Casting a Strong Spell
DAVIS, HOPE HALE
Casting a Strong Spell Beloved By Toni Morrison Knopf. 273 pp. $18.95. Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" To turn these pages is to long for a special...
...To say that this theme powers the shock of the story and validates its supernatural elements is inadequate for Morrison's brilliant, many-stranded fabric...
...Had it been there all along...
...the one she selected to lean against on tiptoe, her knees wide open as any grave...
...For a baby she throws a powerful spell," said Denver...
...She felt like a fool and began to laugh out loud...
...These events are too much for the family's adolescent boys...
...Baby Suggs has urged forgetting all this ("Lay 'em down, Sethe...
...but no one can help remembering...
...When young Macon finds his salvation, it is threatened by the damage of the past...
...Tar Baby (1981) seems almost a changeling in Morrison's family of novels...
...The novel's sophistication has a quality of slickness that lessens the human importance of the characters...
...She thinks first that "something's the matter...
...As in all great literature, however, the art of her writing—its subtle and erotic rhythms, wisdom, lyricism, humor and surprise —is transcendent, giving lift and joy to the reading...
...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" To turn these pages is to long for a special uncorrupted vocabulary reserved by law for speaking of works of genius...
...Yet anger burns in the reader, anger unlike the indignation stirred by such words as these in the Britannica: "The conduct of white Southerners indicated that they were not prepared to guarantee even minimal protection of Negro rights...
...The murder is the secret center of the story, the heart's wound that will not heal, even when exposed at last to daylight...
...In The Bluest Eye the chapters alternate between first-person idiomatic language set in ragged-margin type and justified-margin formality like this comment on a funeral: "The deceased was a tragic hero, the survivors the innocent victims...
...And it lasts in spite of any effort to put that enormous (and still consequential) wrong in perspective, against a history full of mass cruelties—even one so recent as theCultural Revolution when millions of Chinese were swooped down on, imprisoned, maimed, humiliated, tortured, and randomly killed...
...The welcoming cool of unchiseled headstones...
...who, like him, stole from pigs...
...Its logic is almost too inexorable to bear, by everyone including the murderer...
...With Denver won over, they have just one festive family day before a strange young woman arrives, giving her name as Beloved...
...These my hands.' Next she felt a knocking in her chest and discovered something else new: her own heartbeat...
...To achieve this required more than a dream...
...But suddenly she saw her hands and thought with a clarity as simple as it was dazzling, 'These hands belong to me...
...The purpose of evil was to survive it and (hey determined (without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance...
...Who, like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for food...
...They did not believe doctors could heal—forthem, none ever had done so...
...It is always eloquent, but sometimes you may wonder whose voice you are hearing...
...It is then that memories begin to come surging up to form the complex, irresistible interweaving of past and present events, with all their tension and terror...
...But it also "made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too...
...Make him love me...
...Sethe, their mother...
...Nothing stops the haunting until the arrival of Paul D, a fellow slave in the days before they made their separate, desperate escapes from the plantation "Sweet Home...
...black persons were brutally assaulted and promiscuously killed...
...In that position she had paid the engraver to mark the stone with the seven letters BELOVED...
...And Morrison never softens terrible events...
...Down...
...And supporting this possibility is the character called In Coming Issues Barry Gewen on James T. Patterson's "The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture" and Daniel Callahan's "Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society' John P. Roche on Robin W. Wink's "Cloak and Gown Scholars in the Seoel War, 1938-1961" Schoolteacher, a sort of recording angel turned devil, a brother-in-law brought to manage Sweet Home after the death of the moderate master...
...Sula (1973) has a less stylized mix of language...
...Through violence learned at Sweet Home and during his 18-year pilgrimage, Paul D conquers the ghost and Denver's jealousy...
...You hold your breath praying for splendid phrases...
...Morrison's National Book Award winner, Song of Solomon (1977), shows the most direct foreshaping...
...We realize this only gradually, though, after she has already made us part of it—made us love, lose, endure, resist, take flight, murder, and struggle against memories that have become ours...
...Through four other novels Morrison practiced for Beloved, which has as major parts of its structure incidents touched on before...
...No more powerful than the way I loved her,' Sethe answered, and there it was again...
...Down...
...It overturns pots of cooking food, breaks mirrors when they're looked into, and imprints on a cake the outline of a tiny hand...
...This pounding thing...
...They did not believe death was accidental—life might be, but death was deliberate...
...In Sethe's memory "there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream...
...Here is Morrison describing the mood of "evil days" when Sula comes back to town: "What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones...
...No, Morrison stirs a new, inner anger, our own...
...They did not believe Nature was ever askew—only inconvenient...
...To Paul D, "This girl Beloved, homeless and without people, beat all, though he couldn't say exactly why, considering the coloredpeople he had run into during the last 20 years...
...This has been implacable since he walked in, braving the pool of blood-red fire conjured by the ghost...
...But somehow it must be solved...
...This only makes the problem seem insoluble...
...Once he met a Negro about 14 years old who lived by himself in the woods and said he couldn't remember living anywhere else...
...Being one with people who were not regarded as people, we learn what living intensely means, and we will never be the same again...
...Stop my left hand from shaking...
...It is the story, among others, of a quest...
...Sword and shield...
...But they have all been used, carelessly and almost automatically, for writers who could not dream—and this may be where the mystery lies, in the dream—of a task so heroic as Beloved...
...Toni Morrison has brought to imperative life a crucial period of Civil War history...
...who, like him, had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators, raiders, paterollers, veterans, hill men, posses, and merrymakers...
...and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves...
...Shamed as she was by those 10 minutes, she wonders later if 20 minutes with him (his son still watching) would have paid for another word, DEARLY...
...It is 1866 in the North, and they depart, "leaving their grandmother [confusingly called Baby Suggs...
...Beloved opens in a house haunted by a baby's ghost...
...Keep my baby's ghost off the stove...
...who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by night...
...there was the omnipresence of the deity, strophe and antistrophe of the chorus of mourners led by the preacher...
...In Beloved the drama rings inescapably true...
...Schoolteacher was always writing in his notebook, putting down everything he heard and saw, especially while the slaves were being punished—when Paul D had to wear an iron collar and pull a plow, when Sixo was burned to death, when Schoolteacher's nephews violated Sethe, carving thepatternofatreeon her back...
...In The Bluest Eye(l970), little Pecola carries her desire for blue eyes to a mysterious counselor of whom, Morrison tells us, his clients usually "asked for the simplest things: love, health, and money...
...The very vividness and density of the reimagined scenes force the thought that they must once have actually been experienced...
...Yet underlying the action is the pattern that will come so marvelously clear in Beloved, of past events bursting through repression to force their consequences on the present...
...But the melodramatic plot—hidden gold nuggets searched for to fund a band of black avengers—makes the ending hard to believe...
...During, before and after the War he had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired, or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything...
...Set in the Caribbean, it shows an explosion of passion in a rich white family when a new young black erupts into their midst and makes love to the old retainers' daughter, who has lived a liberated life...
...Although almost any page would serve, here is the moment Baby Suggs learns the feel of freedom...
...In riots...
...Sethe wonders how a child not yet two could harbor so much rage, but she knows it is "the baby's fury at havingits throat cut...
...Even seeing apprenticeship in the earlier works, so finished in themselves, is too limiting, but it has some value...
...He saw a witless coloredwoman jailed and hanged for stealing ducks she believed were her own babies...
Vol. 70 • November 1987 • No. 16
