Adventure classics -- Haunted by a love that killed

Beloved

by Toni Morrison

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The year is 1873, and at a former station on the underground railroad, the ghost of a vengeful slain baby shatters mirrors, strews food on the floor and leaves tiny handprints in the icing of cakes. Seemingly exorcised after years of haunting, the baby disappears. But now a mysterious young woman waits at the door for the family’s return. Calling herself only “Beloved,” she insists she doesn’t know who she is or where she comes from. But she’s has an ominous scar under her chin. And she’s strangely familiar with the secrets of the woman of the house, Sethe, from the earrings she never wears to the songs she sang only to her children. And who has been ostracized from the colony of former slaves in Cincinnati, Ohio, for killing her young daughter eighteen years earlier.

While still recovering from the birth of her youngest child, escaped slave Sethe and her four children were tracked down by her former owner. She managed to cut the throat of one child before being caught. attempted to kill all her children, but only succeeded in cutting the throat of one daughter, a children just learning to crawl.

“I couldn’t let all that go back to where it was,” Sethe tells her lover, Paul D, when he confronts her.

But though Sethe believes her action was the only way to protect her child, how could she explain that to her tiny dead daughter?

While researching an earlier book, Toni Morrison came across an 1856 newspaper clipping that provided the real life inspiration for the story of Sethe and her family. Entitled “A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child,” it quoted escaped slave Margaret Garner saying she “would much rather kill (her children) at once, and thus end their sufferings, than have them taken back to slavery, and be murdered by piecemeal.”

(Margaret Garner was not tried for murder or attempted murder, but for what the courts of the time believed to be her real crime, escaping from slavery.)

The story seared Morrison. Ultimately, she decided to concentrate on the emotional life of Sethe and her fellow slaves instead of reconstructing the historical mother’s situation. The result was her 1987 novel and Pulitzer Prize winner, Beloved, followed by a 1993 Nobel Prize for literature.

Whatever Margaret Garner may have finally felt, the family of Beloved was shattered, both by Sethe’s actions and devastation of slavery, separating Sethe from her own mother and her children’s father, Halle, who she believes died during a failed escape attempt; deadening her will, her initiative, her ability to love.

“I got us all out. Without Halle, too.” Sethe tells Paul D. “Up till then it was the only thing I ever did on my own. . . Maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love.”

And he understands. “To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now, that was freedom.”
The threat of losing that freedom terrified Sethe enough to kill. And would terrify her again and again, until the ghost of Beloved is finally--but is it finally?--exorcised.

In both book and movie versions, Beloved is widely available. And for Morrison’s own thoughts about the writing of her book, see “Toni Morrison: Beloved” at
www.youtube.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics begins a November of fantasy with Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter.)

Adventure classics -- Longing to belong to the 'we of me'

The Member of the Wedding

by Carson McCullers

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Carson McCullers had good reason to feel bitter about fellow Southern writer Harper Lee’s immediate entry into the club of successful writers. Lee achieved the feat with the instant acclaim for her first novel. It took McCullers three tries to achieve similar success with The Member of the Wedding, and not until the book’s adaptation as a play and movie was she able to gain financial independence as a writer.

Both McCullers’ and Lee’s stories about lonely girls struggling to understand life in a South paralyzed by rigid racial segregation. Both Frankie Addams in The Member of the Wedding and Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird are raised by black housekeepers after the deaths of their mothers, leaving their rather detached fathers pursued their own careers. The similarities seem to justify McCullers’ quip about Lee “poaching” on her literary territory.

What sets them apart is the size of their canvas. McCullers wrote deep where Lee wrote broad. The world continues to celebrate Lee’s novel while McCullers’ jeweled miniature has become what The Guardian’s Tom Cox termed an overlooked classic.

“It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. . . Frankie had become an enjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid,” McCullers begins.

Even while Frankie affects to despise the tiny world she knows, her longing to become a member of something bigger than herself, some “we of me,” leads to her tragicomic fascination with her brother’s impending marriage. She will spend the entire preceding walking around her small town, telling the story of the wedding to every stranger she meets, longing “to be known for her true self and recognized.”

Of course, no one recognizes her true self, not even Frankie. Certainly not the drunken soldier whose attentions leave the reader gasping in horror but Frankie herself still innocent enough to believe she can accompany her brother and his bride on their honeymoon.

McCullers deals gently with Frankie’s final agony as the married pair leave without her. “The rest was like some nightmare show in which a wild girl in the audience breaks onto the stage to take upon herself an unplanned part that was never written or meant to be,” leaving Frankie heartbroken, and still longing as her creator would all her life for that elusive “we of me.”

Although still in her twenties when The Member of the Wedding was published in 1946, McCullers was almost as broken as Frankie. A bout with rheumatic fever in her teens was followed by a series of paralyzing strokes. At barely twenty, she married another aspiring young writer, Reeves McCullers, already teetering on the verge of alcoholism. She and Reeves would divorce, remarry and separate for the last time when she refused to join him in a suicide pact.

Knowing her dubious health, McCullers must have doubly envied Lee in 1960 -- a healthy young woman with success and the prospect of a long career ahead of her. But though McCullers was dead at fifty and Lee at 87 is still strong enough to have won a suit this month over the literary rights of To Kill a Mockingbird, she has yet to publish another book.

For a discussion of McCullers’ life and work, I liked Virginia Spencer Carr’s introduction to Carson McCullers: Collected Stories.

(Next Wednesday, in a September devoted to young protagonists, a young man learns about love, death and friendship in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.)