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May 12, 2025
The Haunting of Cruelty
By Dr. Lenore Daniels
This is Part 1 of 2 articles on Toni Morrison's Beloved. The cruelty of enslavement in the US is the foundation for all the injustice we are witnessing. Trump's executive orders as they relate to black Americans and the history of enslavement in the US and the actions of DOGE to remove any hint of D.E.I. serve to maintain the racial structure that privileges whites, and wealthy whites at that.
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The Dominican priest Bartolom e' de Las Casas, writes historian Greg Grandin in America, Am e' rica: A New History of the New World, found truth in America rather than in Aristotle. In the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America, Las Casas discovers, everywhere, everyone is "fundamentally the same". Far from inferior, the so-called "born to be "'natural slaves'", were human. Their "skin color, hair texture, cultural practices, and religious beliefs" is evident of a "vast variety of the infinite divine".
In the Indians, for example, the indigenous people, Las Casas recognizes people, possessing both "free will and the ability to reason". The indigenous "could remember the past, imagine the future, estimate probabilities, and could see, hear, feel, smell, and taste".
Nonetheless, the conquerors of the New World recognized not humanity in its variety; instead, they imagined profits. Wealth. The conquerors recognized themselves atop a racial hierarchy. How could the indigenous represent humanity? The conquerors, writes Grandin, began "laying the foundation for race supremacy". The Spanish settlers and colonists, he continues "legitimate cruel killing on an unprecedented scale, forcing the riches of America-- gold, silver, pearls, dyes, and soon sugar and tobacco-- that Europe would use to gild its cathedrals, and pay for more voyages of conquest and enslavement".
The Portuguese already turning to Africa, evidence the humans there, as naturally inferior-- given their dark skin pigment.
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I suffered a heart attack on April 7, 2025, and, ever since, I've been thinking about what subject to write about next. Actually, not so much the subject. That is always about violence. And the attempt to erase it! Erase that violence in American history and, thus, erase black people. A violence repeated time and time again. Let's not forget.
The last piece I submitted here at this site, Oped News, was one already begun before that day last month. The subject is always difficult when forced to experience the violence of racism-- in your home!
I looked at the books on my shelves. I pulled out a number of books, but I decided to re-read a book I hadn't read or taught in some 15 years. I thought text on some historical event, such as slavery or conquest, would be a little much now. Three days a week, I have cardio-rehab, although my neighbors harass so much that I can't imagine the good of this effort in the long run. Particularly, if the therapist themselves can't find it in the hearts to say anything to me, except to announce the schedule for the session. Yet, I'm privy to conversations among the staff and the patients. I'm the only black in the room during this morning session!
I want to scream, but I don't want to be among what Toni Morrison describes as the "permanent crazies".
So I pick up the book to stay familiar with what I know in my bones.
Before Paul D arrives, 124 Bluestone is haunted by a memory, generating more memories, each one more unsettling and, yet, ignored.
124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims.
If you've read Beloved, Toni Morrison's 1988 Pulitzer Prize winner, you know Sethe and Halle "married" as enslaved laborers, property of slaveholder, Mr. Garner. Paul D, too, was one of the men, one of the enslaved laborers, on the plantation, Sweet Home.
The house is haunted by the spirit of Beloved, Sethe's "crawling girl". Her father, Paul D tells Sethe, never arrived at the meeting place because he saw what happened in the barn. He saw what happened to Sethe, the mother of his children, the woman he loved, and he, Halle, unable to do anything that would put an end to the cruelty on display in the barn, misses arriving at the place where he agreed to escape Sweet Home with Sethe. Instead, Paul D last sees Halle near the churn, smearing butter on his face.
He saw! He couldn't leave the loft over the barn!
When Schoolteacher and his nephews look on at a naked Sethe, each boy taking turns stealing her milk and drawing her "animal" side, her animal "'characteristics'", he instructs them, ultimately, to ignore Sethe's humanity. Ignore the body of a human being, woman and mother. They will instinctively understand that their lives matter. Their lives as white Americans! Sethe's as a black is, in part, an animal.
Draw it! See it!
And the white children do!
As Dickens' noted, "'the darkness-- not of skin, but mind-- which meets the stranger's eye at every turn'".
There's the resulting suffering, violence. Abject cruelty. There's Ella's story of being kept for a year in a locked room so the slaveholder and his son can exercise their "freedom". There's the chokecherry tree that Denver, the white girl Sethe encounters after she escapes Sweet Home, notes on enslaved woman's back.
There's Paul D with a bit on his mouth like an animal while Mister, the hen, walks about at Sweet Home, free. "'Mister, he looked so" free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher. Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to be and stay what I was. Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub.'"
Sethe's mother, like so many enslaved blacks, wanted to be free. Sethe's mother wanted to claim her humanity. To claim your humanity and insist on your freedom, however, is a thing for white Americans. But she is caught and hung. And with that memory, Sethe, living free in Ohio, thinks about her boys, Howard and Buglar, chased away from 124 Bluestone by the haunting. She thinks she sees them swinging from beautiful trees.
What travels from Europe and gains a foothold in the New World shift shapes but continues informing one generation after another. "'Eighteen seventy-four,'" Paul D hears himself say, "'and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken...'"
