Anne Raeff on Toni Morrison’s Beloved
/
(Guest post by Anne Raeff)
Two years ago, tired of being in a perpetual state of anger about the state of the world and the United States especially, my wife, Lori, and I decided that we needed a different approach to life. We needed to do something we had never done before, something that would give us purpose and from which we could learn in a new, not an intellectual, way. Over the years of our relationship—we have been together for 28 years—we sometimes talked about adopting a child or fostering, but we enjoyed the freedom and focus on our work and writing that childlessness provided, so the conversations never were very serious. But this time, when my wife, Lori, mentioned fostering, we kept on talking about it, imagining what it would be like. We took the first steps. We filled out the paperwork. We did the trainings, the house checks, the psychological interviews. We said we were open to any child from the age of six and onward, but we indicated on the forms that we might be a good fit for an LGBTQ+ child. We knew these young people were especially at risk.
Finally, in January of 2019 we were approved and in March our son, J, came to live with us. He was fourteen at the time and will be turning sixteen in July. In September we will become his legal guardians. Soon after he moved in, as part of our campaign to get him back into reading, we started a custom of reading out loud after dinner. We started with Night, his choice. (He likes intense books.)
Then, in the fall of 2019, the three of us, two middle-aged white lesbians and a young African American gay boy, began reading Beloved by Toni Morrison. We took it slowly, savoring the poetry, reading it as one should read all great books, as if there were no other. Yet there were nights when the intensity of the cruelty and suffering that Morrison writes about made it impossible for us to bear reading more than two or three pages at a time. At one point when J's emotions were especially raw, we took a week off. The book brought to the surface all the trauma that he had experienced as a black man in America and all the trauma that he had inherited from his ancestors.
Though we were experiencing the book together, though the book brought us together in new ways, it also emphasized our differences very clearly—J is black and we are white. Racial injustice and white supremacy make our experiences in the world vastly different, and we all understand that these injustices are what led J to be taken from his family, what led him to us, to sitting with us in our living room reading Beloved. But still we kept reading through the thick pain of the story, the history that is a part of us all.
I have chosen the following section precisely because, in it, the past and the present are one. It demonstrates perhaps better than any piece of prose ever written the weight of history that we must bear, that we cannot throw off even when we are looking it in the eye. This passage, which takes place towards the end of the book, illustrates the omnipresence of the past in all stories. In this case Sethe, the hero of the book, is reliving the experience of her ancestors during the Middle Passage and yet there is a scent of a time before when there were flowers and sweet smells and songs. It is a passage full of the ghosts that live within us and around us still:
in the beginning the women are away from the men and the men are away from the women storms rock us and mix the men into the women and the women into the men that is when I begin to be on the back of the man for a long time I see only his neck and his wide shoulders above me I am small I love him because he has a song when he turned around to die I see the teeth he sang through his singing was soft his singing is of the place where a woman takes flowers away from their leaves and puts them in a round basket before the clouds she is crouching near us but I do not see her until he locks his eyes and dies on my face we are that way there is no breath coming from his mouth and the place where breath should be is sweet-smelling the others do not know he is dead I know his song is gone now I love his pretty little teeth instead
I cannot lose her again my dead man was in the way like the noisy clouds when he dies on my face I can see hers she is going to smile at me she is going to her sharp earrings are gone the men without skin are making loud noises they push my own man through they do not push the woman with my face through she goes in they do not push her she goes in the little hill is gone she was gong to smile at me she was gong to a hot thing
It was not until I began writing my first book—which was based on my family history, their flight from war and persecution, their experiences in what history calls the Holocaust but which is, in fact, millions of individual stories bound together by grief and cruelty—that I understood there was no distinction between story and history, between present and past. When I was growing up, the people who populated the stories my parents and grandparents told me were as real to me, as present, as my teachers and my school friends, so present that sometimes just as Sethe in Beloved talks to her ghosts, I spoke to my dead. I spoke to my father's brother who died of starvation and cold in Siberia. I spoke to the prisoner of war at the POW camp in Arizona where my father was an interpreter, who thought that Stalin was living in his brain. I spoke to my grandmother's mother, who left them one day, ran off and was never seen again, to my father's childhood friend who died silently from asphyxiation due to a gas leak while taking a bath in Lisbon. I imagined her sinking into the warm water. I felt her body finally relax after months of fear, of waiting for the Nazis to find them, of the long journey through France and Spain.
Though this unity of present and past, story and history has always been true, perhaps we as a nation are beginning to see this truth. Since the first Europeans set foot in the Americas, the culture of the United States, of all the Americas, has been based on ignoring history, on attempting to erase indigenous culture and covering up the inhumanity of slavery. The wealthy and privileged have focused on amassing more and more wealth while the poor and unprivileged focused on dreaming of riches. Now we are taking a moment to acknowledge the past and the role it plays in the present. Perhaps now we will be able to tell stories in which the past and the present cannot be separated from each other, in which history and story are one and the same.
In my latest book, Only the River, past and present flow together down the San Juan River, into the town of El Castillo along the banks of the river, through the lives of two families, one Jewish refugees and one Nicaraguan. Here is the first description of that town where past and present are one. In it Pepa, who when she was an adolescent lived for a few years in El Castillo with her parents and brother after escaping Vienna and the Holocaust, lulls her adult-daughter, Liliana, to sleep by invoking the river as she had done when Liliana and her brother were children:
"Listen to the motor and the lapping of the water against the lancha. There on the right bank are some herons sunning themselves. Now you are coming around the bend. Soon you will see the Spanish fortress on top of the hill. It's so big the houses of the village look like toys in comparison. Look at the houses, all those colors. Ours is pink, but can't see it from the river. Can you hear the falls? The lancha is approaching the dock now. There is Don Solano's shop and there is the church. Don't take your hand out of the river, not until you're there, not until the lancha has pulled into the dock and the driver cuts the motor. Sleep," she said. "You are safe now," Pepa whispered as she did when they were children. "Sleep."
Anne Raeff's new novel, Only the River, was published by Counterpoint in May 2020 and has been long-listed for the 2020 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize and listed by the Chicago Review of Books as 1 of 11 Must-Read Books of the Month. Her second novel, Winter Kept Us Warm, published in 2018, won the silver medal for the California Book Award for Fiction. Her short story collection, The Jungle Around Us won the 2015 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. The collection was also a finalist for the California Book Award and was on The San Francisco Chronicle's 100 Best Books of 2017 list. In 2019 she was a finalist for the Simpson Literary Award. Clara Mondschein's Melancholia, also a novel, was published in 2002. Raeff's stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, ZYZZYVA, and Guernica among other places. She is proud to be a high school teacher and lives in San Francisco.
Find out more at www.anneraeff.com.