'Invisible souls': Toni Morrison experts explain why her most wrenching work was important

LAKELAND – Two of the 16 books conservatives are proposing to ban from Polk County public school libraries because they say they are pornographic were written by the late Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison – “Beloved” and “The Bluest Eye.”

Morrison, who died in 2019 at age 88, tackled some of the most difficult topics facing society in her books. At issue in these two are passages that describe bestiality, incest, child rape and white supremacy.

“Beloved” won the Pulitzer Price for literature and is the story of one family’s trauma from excruciating physical and sexual abuse as slaves, which is described in the book.

The most controversial passage in the book deals with a group of five men in their 20s. When a new female slave arrives on their small plantation – one of only two females on a plantation they are forbidden to leave – the men wait for a year for Sethe, who is 13, to choose one of them. In the meantime, rather than assault her (the rape of slave females was common) they have sex with calves on the plantation.

Literature or pornography? National effort to label school library books as pornography takes root in Polk

Pulled from shelves: Why Polk schools are handling these 16 books differently than a typical complaint

The law: How does Florida law jive with US Supreme Court precedent regarding the banning of books

Read More: Mulberry couple told of horrific life as slaves

"The Bluest Eye" is about an 11-year-old girl, Pecola, who feels ugly because she is not white. Morrison juxtaposed lines from the Dick and Jane books with her prose to compare the life of an idyllic white family to that of a poor black family with serious issues.

The most controversial passage in the book is when she is attacked and impregnated by her father in 1940s Ohio. The book describes when he drunkenly rapes her.

Molestation and sexual assault of children remains a problem in current society, with the Polk County Sheriff's Department holding routine stings to catch people who solicit sex from people they think are minors, but who are actually undercover detectives.

Polk County Sheriff's Office officials said they arrested people for sexually battering 332 minors between 2017 and 2022.

Experts say Toni Morrison was trying to bring up the often taboo topics

Experts say Morrison was trying to bring up the often taboo topics of rape and incest so women and children who suffer silently through it could talk about it and recover from it.

Nora Pelizzari, director of communications for the National Coalition Against Censorship, said the novels need to be viewed in their entirety and not just the recitation of one passage.

“Students aren’t reading one thing – they're reading a whole book,” Pelizzari said. “If someone’s reaction to ‘Beloved’ is, ‘That’s a sexy book,’ then maybe we need to keep an eye on that person.”

Maxine Montgomery, a Florida State University English professor and expert on Morrison’s literature, called “Beloved” an “evocative work of fiction” that uses poetic language to explore the ugliness of slavery and racism. Montgomery said Morrison mined the deep well of Biblical writing, gospel music, jazz and the timeless tradition of Black storytelling to craft her novels. She also uses history.

The story of Sethe Garner is based on the true story of Margaret Garner who tried to escape slavery in 1856 with her husband and four children. When their plantation master and federal marshals showed up hours later to reclaim them, Garner tried to murder all of her children, succeeding with one. She was returned to the plantation and eventually sold to a plantation in Arkansas.

“I think the novel is, I would say, almost 300 pages long and it has a profound message about the need to remember the past so that we can move beyond it, which is something the best psychiatrist or psychologist would tell any patient,” Montgomery said. "It has a lot to say about the resilience of the human spirit in the face of opposition... the importance of self-love, how it's important to acknowledge your worth as an individual, to love yourself even in the midst of a society that would try to destroy your self-image. That is a more profound lesson than a one-line mention of somebody having sex with the cow."

Montgomery, 62, grew up in Mulberry, graduating from Mulberry High School in 1977. Her father, Sam Montgomery, was Mulberry's first Black city commissioner. He was also on the planning board, and the historical gallery at the phosphate museum is named for him. She said her early years of school were segregated, but she began attending Mulberry Elementary School in the second grade.

She said, for the most part, her parents, church and community insulated her from racism, but she remembers some Jim Crow era policies.

“As Black folk, we weren't allowed to go into the front doors of certain business establishments, and I knew that there was tension, racially, in the city of Mulberry, but I've had a fairly sheltered life,” Montgomery said.

As for trying to ban these two works that experts view as literary classics, Montgomery said their real issue isn’t with the sexual material.

So why include sex with calves at all?

“Because there were horrific circumstances that infringed on the lives of Black folk during that time, and the real issue is not that one or two lines from 'Beloved,' but the issue is that slavery was real, it was horrific, and that there were aspects of American history that are uncomfortable, unsettling, and those aspects of our history have influenced things that are going on even today,” Montgomery said. “But again, rather than confront the complexity of what Morrison is saying, conservative groups want to single out that one aspect of a novel that is so rich and immersive – that's mind boggling.”

Wendy Beaver holds a Ph.D in English and teaches International Baccalaureate students in Hillsborough County. She has taught “Beloved” for years and said Morrison’s use of sex with calves was a literary device to equate slaves with cattle – which is, historically, exactly what happened prior to 1865, when slaves were considered three-quarters of a human and bought and sold like cattle.

“In referencing the rape of calves, Morrison asks readers to recognize the dehumanization of slaves, in this case a group of men denied the normalcy of family life (none of them is married),” Beaver texted The Ledger. “There is no single book in my experience that does everything this one does...covers all the ground: what it means to be human(e), what it means to be a parent, what it means to forgive (including oneself), what it means to remember. It would be a shame to exclude it as an option from any curriculum.”

Pelizzari called Morrison’s works literary masterpieces and said literature can do what cold facts and dates in history books simply can’t.

“It’s one thing to read in a history book facts about slavery and another to emotionally connect with characters in a book,” Pelizzari said. “Books are how we don’t just learn history, but internalize it and feel it. And books are really how we learn that learning history keeps us from repeating it...it allows us to inhabit these worlds. Is it going to make some people uncomfortable? Probably. But learning truth might be uncomfortable for some people. We don’t know how people are going to react, and we can’t limit what students are allowed to learn in some attempts to eliminate discomfort in education. Because then what would education be?”

Ledger reporter Kimberly C. Moore can be reached at kmoore@theledger.com or 863-802-7514. Follow her on Twitter at @KMooreTheLedger.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Toni Morrison experts say she paid tribute to 'faceless, invisible souls'