Beloved, Toni Morrison, 1987

 Beloved was the next selection for my tour of American literature and candidates for the Great American novel. 

Beloved takes place primarily in Reconstruction Ohio just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, a former slave state. In an out-of-the-way house near Cincinnati lives a freed Black family centered around Sethe, who lives with her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and her children, most notably her daughter Denver. As the story begins, we see that the family is not a happy one. Baby Suggs lies in her deathbed simply seeking out vivid colors. Denver is quiet, doesn’t attend school, and spends her time playing in the land around the house, including by the nearby river. Sethe works during the day as a cook and takes care of the household. The house itself is as lively a member of this unhappy family as any of the humans - it is known to be violent, to shake, to make its presence known. It is said to be haunted, and the family is almost entirely shunned by the rest of the Black community in town. Sethe’s two sons, who we hardly meet directly in the story, run away from there and do not return. We come to understand that Sethe and the family lost a baby child some years ago, buried before having a name, remembered nonetheless by Sethe simply as Beloved. Something is wrong in this picture. Although the reader knows not what exactly, the haunting is implied to be related to the death of the baby. An uneasy equilibrium hangs over everything. 

A man arrives at the house, which is called 124, named Paul D. We learn that he and Sethe know each other from when they were both enslaved at a Kentucky plantation called “Sweet Home.” Paul D shares that he has been essentially a nomad, but he sought out Sethe and takes up residence with the family. We slowly begin to uncover the history of everything. Faced with the haunted actions of the house, Paul D manages to seemingly chase it away. A much happier condition settles in, a more conventional home life.

The structure of the work is non-linear. It is a mysterious work, with later sections explaining earlier ones. The two primarily time settings, in Ohio in the present, and Kentucky in the past, take place in the 1870s and 1850s, respectively. There are sections in vernacular. A handful are in the form of poetry or other experimental prose. For my description, I will summarize somewhat chronologically, which is quite different from the experience of reading the book, but try to maintain a sense of the revelations as they occur in the novel. The gradual revelation is perhaps the dominant and most intriguing element of the plot, even with some confusion that comes from the structure. If interested in reading it oneself, I recommend skipping until later more thematic sections.

Shortly after Paul D’s arrival at 124, another more unusual person arrives. An unidentified, unknown, naive and confused young woman appears. She becomes known as Beloved, and all but Sethe shortly suspect that she is in fact the same Beloved as Sethe’s dead daughter. Sethe is charmed and bewitched by Beloved, Denver wishes to care for Beloved, but Paul D is suspicious and gradually becomes pushed out of the home. A key moment is when Beloved seduces Paul D - while having sex, Paul D remembers his previously tightly locked away memories of traumas at Sweet Home and away from it during his escape, including sexual violence inflicted on him. 

Sweet Home was owned by a relatively humane slaveholder named Garner and his wife. Several slaves lived there, including Sethe, Baby Suggs, her son Halle, Sixo, and several slaves with similar names such as Paul A, Paul D, Paul F. Halle and Sethe got married and had multiple children together. The implication is made that Sethe was brought to the plantation for this reason - that is, to give birth to more slaves - but the love and marriage between Halle and Sethe is nonetheless genuine and powerful. When Mr. Garner dies and later when Mrs. Garner falls deathly ill, she invites her relative to come manage the plantation. To the reader, this relative is known as Schoolteacher, his apparent vocation. He drastically changes and worsens the life circumstances of the slaves who in turn plan to run and escape. 

In the present time, Paul D is approached by a man named Stamp Paid who works on the Underground Railroad assisting those fleeing slavery, piloting a boat to bring people across the river. Stamp shows Paul a newspaper clipping that reveals the truth about Sethe and the death of her baby.

