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The poem implies that the speaker is dying soon, which lends her request a sense of urgency. The message being presented as a sort of deathbed wish also gives the request stronger moral authority. The use of grave imagery to draw sympathy to the plight of enslaved people was popularized with Harriet Beecher Stowe's popular novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852), whose titular character is buried in an unmarked grave. Harper's poem seems to threaten that the narrator will haunt those who survive as she "could not rest" if she was buried in a land where people are enslaved.
Harper sent a copy of the poem to the widow of John Brown after his execution for his raid on Harpers Ferry. She also republished the poem after emancipation in the United States in the January 14, 1864, issue of "The Liberator".
This poem was recited in the film "August 28: A Day in the Life of a People", which debuted at the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016.
An excerpt from the poem is on a wall of the Contemplative Court, a space for reflection in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. The excerpt reads: "I ask no monument, proud and high to arrest the gaze of the passers-by; all that my yearning spirit craves is bury me not in a land of slaves."
Another Country is a 1962 novel by James Baldwin. The novel is primarily set in Greenwich Village and Harlem, New York City, in the late 1950s. It portrayed many themes that were taboo at the time of its release, including bisexuality, interracial couples and extramarital affairs.
Baldwin started writing "Another Country" in Greenwich Village in 1948 and continued to write the novel in Paris and again in New York. Despite his privately confessed reluctance to bring ""Another Country", unfinished, into yet another country," Baldwin completed the book in Istanbul in 1962. In 1959, amidst growing fame, Baldwin received a $12,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to support his work on the book.
Baldwin had returned to the United States in 1957, partly to cover the mounting Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. Baldwin admired King, but sought to depict relationships deeper than King's "brotherly love."
One author felt the title echoes lines in Christopher Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta":
The book uses a third-person narrator who is nevertheless closely aware of the characters' emotions.
The first fifth of "Another Country" tells of the downfall of jazz drummer Rufus Scott. He begins a relationship with Leona, a white woman from the South, and introduces her to his social circle, including his closest friend, struggling novelist Vivaldo, his more successful mentor Richard, and Richard's wife Cass. Initially, the relationship is frivolous, but it turns more serious as they continue to live together. Rufus becomes habitually physically abusive of Leona, and she is admitted to a mental hospital in the South. Depressed, Rufus returns to Harlem and commits suicide, jumping off the George Washington Bridge.
The rest of the book explores relationships between Rufus' friends, family, and acquaintances in the wake of his death. Rufus's friends cannot understand the suicide, and experience some guilt over his death. Afterwards, they become closer. Vivaldo begins a relationship with Rufus's sister Ida, which is strained by racial tension and Ida's bitterness after her brother's death.
Eric, an actor and Rufus' first male lover, returns to New York after years living in France, where he met his longtime lover Yves. Eric returns to the novel's social circle but is calmer and more composed than most of the group. Everyone's relationships become strained in the course of the novel. Ida starts having an affair with Ellis, an advertising executive who promises to help with her career as a singer. Cass, who has become lonely due to Richard's writing career, has an affair with Eric after he arrives in New York. At the novel's climax, Cass tells Richard about her affair with Eric, who in turn has a sexual encounter with Vivaldo, who himself learns about Ida's relationship with Ellis.
Baldwin called Rufus Scott "the black corpse floating in the national psyche," as well as a Christ figure—a living (and dying) symbol of suffering black men. Rufus's death has been described as tantamount to murder.
Because Rufus is living in a predominantly racist era, his life is constantly affected by an internalization of this racism to the point where he hates himself. Throughout the novel, the effects of this internalized oppression are obvious: he is sexual with any person who is white — violently sexual, because he seeks power; he feels disappointed in himself because of his proud black sister Ida, and he avoids the support of his family during his last day of life.
The concept of "another country" reflects not only the return of Eric to the United States from France, but also the feelings of alienation experienced by African Americans within the United States.
"Another Country" was unique at the time, in its attempt to explore race relations through romantic love instead of homosocial friendships.
