In the foreword to the 2004 Vintage Books edition of her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison notes that the history of black motherhood in the United States is one in which "birthing children was required, but "having" them, being responsible for them – being, in other words, their parent – was as out of the question as freedom. Assertions of parenthood under conditions peculiar to the logic of institutional enslavement was criminal." Despite this fact, misconceptions and false narratives around the figure of what Angela Davis has called the "myth of the matriarchate" have flourished, and the figure of the black female – and most especially the black mother – has consequently become enshrouded in fictive and harmful mythologies. Morrison's situating of her novel within the framework of the conditions of parenthood for black slaves locates her work as a radical instance of resistance to such mythologies.
In this paper, I will argue that Morrison enacts a speculative re-writing of the figure of the black mother and, consequently, of black female subjectivity, through her engagement with the historical story of Margaret Garner and her imaginative divergent ending from the tale in its historic form. In making this argument, I will examine the work of memory and responsibility in the novel, taking Sethe's killing of her oldest child, Beloved, in her attempt to free her from the horrors of slavery, as an act of reproductive resistance. I will draw on theoretical formulations of black female agency and black motherhood, including work from Hortense Spillers ("Mama's Baby, Papa's Baby: An American Grammar Book"), Saidiya Hartman ("The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner"), and Angela Davis ("Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves") in an attempt to theorize instances of black female agency in relation to their role as enslaved mothers. I will also situate Morrison's use of rememberative strategies in the novel in relation to Hirsch's theory of postmemory and Rothberg's theory of implication (2019), connecting these strategies to the radical resistance I argue that Morrison enacts. Through these strategies, I argue that Morrison accomplishes a speculative rewriting of the trope of the black mother of slavery, one that rejects the figure of the matriarch and replaces her instead with a complex and unassimilable figure uniquely positioned to both survive and contest the system of slavery through her radical modes of resistance.
