Yesterday And Tomorrow In Beloved

I finished Toni Morrison's Beloved yesterday and noted this passage love, memory, and the future. One theme in the book is the challenges and difficulty of love and motherhood in the face of extreme trauma and challenge -- namely slavery and its aftermath.

I was reminded of Robert Jones Jr.'s The Prophets. Jones' novel is about the attempt to sustain love on a Mississippi plantation during the time of slavery. The love in Jones' novel is between two men -- Isaiah and Samuel. The novel was clearly inspired by the work of Toni Morrison. Both Beloved and The Prophets are filled with sublime poetic language even though they depict some of the most brutal aspects of American chattel slavery.