The relationship between Ida and Vivaldo serves as a microcosm for the relationship between African Americans and white liberals. Their relationship and others (including the earlier coupling of Rufus and Leona) represent a struggle for love amidst the obstacles of race, sex, and modern society. According to Baldwin biographer W. J. Weatherby:
Whether it was the central relationship between white Vivaldo and black Ida or the accompanying bisexual affairs involving most of the other leading characters, all were intended by Baldwin to illustrate how difficult he felt real love was in contemporary American society. Facing each other without lies and perceiving the relationship realistically were much more important than which sexes were involved or how love was expressed, in Baldwin's opinion.… The whole racial situation, according to the novel, was basically a failure of love.
Racial and sexual differences are compared and contrasted, both represented as areas for conflict that must be addressed en route to mature love. According to some readings, this complete unity represents another "another country" and perhaps an impossible utopia. Stefanie Dunning wrote:
Dunning argues that the novel's critique of nationalism extends to black nationalism, which still relies on a fantasy of authentic and heterosexual reproduction.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, after considerable youthful struggles with self-acceptance of his homosexuality due to social ostracism in his hometown in Alabama, Eric eventually becomes the novel's most honest and open character. He admits that Rufus was abusive of Leona, that he actually does not reciprocate Cass's love, and that his love of Yves is genuine. This also makes him the book's calmest and most composed character. Only after a night with Eric does Vivaldo see the world more clearly and make tentative steps toward acceptance of his own bisexuality.
Most of the white characters in the book downplay or refuse to admit the racial tension surrounding them. Cass and Richard are shocked when a group of black boys beat up their sons. Ida constantly suspects Vivaldo of exploiting her because she is black and has known white men who seek out sexual relations specifically with black women. Vivaldo refuses to admit any of this, although it is indicated that it may be true of their relationship.
Richard and Vivaldo are jealous of one another as writers. Vivaldo essentially denies the value of Richard's first novel and is jealous that it is being published, while Richard is jealous of Vivaldo because Richard thinks his wife Cass sees suffering and a lack of commercial success as a sign of artistic integrity. Consequently, after Cass and Eric initiate their affair, Richard suspects she is seeing Vivaldo.
Also, Ida's beginning recognition as a jazz singer causes increased tension and jealousy between her and Vivaldo.
In his 1968 essay "Notes On A Native Son", from his book "Soul on Ice", Eldridge Cleaver denounced the concept of interracial homosexuality and, in effect, acted as the mouthpiece for the hegemonic narrative that framed black homosexual masculinity in America in the 1960s. He expressed not so much a discomfort with homosexuality as with the power paradigm and ultimate feminization that ensues after the physical act of black men sexually submitting to white men:
"Another Country" received much attention and mixed reviews. Reviews in the black press were generally favorable. "The New York Times" called it "a sad story, brilliantly and fiercely told" and compared it to T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" as a record of spiritual desolation in modern times. "Time" magazine called it "a failure". Norman Mailer said it was "abominably written". It quickly became a bestseller.
A film adaptation was announced in 1964, with Tony Richardson directing and Baldwin himself writing the screenplay, though the film was never produced.
The book was designated "obscene" in New Orleans and banned, drawing the attention of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. In Australia, the Commonwealth Customs Department banned its import. The country's Literature Censorship Board, while admitting Baldwin's writing had some merit, described "Another Country" as "continually smeared with indecent, offensive and dirty epithets and allusions". The chairman noted that some might connect the novel's depiction of race relations with current events in Australia, and bearing in mind that a complete ban might damage the country's reputation, suggested that the book be available to "the serious minded student or reader."
Baldwin inferred from the book's popularity that "many more people than are willing to admit it lead lives not at all unlike the lives of the people in my book." Baldwin also said that the book "scared people because most don't understand it."
Eldridge Cleaver had harsh words for Baldwin, in his book "Soul on Ice", writing that he admired Baldwin in some ways but felt increasingly uncomfortable with his writing. Cleaver says that "Another Country" made clear why his "love for Baldwin's vision had become ambivalent," and writes:
Rufus Scott, a pathetic wretch who indulged in the white man's pastime of committing suicide, who let a white homosexual fuck him in the ass, and who took a Southern Jezebel for his woman, with all that these tortured relationships imply, was the epitome of a black eunuch who has completely submitted to the white man. Yes, Rufus was a psychological freedom rider, turning the ultimate cheek, murmuring like a ghost "You took the best so why not take the rest", which has absolutely nothing to do with the way that Negroes have managed to survive here in the hells of North America!
