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Monday
Few photos from the Civil War era are more iconic than “The Scourged Back,” where scars from a vicious beating can be seen on a runaway slave. Therefore, the image’s recent removal from certain venues is creating a furor amongst historians and archivists. As CNN reports,
On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that officials at an unidentified national park had ordered that the photo be taken down, along with other signs and exhibits related to slavery. Citing unnamed sources, the newspaper described the move as being in line with an executive order Trump issued in March directing the US Interior Department to do away with content that disparages “Americans past or living.”
In today’s post I will be writing about another work of art featuring a scourged back, one that has also faced censorship as a result. More on Toni Morrison’s Beloved in a moment.
Apparently the removal of “Scourged Back” is controversial enough that the department that runs the National Park Service is now denying the report, although its weasel words do not inspire confidence: “If any interpretive materials are found to have been removed or altered prematurely or in error, the Department will review the circumstances and take corrective action as appropriate.”
There’s no doubt about what Trump himself wants. He has complained that the Smithsonian focuses “too much on how bad slavery was,” and no photo dramatizes more how bad slavery was than “Scourged Back,” which activists in 1863 used to rally support for the abolition of slavery. Abraham Lincoln needed such support to back up his signing of “The Emancipation Proclamation” earlier in the year.
Morrison’s graphic depiction of her protagonist’s sexual assault and subsequent whipping helps explain why Beloved is one of the most banned novels in America. The still bloody scarring is described to Sethe by a poor white woman who helps her to shelter after she has run away and who refers to her as “Lu”:
It’s a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk—it’s red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What God have in mind, I wonder. I had me some whippings, but I don’t remember nothing like this.
The beating occurs after Sethe, who is late in a pregnancy, informs her mistress that she has been assaulted by the master’s sons and had her milk sucked from her breasts. As she later tells Paul D, one of her fellow slaves who reconnects with her after the war, her master (“Schoolteacher”) makes her pay:
“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 them. She had that lump and couldn’t speak but 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 you?”
“And they took my milk.”
They beat you and you was pregnant?”
“And they took my milk!”
In a tender lovemaking scene that is all the more powerful because it comes immediately after this account of unimaginable barbarity, Paul D traces the scars:
Raising his fingers to the hooks of her dress, he knew without seeing them or hearing any sigh that the tears were coming fast. And when the top of her dress was around her hips and he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display, he could think but not say, “Aw, Lord, girl.” And he would tolerate no peace until he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth, none of which Sethe could feel because her back skin had been dead for years. What she knew was that the responsibility for her breats, at last, was in somebody’s else’s hands.
Someone else who treats this back tenderly is the poor white woman Amy Denver, who is taking a significant risk by assisting a runaway slave:
Whoever planted that tree beat Mr. Buddy by a mile. Glad I ain’t you. Well, spiderwebs is ’bout all I can do for you. What’s in here ain’t enough. I’ll look outside. Could use moss, but sometimes bugs and things is in it. Maybe I ought to break them blossoms open. Get that pus to running, you think? Wonder what God had in mind. You must of did something. Don’t run off nowhere now.
And then:
Sethe could hear her humming away in the bushes as she hunted spiderwebs. A humming she concentrated on because as soon as Amy ducked out the baby began to stretch. Good question, she was thinking. What did He have in mind? Amy had left the back of Sethe’s dress open and now a tail of wind hit it, taking the pain down a step. A relief that let her feel the lesser pain of her sore tongue. Amy returned with two palmfuls of web, which she cleaned of prey and then draped on Sethe’s back, saying it was like stringing a tree for Christmas.
Isn’t it revealing that those book banners who attack Beloved identify with the slave owners rather than Amy? They see themselves as attacked for their racism rather than imagining themselves as the white characters (there are several in the novel) who help this Black woman. The companionship that arises between Amy and Sethe, which includes Amy helping with the delivery of Sethe’s baby, leads to this beautiful moment:
On a riverbank in the cool of a summer evening two women struggled under a shower of silvery blue. They never expected to see each other again in this world and at the moment couldn’t care less. But there on a summer night surrounded by bluefern they did something together appropriately and well. A pateroller [slave catcher] passing would have sniggered to see two throw-away people, two lawless outlaws—a slave and a barefoot whitewoman with unpinned hair—wrapping a ten-minute-old baby in the rags they wore. But no pateroller came and no preacher….There was nothing to disturb them at their work. So they did it appropriately and well.
While many Americans are flabbergasted at the way that MAGA is trying to erase the dark facts of slavery from history, I myself have seen it before. When I was 12 and studying Tennessee history in a segregated school system, barely any mention was made of slavery. Instead, we were informed that the real cause of “the War between the States” (they didn’t call it the Civil War) was economic, as though slavery did not have major economic ramifications. In fact, there was barely any mention of it and no mention at all of Jim Crow.
Nor was it only African Americans who were left out. In the chapter on Andrew Jackson, there was no mention of the Trail of Tears, even though the trail ran right through the school grounds. Nor did our book question the unjust invasion of Mexico carried out by James K. Polk, another slave-owning president from Tennessee.
I wrote last Friday about the moment when I realized, as a child in the early 1960s, the importance of learning about African American history. Only when members of my generation became teachers, professors and librarians did the educational system start acknowledging Black history and Black literature—oh, and the same for women, LGBTQ+ folk, and other minorities. It shouldn’t surprise us, therefore, that people who want to return to the 1950s would be waging these educational battles.
History and literature are never static. Don’t expect the battles to end.
