Jack

“Long before Du Bois wrote of a struggle with the “double consciousness” of being American and black, African American freedmen had to decide how to look backward and forward. Many may have been like the characters Toni Morrison created in Beloved (1987)—haunted by slavery’s physical and psychic tortures, but desperate to live in peace and normalcy. When Paul D says to Sethe, “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody, we need some kind of tomorrow,” Morrison imagined herself into the heart of late-nineteenth-century black memory. Memory is sometimes that human burden we can live comfortably neither with nor without.”
― David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory