The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,139

belongs—in the hands of the individuals who knew it, certainly as well as anybody, and that would be the slaves. And at the same time, not to dismiss it or denigrate its horror. Because the problem is always pornography. It’s very easy to write about something like that and find yourself in the position of a voyeur, where actually the violence, the grotesqueries and the pain and the suffering, becomes its own excuse for reading. And there’s a kind of relish in the observation of the suffering of another. I didn’t want to go into that area, and it was difficult to find out—difficult and important to find out where those lines were, where you stop and how you can effect a kind of visceral and intellectual response without playing into the hands of the institution and making it its own excuse for being. I didn’t want to chew on that evil and give it an authority that it didn’t deserve, give it a glamour that it didn’t really have; I wanted to return the agency into the hands of the slaves, who had always been fairly anonymous, or flat, it seemed to me, in much, although not all, of the literature.

Now of course here’s three to four hundred years to peruse, and it is indeed a humbling experience. You find that the sheer documentation—the history—is too long. It’s too big, it’s too awful, too researched, too ancient, too recent, too defended, it’s too rationalized, it’s too apologized for, it’s too resisted, it’s too known, and it’s too unknown, and it’s too passionate, and it’s too elusive. And, in order to explain other kinds of oppression, such as women’s oppression, it was also very much appropriated.

So I’m dealing in an area that I know is already overdone and underdone—attractive in an unhealthy sense, and repulsive and hidden and repressed in another. What I needed then, to deal with what I thought was unmanageable, was some little piece, some concrete thing, some image that came from the world of that which was concrete. Something that was domestic, something that you could sort of hook the book on to, that would say everything you wanted to say in very human and personal terms. And for me that image, that concrete thing became the bit.

I had read references to this thing people put in their mouths. Slave narratives were very much like nineteenth-century novels, there were certain things they didn’t talk about too much, and also because they were writing for white people whom they wanted to persuade to be abolitionists or to do abolitionist-type work, did not dwell on, didn’t spend a lot of time telling those people how terrible all this was. They didn’t want to call anybody any names, they needed their money, so they sort of created an upbeat story: I was born, it was terrible, I got out, and other people are still there and you should help them get out. They didn’t stay and talk a great deal; there was a lot of hinting and a lot of reference but nothing explicit that you could see. So sometimes you might read that Equiano goes into a kitchen in New England and he sees a woman cooking, and she has this thing in her mouth and he says, “What is that?” And somebody says, “Oh, that’s a brake,” b-r-a-k-e, and he said, “I have never seen anything so awful in my life,” and he leaves and doesn’t talk about it anymore. And then I had seen many references, such as some entries, very selective entries, from William Byrd, in Virginia, in the early part of the eighteenth century, 1709, 1712—and his editors describe him, quote, as “Virginia’s most polished and ornamental gentleman, a kindly master, who inveighed in some of his letters against brutes who mistreated their slaves.”

February the eighth: Jenny and Eugene were whipped. April: Anna was whipped. May: Mrs. Byrd whips the nurse. May: Ma was whipped. June: Eugene [who was a little child] was whipped for running away and had the bit put on him. September: I beat Jenny. September: Jenny was whipped. September: I beat Anna. November: Eugene and Jenny were whipped. December: Eugene was whipped for doing nothing. Then the next year in July: The Negro woman ran away again with the bit on her mouth. July again: The Negro woman was found, and tied, but ran away again in the night. Five days later: My wife, against my will, caused little