Beloved: America’s Grammar Book

Karla FC Holloway

When the music entered the window . . . [b]oth

women heard it at the same time. . . . [W]here the
yard met the road, they saw the rapt faces of thirty
neighborhood women. Some had their eyes closed;
others looked at the hot, cloudless sky. Sethe opened
the door and reached for Beloved’s hand. Together
they stood in the doorway. For Sethe it was as though
the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and
simmering leaves, where the voices of women
searched for the right combination, the key, the code,
the sound that broke the back of words. Building
voice upon voice until they found it, and when they
did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound
deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It
broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized
in its wash.

–Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987),
261. Copyright © 1987 by Toni Morrison. Used by permission
of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Any
third party use of this material, outside of this publication,
is prohibited.

The expressive license within this epigraph, an ex-

traordinary passage from Toni Morrison’s quintes-
sential American masterpiece Beloved, takes up the
implicit challenge of a literary ½ction: the authority
in (and of ) a literary imagination. This gathering
of women’s voices enables this speaking text–a
“talking book” in the tradition of African American

KARLA FC HOLLOWAY is the
James B. Duke Professor of English
at Duke University, where she is
also Professor of Law and Professor
of Women’s Studies. Her books in-
clude Legal Fictions: Constituting Race,
Composing Literature (2014), Private
Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender,
and a Cultural Bioethics (2011), and
BookMarks: Reading in Black and
White: A Memoir (2006).

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107

“Beloved”:
America’s
Grammar
Book

letters–that at once nominates, engages,
and liberates the poetic voice. The passage
gestures toward an essential complexity
even as it maps a route toward understand-
ing the ways in which America, and in par-
ticular this formerly enslaved community,
has an exquisitely sculpted potential to
survive the terror in our nation’s history.
This potential might be as insistent as the
immediate conundrum in the novel’s nar-
rative: how the black folk who were expe-
riencing a tenuous freedom in Ohio might
live without the detritus of the past as a
disabling accompaniment. The return of
Sethe’s dead daughter Beloved as a fleshly
inhabitation threatens her mother’s, her
sister’s, and the new community of freed
and escaped black folk’s opportunity to
safely manage their lives beyond (and with-
out) the shadow of enslavement, which
maliciously haunts their new and quasi-
liberated landscape.

In the context of America’s literary his-
tory, Beloved’s inhabitation explores the
ways in which race in America is deeply
embedded in persons, in our language, and
as a consequence of these ½rst two, in our
national narratives. The persistence of a na-
tional paradigm of race that exists between
persons, that constructs racialized identi-
ties, and that seeps into our linguistic and
literary structures constitutes a particular
and perhaps a peculiar American grammar.
In the vulnerable era of Beloved’s setting,
the perplexities of the U.S. legal framework
surrounding property allowed the federal
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to render a per-
sonal act of self-determination, such as
escape, into a confounding shape-shift
whereby a freed and legal black body is
not quite either: neither free nor endowed
with liberal, legal personhood. Instead,
escaped slaves were vulnerable to recap-
ture. As persons who were also property,
they were liminal bodies whose presence
oddly clari½ed, instantiated, and confused
the tangle of U.S. personhood–arguably

the most critical nomination within the
U.S. Constitution’s declaration of the na-
tion’s insistent and principled autonomy.
It was fully and absolutely a reasonable
terrain for a ghost.

As long as the threat of recapture loomed,
these people were too much like Beloved
herself, caught in the interstices between
personhood and fracture, freedom and fugi-
tivity, ½ction and fact. Because race mat-
tered, its regulatory language clari½ed na-
tional personhood even as it confused pri-
vate personhood. The Constitution’s rep-
resentation clause assured the nation’s
failure to perfect its union.1 In fact, the
mark it left, even after it was overturned
by the 14th Amendment, would come to
be as telling as a slaver’s brand. The con-
sequence of constitutionally inscribed par-
tial personhood lingered like a bookmark
in the literary, legal, and even social texts
that would follow.

