'Beloved' by Toni Morrison: "I never thought I had the emotional resources to deal with slavery," Toni Morrison once said. "There was some deliberate, calculated survivalist intention to forget certain things." But she was haunted by an old newspaper story about Margaret Garner, an African-American woman who killed her daughter to keep the child from being dragged back into slavery. Inspired by that tragedy, Morrison - the granddaughter of a slave herself - in 1987 published "Beloved," and "certain things" could never be forgotten again. The greatest American novel of the 20th century, "Beloved" remade the history of our national literature. Its most profound impact, though, was to shatter the lingering mythology of antebellum honor and gentility. More powerfully than any work of history could, "Beloved" plumbed the humanity of enslaved people and exposed the moral and physical obscenity of this system. After "Beloved," it became that much more untenable to cling to bloodless arguments about states' rights or to defend the sanctity of Confederate statues. A few years after the novel was published, Morrison lamented that there were no suitable memorials - not even a "small bench by the road" - to mark the lives of slaves. "And because such a place doesn't exist," she said, "the book had to." In response to that comment, in 2006, the Toni Morrison Society began placing benches "at sites commemorating significant moments, individuals, and locations within the history of the African Diaspora." There are now 26 benches around the world.
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