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** spoiler alert ** Book # 8 and final read for Black History Month, 2024. However of course, I will keep reading black writers forever!

“Take me by the hand…either she doesn’t know about me or has forgiven me for my solution. But once in a while her voice is so full of longing, I can’t help it. I want something back. Something just for me�� (Morrison 203)

I have read this Toni Morrison novel a few times during the last 20-odd years since its publication in 2003. Since it was a bestseller in my youth, I picked up a copy and read her dark tale on the themes of love. Later, as an adult after reading “Sula�� for the first time, I realized that this is a darker riff about the complexities of friendship that began with that book.

“Love�� continues on Morrison’s signature themes of the complications of loving too much, the dark recesses of the human condition, and of the toxic nature of masculinity and how societies and communities scapegoat people they cannot pin down (and Morrison usually uses black girls as examples) of the outsider in her literary discourse, “people with no imagination feed it with sex—the clown of love. They don’t know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits�� (Morrison 63).

My first attempts at reading “Love�� ranged from feeling bewildered to dizzy- sometimes I felt like I missed something.

It might be the Toni Morrison novel that confused me most, because I did not feel a connection to it. It felt disjointed and haphazard- and for a time, was the Morrison I wanted to disown after having loved everything else she wrote.

I can safely write that I think this is a dark, underrated gem of book that needs to be rediscovered and treasured as much of her early, celebrated work. I've upped my original 2 stars, to 3 stars (in 2015) and now, 5 stars.

In this reassessment of this baffling, yet intoxicating novel- it might be the most obtuse and interesting one in her oeuvre. Once again riffing on ghost stories, the supernatural, and of broken sisterhood, it’s a dazzling feat.

The story is set in the surreal Up Beach. The town patriarch and subject of perversity and gossip, Bill Cosey has died. He leaves behind his widow Heed, whom he married when she was only 11 years old. His granddaughter Christine and his daughter in-law May all live on his estate, bickering and fighting over his legacy, and while he was alive, for his attention.

His first wife Julia had died, so did their son Billy, so it’s only Christine and May left- alone with the haughty Heed.

L is the cook of Cosey’s estate, acting as narrator commenting on the events of what happened in Up Beach, set before and after the Civil Rights Movement, an all-black seaside community somewhere on the East Coast.

The setting, often shifting from 1995 then back to the 1940s, in this dreamlike world where there are almost no white people, of parties and jazz- is often surreal and expressionistic.

I say 1995 because the character Junior is 19 and born in 1975.

Then finally, rounding out Morrison’s dramatis personae are Vida and Sandler Gibbons, who worked for Cosey. Their grandson Romen, a strapping 14-year-old boy, becomes involved with Junor Viviane- a young woman released from prison, and hired by Heed Cosey to help write their history, and oh yes, to help draw up a will that makes Christine unable to get anything.

All these characters have been manipulated by Cosey in some way or another- and his lover, Celestial, confirms this. Heed and Christine were once childhood friends whose love for each other fell apart after Heed married her grandfather as a kid. Cosey’s always loved Celestial most.

Finally, Romen, being a child himself, like Heed- is manipulated by an older woman (though their age difference is only 5 years apart versus Cosey and Heed, who was only 11).

Pedophilia and the rape of children should never be accepted- but in Morrison’s world, characters�� motivations are always complex and ambiguous, which I think often is a metaphor for the notion that human relationships and race are always intersected in ways that might seem perverted to the outsider- but it’s the reality of what her characters, and her ideas often feel, “a clear sight of the world as it was, barren, dark, ugly with remorse…motives pointless�� (Morrison 132).

In Heed’s case, she married Cosey in order to remain close to Christine, and to escape a life of poverty. It’s also after having been molested by Bill himself is that shame of having experienced perverted love is why she marries him- and Christine knows that he’s a dirty told man too. It is their inability to discuss and process sexual trauma is the wedge that drives the women apart.

Somehow, Heed’s tenacity reminded me of Laila from “A Thousand Splendid Suns��- also an adolescent who married a much older man in order to survive and protect her dignity. Except Cosey doesn’t treat Heed with the indignities that Rasheed imposes on his wives.

The language in “Love�� is gorgeous, as it to be expected by reading a Toni Morrison novel. It bites with white hot intensity of emotions that jump off the page, often simmering in heartbreak.

The story of how Heed and Christine’s friendship fell apart are the saddest instances that happen in this book, of how it all went wrong, “they shared stomachache laughter, a secret language, and knew as they slept together that one’s dreaming was the same as the other one’s�� (Morrison 132).

The exquisite finale that showcases their final scenes together is as haunting as any ending that she’s written in past books, a jazzy riff that both reconciles and releases love and pain.

As Heed and Christne’s time come to an end-so does their toxic love.

Ironically, though it begins with a lot of sex and lust, the love that evolves between Junior and Romen becomes the purest love of the story, love is free to continue, without Bill Cosey.