In Beloved’s experiment with the inter-

textuation of words, bodies, and imagery,
Morrison encapsulates a brief but critical
and deadly serious jouissance with America’s
racial shadows as literary scaffolding. The
novel’s imagery, narrative, and characters
excavate the interdisciplinary architectures
of the deeply racialized texts that constitute
our laws and compose our national litera-
tures. Even its origin story is complicit.
Morrison was prompted to create the ½c-
tion after reading an 1856 newspaper article
from The Cincinnati Enquirer about an es-
caped slave, Margaret Garner, who killed
her daughter when confronted with slave
catchers who had tracked her down in
Ohio and attempted to return her to her
“owner” in Kentucky. It’s this engagement
between Morrison’s ½ction and the nar-
rative fact of race in the United States that
makes the evidence of what becomes an
oddly reasonable terrain for racialized lit-
erary allusions as fateful as it is necessary.2
The fullness of America’s racially haunted

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history is a regulatory accompaniment to
America’s literary narratives. The way in
which Beloved exposes this history as a nec-
essary utility in American storytelling is
what makes this book so extraordinary in
our literary history and so revelatory of the
ways in which the histories of our national
literary landscape have been sculpted by
our “play in the dark.”

Morrison engaged that literary land-
scape and history in her 1992 William E.
Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of
American Civilization at Harvard Univer-
sity. The lectures were later published as
a monograph, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness
and the Literary Imagination.3 I see a slender
but rigorous trace between the capacious
subject of those lectures–American civi-
lization–and her unbounded proffer in
Beloved when she writes that “not a house
in the country ain’t packed to its rafters
with some dead Negro’s grief.”4 Beloved’s
domestic site is the nation’s homeland–
without exception and without any demar-
cation other than their domestic location.
Morrison’s interest is similarly domestic
in Playing in the Dark. There she explains
how a “contemplation of [black people]
. . . is central to any understanding of our
national literature.” Her argument explores
how the consequently “coded language
and purposeful restrictions of this Afri-
canist presence . . . extend into the twen-
tieth century.”5 In Playing in the Dark,
Morrison reveals the ways in which Amer-
ica’s house (and not only its ½ction by
and about American black folk) is haunted
by race. Her own excavation of that ghostly
habitation is imaginatively reconstructed
in the novel that preceded those lectures
by just a few years. Beloved explored the
ways in which our national narratives
would be similarly haunted: in the nation’s
keys and its codes, in its imagery and
through its gestures, in its architecture
and its corporeal embodiments.

This is why it is particularly important
to notice the literary landscape in the pas-
sage I’ve isolated–how the “yard meets
the road.” Although the yard is a domestic
and privately bounded space, it reaches
toward the road’s public path. It is an invi-
tation for the reader to map a new dimen-
sion in what Morrison locates as “a critical
geography” and to follow the exemplary
but vexed terrain that has contoured
America’s private and public interstices.6
In Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama
explains how “landscapes are culture
before they are nature; constructs of the
imagination.”7 The cultural conundrum of
our national homeland is that it has been
both bound and free, and that textural battle
has shaped the landscapes in our literary
imaginations. When I ½rst read Beloved, I
was well-schooled enough to recognize it
as a descriptive grammar for my own work
in American literary and cultural studies.
But it is only now that I recognize its lib-
erating creative license.

Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing

Literature, the book that I believe will be
the capstone of my critical writing, has,
at the very least, a far better grasp of the
challenge of and potential in critical theory
and literary text than did my ½rst book,
The Character of the Word, an outgrowth of
my doctoral dissertation.8 I begin the epi-
logue in Legal Fictions with an epigraph of
my own composition. It deliberately en-
gages the fanciful potential in our words–
what writer and philosopher Owen Bar½eld
would have called an exploration of the
aesthetic imagination in poetic diction. It
is, for Bar½eld, “a felt change of conscious-
ness.”9 Legal Fictions embraces that shadow:

Our shadows linger and leak. They seep
from mottled grey and scaffold scalar rec-
ollections. They assure our potential, secur-
ing it by ways and means at once penumbral
and exquisite. They instantiate things re-

Karla FC
Holloway

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143 (1) Winter 2014

109

“Beloved”:
America’s
Grammar
Book

membered past their time, promised beyond
situation.10

Legal Fictions explores the consequence of
the law’s persistent constitution of race as
a category that matters in American soci-
alities. It is a sustained meditation on the
consequential literary imagination that
such a scaffolding encourages, especially
with literature’s memory of slavery as
“remembered past its time, promised
beyond situation.”11 In the ½rst chapter,
“Bound by Law,” I make what some may
read as a provocative argument as to why
literary allusion is like legal precedent. I
use Beloved to provide the illustration that
I believe is credible and theoretically rig-
orous enough to sustain the weight I assign
to our nation’s particular interplay of law
and literature. To explain the literary rep-
resentation of precedent, I recall this scene
from Beloved, in which Sethe explains her
idea of a “rememory” to her daughter
Denver. Morrison writes:

I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me
to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on.
Some things just stay. I used to think it was
my rememory. You know. Some things you
forget. Other things you never do. . . . [T]he
place–the picture of it–stays, and not just
in my rememory, but out there in the world.
What I remember is a picture floating around
out there outside of my head. I mean even
if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of
what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there.
Right in the place where it happened. . . .
Someday you be walking down the road and
you hear something or see something going
on . . . and you think it’s you thinking it up.
. . . But no. It’s when you bump into a re-
memory that belongs to somebody else.12

Beloved exempli½es the rigorously cre-
ative textual standard within the factual
histories and execution of American letters,
the codes of our conduct as well as the lib-
eral principles that govern usage. It forces

us to confront the ethic of racial reasoning
that produces the nonsense that comes
from our insistence that race and the stand-
ing of one’s national personhood have a
reasonable relationship. It also encourages
the haunting persistence that exacts a toll
on our national memory and contempo-
rary socialities.

When Beloved was published, I was nearly
a decade into my own scholarly career. I
did notice its exquisite and even painful
architecture of words that structured
America’s legal and literary stories into a
narrative terror. But I had neither the ex-
perience nor the chutzpah to claim myself
as being among those who might take
advantage of the resident opportunity in
that complex congregation of women
whose voices carried “the key, the code,
the sound that broke the back of words.”
As a linguist, my scholarly perspective had
been trained to notice the deep structures
as well as the surface structures of lan-
guage use, the compositions in its words,
syntax, morphology, and phonology–and
especially the principles and imagery that
inhere–their moorings and their meta-
phors. Beloved became the book that en-
couraged my notice, and further than that,
it urged me to do the work myself and
claim the opportunity extended in that
choral moment. I deliberately engaged this
opportunity as I composed Legal Fictions,
the book that Beloved made possible, and
where I gave myself permission for mo-
ments of uninhibited play with literary
language’s liberal imagination.

In the passage from Beloved quoted above,

the grammar–linguistic and literary struc-
tures both–of America’s racial legacy are
on display. Morrison instantiates this crit-
ical linguistic potential and bookmarks the
moment, making certain that it is passed
on to the reader.13 I was critically sophis-
ticated enough to recognize its importance
and to highlight the passage in my ½rst

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reading of the novel. But I was clearly not
insightful enough to grasp the scholarly
and creative opportunity offered to me or
to notice that I too could be in that com-
pany–invited in, and offered a measure
of whole notes.14

The choral gathering is as traditional to
the literary text as it is extraordinarily
endowed in this novel. For as much as it
echoes the spoken word traditions of the
Greek tragedians, Beloved’s chorus is writ-
ten as a post-modern collage of voices
imbued with an essential American text
regarding their luminous performance
of linguistic dexterity. The company–the
congregation–of women matters. This is
no singular task. The women gather in
order to build “voice upon voice” until
their tone settles into a wide “wave of
sound” that could accomplish the neces-
sary spiritual work and reach the regions
that seemed beyond their everyday capa-
bilities. When they did, Sethe “tremble[d]
like the baptized”–a clear indication that
she had been touched.

It wasn’t immediately apparent what
potential Beloved offered me. It was clearly
the book that explored, as well as encour-
aged, the possibilities in the words I might
choose to engage the literary discipline of
U.S. African American literatures, the
major focus of my scholarly oeuvre. And
my background in linguistics prepared
me for the deep structures buried in the
grammars of our dialects and helped me
navigate the “deep waters” that Morrison
plumbs in Beloved. That extraordinarily
empowered gathering that broke through
the haunt of the novel underscores the
work that a notice of grammar might ac-
complish to excavate American literature’s
stories as well as the ways in which race
continues its spectral hold on our nation’s
imagination. But at the time I ½rst read
Beloved, I maintained my distance from
their offering, satis½ed to simply appreciate
the stunning narrative within.

