The Eloquence of Toni Morrison

Reading Toni Morrison's Beloved is like trying to make your way through a maze. Just when you think you see the way out, you're staring at impenetrable hedge again, feeling puzzled, even maddened. Morrison jumps around in time, offers incomplete tidbits of a scene or memory she'll return to later, and eschews logic for poetry. But her truths are essential, her stories haunting, and her sentences often worth holding up to the light.

Here’s how Morrison describes Stamp Paid, a former slave who worked for the Underground Railroad:

"...sneaking was his job—his life; though always for a clear and holy purpose. Before the War all he did was sneak: runaways into hidden places, secret information to public places. Underneath his legal vegetables were the contraband humans that he ferried across the river. Even the pigs he worked in the spring served his purposes. Whole families lived on the bones and guts he distributed to them. He wrote letters and read to them the ones they received. He knew who had dropsy and who needed stovewood; which children had a gift and which needed correction. He knew the secrets of the Ohio River and its banks; empty houses and full; the best dancers, the worst speakers, those with beautiful voices and those who could not carry a tune."

I love the cadence of this passage, established by its many pairs of words joined by and: wrote and read; empty and full; best and worst. Morrison varies the syntax of the pairs, using adjectives ("empty houses and full"--love that unconventional placement of the second adjective); clauses ("who had dropsy and who needed stovewood"); and modified nouns ("contraband humans" under "legal vegetables"). The many opposites echo the escaped slaves' vision of the world as having only two kinds of people, "whitepeople" and "blackpeople." Only one race was human.