"Liberal" slaveholders, like Mr. and Mrs. Garner, avoid the unspoken around their enslaved blacks. Unlike Schoolteacher, the Graners would never have referred to the "animal" side of the black population. But the Garners knew they owned so much free labor because they owned like Thomas Jefferson human property.
After Schoolteacher's class in cruelty, Sethe attempting to seek help from Mrs. Garner. Sethe timidly asks about Schoolteacher's use of the word "characteristics". She's not challenging what took place in the barn; she's asking for an understanding of the underlying thinking that permits a schoolteacher to be so cruel and pass that cruelty on to his nephews.
"'What is it, Sethe?'"
"'What do characteristics mean?'"
"'What?'"
"'A word. Characteristics.'"
"'Oh.' She moved her head around the pillow. 'Features. Who taught you that?'"
"'I heard the schoolteacher say it.'"
"'Change the water, Sethe. This is warm.'"
"'Yes, Ma'am. Features?'"
"'Water, Sethe. Cool Water.'"
Mrs. Garner can't even begin to see with Sethe what the black woman experiences on the same land she lives on. She can't see the life her nephew is creating for Sethe. On the same plantation, there are two women in a world created by the structuring of racial hierarchy. One has been granted power as a result of that structuring. The other, as a result, is, part animal.
It never matters how "liberal" the perpetrators. As we see in Morrison's Beloved, it's not in Mrs. Garner's interest to know anything about Sethe, except whether or not she is a good worker. What can Sethe do in the serve of her needs! Mrs. Garner can't identify with Sethe. Where in the structuring of racial hierarchy are the two women allowed to identify with each other?
Under the white sheet of innocence, Mrs. Garner is permitted to deny knowledge of her deceased husband and Schoolteacher's cruelty. She denies herself knowledge of slavery as an injustice and a mockery of democracy. Mrs. Garner denies knowledge of her role in maintaining the racial structuring that allows white supremacy to thrive well into America's 21st century. For trying to pretend this structuring of human beings, in turn, didn't result in the accumulation of wealth and affirmative action for white citizens is to continue breathing life into a way of being that should have ended in 1865.
Unfortunately, in the years after slavery, Sethe is forced to linger with the spirit of the past, a spirit that maintains her status as an enslaved wife and mother, forever confronting Halle's butter-smeared face and the handsaw in the shed.
Isolated among the dead at Sweet Home, Sethe resorts to speaking to spirit of her dead daughter directly. Forgetting her living daughter and her own upkeep, she addresses what has been made real and central in her life, further conceding power to that haunting cruelty, which overwhelms her, and keeps her remembering without the acknowledgment or the taking of responsibility on the part of the perpetrators.
Sethe conjures Nan. In the fields there, back at Sweet Home, Nan is nursing whitebabies and me too, while my mother worked in the rice fields. "The little whitebabies got it first and I got what was left. Or none. There was no nursing milk to call my own. I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and holler for it, and to have so little left."
Cows and breeders. Breeders and cows. Sixty years and there's Baby Suggest, grieving the "loss" of children, referring "to the people who chewed up her life and spit it out like a fish bone".
To the people who were white Americans! To the fathers who were white Americans!
Only the black mothers grieved the lose of children and their potential in this cruel structuring of human beings based on race.
Today, for fascists whose end game is the death of life on this planet, six is a good number. Six what? Children. American women will be rewarded if they dedicated their lives to giving birth to six children! Sounds like 1930s Germany?
What is the message: white supremacy must survive the rise of people of a darker hue at all cost.
It's all about white supremacy. Not just "an ideology". A generic ideology. Let's not name it, huh?
I recently read Naomi Klein's article, "The Rise of End Times Fascism", where she makes a compelling argument for the crisis before us in the US. I, too, can see Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, and the goal of other billionaires depended on the creation of "artificial islands". "Freedom cities". Cities free of democracy: diversity and equity and inclusion issues.
No black Americans. No forced remembrance of even a Dr. Martin L. King Day. No remembrance of enslavement in America.
The Nazi-saluting Elon Musk of South Africa is pursuing Mars. It's a matter of leaving Earth behind.
"Let the planet burn"!
When Klein states, however, that "we are up against an ideology", I cringe. It's the liberal take again. The "ideology" is white supremacy. If only Americans would confront their past... if only. Then we wouldn't have to suffer such kumbaya solutions. We don't have to go back to a Jewish culture during the Nazi era to find the "'fight for freedom'". Has the liberal class in the US ever read Frederick Douglass and understood is fight for freedom? Or that of Harriet Tubman?
But who are those who make up the "we" Klein refers to?
There's a certain level of cruelty involved in the dismissal of the fight for freedom waged by enslaved Africans brought by forced to labor for free in the building of this USA.
"We have endured throughout history's progress and regress," writes Christina Greer, ("Black Americans Are Not Surprised"), watching the arc of justice bend with changing winds. Until we reckon with our fellow citizens' capacity-- even hunger-- for injustice, we will fail to meet, understand and survive this political moment.
As Paul D tells Sethe, "we need some kind of tomorrow."
Activist, writer, American Modern Literature, Cultural Theory, PhD.