my milk.”
“They beat you and you was pregnant?”
“And they took my milk.
We are living in a society right now where anything racial that makes certain Whites feel uncomfortable is a cause for offense. We’ve seen videos of police being called on Black birdwatchers, on Black picnickers, on Blacks standing in their front yard and Blacks entering their apartment complexes. Ahmaud Arbery was shot for jogging, Trayvon Martin for returning from the store.
And it’s getting worse. Increasingly we’re seeing parents complain when their kids are taught Civil Rights history, while Texas history books have begun to soft pedal slavery. It seems inevitable that people would get around to Toni Morrison sooner or later.
Literature, after all, packs a wallop. And just as Edgar Allan Poe (in the words of Harold Bloom) dreamt America’s nightmares, so Morrison dreams its racial traumas. African Americans no less than Whites continue to bear the scars of slavery. One imagines Morrison quoting one of her own literary models, William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
If we were truly concerned about raising young people right in this country, English teachers would explain to parents how their children benefit from reading challenging novels like Beloved. Kids are tougher than their parents think and well able to rise to the challenge of difficult material, but to involve the entire community in the education of the young would be to avoid some of the conflicts that we are encountering.
Unfortunately, we are so polarized, and so many Whites are see mere discussions of race as threatening, that I’m becoming pessimistic that such conversations could ever happen. If that’s the case, then we’ll continue to have racial fear-mongering in our politics. And if Beloved is targeted today, other African American classics that remind us of our dark past will find themselves on banned lists tomorrow.
Added note: To make clear the slippery slope we have entered, just today a Texas lawmaker has released a list of 850 books that he wants school districts to investigate, with more to come. As NBC News reports,
A Texas Republican lawmaker has drawn up a list of 850 books on subjects ranging from racism to sexuality that could “make students feel discomfort,” and is demanding that school districts across the state report whether any are in their classrooms or libraries.
State Rep. Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth, also wants to know how many copies of each book the districts have and how much money they spent on them, according to a letter he sent Monday to Lily Laux, deputy commissioner of school programs at the Texas Education Agency, and several school district superintendents.
Krause, who chairs the state’s House Committee on General Investigating, also directed the districts to identify “any other books” that could cause students “guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”
Toni Morrison isn’t on the list yet but could well be included under “any other books” once the censors get started. The NBC News article mentions some of the fiction that has been included:
Along with the letter, which was first obtained by The Texas Tribune, Krause appended the book list that includes well-known titles like the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Styron novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner and best-sellers that were turned into movies or television series, such as John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, Alan Moore’s dystopian V For Vendetta, and the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.