In my selected excerpt, Morrison writes
that the women’s congregated voices ½nd
communion under “a hot, cloudless sky
. . . as if the Clearing had come to her with
all its heat and simmering leaves.” Earlier
in the novel, Morrison describes the Clear-
ing as a place that was “green and blessed,”
a place where the motley community could
become “flesh”–surely a signifying allu-
sion to the biblical gospel where the word
becomes flesh. This embodiment is formed
in a quintessentially American way because
it was only in the United States where
fully (rather than fractionally) fleshed black
personhood was legally challenged. As a
consequence, the literary bodies–black
and white both–had potential to harm and
be harmed. The women’s gathering is
de½ant in its collaborative empowerment,
but also vulnerable in the ways their con-
gregated presence makes them dramati-
cally visible and easily heard (“When the
music entered the window . . . [b]oth wom-
en heard it at the same time”). Their offer-
ing is as bold as it is endangered, and it
deploys the very contradiction of their pres-
ence in an American community. But it is
also generous and salvi½c. The women use
the moment to reclaim Sethe back into
their vital community, to give her living
daughter Denver the future they all strug-
gled to enable, and to place the haunt of
the past back into the unreasonable shadow
of its origin.

So it is a choice the women make to
claim the freedom road as a space cleared
for communion. Despite the bounded pri-
vate property of the yard in front of them,
and despite the peril in memories, they
gather to preserve and protect what could
eventually become the post-slavery pub-
lic potential of their persons. Their con-
vention uses the only text they have in
common as the route to restoration. My
selected passage’s reference to “the Clear-
ing”–a critically capitalized site in this text
–is an essential nomination of the place

Karla FC
Holloway

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143 (1) Winter 2014

111

“Beloved”:
America’s
Grammar
Book

that has already assured these women
their salvi½c potential. It is the site where
Beloved’s grandmother, Baby Suggs Holy,
preached the sermon that explicated the
challenge confronting this newly freed,
escaped, and hopeful yet haunted com-
munity. She understands their synecdochic
dismemberment and the alienation of their
bodies from self-love. She preached: “love
your flesh . . . your eyes . . . your hands . . .
your mouth. You got to love it. . . . You. For
this is the prize.” Like the ½nal gathering
of women, this early communal gathering
held its music as well: “Long notes held
until the four-part harmony was perfect
enough for their deeply loved flesh.”15
Later, when the women who had danced
in the Clearing come together to use the
force of their congregation to send Beloved
back to memory, they use their restored,
re-membered, and loved black bodies and
their gathered sounds as “the key, the code,
the sound that broke the back of words,”
fracturing the text of their enslavement.
Morrison’s Beloved excavated the ways
in which our national literatures could
help the nation understand the relational
racial realities that our laws have instan-
tiated and that our literatures remember.
This underbelly of our constitution would
mean that “reconstruction” would not
simply be a notable era and event in our
post-slavery history, but it would also have
to be a moment when the fractured na-
tional body would require reconstitution
and when America as a predator would
have to reconstruct its prey as its prospect.
But before there would be private bodies
that mattered to history, or to our laws,
there had to be public texts that were cog-
nizable. Race was America’s syntactic
structure. Like a grammar, it held together
the inherent complexities and contradic-
tions.

Our laws’ instantiation of racial rules
made the plain fact of our legal ½ctions a
regulatory apparatus–a structural social

reality. Race was a legal ½ction worthy of
the nation’s literary imagination. Morrison
was composing America’s grammar–its art
of letters–one that explored the potential
of coherence after the incoherence of slav-
ery, America’s legal institution of fraction-
alized personhood, and America’s (re)con-
stitution of its bodied politics.16
In a 1989 review of the novel, I wrote that
Beloved “is not a ‘ghost story.’” I declared
that instead “it is a spiritual.”17 The dis-
tinction helped me explain what I then saw
as a crucial difference, one that spoke of
the translucent lingering that is less male½-
cent than it is confused. A ghost story has
little of the agency that Beloved commands,
almost as if she is taking up the challenge
extended in the epigraph I used to intro-
duce my review essay: “One wants a teller
in a time like this.”18 Beloved inhabits the
novel as if she alone is the teller. She is
certainly the one who is left to judge–to
determine whether her mother’s act was
one of desperate kindness or desperate cru-
elty. She alone has the standing to speak
through the murkiness of the reader’s eth-
ical dilemma–was Sethe’s act murder or
mercy?–and she was left to suffer the
peculiar consequence of her early death.
Beloved’s persistent, troubled, and ½nally
insistently and deadly loving spirit under-
scores the complexity of the era but also
makes necessary the community’s and the
reader’s disengagement from her. The
gathering of women is as necessary to the
novel as it is to the reader. Their daringly
engaged spirituality made certain there
would be others who could be tellers, and
they extend this potential to any who
would use and remember the language
and the texts that come from our history
–whether they be ½ctions or facts. Even
though the women have no quotidian
vocabulary to exorcize Sethe’s daughter,
they clearly have an extraordinary spiri-
tual reach that is enough for the task.