The book was listed by Anthony Burgess as one of his "Ninety-nine Novels: The best in English since 1939".
On writing the book, Baldwin said in the "New York Times Book Review":I think I really helplessly model myself on jazz musicians and try to write the way they sound. I am not an intellectual, not in the dreary sense that word is used today, and do not want to be: I am aiming at what Henry James called 'perception at the pitch of passion.' Asked to cite literary influences, Baldwin said that Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and George Bernard Shaw were his "models." The character of Yves is connected to Baldwin's lover Lucien Happersberger, who made plans in 1960 to meet Baldwin in New York City.
It has been argued that James Baldwin is in three characters: Rufus as Baldwin would have turned out had he not moved to France; Eric as Baldwin was in Paris; and Vivaldo as a writer struggling with a writer's block because of his love affairs, in the manner of Baldwin himself. Baldwin has also been identified with Ida, as Rufus's advocate after death, and Richard, a writer who has become successful.
Baldwin later said that he developed the character of Rufus to complement and explain Ida.
The book has been described as an implicit criticism of Mailer's "The White Negro" and its passive romanticization of black culture. Brandon Gordon describes this critique in terms of the relationship between Vivaldo and Rufus, mediated by Leona. Gordon writes: "Contrary to Vivaldo's expectations, emulating the African American's hypermasculine sexual ethos does not ultimately enable him to fulfill the hipster's fantasy of embodied identification." He concludes that, in fact, Vivaldo's homosexual encounter with Eric at the end of the novel—and specifically the fact that Vivaldo is penetrated—represents a truer form of "embodied identification" with another.
Another Brooklyn is a 2016 novel by Jacqueline Woodson. The book was written as an adult book, unlike many of the author's previous books and titles. NPR wrote that the book was "full of dreams and danger". It was nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2016.
The story starts with August, an adult anthropologist, returning to New York to bury her father. On the subway, she encounters an old friend, and begins to reminisce. She remembers being an 8 year old girl moving with her father and younger brother to Brooklyn from Tennessee after the death of her mother. The book then follows August through her teenage years. August shares friendships with three other Brooklynites, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, as they walk through the neighborhoods and dream optimistically of the future, and revealing what it held in store for them. August and her friends also face dangers on the streets, and family strife of various types.
The book received many reviews. To "The Washington Post", it is a "short but complex story that arises from simmering grief. It lulls across the pages like a mournful whisper." "Publishers Weekly" writes that it is a "a vivid mural of what it was like to grow up African-American in Brooklyn during the 1970s."
NBC News wrote that it "weaves together themes of death, friendship, Black migrations, the sense of displacement that usually follows, and family." "The New York Times" said "the subject isn’t as much girlhood, as the haunting half-life of its memory." Kaitlyn Greenidge for "The Boston Globe" wrote that the book was "a love letter to loss, girlhood and home. It is a lyrical, haunting exploration of family, memory and other ties that bind us to one another and the world." "USA Today" gave it 3 out of 4 stars.
"The Los Angeles Times" said that the book "joins the tradition of studying female friendships and the families we create when our own isn’t enough, like that of Toni Morrison’s 'Sula,' Tayari Jones’ 'Silver Sparrow' and " by Audre Lorde. Woodson uses her expertise at portraying the lives of children to explore the power of memory, death and friendship."
Beloved is a 1987 novel by the American writer Toni Morrison. Set after the American Civil War, it tells the story of a family of former slaves whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. "Beloved" is inspired by a true-life incident involving Margaret Garner, an escaped slave from Kentucky who fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856, but was captured in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. When U.S. marshals burst into the cabin where Garner and her husband had barricaded themselves, they found that she had killed her two-year-old daughter and was attempting to kill her other children to spare them from being returned to slavery.
