Pulitzer Prize Project: Beloved

Beloved is the first installment of the Pulitzer Prize Project. I have embarked on a journey to read all the Pulitzer Prize winners from my life time. My mother has always told me that we are who we are because of the books we read and the company we keep. I hope this blog series gathers company to dialogue about award-winning books of our generation.

“For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit…”

-Toni Morrison, Beloved

Beloved won the prize for fiction in 1988. The novel is set in 1850’s Ohio and is the story of Sethe, a former slave who escaped to freedom, her family and their lives, both enslaved and free.

It is beautiful and heartbreaking, symbolic and rhythmic, and it bears the pain of the stories of generations of black people in this country. It is a pain that never stops because the world we live in still bears far too much resemblance to the past. Our world is one in which, though slavery has ended, racism has not. A world in which the privileged claim racism is history but not present.

There is a chasm between our realities; each generation must keep building the bridge to understanding so that no human ever relates to Sethe’s story again. Given the current climate of the world, it is devastatingly clear that we are far from healing.

When I finished this book, one overwhelming thought took hold: white people will never understand. No matter what we learn about the way things were or are to people whose reason for a different history is skin color alone, we will never understand. We can read about History with a capital H and feel removed from a tragic time of “other” oppressors and feel separate from that.

I wonder if my black friends feel separate. I wonder what oral histories are being passed down in their families that may keep an understanding closer.

Reading Beloved felt like an oral history with one character whose mind I could see inside and know her stories of atrocities, pain and tragedies I would never have imagined or visualized, even when History glossed over them. I wept for her. I wept for Sethe and all the other real women of history who bore the pain of loving something so much it was dangerous. I wept for the stories of strong, smart, brave people that have been lost because of a dark and dispicable time in our history that hasn’t faded into the past enough for us to claim being distant from it.

It is important to learn, even though we will never understand. It is important to listen, even when there is nothing to say. It is important to create a better future, even though a dark past is part of our history.