Truth in Timbre: Morrison's Extension of Slave Narrative Song in "Beloved"

Abstract

In her 1987 novel Beloved, Toni Morrison acknowledges and even borrows from Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative, but she also makes a resolute break from its rhetorical and political objectives. Historical differences between the audiences of Douglass and Morrison account for a large part of their contrasting styles, particularly in their treatment of slave song. Since Douglass composed his Narrative as a fugitive slave in the early 1840s, he was aware of his principally white audience and also of his precarious task of presenting an attack not on white America, but on the institution of itself. Douglass's judicious decision to report the bleakness of with austerity of tone allows him to present this attack successfully. He relies heavily on factual evidence, rather than on the tremendously emotional slave songs, to present the most appalling scenes of brutality endured by the slaves in his narrative. This shrewd emphasis on the factual enables Douglass to navigate between the specific facts and the general nature of in a way that informs rather than offends his audience. In 1845 Douglass could not afford to focus repeatedly on the ineffable sadness of slave songs or on the songs' reflection of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish, even though he reports early in the Narrative that every tone [is] a testimony against slavery (58). As readers, we learn the importance of slave song at the outset, but we learn far more about the exact number of Colonel Lloyd's slaves, horses, and plantation acreage throughout the remainder of the narrative. We come to know the exact assignments involved in Edward Covey's wheat-fanning operation with a precision that leaves us unsatisfied with the important but brief description of the songs reverberating through the pinewoods of the Great House Farm at the outset of the narrative. Despite this, Douglass's task of uncovering the truth of slavery's brutality without mitigating that truth with indignant protestations has proven to be at once inhibiting and fecund. The aware