Under Schoolteacher’s management at the plantation, the treatment of the enslaved degraded very far. Sethe was raped and whipped by Schoolteacher’s nephews. Before Schoolteacher arrived at Sweet Home, Halle bought the freedom of his mother Baby Suggs from Garner with his own labor, enabling her to go to Ohio. An escape plan develops with the goal of joining Baby Suggs in Ohio. The escape did not go very well - Halle and a pregnant Sethe are separated and Halle’s fate is uncertain. The other children make it to Baby Suggs first, without Sethe, who arrives shortly after nearly dead from her treatment. Delirious, Sethe wishes to continue on to bring her milk to her baby, Denver, and to carry her unborn child to freedom. 

After about one month of Sethe ‘s new life with Baby Suggs, in the early phases of her recovery, Schoolteacher arrives with White police, seeking to recapture her and her children. Faced with the return to Sweet Home and to slavery at the hands of her rapist, assaulter, and near-murderer, Sethe flees the house and kills her newborn baby before the police can arrest her and prevent her from killing the other children. Sethe claims to have done this out of love for her children, to prevent them from being returned to slavery - to keep them safe. Baby Suggs, who up to the incident had been a preacher and active community leader, becomes bedridden and wastes away, content merely to consider various colors, trying to understand what Sethe did. 

Learning about this history, Paul D runs away from Sethe and the family. Beloved comes to dominate the house and particularly Sethe more and more, so much so that Sethe stops working. With no money, Sethe and Denver begin to starve while Beloved becomes fat like a pregnant woman. Finally, Denver leaves 124 to seek help for her family - she has almost never left the house in her life up to that point. She wants to work to make money, but the other woman in the community come to understand the situation. A group of them come to the house. At the same time Mr. Bodwin, the owner of 124, a White abolitionist, comes to the house to offer Denver work. Sethe attempts to kill Bodwin, recalling the time when Schoolteacher came to the house, but is restrained by the others. Beloved disappears. As time passes, Sethe becomes bedridden as was Baby Suggs, and the story concludes. 

I watched some of one interview of Toni Morrison by Charlie Rose. Rose quoted a question posed by a journalist to Morrison which asked if or when Morrison would write about something other than race and Black America. In the most charitable interpretation of this question, it alludes to an oft-cited goal of literature, which is to explore and help understand the universal human condition. However, this question was rightly called “illegitimate” by Morrison. It unfairly and wrongly suggests that the Black American experience is not part of that universal human experience - it verges on dehumanization. Morrison counters the question by pointing out how unexpected it would be for other authors to be faced with a similar question, introducing ideas such as the ‘White gaze,” and more. In addition to all of these points, there is the simple fact that great art usually must zoom into the specific and plumb its depths in order to leave the reader with an impression of the universal and the human. After all, there are really only “humans” rather than some massive entity called “humanity.” Morrison writes about humans, and does so very well. In the book, she describes the suffering of a single person, a family, a people, and a world. I in no way felt unable to connect to Morrison’s thoughts due to its subject matter which I personally did not experience. 

Beloved can be read as a piece of historical fiction explaining and documenting the experiences of Black Americans during and after the end of legal slavery in 1865. It details the experiences of enslaved, formerly enslaved, and free Black Americans in the antebellum period, during the war, and reconstruction. The traumatic treatment at the hands of Whites is a prominent throughline. The actions of many of the Whites terrorize and humiliate, resorting to sexual violence, physical violence, killings, lynchings, family separation, dehumanization, and more. Morrison does not paint a wholly grim picture. We see Black families and communities living their lives - at play, in religious devotion, offering and accepting charity, expressing love, gathering in family, resisting, working, and more.

Beloved is also about trauma and recovery, including both first-hand and inherited traumas. Among its most universal and simplest morals is that to seek healing and recovery we must seek other people, seek the community of people who would help us if we sought them out, because we love them. Holding on to traumas, hiding away from others, these are ways to keep the traumas alive and to make them worse. The house itself, 124, was the place where Sethe recoiled from the world to stew in the traumas that the world inflicted on her. It grew literally haunted and monstrous in that house. Near the end of the story, when Denver left the house to seek help, she received it in spades and the specter was sent away. 

