The books sending shivers down GOP spines

“124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old — as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny band prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard).”

Those first sentences of Toni Morrison’s novel, “Beloved,” probably are not from the part of the book that in 2013 gave a Virginia high school senior nightmares. Nightmares so bad his Republican activist-mother attempted to have one of the signature works of the Nobel laureate banned from her son’s English curriculum because of its graphic images.

“Beloved” is a ghost story given form and substance by American history and the sin of slavery. It’s a horrible depiction of slavery because slavery was a horrifying and barbaric institution. It’s frightening because of the reason the child, Beloved, became a ghost who haunts her family. It’s a reminder that we are haunted by our past.

The student to whom “Beloved” bequeathed nightmares grew up to work in the Trump White House and now works for the GOP’s congressional campaign committee. What different paths would his life have taken had he continued reading Morrison?

This is in the news because the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, has a campaign commercial starring the mother as she resurrects her story about her unsuccessful attempt to have “Beloved”

banned.

In this orange-and-black-tinted season of goblins and ghouls and things that go bump in the night, few things frighten some Republican politicians more than the bump of a book on a child’s nightstand. A book the child is reading but isn’t approved of by the state because it may offer histories, experiences and interpretations different from and broader than anything previously encountered. A book that terrifies parents and politicians who have not read it or whose minds are closed to new information.

No one is as terrified as Texas state Rep. Matt Krause, Republican candidate for attorney general and chairman of the Texas House Committee on General Investigating. With emphasis on “general investigating,”

Krause sent a letter to the Texas

Education Agency and school districts about books in their campus libraries.

Attached to his letter was a 16-page addendum with more than 850 books whose themes are history, race, sexuality or LGBTQ issues. He wants to know how many copies of each book each school district possesses and how much money was spent purchasing them. He then asks:

“Please identify any other books or content in your District, specifying the campus location and funds spent on acquisition, that address or contain the following topics: human sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, or human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), sexually explicit images, graphic presentations of sexual behavior that is in violation of the law, or contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Krause wants a lot of hardworking educators to do his work for him. Instead, let Krause write a paragraph for each of these 850 books explaining why he singled them out. Let him explain why he’s concerned about a book by Ruby Bridges, who as a 6-yearold had to be escorted to school by federal marshals protecting her from screaming mobs as she integrated a New Orleans elementary school. Ruby’s parents had greater reason to be afraid in 1960 than do parents and grandstanding politicians in 2021 who fear children reading about her.

In the movie “The Sixth Sense,” a boy is haunted by ghosts and the secrets they share. “I see dead people,” he says.

People like Krause see books they’ve not read or don’t understand and are haunted by all they’ve yet to learn.