(also think of beloved, and the iron, how the scars are called iron)
(also the fable of the bird she tells often, most powerfully at the nobel prize cermony)
(as well, her isolation of language as a tool of the white opresser, and connecting that to logos)

some books to read by her
Racing Justice/Engendering Power

Playing In The Dark: Whitness and The Literary Imaganation

About her:
The Toni Morrison Encly.
The Signifying Monkey--HLG
John N. Duvall. The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness
Marc C. Conner, ed. The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable.
J. Brooks Bouson. Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison
William L. Andrews and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Casebook,
HR Rice Toni Morrison and The American Tradtion
Slavery and the Literary Imagination, Deborah McDowel

Qoutes From Her:

For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised.

Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
Both from her 1993 Nobel Speech

The desperate strategy of infanticide,
interview with wolff (note 7, page 6 of essay below)

Here," she said, "in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs, flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they don't love your flesh. They despise it....And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them....the beat and beating heart, love that too....For this is the prize." (88-87, Beloved)

From Jeanna Furston White, in Fall 2003 AA Review
The horrifying scene of Sethe swinging her infant toward the wall while her three other children lay bleeding is described in the novel from varying perspectives, each processsed by the teller. (7) Sethe' "rememory" of the act shows its distance from madness, its proximity to agency. Sethe is a thinking subject who acts and uses reason to form what appears to her a logically and rationally determined resolution to kill/save her children: (cf YHWH/X c/c Abram/Isaac/The Ram)