Owning Up to the Past: Identity and Ownership in Select Works of Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor

Slavery, at its core, is about one human being owning another. What happens, then, when someone who belongs to a group of people is granted not only freedom from bondage, but the liberty to make claims of ownership--over land, over people, and most dauntingly, over his or her own person? It is a question that Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison take on in their novels. They explore conceptions of ownership in post-slavery black communities, and examine how their implications evolve well into the late twentieth century. This essay\u27s primary focus will be on two of their many works, Naylor\u27s Linden Hills and Morrison\u27s Beloved, references will also be made to other relevant novels where or when appropriate. An examination of how ownership emerges in these novels\u27 language and content will reveal, in one instance, a quest for ownership over other people that resembles supremacy, contrasted in another instance by a struggle to attain an empowering form of ownership over one\u27s own self