This was my first time reading Toni Morrison’s work, and it was for a book club, which was exactly the push I needed to finally get around to it. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from this book, but in the weeks leading up to me reading it, countless posts on social media were telling me that Miss Morrison would “take me through there” and they were fucking right.

Beloved is devastating and beautiful. The writing is unmatched by any author I have read to date. As far as I know, this is also my first exposure to poetic prose, and I am certainly a fan of the style now. The characters are grounded in all the complexities of humanness, in all their flawed and messy glory. Every word, sentence, and paragraph earns its place, leaving no room to become disengaged by prose that feels like “unnecessary filler.”

The vignettes of individual characters and their experiences with slavery and how those experiences informed their choices, feelings, and actions add a terrifyingly personal touch that I really appreciated. Beloved depicts the horrors of slavery in a personal and individualized way that forces the reader to humanize the enslaved and does not allow us to treat slavery as some mythical tale of the past, but the visceral, life-altering, and generationally traumatizing experience that it is. Though the specific details were fictional, the essence of each experience was very real, and grounded in the ugly truth of what our ancestors were victims to.

As a Black person, and specifically and African-American, I was exposed to and taught the realities of slavery from a young age, but in bits and pieces throughout my life, and sometimes (oftentimes) through the filtered lens(es) of white institutions that diluted and downplayed the full calamity that slavery under the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade presented for the enslaved. I have never had to contend with these realities in rapid succession in the way that I did while reading Beloved. Morrison so masterfully forces the eyes open and says “BEHOLD.”

This book explores motherhood, identity, loneliness, community, consequence, shame, grief, freedom, and does so in a way that situates the reader in the middle of it all, as if we are bearing witness to a battle occurring around us, but never quite touching us. In the forward, Morrison states that she “wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population,” and she achieved that with an abundance of tact and intention.

Beloved is deep and challenging, both emotionally and intellectually. It was incredibly difficult to read and just as difficult to put down or stop thinking about. It is a classic for a reason and is beyond deserving of the hype it receives. I look forward to reading more from Toni Morrison...as soon as I emotionally recover 😂.