Morrison had come across an account of Garner titled "A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child" in an 1856 newspaper article published in the "American Baptist", and reproduced in "The Black Book", a miscellaneous compilation of black history and culture that Morrison edited in 1974.
The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award. It was adapted as a 1998 movie of the same name, starring Oprah Winfrey. A survey of writers and literary critics compiled by "The New York Times" ranked it as the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006.
The book's dedication reads "Sixty Million and more", referring to the Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. The book's epigraph is Romans 9:25.
"Beloved" begins in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio, with Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, and her 18-year-old daughter Denver, who live at 124 Bluestone Road. The site has been haunted for years by what they believe is the ghost of Sethe's eldest daughter. Denver is shy, friendless, and housebound. Sethe's sons, Howard and Buglar, ran away from home by the age of 13, which she believes was due to the ghost. Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe's husband Halle, died soon after the boys fled, eight years before the start of the novel.
One day, Paul D, one of the enslaved men from Sweet Home, the plantation where Sethe, Halle, Baby Suggs, and several others were once enslaved, arrives at Sethe's home. He forces out the spirit, receiving Denver’s contempt for driving away her only companion, but persuades them to leave the house together for the first time in years for a carnival. Upon returning home, they find a young woman sitting in front of the house who calls herself Beloved. Paul D is suspicious and warns Sethe, but she is charmed by the young woman and ignores him. Denver is eager to care for the sickly Beloved, whom she begins to believe is her older sister come back.
Paul D begins to feel increasingly uncomfortable in the house and that he is being driven out. One night, Paul D is cornered by Beloved, who demands sex. While they have sex, his mind is filled with horrific memories from his past. Paul D tries to tell Sethe about it, but cannot. Instead, he says that he wants her pregnant. Sethe is afraid to have to live for a baby. When Paul D tells friends at work about his plans to start a new family, they react fearfully. One, Stamp Paid, reveals the reason for the community's rejection of Sethe.
Paul D confronts Sethe, who tells him that after escaping from Sweet Home and joining her children at 124, four horsemen came to return her children and her to a life of slavery at Sweet Home. Sethe ran to the woodshed with her children and tried to kill them all, but only had time to kill her eldest daughter. Sethe says that she was "trying to put [her] babies where they would be safe." Paul D leaves, telling her her love is "too thick"; she retorts that "thin love is no love", adamant that she did the right thing.
Denver reaches out to the Black community for help, from whom they had been isolated because of envy of Baby Suggs' privilege and horror at Sethe killing Beloved. Local women come to the house to exorcise Beloved. At the same time, a White man, Mr. Bodwin (their landlord, who had offered work to Baby Suggs and Sethe) arrives at the house on a horse for Denver, who asked him for a job. Not knowing this, Sethe attacks him with an ice pick, thinking he was Schoolteacher coming back for her daughter. The village women and Denver hold her back and Beloved disappears.
Denver becomes a working member of the community, and Paul D returns to a bed-ridden Sethe, who, devastated at Beloved's disappearance, remorsefully tells him that Beloved was her "best thing". He replies that Sethe is her own "best thing", leaving her questioning, "Me? Me?" As time goes on, those who knew Beloved gradually forget her until all traces of her are gone.
The maternal bonds between Sethe and her children inhibit her own individuation and prevent the development of her self. Sethe develops a dangerous maternal passion that results in killing one daughter, her own "best self". Her surviving daughter becomes estranged from the Black community. Both outcomes result from Sethe trying to salvage her "fantasy of the future", her children, from a life in slavery.
In Ohio, Sethe fails to recognize her daughter Denver's need for interaction with the Black community to enter into womanhood. At the end of the novel, Denver succeeds in establishing her own self and embarking on her individuation with the help of Beloved. Sethe only becomes individuated after Beloved's exorcism. Then, she is free to fully accept the first relationship that is completely "for her", her relationship with Paul D. This relationship relieves her from the self-destruction she was causing based on her maternal bonds with her children.
