Searchin’ for the Sand

Dear Ms. Sherbine:

 I am writing to you in response to your book review of Beloved entitled “A Mildly Entertaining Ghost Story.” My name is Dan Lyons and I am a junior at The William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, PA. My 11^th grade English class has just finished reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved and I read your review of the novel and there are few things that I agree with, and more that I disagree with. You seem to take on the role of a very harsh critic. I, on the other hand, am taking on the role of a simple reader who enjoyed the novel. I hope that after reading this, you take a step back and rethink what you thought were good arguments and logical statements.

I disagree with your statement that Beloved is “…a novel with delusions of grandeur, written in arrogance….” Frankly, it doesn’t make sense; there is no way Tony Morrison is being arrogant. The Encarta Dictionary defines arrogant as “feeling or showing proud self-importance and contempt or disregard for others.” (Microsoft Word) I don’t think anyone who read this novel thinks that Morrison shows she is proud of herself because she thinks that she is important. All she is doing is writing a novel the same way anyone else writes one. If you believe that Morrison is being arrogant, look it up for yourself and think about it.

In your review, you ask, “Remember the day when reading fiction was all about escaping and enjoying a read about someplace/someone doing something far more interesting than you?” Ms. Sherbine, are you saying that you have been somewhere more interesting and have done more interesting things than what happened at 124? In the opening lines of the novel, this is how Morrison describes 124: “124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims.” (3) Morrison clearly states how horrible 124 was for everyone, especially Sethe and Denver. Going through the horrors of slavery and dealing with being African-American just after freedom was achieved is a lot more interesting than anything that I’ve been through. A mother kills her child to protect her from the tortures of slavery; the child then comes back and haunts the family…that’s interesting! Beloved could have been written better, but the idea of it not being interesting is ridiculous.

Morrison purposely brought history of slavery into her novel so the reader could understand what this family had been through. Novels can get complicated at times and that is something that readers should be able to deal with. Without the historical references to slavery, it would be impossible to explain why Beloved came back. Beloved was killed because of slavery, so Morrison should talk about it. She does a good job of alluding to how bad slavery was when she writes, “Underneath his legal vegetables were the contraband humans that he ferried across the river….Whole families lived on bones and guts he distributed to them.” (199-200) People read that and think if keeping Beloved out of that horrible treatment was a good idea or not; it is up to the reader to decide. I know I wouldn’t want my child to be treated like an animal and be fed old scraps that are barely edible. The question is if it’s worth taking your child’s life to prevent him or her from such treatment. Morrison wants the reader to think if Sethe’s actions towards Beloved were logical or not; they would obviously seem illogical if Morrison didn’t mention anything about how bad slavery was.

It wasn’t wrong of Morrison to intertwine the two ideas so the readers could get a taste of slavery and read about Beloved and the problems she caused. Paul D even gets angry at Sethe for not leaving the house when they know there is a ghost lurking around; he says, “Leave off Sethe. It’s hard for a young girl living in a haunted house. That can’t be easy.” (17) Paul D is referring to the problems the ghost will cause for Denver if they continue to live there; he thinks it will be hard for Sethe to manage Denver and the ghost in the same house.

You say that “…the characters’ past …were really quite irrelevant, and could have been left out without detriment of the story.” Morrison included the pasts of her characters because readers need to know who the characters really are, past and present. Previous experiences determine who someone is. She used their pasts so the readers would know why characters did certain things. Actions of anyone are almost always based upon their previous experiences. There is a clear-cut example of this when Sethe says, “I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running-from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth.” (18) Sethe doesn’t want to run away again because she ran away from slavery and she metaphorically ran away when she attempted to kill her daughters. By killing them, she would be running away from the problems she fears will come about later in life.  I know I will never drink coffee ever again; you will never know why I won’t unless I tell you. If Morrison kept out characters’ pasts, then you would never know why they did the things that they did.

I disagree with “Morrison’s main point was to write a book on slavery.” It was one of the points but not the main point. If Morrison wanted to write a book on slavery she would have written a book that actually took place during the time of slavery; Beloved takes place just after that period. She would have also included more historical facts and events that took place and it wouldn’t be a fictional story. Morrison’s point was more of writing a story about a family struggling with slavery and the hardships of freedom’s early years. The “…trivial ghost plot…” is obviously used by Morrison but it would have been dumb for her to make that the novels main plot. If that were the case, I think I would have read this story in 5^th grade, not 11^th.The story that she used was much better than a “trivial ghost plot.”

Morrison did write this novel in 1993, and slavery didn’t have a direct effect on her, but it definitely had an indirect effect. I realized something when you said, “She arrogantly assumes she deserves sympathy for a political effect that, really, had no effect upon HER.” I realized that you have no idea what it is like to be an African-American these days. I may be wrong, but I believe that you are a white, pretty wealthy female that needs to think about what it’s like to be an African-American. I can’t say what it is like to be an African-American, but I know it isn’t as easy as you are making it seem. Here you are saying that what happened during the time of slavery no longer has an effect on African-American’s; that is just not true. Of course there aren’t any African-American’s now that we’re affected by slavery directly, but each and every one of them is still affected indirectly. No one will ever forget what African-American’s were put through. Today, in 2007, racism still exists. There is still something between whites and African-Americans and there always will be. I don’t know much about being in an African-American community, but I do go to school in the “city of brotherly love.” It is very clear to me that African-American’s have a different type of community than white people do…I believe that their communities are closer-knit than white communities, and that’s because of what their ancestors were put through. They believe that they need to stay together to succeed; that is why Morrison described her novel as being aimed at “her people, her tribe, her family.” She was born after freedom was reached, but who cares. Even I could write a story about slavery from the knowledge I have about it and I’m a 16-year-old white kid.

