Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

A strong historical commitment characterizes Morrison’s work. As she tells LeClair in an interview in 1981,

My work bears witness and suggests who the outlaws were, who survived under what circumstances and why, what was legal in the community as opposed to what was legal outside it. All that is in the fabric of the story in order to do what the music used to do. The music kept us alive, but it’s not enough anymore. My people are being devoured. ²⁵

In the dedication to the novel Beloved (1988) Morrison states that it was dedicated to the “sixty million or more” who perished under slavery. She tells Bonnie Angelo in an interview in 1989 that she had felt that Beloved would be least read of her novels, because it is a subject on which a “national amnesia”²⁶(qtd. in Taylor-Guthrie, 257) prevails  where whites don’t  want to look at it and neither do blacks because of the quality of its dehumanization.