Beloved and Sethe are both emotionally impaired, which come from Sethe having been enslaved. Under slavery, mothers lost their children, with devastating consequences for both. Baby Suggs dealt with this by refusing to become close with her children and remembering what she could of them, but Sethe tried to hold onto them and fight for them, to the point of killing them so they could be free. Sethe was traumatized by having had her milk stolen, unable to form the symbolic bond between herself and her daughter of feeding her.
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.
The discussion of manhood and masculinity is foreshadowed by the dominant meaning of Sethe's story. "Beloved" depicts slavery in two main emotions: Love and Self-Preservation; however, Morrison does more than depict emotions.
The author accurately depicts the horrors of enslavement and its effects to communicate the morals of manhood. It also distorts a man from himself. Morrison revealed different pathways to the meaning of manhood by her stylistic devices. She established new information for understanding the legacy of slavery best depicted through stylistic devices. To understand Paul D's perception of manhood, Morrison deliberately inserts his half-formed words and thoughts, to provide the audience a "taste" of what is going on inside his mind.
Yet, throughout the novel, Paul D's depiction of manhood was being constantly challenged by the norms and values of White culture. The author demonstrates the distinctions between Western and African values, and how the dialogue between the two values is heard through juxtaposition and allusions. She maneuvered her "message" though the social atmosphere of her words, which was further highlighted by the character's motives and actions.
Paul D is a victim of racism in that his dreams and goals are so high that he will never be able to achieve them because of racism. He thought he earned his right to reach each of his goals because of his sacrifices and what he has been through, that society would pay him back and allow him to do what his heart desired.
During the Reconstruction era, Jim Crow laws were put in place to limit the movement and involvement of African Americans in the White-dominant society. Black men during this time had to establish their own identity, which may seem impossible due to all the limitations put upon them. Many Black men, like Paul D, struggled to find their meaning in their society and achieving their goals because of the "disabilities" that constrained them to a certain part of the social hierarchy.
In "Beloved," Stamp Paid observes Paul D sitting on the base of the church steps "… liquor bottle in hand, stripped of the very maleness that enables him to caress and love the wounded Sethe…" (132). Throughout the novel, Paul D is sitting on a base of some sort or a foundation like a tree stub or the steps, for instance. This exemplifies his place in society. Black men are the foundation of society because without their hard labor, the white men would not profit. They were coerced into the society where they were deemed "lower-status" because of the color of their skin.
Family relationships are an instrumental element of "Beloved," which help visualize the stress and the dismantlement of African-American families in this era. The slavery system did not allow African Americans to have rights to themselves, their family, their belongings, or their children. So, Sethe killing Beloved was deemed a peaceful act because Sethe believed that killing her daughter was saving her. By doing this, their family is divided and fragmented, much like the time in which they were living. After the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, formerly enslaved families were broken and bruised because of the hardships they faced while they were enslaved.
Since enslaved people could not participate in societal events, they put their faith and trust in the supernatural. They performed rituals and prayed to their god or multiple gods.
In the novel, Beloved, who was murdered at the hands of her mother Sethe, haunts Sethe. For example, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D go to the neighborhood carnival, which happens to be Sethe's first social outing since killing her daughter. When they return home, Beloved appears at the house. Throughout the novel, Sethe believes that the person claiming to be Beloved is her daughter that she killed 18 years prior - a scenario that shows how [fractured] family relationships are used to display the mental strife the protagonist faces.
The pain throughout this novel is universal because everyone involved in slavery was heavily scarred, whether that be physically, mentally, sociologically, or psychologically. Some of the characters tend to "romanticize" their pain, in a way that each experience is a turning point in one's life. This concept is played throughout history in early Christian contemplative tradition and African-American blues tradition.
"Beloved" is a book of the systematic torture that people who had been enslaved had to deal with after the Emancipation Proclamation. Therefore, in this novel, the narrative is like a complex labyrinth because all the characters have been "stripped away" from their voices, their narratives, their language in a way that their sense of self is diminished. Also, all the characters have had different experiences with slavery, which is why their stories and their narratives are distinct from each other.