Sethe and Paul D are faced with the memories of their traumas, both in their minds and their bodies. In order to continue with their lives, they resort to locking away the memories of their traumas, a defense mechanism that helps them move on but not to heal. Denver did not directly face the same traumas as her mother but nonetheless is seriously impacted by then through an inheritance process - she learns her traumas from her mother’s example. Denver also has her own traumas from her broken home life during her upbringing.

There are many therapeutic practices that emphasize the connection between the body and emotion, variously known as “somatic experiencing”, “body work”, and other terms. I have personally pursued these methods and seen their benefits, and I experienced this book as firmly in this tradition. The characters themselves demonstrate the connections between spirituality/emotion and the body, as well as the writing and framings of the author. 

This was one of the most intense pieces of literature that I’ve read. Its content is very visceral, physical - so much so that during my reading experience, I felt many emotions grounded in the body, ranging from sadness, to anger, disgust, and so on. Morrison doesn’t shy away from discussing the dynamics of the bodies in her story - the black bodies, women’s bodies - in their full range of bodily experiences, be it torture, exuberant dance, sexual violence, sexual pleasure, tiredness of work, nursing a baby, bleeding, dreaming, dying, resurrecting. 

Beloved investigates womanhood, motherhood, and personhood. Personhood is denied to the enslaved during enslavement by definition, but also at least to some extent after liberation through the continuing impacts of traumas and recovery. The characters of the novel strive to reassert their personhood through various ways, primarily in how they relate to themselves and their recovery in their mind, body, and soul. 

In my experience reading literature, I’ve noticed a loose pattern where novels written by women sometimes tend to explore the physical and embodied aspects of the human condition more so than those written by many men. This may be due to societal pressures - society more explicitly values attractive women - and a function of the biology of womanhood - childbirth, menstruation, and more. Sethe’s experience escaping from the plantation while pregnant is one of the closest and most heartbreaking physical/embodied passages I’ve read. Sethe wants to bring her milk to her baby Denver, and in the end is able to, but the milk becomes mixed with the blood of her other daughter Beloved. Morrison dives into the relationships between several generations of the family, with Baby Suggs, Sethe, and Denver all with complex interactions and dependencies between and among each other. 

One of the throughlines is the comparison and interaction between humans and animals. The line between is erased at points. The enslaved men at Sweet Home have sex with their animals because there are no women. Schoolteacher has his pupils describe the “human and animal characteristics” of the slaves. The institution of slavery attempts to make humans into animals through their treatment like livestock. This includes the ways the owners worry about the monetary value of the slaves and their ability to reproduce themselves. A particularly clear example is the methods of punishment like the iron bit that Paul D had to wear. 

Morrison also considers resistance to slavery and moral wrong. Much of this occurs in the inner space of one’s own mind, the family life, and the community. There isn’t a direct discussion of organized resistance such as that of Nat Turner, for example. Morrison’s characters demonstrate how we as humans resort to defense mechanisms such as memory repression, but that the most effective defense mechanism is to seek out connection with others and to form community. It is through this that Denver ends up saving her family. Sethe’s murder of her child is not portrayed as heroic, but neither is it totally condemned. It is explained as an act of very “thick” love - Sethe wanted to put her children in a safe place and could only do that in one way. In the book, it is the moral cruelty and extremism of the society and slavery that is more to blame than is Sethe. This is demonstrated by Sethe’s release from jail due to the appeals of the White abolitionists in town. 

On the subject of race relations, Morrison describes how the Black characters fear the Whites due to their violence and repression towards them. There is fear, but also anger and perhaps hatred. However, I didn’t get a sense that the book condones continuing this hatred today. Rather, in my interpretation it calls for a direct moral accounting and a reconciliation process. Morrison does not shy away from confronting and presenting the brutality inflicted on the Black population of America by the White population. This book has been banned in some school districts in 2023, ostensibly due to passing portrayals of bestiality and other issues, but I think it is more likely due to its presentation of unvarnished truths. I believe that the power of these truths present an opportunity to develop the forces of human compassion in our society to become better.