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Beloved By Toni Morrison

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My book club chose Beloved by Toni Morrison for our last meeting, so I was reading it along with the cases I’ve been discussing in this series. It’s a marvelous book, beautifully writtent. One piece of that craftsmanship is that although the events are not in chronological order we don’t have a problem following along because she gives a a few key words that place things in time.

This book can take different shapes for different people. I read it as stories about the people who endured the physical and psychological horrors of enslavement.

Kermit Roosevelt and Eric Foner describe the efforts of Black people to end slavery, by participating in abolition movements, by writing for themselves and for White people, and by the dangerous work of helping escapees. Some of these people appear in Beloved: John and Ella, for example, and Stamp Paid. The entire community helps newly freed people come to grips with their new status.

We know something about the cruelty of slavers from oral histories compiled by writers during the Depression and other sources. We have some first person accounts of slavery and escape. There’s some of that in the book. But for me, the power of Beloved lies in Morrison’s imagining of the reaction of newly freed people to freedom, and her instantiation of the psychic injuries inflicted by the slavers on her characters.

None of the psychological damage was discussed at the time as far as I know. And it’s certain that the voices of former slaves, their children, and their communities were never heard by the Supreme Court, which couldn’t even be bothered discussing the Colfax Massacre in US v. Cruikshank. I’ll discuss just two aspects of this powerful work.

1. Baby Suggs and Sethe react to being freed.

Baby Suggs was purchased by Mr. Garner from a slaver in North Carolina and taken with her children to Garner’s farm in Kentucky, Sweet Home. He was a decent slaver, who didn’t beat or mistreat his property. Years later he allowed Halle, Baby Suggs’ son, to buy her freedom. Garner takes her to Cincinnati. Morrison writes:

Of the two hard things—standing on her feet till she dropped or leaving her last and probably only living child—she chose the hard thing that made him happy, and never put to him the question she put to herself: What for? What does a sixty-odd-year-old slavewoman who walks like a three-legged dog need freedom for? And when she stepped foot on free ground she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn’t; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew that there was nothing like it in this world. It scared her.

Something’s the matter. What’s the matter? What’s the matter? she asked herself. She didn’t know what she looked like and was not curious. But suddenly she saw her hands and thought with a clarity as simple as it was dazzling, “These hands belong to me. These my hands.” Next she felt a knocking in her chest and discovered something else new: her own heartbeat. Had it been there all along? This pounding thing? She felt like a fool and began to laugh out loud. P. 166.

Sethe is Halle’s wife. A few years after Baby Suggs is freed, Sweet Home has been taken over by a vicious overseer, Schoolteacher. Sethe is pregnant, and is sexually assaulted and whipped senseless by Schoolteacher’s nephews. Sethe escapes. Just before crossing the river into Ohio, she gives birth to a daughter, Denver, and the last part of the trip is terrible. Then she reaches the safety of the home of Baby Suggs.

Sethe had had twenty-eight days—the travel of one whole moon—of unslaved life. … Days of healing, ease and real-talk. Days of company: knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits; where they had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, which made it better. One taught her the alphabet; another a stitch. All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day. … Bit by bit … she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another. P. 111-2.

The freedom Baby Suggs and Sethe share is touching in its smallness and fragility. I write about the abstract idea of freedom, as here, but this is so much more meaningful. In the long run, it’s not enough, but for these people in these moments it’s everything they can imagine.

2. Beloved.

Sethe’s 28 days of freedom end when Schoolteacher and other slavecatchers and the local sheriff find her. Sethe kills her two-year old daughter and tries to kill her two boys rather than let them suffer under slavery. Schoolteacher realizes she’s of no use as a slave, and leaves her in the hands of the sheriff. It’s unclear why, perhaps because of the intervention of anti-slavery advocates, but she only serves three months in jail and then is freed. This aspect of the story is loosely based on the life of Margaret Garner.

Sethe’s house is haunted. Everybody thinks it’s the murdered child. The community thinks it’s frightening, and cuts off Baby Suggs, Sethe, the two boys and Denver. Years later a strange woman appears, calling herself Beloved, the name engraved on the headstone Sethe purhased for her dead child. Beloved seems to exist as a separate, physical entity, but she has no history. The introduction of this character suggests she’s come back from the dead.

This is from the Wikipedia discussion of this part of the book:

Because of the suffering under slavery, most people who had been enslaved tried to repress these memories in an attempt to forget the past. This repression and dissociation from the past causes a fragmentation of the self and a loss of true identity. Sethe, Paul D., and Denver all suffered a loss of self, which could only be remedied when they were able to reconcile their pasts and memories of earlier identities. Beloved serves to remind these characters of their repressed memories, eventually leading to the reintegration of their selves. Fn. omitted.

I wonder about that first sentence. Morrison seems to confirm this reading in the forward to the Kindle edition.

In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietude of everyday life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way. P. xvii.

The community of free Black people share the experience of haunting and sense the danger around Beloved. I assume they share some of the same psychic fragmentation. The community is there for the denoument, when the fragmentation seems to heal for all of them.

Now recall the offhand comment of Joseph Bradley in The Civil Rights Cases:

When a man has emerged from slavery, and, by the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen or a man are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.

Just shake it off, like a hard hit in a soccer match. And Black people are expected to call Bradley “Mr. Justice”.
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The Supreme Court Has Always Been Terrible

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The Civil Rights Cases

The Slaughterhouse Cases and US v. Cruikshank are preludes to the final gutting of the Reconstruction Amendments in The Civil Rights Cases, decided in 1883. Earlier bills aimed at insuring the full citizenship of Black people were struck down by the Supreme Court but Congress kept trying, passing another Civil Rights Act in 1875.

