Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I was some way into the novel before I realized that it is, basically, a Bildungsroman . It charts the growth into maturity of Macon Dead, Jr., nicknamed Milkman. Born into middle-class affluence, and suffering from its ennui, Milkman is torn between a dominating landlord father and a loveless, hopeless mother. He wishes to escape from home, from the heavy hand of the past, but he does not know what he wishes to escape to. In search of the gold his Aunt Pilates had supposedly taken from a white man she and her brother killed, Milkman journeys to the South (Virginia) where he experiences black communal life--connected to Nature, free of the North's materialistic individualism--and so recovers his lost family history. If this sounds like romanticizing the black South, it is. Sure, Morrison depicts the South as proud and violent (Milkman gets into a fight in the store), as racist and greedy (Macon Dead Sr.'s father was shot dead by the whites who wanted his farm). But the Southe...

The novel is a brutal indictment of slavery. Its protagonist, Sethe, a runaway slave, tries to kill her children when their owner catches up with them, and she succeeds in killing a daughter. Beloved haunts Sethe's house 124, first as a ghost, and then, when Paul D, Sethe's fellow slave at Sweet Home, chases it out, returns in person. And so the plot itself embodies the novel's truth: slavery is not over even when it is over. Its horrific effects continue to lash the freed, who will never be free. The novel moves by visiting and revisiting the past, as one character, and then another, recalls ("rememories") their enslaved life at Sweet Home, their escape, their attempt to live as freed slaves (to lay down the sword and shield, as the novel puts it). Common memories, of great pain and sorrow, bind those who share them, and exclude those who don't. Different memories delineate the different experiences of men and women, and so encompass different kinds of savage...

I watched only my second opera yesterday afternoon. Margaret Garner is based on the real story of a runaway slave who killed her daughter to rescue her from slavery. The same story inspired Beloved , by Toni Morrison who wrote the libretto for the opera. Unlike the novel, the opera focuses less on the moral complexity of that act of infanticide than on the far more black-and-white struggle of Edward Gaines, the plantation owner, whether to ask for Margaret's reprieve from execution for the crime of stealing and destroying his property, her children. As such, the opera has a feel-good atmosphere to it, despite the horrific acts of oppression, rape and murder. Edward Gaines asks for the reprieve, but Margaret pulls the platform lever to kill herself anyway, and is transformed into a spot-lit spirit wandering among both blacks and whites standing around the hanging. Anthony Tommasini of the NYT described the ending as "a major miscalculation," and I agree. It tries too hard ...