Paul D retains his slave name; most of the enslaved men at Sweet Home were named Paul. He also retains many painful memories from enslavement and being forced to live in a chain gang; he had been moving around continuously before arriving at 124. He has a "tobacco tin" for a heart, in which he contains his painful memories, until Beloved opens it. Years after their time together at Sweet Home, Paul D and Sethe reunite and begin a romantic relationship. He acts fatherly towards Denver and is the first to be suspicious of Beloved. Despite their long past, he fails to understand Sethe fully because of her motherhood and because of the many years that had passed since.
Denver is Sethe's only child who remains at House 124. Isolated from her community after Beloved's killing, Denver forms a close bond with her mother. Upon Beloved's arrival, Denver watches as her sister's ghost begins to exhibit demonic activity. Although introduced as a childish character, Denver develops into a protective woman throughout the novel. In the final chapters, Denver fights not only for her personal independence, but also for her mother's wellbeing, breaking the cycle of isolation at House 124. She is 18 years old at the beginning of the novel.
Baby Suggs is Sethe's mother-in-law. Her son Halle worked to buy her freedom, after which she travels to Cincinnati and establishes herself as a respected leader in the community, preaching for the Black people to love themselves because other people will not. This respect turns sour after she turns some food into a feast, earning their envy, as well as Sethe's act of infanticide. Baby Suggs retires to her bed, where she thinks about pretty colors for the rest of her life. She dies at 70 in the beginning of the book, 8 years before the main events.
Halle is the son of Baby Suggs, the husband of Sethe and father of her children. Sethe and he were married in Sweet Home, yet they got separated during her escape. He is only mentioned in flashbacks. Paul D was the last to see Halle, churning butter at Sweet Home. He is presumed to have gone mad after seeing residents of Sweet Home violating Sethe. He is hardworking and good, qualities that Paul D sees in Denver at the end of the book, but ones that Baby Suggs fears make him a target.
Schoolteacher is the primary discipliner, violent, abusive, and cruel to the people he enslaved at Sweet Home, whom he views as animals. He comes for Sethe following her escape, but she kills her daughter and is arrested, instead.
Amy Denver is a young White girl who finds Sethe desperately trying to make her way to safety after her escape from Sweet Home, trying to get to Boston herself. Sethe is extremely pregnant at the time, and her feet are bleeding badly from the travel. Amy helps nurture her and deliver Sethe's daughter on a small boat, and Sethe names the child Denver after her.
In 1998, the novel was made into a film directed by Jonathan Demme, and produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey.
In January 2016, "Beloved" was broadcast in 10 episodes by BBC Radio 4 as part of its "15 Minute Drama" programme. The radio series was adapted by Patricia Cumper.
The novel received the seventh annual Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award in 1988, given to a novelist who "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes—his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity."
The publication of "Beloved" in 1987 resulted in the greatest acclaim yet for Morrison. Although nominated for the National Book Award, it did not win, and 48 African-American writers and critics—including Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Angela Davis, Ernest J. Gaines, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Rosa Guy, June Jordan, Paule Marshall, Louise Meriwether, Eugene Redmond, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, John Edgar Wideman, and John A. Williams—signed a letter of protest that was published in "The New York Times Book Review" on January 24, 1988. Yet later in 1988 "Beloved" did receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award, the Melcher Book Award, the Lyndhurst Foundation Award, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award.
Since the late 1970s, the focus on Morrison's representation of African-American experience and history has been strong. The idea that writing acts as a means of healing or recovery is a strain in many of these studies. Timothy Powell, for instance, argues that Morrison's recovery of a Black logos rewrites blackness as "affirmation, presence, and good", while Theodore O. Mason, Jr., suggests that Morrison's stories unite communities.
Many critics explore memory, or what "Beloved"’s Sethe calls "rememory", in this light. Susan Bowers places Morrison in a "long tradition of African American apocalyptic writing" that looks back in time, "unveiling" the horrors of the past in order to "transform" them. Several critics have interpreted Morrison's representations of trauma and memory through a psychoanalytic framework. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy explores how "primal scenes" in Morrison's novels are "an opportunity and affective agency for self-discovery through memory" and "rememory". As Jill Matus argues, however, Morrison's representations of trauma are "never simply curative": in raising the ghosts of the past to banish or memorialize them, the texts potentially "provoke readers to the vicarious experience of trauma and act as a means of transmission".
