Through this Banned Book Writing Prompts series, Teachers & Writers Magazine aims to push back against the growing movement to censor what students can read and to show what happens when we enthusiastically embrace banned works rather than fear them. You can read an introduction to this series by Susan Karwoska here, and you can find more Banned Book Writing Prompts here.

I read Beloved just out of college, as a young wannabe writer living in a small East Village apartment with a rusted fire escape and an empty lot across the street. I raced through the novel in one weekend, and the effect of reading it was palpable. I still remember how Morrison’s writing—the story, the language, the imagery—filled me up, as if I had eaten something nourishing.

During the day at my legal journalism job, on the phone with lawyers trying to get them to reveal their salaries, images from the novel would flow through my mind and leave something bright and edible behind: Sethe making bread in the early morning; Sethe’s daughter Denver shelling peas on the porch; Amy, a white indentured servant who aids Sethe when she is in the most dire of circumstances, describing her wished-for velvet. That novel was food I needed. 

Why? As a young writer coming of age during the height of the laconic Raymond Carver style, Morrison’s stylistic freedom—the lushness of her metaphors and imagery, as well as her circular structure—was a revelation. She gave me permission to push back against the reigning minimalism. So as both literary text and model for making art from psychological pain, Beloved became a guide, a way forward.

By denying access to Beloved, we deny readers the essential gift of great art: the transformation of suffering into language that transcends brutality and grants us a shared experience of humanity, hope, and resilience.

I’ve been reading Beloved again for the first time in decades. The story of Sethe—a proud, beautiful woman who escaped from slavery but is haunted, figuratively and literally, by its effects and the horrific choices it forced her to make—reminds me again what a masterful work it is. Morrison deftly weaves past and present to show how Sethe’s hard-won life in Ohio can be swamped by memories of what she endured on the Kentucky farm where she was enslaved. Morrison’s use of circular structure and lyricism creates a world unto itself.

What strikes me most now are the bold, radical authorial choices threaded throughout—not only in Morrison’s layered metaphors and startling images, but in how she lets memory, sensuality, trauma, and beauty pulse through Sethe’s daily life. Morrison does not hide the horrors of slavery, but she shows us something else: we are trauma, and we are healing. There is the possibility to make beauty from the unspeakable. 

Yes, there is brutality in Beloved—rape, dehumanization—but almost every horror is counterbalanced by individual acts of tenderness, beauty, or kindness: Mrs. Garner, Sethe’s mistress, gifting her crystal earrings for her wedding to Halle; Amy, on discovering Sethe collapsed in a field, deciding not to turn her in but to tend to her wounds, massaging her feet and helping her give birth to Denver; the Sweet Home men containing their own impulses to give Sethe the space and time to choose a man for herself. Morrison’s vision of humanity is deeply complex and nuanced, and the system of slavery emerges as even more horrific against the backdrop of her full, striving, imperfect, dreaming, suffering, and alive characters. And her characters—Black and white—are just so astoundingly alive! 

One recurring image epitomizes this deft dance Morrison performs: Sethe’s back bears the scars of a hideous whipping. These are terrible scars, but in Sethe’s mind they become a tree—an image Amy suggests to Sethe when she is tending her wounds. 

It’s a tree, Lu,” she says to Sethe. “A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk—it’s red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and . . . blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom.

Sethe comes to adopt this image as her own. In the painful description of her wounds, Morrison does not let us look away—yet by naming the image in this way she gives it back as a symbol of endurance, strength, and beauty; a tree’s duality—the stability of its trunk and roots and the flowering of its branches—makes it deeply resonant. So too does the novel become a vessel where trauma coexists with the pulse of life, of sensuality—even joy.

Beloved taught me that what you are is not fully defined by your past trauma. There is still the chance to find resilience in the folding together of past and present, pain and healing. Sethe’s joy in cooking and her sensual appreciation of life embody Morrison’s deep faith in the persistence of a human desire for love and beauty.

How strange, then, to ban this book. By denying access to Beloved, we deny readers the essential gift of great art: the transformation of suffering into language that transcends brutality and grants us a shared experience of humanity, hope, and resilience. That is Beloved’s gift, and we are lesser for denying it.

Decades after I first read it, the image that stays with me is Sethe’s “tree”: the horrors of her past transformed into regal endurance, a strange kind of power. To this day, I carry Morrison’s character of Sethe with me—as a writer and a human—as a testament to healing and transformation. Why would we want to deny this novel’s sustenance to readers who need its nourishment?

Writing Prompt

Shivering, Denver approached the house, regarding it, as she always did, as a person rather than a structure. A person that wept, sighed, trembled, and fell into fits. Her steps and her gaze were the cautious ones of a child approaching a nervous, idle relative (someone dependent but proud). A breastplate of darkness hid all the windows except one. Its dim glow came from Baby Suggs’ room.

— from Beloved by Toni Morrison 

Much of the richness of Morrison’s prose is created through her use of metaphorical language. In the excerpt above, Morrison uses personification to create a powerful sense of Sethe’s house as a character in its own right. Through personification, she gives the house both emotional and physical attributes; it is vulnerable, demanding, and also protective. It wears a “breastplate of darkness.” 

What places or physical structures can you think of that have a strong “personality”? What type of person would you compare the structure or place to? What physical qualities or emotional characteristics would you give it? Sentence prompts that may be helpful:

This place loves . . .

This structure feels sad when  . . . 

This place is loneliest when . . . 

Now, write a description of this place/structure using personification to bring it to life. If you want to take the exercise further, write a scene in which the place or structure plays a role in the action of the scene.