Hiding from history, even the 'disgusting and gross' parts, doesn't protect us. It hurts us.
In a recent TV ad for Virginia’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, a mother named Laura Murphy thinks she is making the case for banning books.
Murphy is white and lives in Fairfax County. Wringing her hands as the lonely piano plays, she describes how her 17-year-old son was traumatized by an assigned reading in his senior AP English class.
Her heart sank at the sight of that novel, she says. “It was some of the most explicit material you can imagine.”
What Murphy doesn’t tell you in that ad is that this alleged ordeal happened a decade ago, and that the book was Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "Beloved." The story is set in post-Civil War Ohio and is unsparing in its descriptions of the monstrous horrors of slavery.
Murphy’s son, Blake, told The Washington Post when he was 19 that reading "Beloved" gave him night terrors. “It was disgusting and gross. It was hard for me to handle. I gave up on it.”
He seems to have recovered. He is now an associate general counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Connie Schultz: Read more of her Paste BN columns
It is not unusual for a Southern white family to prefer not to learn much about slavery. History is messy that way, but it’s noteworthy that Murphy’s Virginia reportedly now leads the nation in its removal of Confederate statues and symbols.
The dangers of candor (and ignorance)
It’s not surprising that many white readers are shocked by the revelations of "Beloved." This is the fault of education, and parents like Murphy who get their way.
Morrison did a lot of research for her novel. As she told the Paris Review in 1993, she had to read slaves’ narratives before she could create the world that so offended the Murphys. These accounts had their limits, she said. Candor was dangerous.
“I wouldn’t read them for information because I knew that they had to be authenticated by white patrons, that they couldn’t say everything they wanted to say because they couldn’t alienate their audience; they had to be quiet about certain things. They were going to be as good as they could be under the circumstances and as revelatory, but they never say how terrible it was. …
“So while I looked at the documents and felt familiar with slavery and overwhelmed by it, I wanted it to be truly felt. I wanted to translate the historical into the personal. I spent a long time trying to figure out what it was about slavery that made it so repugnant, so personal, so indifferent, so intimate, and yet so public.”
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The Nobel laureate pieced together the evidence. “In reading some of the documents I noticed frequent references to something that was never properly described – the bit. This thing was put into the mouth of slaves to punish them and shut them up without preventing them from working. I spent a long time trying to find out what it looked like.”
Finally, somebody told her what it was. “I never saw anything so awful in all my life. But I really couldn’t imagine the thing – did it look like a horse’s bit or what? ...
“Then I realized that describing it would never be helpful; that the reader didn’t need to see it so much as feel what it was like. I realized that it was important to imagine the bit as an active instrument, rather than simply as a curio or an historical fact. And in the same way I wanted to show the reader what slavery felt like, rather than how it looked.”
In her novel, Paul D can never quite describe to Sethe what it felt like to be bridled by the bit. “I never have talked about it,” he says. “Not to a soul. Sang it sometimes, but I never told a soul.” Instead, he describes a rooster he was sure smiled at him when he was forced to wear it.
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Sethe has her own memories. “She already knew about it, had seen it time after time in the place before Sweet Home. Men, boys, little girls, women. The wildness shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back. Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye.”
We protect by educating, not banning
White readers are often shocked by the revelations of "Beloved." There is no easy story about slavery, with its rapes and tortures and lynchings. There is no gentle way to describe losing your child to the auction block or watching your husband swaying dead and castrated from a tree.
With thoughtful, age-appropriate discussions led by open-minded adults, children can be trusted to learn about our history, and feel the magnitude of their own emotions. What better way to prepare them for the world that awaits?
Parents who want to ban books say they are protecting their children. What they are doing is sentencing them to smaller lives.
Paste BN columnist Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize winner whose novel, “The Daughters of Erietown,” is a New York Times bestseller. You can reach her at CSchultz@usatoday.com or on Twitter: @ConnieSchultz