Ann Snitow's reaction to "Beloved" neatly illustrates how Morrison criticism began to evolve and move toward new modes of interpretation. In her 1987 review of "Beloved", Snitow argues that Beloved, the ghost at the center of the narrative, is "too light" and "hollow", rendering the entire novel "airless". Snitow changed her position after reading criticism that interpreted "Beloved" in a different way, seeing something more complicated and burdened than a literal ghost, something requiring different forms of creative expression and critical interpretation. The conflicts at work here are ideological, as well as critical; they concern the definition and evaluation of American and African-American literature, the relationship between art and politics, and the tension between recognition and appropriation.
In defining Morrison's texts as African-American literature, critics have become more attentive to historical and social context and to the way Morrison's fiction engages with specific places and moments in time. As Jennings observes, many of Morrison's novels are set in isolated Black communities where African practices and belief systems are not marginalized by a dominant White culture, but rather remain active, if perhaps subconscious, forces shaping the community. Matus comments that Morrison's later novels "have been even more thoroughly focused on specific historical moments"; "through their engagement with the history of slavery and early twentieth-century Harlem, [they] have imagined and memorialized aspects of black history that have been forgotten or inadequately remembered".
On November 5, 2019, the "BBC News" listed "Beloved" on its list of the 100 most influential novels.
Tituba of Salem Village is a 1964 children's novel by African-American writer Ann Petry about the 17th-century West Indian slave of the same name who was the first to be accused of practicing witchcraft during the 1692 Salem witch trials. Written for children 10 and up, it portrays Tituba as a black West Indian woman who tells stories about life in Barbados to the village girls. These stories are mingled with existing superstitions and half-remembered pagan beliefs on the part of Puritans, and the witchcraft hysteria is partly attributed to a sort of cabin fever during a particularly bitter winter. Petry's portrayal of the helplessness of women in that period, particularly slaves and indentured servants, is key to understanding her view of the Tituba legend.
Blood on the Forge is a migration novel by the African-American writer William Attaway set in the steel valley of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during 1919, a time when vast numbers of Black Americans moved northward. Attaway's own family was part of this population shift from South to North when he was a child.
His novel follows the Moss brothers as they escape the inequality of sharecropping in the South only to encounter inequality in the mills of the North. Their story illustrates the tragedy and hardships many Black Americans faced during the Great Migration. "Blood on the Forge" touches on themes such as the destruction of nature, the emptiness and hunger that the working characters experience, the complications of the individual in a depersonalized world, and the myth of the American Dream.
The novel opens in Kentucky, in the year 1919; sharecropping half-brothers Big Mat, Chinatown, and Melody Moss are in dire straits. After their mule dragged their mother to her death, Big Mat killed the animal in a fit of rage. Now without a mule, the brothers are unable to work their land, and are likely to starve. The landowner, Mr. Johnston, agrees to give the brothers another mule.
When Big Mat goes to Mr. Johnston's riding boss to collect the mule he had been promised, the riding boss refuses to give him the mule, and makes a racist comment about the departed Mrs. Moss. Big Mat's anger again overcomes him and he attacks and possibly kills the riding boss. Earlier that day, Chinatown and Melody are visited by a white man on horseback who gives them a ten-dollar bill, promising much more if the brothers leave that night on a train that would take them North, to work. When Big Mat returns that evening and Melody and Chinatown tell him what the stranger said, Big Mat decides that he and his brothers will head North that very evening.
Part Two, the shortest of the novel, chronicles the inhumane conditions of the train in which the Moss brothers are shipped north to Pennsylvania.
The Moss brothers arrive at a mill town near Pittsburgh, where they get work in the steel mill and live together in a bunkhouse with the other workers of the mill. On their time off, Chinatown and Melody go to a Mexican madam named Sugar Mama, where they meet her niece Anna, whom Melody becomes infatuated with.
