Big Read 2022 Beloved
Without warning, Toni Morrison’s Beloved ushers you into 124 Bluestone Road, a house where chairs move by themselves, kettles turn over, and handprints appear in cake icing from nowhere, left by a haunting presence which is both an actual ghost and the specter of America’s unforgettable racial history. "Beloved originated as a general question, and was launched by a newspaper clipping,” Morrison said of this novel. “Suppose having children, being called a mother, was the supreme act of freedom—not its opposite?” The question was sparked by an actual case reported in a newspaper, The Southern Baptist, in 1856: Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who escaped to Cincinnati, Ohio, in the years before the Civil War, was compelled under fugitive slave laws to return to her owner in Kentucky, but killed her infant daughter rather than see the child returned to slavery. Under a dehumanizing legal system, her daughter could not even claim the status of human being: Garner was charged not with murder but with destruction of her owner’s property. From these spare and powerful ingredients, Beloved weaves a wholly unique reading experience—part ghost story, part romance, part domestic drama, part gripping chronicle of enslavement—to humanize the historical record through the lives of specific individuals.
The NEA Big Read will kick off First Friday, February 4, 2022 in downtown Brunswick followed by two months of unique programming with something for everyone to participate in.
The calendar of Big Read events can be found here: http://upto.com/s/PKve
For more information or to learn how you can be a part of this valuable and fun community-building initiative, email Golden Isles Arts & Humanities.
