Beloved Middle Passage Quotes

Later, when that murdered child, the title character of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, makes her ghostly return, she’s more than simply the child lost to violence, sacrificed to the revulsion of the escaped slave toward her former state. Instead she is one of, in the words of the epigraph to the novel, the “sixty million and more” Africans and African-descended slaves who died in captivity and forced marches on the continent or in the middle passage or on the plantations made possible by their captive labor or in attempts to escape a system that should have been unthinkable—as unthinkable as, for instance, a mother seeing no other means of rescuing her child except infanticide. Beloved is in fact representative of the horrors to which a whole race was subjected.

How quickly the years fall away and the passage of time ceases meaning. We have each a purpose: we are bred to it, engineered for it, or we are drawn to it out of some fathomless innate longing that we cannot explain. Some unlucky few must discover—or create—it on their own, but those are rarer in these days, when by the grace of the forebears we are manufactured to our place in the order of the world. We have our destinies. We race for them, fight for them, fulfill them. Or we fail them. Listen, Perceval. Do you hear your long immortal life stretched out before you, before the stars? I have so much to teach you, my dear. The young do not believe in endings. They do not believe in death. They do not believe in time. Everything takes forever to happen, and twenty years is a long time. Under those circumstances, the apocalypse can seem sexy. Death is a fetish, a taste of the edge. It is not real. And so the days are long, and though time holds us green and dying, we cannot yet feel the drag of our chains hauling us forward to the end. But the old, Perceval. The old have forgiven time. Whatever time you may have is too little. If you live a thousand years—as I nearly have, and you surely will—it does not matter. Unless you have given up, laid down your tools, and folded idle hands to wait, beloved, you will still be in the middle of something when you die. The world is a wheel, and we are all broken on it. And that is fine and just. For there is never any hurry, until there is no time.

Love is Holiness and Divine Indignation; the placidity of an ordinary married life is the veil of a spiritual passage into profound things. Nor is this all; the lover knows himself also to be the cross upon which the Beloved is to be stretched, and so she also of her lover. A suggestion of this — probably no more — is to be found merely in the fact of her existence the sense of being for ever intimately bound to another which when it is not repose is agony, the state of suspension upon a substance alien and unavoidable for which, though from a more dreadful distance, crucifixion is the only comparison. There is no middle state into which this issues — either it is continued into an anguish of entire repulsion and hate, or, by the grace of that Crucifixion which includes it but is so much more than it alone, it becomes itself a purgation and a redemption. This is — in its degree, and who shall say how terrific that degree may become? — the annihilation of the selfhood which the saints have sought, and the end of it is union.