american-holocaust

THERE IS A MOMENT in Toni Morrison's moving novel, Beloved, whenStamp Paid, a black man in the mid-nineteenth-century AmericanSouth, notices something red stuck to the bottom of his flatbed boatas he is tying it up alongside a river bank. It was a particularly bad timefor black people in a century of particularly bad times for them. "Whitefolkswere still on the loose," writes Morrison: "Whole towns wiped cleanof Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; fourcolored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children;children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; propertytaken, necks broken." And the smell of "skin, skin and hot blood . . .cooked in a lynch fire" was everywhere.At first when he saw the red thing stuck to his boat Stamp Paid thoughtit was a feather. Reaching down to retrieve it,he tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted arounda curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp. He untied theribbon and put it in his pocket, dropped the curl in the weeds. On the wayhome, he stopped, short of breath and dizzy. He waited until the spell passedbefore continuing on his way. A moment later, his breath left him again.This time he sat down by a fence. Rested, he got to his feet, but before hetook a step he turned to look back down the road he was traveling and said,to its frozen mud and the river beyond, "What are these people? You tellme, Jesus. What are they?" 1It is a question many have asked, many times, during the course of thepast millennium. What were those people whose minds and souls so avidly