"I took and put my babies where they'd be safe."

An utterly unflinching examination of the consequences of slavery on motherhood.

"He was the last of her children, whom she barely glanced at when he was born, because it wasn't worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see change into adulthood."

I do believe Morrison has pulled into first place as my absolute favorite author. I put this book down feeling that I'd never read a book before having read this book. How I've gone this long without experiencing Beloved is yet another testament to my faulty educational system.

Yes, Beloved is a ghost story: a woman is haunted by her dead child. But that is simply a mechanism used to soften the horrors of the reality Morrison extrapolates in this narrative about the lasting consequences of the inhumanity inflicted on enslaved people.

Again I was flummoxed by her ability to, within a few paragraphs, strip open a person to their interior and spill their truth all over the page.

"They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and as soon as you felt how light and lovely that was, they studied your scars and tribulations."

My brain did not learn anything new about the way enslaved people were treated but I felt it in an entirely different capacity than I ever have before.

"She knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like. Could she sing? Was it nice to hear when she did? Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother, a faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me, would she like me?"

Toni Morrison is a national treasure. It's not just her point of view but the way she articulates it that makes her contributions a critical component of the American canon. As brutal as it is enlightening, I cannot overstate how essential reading her work is.