Beloved & Writing Race

   In Henry Gates JR's essay Writing Race, he asks the question, "what importance does 'race' have as a meaningful category in the study of literature and the shaping of critical theory?" (2). During the time this was written however, he states that the answer to this question would probably be "nothing" or "nothing explicitly" (2). After reading the rest of his essay I kept going back to a novel that I recently read in my Studies in the Novel class. The novel Beloved by Toni Morrison is entirely about what life was like during and after the Civil War.
   A summary of the novel is it essentially inspired by the story of an African American slave woman named Sethe who escapes slavery in Kentucky to Ohio which was a free state at the time. The story follows as she attempts to save her children as she runs away and in the end, ends up having to kill her newborn, named Beloved, so that the slave owners do not do it first. The story is told by Sethe recalling her memories as well as the memories of an old acquaintance. Although this novel is in some ways very dark, it has a happy ending to it.
   Back to Gates' essay; he discusses how writing has become a tool and essentially it is important to "analyze the ways in which writing relates to race" (15). I feel this book is the epitome of that statement as well. The way in which Toni Morrison constructs this novel in a way to let the reader decide whether or not what Sethe did to her child was something that we should disagree or agree with. It's left up to interpretation, and I believe that is the whole point that Gates is attempting to come across in this essay.