Beloved-Toni Morrison

Books have a unique power. Imperceptibly, like a distant memory of a dream, they permeate our psyche, altering our perceptions and transcending our limited experiences.

While some provide an escape, painting our imaginations with vivid hues, others confront us with the depths of human sorrow or offer a much-needed laugh in a joyless world.

We do not often feel the change as it occurs, in the same way we do not see ourselves age. Only in hindsight can we see the metamorphosis; a moment, a word, a sentence, an idea that proliferated a transformation.

If you had asked me before I had read it, what I would have thought of a mother who killed her child, I would have recoiled in self-righteous indignation, irritated at you for even posing such a silliness. Judged you for it, even.

I was 14 the first time I encountered Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’

From the very first page, I felt it rummaging through my soul, shifting and turning the cogs and wheels. Shaping the sands of my time on earth with words. With ideas.

In that singular, suspended moment, I was pinned like a moth behind glass, absorbing an existence I could not understand.

Everything I thought I knew was gone.

And in its place, a shade of grey. A world so far removed from the silly, frivolous, little white world I had always known — a world I would never have to experience, nor endure. Yet, I felt its weight deep in my childish spirit.

Sethe did what she had to do in a landslide of cruelty. The greatest kindness she could have done. Was it right? I still don’t know. But was it wrong? Absolutely, no.

I understood in that moment, as I closed the last page, "It was not a story to pass on."

It was a story to live by

And a story to keep sacred. Close, A reminder that every story has another side.