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In a characteristically savvy play with
our national grammar, Morrison ends
Beloved with a warning: “It is not a story
to pass on.”19 The preposition “on” allows
the sentence to mean it is not a story to be
avoided, even though its ½rst meaning sug-
gestively retains the intent of “on” as a
particle: it is not a story to share. With that
½nal syntactic complexity, Morrison ex-
plains how America’s grammar contains
structural contradictions even as it un-
leashes creative potential.

At this particular moment in the mid-
dle of my fourth decade as a scholar, I feel
fully embraced by that gathering of women.

Karla FC
Holloway

In fact, I feel as if I am not only among
their company but absolutely entitled to
the license and creativity they engage.
Beloved’s gathered women, the ones who
hold the key and whose empowered sound
can break the back of words, have given
me license to my own life in letters and
have challenged me to join the choir. I
sing alto. And “who knows but that on
the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”20

endnotes
1 Article I, section II of the U.S. Constitution, also known as the representation clause, declared
that each slave would count as “three-½fths of a free person” in matters of congressional
representation and taxation. It protected the property of those who held slaves but at the
same time quixotically rendered the enslaved to both categories: they were property as well
as (partial) persons.

2 In 1856, Margaret Garner and her family escaped from Kentucky to Cincinnati. They were
found by slave catchers and returned to their owners, but not before Garner killed her
daughter with a butcher knife. As tragic and pitiful as this story is by itself, its accompanying
legal conundrum marks the case as one that explains the peculiar intersectionality of per-
sons and property. Garner’s defense lawyer, hoping her trial might be in a free state, claimed
she was a person who committed murder. But Kentucky argued for federal rule; she was
property to be returned to her owner. See Stephen Weisenberger, Modern Medea: A Family
Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999).

3 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage,

1993).

4 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 5.
5 Morrison. Playing in the Dark, 5–6.
6 Ibid., 3. Morrison explains that the chapters in Playing in the Dark would “put forth an argu-
ment for extending the study of American literature into . . . a wider landscape. I want to
draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography.”

7 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 61.
8 Karla FC Holloway, The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston (Greenwood,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987). The dissertation, A Critical Investigation of Literary and Lin-
guistic Structures in the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, was submitted to Michigan State Uni-
versity in 1978 to ful½ll the requirements of my Ph.D. in English and linguistics.

9 Owen Bar½eld, Poetic Diction (1928; Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 48.

Here Bar½eld explains “aesthetic imagination” as a “felt change of consciousness.”

10 From Karla FC Holloway, Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature (Durham,

N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).

143 (1) Winter 2014

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“Beloved”:
America’s
Grammar
Book

11 Ibid.
12 Morrison, Beloved, 35–36.
13 As I write “linguistic and literary structures” I recall the title of my 1978 doctoral dissertation,
A Critical Investigation of Literary and Linguistic Structures in the Fiction of Zora Neale Hurston. It
is with some satisfaction that I notice this consistency in my vision and interests, and that
even then I was focused on the combinations, both “the key [as well as] the codes.”

14 I believed then, as I do now, this to be a correct (and decidedly humbling) determination of
the reviewer who expressed her disappointment in the execution of The Character of the Word.
Cheryl Wall suggested that there was more potential in the title than the text of my disser-
tation-become-book. See Cheryl A. Wall, “Black Women Writers: Journey Along Motherlines,”
Callaloo 39 (Spring 1989): 419–422.

15 Morrison, Beloved, 88–89.
16 The derivation of the word grammar is from the Greek grammatike (tekhne), or “art of letters.”
17 Karla FC Holloway, “Beloved: A Spiritual,” Callaloo 13 (Summer 1990): 516–525.
18 Ibid. The epigraph is the title and ½rst line of a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, “One Wants a

Teller,” in Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press, 1994), 132.

19 Morrison, Beloved, 275.
20 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; New York: Random House, 2010), 581.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
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