If Hell Was a Pretty Place Too

Beloved. Toni Morrison. 1987.

I’m afraid to write about this book. What could I possibly say? I find that if I want to write something about Beloved that even approaches what it deserves I’ll need to spend much more time, something like weeks just making notes and outlines and thinking and reading what critics have written about it.

Because seriously, what is there left to say about a book this good? It’s terrifying. It’s the greatest, the most complete, the most definitive novel ever written about America. Everything there is to say is already in the book. All I can do is point at it.

So that’s what I’ll do. Here are some lines from Beloved that are sharp as a razor and clear as water and beautiful as the moon:

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind--wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive. On its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one's own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.

And:

Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.

And:

And in all those escapes he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his. He his in its breast, fingered its earth for food, clung to its banks to lap water and tried not to love it. On nights when the sky was personal, weak with the weight of its own stars, he made himself not love it. Its graveyards and its low-lying rivers. Or just a house - solitary under a chinaberry tree; maybe a mule tethered and the light hitting its hide just so. Anything could stir him and he tried hard not to love it.

And:

The last of her children, whom she barely glanced at when he was born because it wasn’t worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see change into adulthood anyway.

And:

I’ll explain to her, even though I don’t have to. Why I did it. How if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her.

And:

Not even trying, he had become the kind of man who could walk into a house and make the women cry. Because with him, in his presence, they could. There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep—to tell him that their chest hurt and their knees did too. Strong women and wise saw him and told him things they only told each other.

And:

That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing—the part of her that was clean. No undreamable dreams about whether the headless, feetless torso hanging in the tree with a sign on it was her husband or Paul A; whether the bubbling-hot girls in the colored-school fire set by patriots included her daughter; whether a gang of whites invaded her daughter’s private parts, soiled her daughter’s thighs and threw her daughter out of the wagon. She might have to work the slaughterhouse yard, but not her daughter.

And:

Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing laughter to swallow her all away.

And:

and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too

And finally:

He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers.

‘Me? Me?'

How did she know, that the “me” had to be doubled to hit the way it does? Morrison just knew what to do, the same way Shakespeare knew what to do. There’s a genius that can’t be taught and isn’t born in you either; it comes from years of crafting and work and living and thinking. How lucky we all are, to have her work.

I’m crazy about this book. This book kills me. At some point maybe I’ll return to this space with something more extended, but that’s all I can do for now.