Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Summary
The house at 124 Bluestone Road, outside Cincinnati, is haunted. It is 1873, and Sethe lives there with her daughter Denver and with a spite that throws furniture and presses handprints into cake. Sethe's two sons left years ago. Her mother in law Baby Suggs, who used to preach in a clearing in the woods and tell people to love their own flesh because nobody else would, is dead.
Paul D arrives, from the same Kentucky farm Sethe escaped, and drives the ghost out of the house. Shortly afterwards a young woman with unlined skin and a raw throat walks up out of the water and sits on a stump outside. She says her name is Beloved.
What happened when the slave catchers came for Sethe in the woodshed is circled for most of the book before it is finally said plainly, and Morrison withholds it not for suspense but because Sethe cannot approach it any faster than that.
Beloved eats sugar constantly, asks Sethe questions only the dead child could ask, and gradually consumes the household, while Denver, who has never had anyone, would rather be consumed than left alone again.
It is not linear and it does not explain itself. Sentences hand you a crucial fact in passing and move on, three chapters late in the book abandon punctuation entirely, and the first sixty pages ask you to accept confusion and keep reading forward. Do.
Expect infanticide, rape, whipping and the theft of a woman's milk, none of it staged for effect. Nothing else in American fiction sounds like it, and it more or less requires a second reading, which it repays. Best for readers ready to be worked on rather than entertained.
Historical Context & Significance
Beloved won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction after one of the sharpest public arguments in the history of American book prizes. It had lost the 1987 National Book Award to Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story, and in January 1988 forty eight Black writers and critics, among them Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, John Edgar Wideman and Henry Louis Gates Jr, published a statement in the New York Times objecting that Toni Morrison had never received either the National Book Award or the Pulitzer. She won the Pulitzer that March, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Sethe is drawn from Margaret Garner, who escaped Kentucky in 1856 and killed her young daughter rather than see her taken back.
Jonathan Demme filmed it in 1998 with Oprah Winfrey, who had bought the rights herself. It remains among the most frequently challenged books in American schools.