Story of Freedom Goes Suppressed

What does a sixty-odd-year slavewoman who walks like a three-legged dog need freedom for? And when she stepped foot on free ground she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn’t; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew there was nothing like it in this world.

--Toni Morrison, “Beloved,” 1987

Those of you who have been enriched by the poetic power of Toni Morrison’s novels will find this ludicrous, I know. It’s almost beyond silly that we should have to defend Toni Morrison’s place in the classroom.

We aren’t talking Henry Miller here, or Jackie Collins at the other end of the pendulum. This is Princeton-teaching, Pulitzer Prize-winning, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. She’s one of our literary treasures.

But the school board of the Anaheim Union High School District, by a 4-1 vote this month, has decreed that Morrison’s “Beloved” is not fit for the eyes and hearts of its schools’ seniors.

Too violent, too graphic, too sexually explicit, was the complaint from some parents, and echoed by the board majority. So the board rejected the recommendation from its own advisory committee of parents and teachers that “Beloved” be added to the core reading list for 12th-grade English classes.

How utterly sad.

Yes, there are stark passages about slave life, barnyard descriptions that lead even adult readers to feel uneasy. Yes, there’s rape, fratricide and incest. Worst of all for some book burners, that dreaded “f-word” shows up on a few occasions.

But these things are just a snippet of what “Beloved” is about. To describe Morrison’s book by focusing on those issues is like saying that Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” is about a lawyer, or that “The Good Earth” by Pearl S. Buck is about farming.

At the heart of “Beloved” is a group of slaves bonded by their plight on a small Kentucky farm. Those who break for freedom cannot escape the shackles of their past. When Sethe is about to be recaptured, she kills her toddler daughter--she tried to kill all four of her children but was stopped--to spare them from the life she’d known. Morrison based it on a true story.

Noted book critic John Leonard wrote of “Beloved” even before it won the 1987 Pulitzer: “‘It belongs on the highest shelf of American literature. . . . Without ‘Beloved,’ our imagination of the nation’s self has a hole in it big enough to die from.”

The only real issue for a school board should not be the explicit descriptions, but whether seniors are old enough to grasp the book’s meaning, or appreciate Morrison’s marvelous gift for language. The answer to that one is an obvious, resounding yes.

The other day I drove my son and some of his friends to an academic event. Two girls in our vehicle were delightfully discussing “Jane Eyre” and some of their other classwork. I didn’t have a shred of doubt that these two would have been enraptured with, and enriched by, “Beloved.” And these girls were only freshmen.

It’s hard to say which is more worrisome: that the school board majority apparently failed to grasp what “Beloved” is about, or that the board is so vastly out of touch with how bright high school seniors are. A third chilling factor is the board majority’s disregard for the horrors from the history of book burning in this country.

I keep emphasizing board “majority” to single out Trustee Joanne L. Stanton. She cast the lone vote in support of “Beloved” for the seniors’ reading list.

“I have problems with downright banning books,” she said.

Bravo.

School seniors must be wondering what all the fuss is. This is a generation that goes to a movie and sees little green monsters pop from people’s stomachs. They walk three feet outside a classroom and they’re confronted with a barrage of foul language from their peers. They see more violence on TV in a week than what Morrison would put them through with her passages taken from real-life experiences.

After reading “Beloved” this week, my first thought was that my son should read it. He’s 15 and a high school sophomore. He already comprehends more in books than I do. He’s in the same Anaheim system where this book has been rejected from a reading list (though the board did allow it to remain in school libraries).

For years “Beloved,” has been standard reading in hundreds of high school and college classes across the country, according to a Times education study. Carol Jago, who teaches English at Santa Monica High School, predicts that “Beloved” will be taught 20 years from now as required reading next to Faulkner.

Seems to me students need a variety of writers in their lives. And if a high school wanted to introduce its students to American women who have won the Nobel Prize for literature, there are just two--Pearl S. Buck and Toni Morrison. That’s too elite a group to handily dismiss one of them.

If a high school student doesn’t read “Beloved,” he or she will never meet rich, wonderful characters like Baby Suggs, “who decided that, because slave life had busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue, she had nothing left to make a living with but her heart.”

Then there’s Paul D., who lost Sethe to Baby Suggs’ son, Halle. “In all his escapes, he could not help being astonished by the beauty of this land that was not his.”

And then there’s Sethe, who captures your spirit despite her crime, who had “Beloved” chiseled on her daughter’s tombstone because she could not afford the standard “Dearly Beloved.”

Novelist Martin J. Smith of Los Alamitos wrote to the Anaheim school board that it should “encourage students’ exposure to our culture’s highest standards, not discourage it.” If enough parents and teachers drive home that point, maybe there’s hope for a reversal.

I’m not saying this school board is made up of bad people. They are conscientiously trying to do their best. But running a school system is more than funding classroom space and hiring principals. What gets taught has to come first. And on the Morrison issue, this isn’t education; it’s deprivation of education.

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Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling The Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823, by fax at (714) 966-7711 or by e-mail at jerry.hicks@latimes.com.