Toni Morrison’s Beloved burrows under the lofty language of the founding fathers and straight into the great American horror: the slavery and the caste system. America as an ideal was a mirage and every one of us bears the violent ripple effects raging across the American ecosystem to this day.

The first time I read Beloved in the late 1980s, I’d just given birth to my first child. I was swollen and bruised, leaky and emotional and deeply in love with the little blob of exhausting flesh in my lap. My entire body throbbed with that mysterious hormonal brew of maternal ferocity when Seth entered my consciousness (while aforementioned lap-blob napped between feedings). Seth pulled me under the tidy facts of school-book-learning, because she was me: throbbing, ferocious, swollen and in the throes of mother-love. Except Seth’s babies were born into slavery and certain violence, degradation and broken bones. My baby was borne to the caste perpetrating that bone-crushing brutality. The American tragedy happens on mother’s laps, generation to generation. What a God awful truth for mothers. Because if that caste system turned my perfect lap-blob love-baby into a malevolent monster, I’d be ruined.

There is no “othering” or safe distance from the violence wrought on mothers and babies in Beloved, and the long fingers of muscle memory happen on laps, at dinner tables, on street corners and Capitol steps, on knees or under them, to this day. It’s the American tragedy, our unkept secret and national shame. Toni Morrison made sure we felt it where it hurts most, on mothers’ laps.

Maria Lewis
Furlong, PA