Chinatown and Melody convince Big Mat to come with them to a dog fight. When Anna rushes into the ring to prevent the death of one of the dogs, she is hit by the dog's owner. Big Mat responds by punching the man, which leads to a riot. After the fight breaks up, Anna rushes up to Big Mat and kisses him before running away again.
Big Mat takes Anna away from Sugar Mamma and sets up house with her in a small shack. Melody brings a letter from Big Mat's wife Hattie to the shack only to find Anna there alone. When he tells Anna about the letter she tries to snatch it from him; the two wrestle over the letter. The struggle culminates in Melody raping Anna.
There is a catastrophic accident at the mill that kills 14 men and blinds Chinatown. After this tragedy, the labor union becomes very active and gains many new members. The atmosphere of the town becomes increasingly hostile as the foreign mill workers come to resent the African American workers, who are the only group that refuse to join the union.
Big Mat is recruited by the sheriff, who is impressed with Big Mat's strength, to be a deputy and help combat the growing union. Once deputized, Mat is told that he is a boss in the town; after a lifetime of oppression, this new feeling of authority goes to Big Mat's head.
Melody decides to cheer Chinatown up after his accident by taking him to visit some prostitutes. Once at the brothel, Melody finds out that Anna has been working there. Melody returns home and tries to convince Anna to run away with him. When Big Mat overhears them, he once again is overpowered by his rage and beats Anna with his brass-studded belt.
Later that night Big Mat, along with the sheriff and his deputies, raid the union headquarters. In the midst of the action, Big Mat is repeatedly hit on the back of the head with a pickaxe handle by a young Slavic union member. Big Mat is killed by the blows.
The book ends with Melody and Chinatown leaving the mill town as they take a train to Pittsburgh, where they plan to rebuild their lives.
"Blood on the Forge" is an example of proletarian literature, a genre whose works usually represented the years surrounding the Great Depression. The experience of the characters in the novel mirror the class struggles during the Great Migration, specifically the hardships of African American workers during this period. The Moss brothers are realistically depicted as "emerging black proletariat."
Edward E. Waldron claims that Big Mat represents "the last side of the complete folk culture, religion, and an equally important tie to the soil. " John Claborn asserts that while Melody and Chinatown become destroyed in the North, Big Mat "thrives" in his new home, as he, "identifies more with the machines than with his fellow white workers, for they allow him to flourish in a way denied him by Jim Crow. "
Chinatown is a younger half sibling to Big Mat. Chinatown resists sharecropping work, instead enjoying a lazy and carefree lifestyle on the Kentucky farm. Chinatown focuses on his own needs before those of the family, using his money on frivolous items such as a gold tooth. After leaving the farm, Chinatown, succumbing to the temptations offered by city life in Pennsylvania, becomes fascinated with drinking, gambling, and hiring prostitutes. Midway through the novel, Chinatown is left blind after an accident at the steel mill and is forced out of work and into the care of Big Mat and Melody. Phillip H. Vaughan argues that Chinatown's "lazy, happy-go-lucky attitude reflects in part a psychological response to the subjugated position of the Negroes" following the abolition of slavery.
Edward E. Waldron claims that Chinatown's main concern in life is to make himself unique, to be noticed as special; his gold tooth provides relief for this concern, and "looking at the tooth shining back at him from his mirror image gives Chinatown a real sense of being somebody. " Stacy I. Morgan claims that the tooth represents Chinatown's "fragile sense of self-esteem," and that he "fixes on the gold tooth as a way of struggling to affirm his individuality and humanity in the face of a socioeconomic system that would otherwise reduce him to a faceless sharecropper.
Melody, like Chinatown, is a younger half-sibling to Big Mat. Melody's most prominent characteristic is his love for music, which is expressed through his guitar playing. Once the brothers migrate to Pennsylvania, Melody is forced to work in the steel mills alongside his brothers; this harsh new way of life alienates Melody from his guitar, and he ceases to play. Melody develops feelings for Anna, despite her relationship with Big Mat, and tries to convince her to run away with him. According to Vaughan, Melody's blues singing "recreates and sustains the pastoral myth... and an existence characterized by images of hunger, barrenness, and drudgery".