La Musique

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

"It made sense for a lot of reasons because in all of Baby's life, as well as Sethe's own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn't run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortaged, won, stolen or seized. So Baby's eight children had six fathers. What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children."

~Beloved, by Toni Morrison

I was amazed at how moved I was by this sentence. Never having appreciated my literature texts before, this comes as a very pleasant surprise. Perhaps what makes it even more potent would be the fact that it was, and maybe still is, very real - to the sixty million and more. This kind of books make literature worth studying.

11:03 PM