Throughout the story, Morrison makes her characters as believable as she can. She messes with the words and overall grammar in the dialogue on purpose because at the time this novel takes place, that is most likely how African-American’s spoke. You contradict yourself when you say “Her habit of writing non-sentences…is merely irritating, and doesn’t come across as the kind of language Black people would speak, only (perhaps) young children.” In the previous paragraph of your book review, you state that Morrison wasn’t there at that time of slavery so she has no way of knowing what things were really like; it goes the same way for you. Morrison, being an African-American female who wrote a novel pertaining to slavery probably knows more about the way of life back then than you do. I agree with the style of dialogue Morrison uses throughout the novel because that is just what makes sense. African-American’s during slavery hardly received any education at all, and by just overcoming slavery doesn’t all of a sudden make them educated. It is obvious that most African-American’s still lived uneducated at that time, and Morrison knew that and used that information with her dialogue. It certainly doesn’t make them come across as lazy; it just seems like their uneducated because they are. The characters appear to be young children because the only intelligence that they have is that of a young child.     

Morrison did throw a lot into her Nobel Prize winning novel Beloved, but she did a good job controlling everything and managed to deliver it well. I partially agree with your statement, “As noble as it is to highlight the horrors of slavery, we’ve seen it all before, and in a much more realistic and interesting way.” It was a very noble move to write about a subject like slavery, where millions were affected and continue to be affected today. Readers certainly have seen the horrors of slavery written before, but not how it’s written in Beloved. Morrison took the horrors of slavery and a fictional family and combined them into a great novel. She told the story of a family dealing with the horrors of slavery; that is more interesting than any textbook chapters I’ve read about slavery. What Morrison said about slavery was realistic, (except for the ghost part obviously) and was written in a very interesting way.

I don’t agree with your idea you make here, “…the message is bogged down and far too convoluted to be enjoyable.” I don’t believe every story needs a clear-cut message. Sometimes a story can just be a story, and that is how Morrison writes it. She simply tells a story; the story of a family overcoming slavery and that is a great story with no clear-cut-deep hidden meaning to it. A ghost story resulting from slavery would just be dumb. Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature for a reason, she deserved it. Ms. Sherbine, someone obviously enjoyed this story.

Morrison creates many interesting characters that all have an important role in the story. I don’t think “Paul D…the only remotely interesting figure, his past, unlike the others’, is very compelling.” Paul D is probably one of the most interesting characters, but not the only interesting character. I think it’s ridiculous to say that at least Sethe’s and Beloved’s figure isn’t interesting. Sethe kills her daughter, Beloved, to save her from slavery. Beloved then comes back in the form of a ghost, then in the form of a human and causes numerous problems for the family; that is a pretty interesting figure. Sethe escaped slavery to Cincinnati, attempted to kill her children, and is haunted by her memories of slavery and the one daughter she did manage to murder. Both characters are examples of interesting figures other than Paul D.

Paul D is made into such a good character in part because of his past, but other characters carry a compelling past as well. Morrison basically sums up Sethe’s past when she writes, “Her past had been like her present-intolerable….” (4) Right there is all that is needed to say that her intolerable past is just as compelling as Paul D’s. Denver also lives with a compelling past. She was born on the Ohio River and Sethe was helped by a girl that was white, which at that time and place is very surprising. Sethe attempted to kill Denver but she survived. Denver also had to stay in jail with Sethe because she was still being nursed by Sethe. Right there are two examples of other very interesting characters with compelling pasts. I agree that Paul D got more attention by Morrison, but that doesn’t mean characters like Sethe and Denver are boring. There is a good reason why Morrison gave Paul D “…more depth and realism than any other in the novel.” Authors tend to do that with their main characters. Morrison spent a lot of time with all three main characters: Beloved, Sethe, Paul D. One of them had to receive the most attention by Morrison, and that was Paul D.

Saying that “…this book does not belong on any list of Nobel Prize winners…this novel just isn’t very good” is like saying the 1996 Chicago Bulls basketball team didn’t deserve to win the 1996 NBA Championship and they weren’t very good. I don’t see why anyone would believe the Bulls didn’t deserve it because that year, they were the best. The Bulls proved that they deserved the Championship by winning it. It isn’t a very hard concept to understand; if you win the championship, or in this case a Nobel Prize, it is because you are the best. You’re arguing for the Utah Jazz when everyone else knows that the Chicago Bulls we’re better and deserved to win. Whoever ended up with the trophy in their hand deserved it for one reason or the other; the Nobel board did a fine job. Morrison deserved it.

As I said before, there are some things that you say that I do agree with; I believe that Morrison did try to take this novel too far. She included things that weren’t really necessary for the story. It didn’t cause that much of a problem for her because Morrison did a great job mitigating those extra things and delivered it nicely. I do think it was wrong for Morrison to directly center this novel towards “her people, her tribe, her family.” It was clearly the wrong thing to do because that drives white readers away and it is also flat out racist. I’m sure African-American’s would think it would be racist if a white male wrote a story and directed it towards his “fellow whites across America.” It was wrong but I can see where she is coming from. She is an African-American and figures that the majority of people that are going to read her novel are also going to also be African-American.

I, being a 16-year-old kid who doesn’t really have a habit of reading, probably don’t have anywhere close to the experience with books as you do, but I stick by my opinion. Toni Morrison’s Beloved was a well-written novel that won and deserved a Nobel Prize for literature and it certainly didn’t deserve such criticism. Thank you for your time and I encourage you to write back to me if you are able to do so.

Sincerely,

Dan Lyons