The new law required all businesses to serve people equally regardless of race or prior condition of servitude. The Civil Rights Cases are a consolidated group of cases brought by Black people to enforce their right stay in a hotel, to visit a theater, to sit in the dress circle of a theater, and for Black women to ride in the Ladies Car on a railroad. The Court struck down the law on the same grounds as cases linked above. I have two further observations.

1. Writing for the majority, Joseph Bradley writes:

We have … felt, in all its force, the weight of authority which always invests a law that Congress deems itself competent to pass. But the responsibility of an independent judgment is now thrown upon this court, and we are bound to exercise it according to the best lights we have.

Bradley doesn’t say who threw the “responsibility of an independent judgment” onto him. He uses the passive voice to hide it. We know it can only come from the minds of the members of the Court. He also knew he could get away with this outrageous assertion of power. By 1883 Congress was controlled by the Democrats, then the part of White Supremacy, so they didn’t care. The presidency, then at a low ebb in power, was irrelevant.

The lives and liberty of Black people didn’t count, and nothing was left of the Reconstruction Amendments.

2. To add insult to injury Bradley offered this argument.

When a man has emerged from slavery, and, by the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen or a man are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected. There were thousands of free colored people in this country before the abolition of slavery, enjoying all the essential rights of life, liberty and property the same as white citizens, yet no one at that time thought that it was any invasion of his personal status as a freeman because he was not admitted to all the privileges enjoyed by white citizens, or because he was subjected to discriminations in the enjoyment of accommodations in inns, public conveyances and places of amusement. Mere discriminations on account of race or color were not regarded as badges of slavery.

The Supreme Court had struck down that “beneficent legislation”. Bradley knew about the Colfax Massacre. He knew the army had been sent in to stop murderous groups like the KKK. He know about lynchings, rapes, robberies, and mob violence. He knew that states refused to protect Black citizens, and that Congress was trying to fill the gap. He knew full well the intent of the Reconstruction Amendments was to enable the federal government to protect Black Citizens. He just didn’t care.

Bradley would fit right in with the MAGA SCOTUS of today.

Our Current SCOTUS Doesn’t Care About The Consequences of Its Decisions

Three examples will suffice.

Gun Case. Here’s a section of the oral argument in Macdonald v. City of Chicago.

… BREYER: You’re saying they can have — no matter what, that the City just can’t have guns even if they’re saving hundreds of lives — they can’t ban them.

….

… SCALIA: There’s a lot of statistical disagreement on whether the Miranda rule saves lives or not, whether it results in the release of dangerous people who have confessed to their crime, but the confession can’t be used. We don’t — we don’t resolve questions like that on the basis of statistics, do we?

Miranda is not analogous, and the intellectual fraud Scalia knew it. The statistics the odious Scalia is talking about are real dead and injured people. Like this child. Scalia doesn’t care about these murders or what guns and gun violence do to our society. He thinks his views of the intent of the Founders are more important. He thinks the Founders would sacrifice thousands of dead people for the right to waltz around with an AR-15.

The OSHA Rule. Here’s a snippet from oral argument on the OSHA Covid vaxx or test rule.

… ROBERTS: No, it’s not so much that OSHA has less power. It’s that the idea that this is specific to particular agencies really doesn’t hold much water when you’re picking them off one by –one by one.

I think maybe it should be analyzed more broadly as this is, in effect, an effort to cover the waterfront. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing.

But I don’t know that we should try to find, okay, what specific thing can we find to say, oh, this is covered by OSHA? What specific thing can we find to say that this is covered by the hospitals? What specific thing can we find to say, oh, no, we’re doing this because this is a federal contractor?

It seems to me that the more and more mandates that pop up in different agencies, it’s fair –I wonder if it’s not fair for us to look at the Court as a general exercise of power by the federal government and then ask the questions of, well, why doesn’t Congress have a say in this, and why don’t the –why doesn’t this be the primary responsibility of the states?

Roberts is saying it’s suspicious that Biden (and Trump before him) marshaled all government agencies to deal with the pandemic. He’s going to decide how the government can respond, no matter what the statutes say, and as Elizabeth Prelogar, the Solicitor General responds, he could just read the statute. But you won’t see Roberts taking any blame for the people who died, or spent days or weeks in intensive care, or got long Covid, because of his decision. For him, that’s just statistics. He doesn’t care.

Abortion. In Dobbs v. Jackson Whole Women’s Health Alito says SCOTUS doesn’t have to follow precedent, meaning Roe v. Wade, in part because no one can prove they rely on it. Reliance requires proof that one is planning in advance based on the precedent. No one plans to get pregnant then get an abortion. Presto, no reliance. There’s more, and it just gets more cruel.

Alito ignores the actual effect of Roe v. Wade: that women and their families can control their own lives, that their lives are valuable. The abstract idea that states should have a say in women’s lives is more important than an unknown number of deaths, thousands of dangerous pregnancies, and loss of dignity as citizens. Alito doesn’t care.

Conclusion

The Constitution doesn’t give SCOTUS the final say on our rights. It doesn’t say SCOTUS has the unrestrained power to throw out laws and rules created by the elected branches. That’s all invented by SCOTUS itself, taking power and control away from democratically-elected officials.

The Fox News Six would repeat every decision of the Reconstruction Era Supreme Court. They follow in the footsteps of people who don’t care.