Beloved

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Beloved

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel primarily set in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873, but also set from 1855 to 1873 and in Kentucky prior to 1855; published in 1987.

SYNOPSIS

Sethe, who was a slave before the Civil War, is now physically free but still bound by the legacy of slavery and haunted by a murder she has committed.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

For More Information

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison has emerged as one of the leading voices in American literature since the publication of her first novel, The Bluest Eye , (also covered in Literature and Its Times), in 1970. Morrison’s writings are largely concerned with the African American experience; their author, in fact, declares that her art is inherently political. In 1988 her novel Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, testimony to the groundbreaking nature of her achievements. This victory was followed by Morrison’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The position of post-Civil War blacks

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 and the end of the Civil War brought immediate legal freedom to more than 4 million blacks in the South. The importation of slaves from Africa had ceased after a new law in 1808 curtailed the international slave trade, with the result that the blacks freed at the end of the war were predominately American-born. These ex-slaves had no sustaining support after the Civil War. Trained for few tasks beyond farming and for the most part uneducated (since it was illegal for slaves to learn or be taught to read), many freed blacks found their new situation as equally dismal as the old, but now they possessed no means to survive. Some remained on the old plantations as low-wage workers, but more took advantage of their sudden freedom by moving. A number moved north in search of a new life and still could not escape the legacy of slavery, a problem that plagues the character Sethe in Beloved.

Slavery in Kentucky

In Beloved, Sethe has escaped from life on a Kentucky farm called Sweet Home. Bordering the free states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, Kentucky offered a less sinister environment for slaves than in the Deep South. The products raised in Kentucky—livestock, tobacco, and hemp (manufactured into cotton bagging and rope for tying cotton bales) required relatively small labor forces. Kentucky was thus dotted with medium-sized farms rather than plantations, and in 1850 most of the 38,500 slaveowners of Kentucky possessed fewer than five slaves apiece. Historical records indicate that because of the less vicious form of slavery existing in Kentucky, its slaves lived in terror of being sold into the Deep South. Sale to a Mississippi or Louisiana plantation owner became a justifiable fear after 1820, when there arose a vigorous slave trade between Kentucky and the slave states in the cotton kingdom of the Deep South. One Kentucky judge estimated the yearly number of blacks sold to owners in the Deep South to be 5,000.

Slaves still encountered cruelty at the hands of their masters even in Kentucky. One documented account describes a young female slave. Thinly clad and barefooted, she was severely whipped on a cold winter morning by her white mistress, a Mrs. Maxwell. Maxwell’s son later applied his cowhide whip to the young slave with vigor after having her strip down to her waist. A medical examination of her “emaciated body revealed numerous lacerations, bruises, and scars resulting from the searing of her flesh with a redhot iron” (Coleman, p. 252).

KENTUCKY IN THE CIVIL WAR

Kentucky did not secede from the Union during the Civil War, but its citizens showed a sharp division in their loyalties. Although some 70,000 Kentuckians fought for the Union, around 35,000 volunteered to fight for the Confederacy. Meanwhile, its slaves remained in bondage even after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The Proclamation, which took effect January 1,1863, freed only the slaves in rebel territory. Kentucky slaves would have to wait until 1865 when the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery throughout the nation.

With little or no chance of legal retaliation, slaves resisted such cruelty in various ways. Most commonly, a wronged slave would obtain justice by burning down a house, barn, or other structure, a crime for which it was hard to pin down the perpetrator. If caught at such an act, however, the slave faced the death penalty. A few slaves resorted to murdering their masters or overseers and, in some instances, even their own children to prevent them from having to endure the perils and indignities of slavery. One Kentucky slave couple about to be sold down South made a mutual pact “to send their children to heaven” rather than let them “descend to the hell of slavery” (Coleman, p. 269). After killing them, the couple committed suicide. The violence committed by Sethe in Beloved, then, while atypical was by no means unique.

Slave women and their children

On Kentucky plantations, as elsewhere, life for the women was replete with emotional as well as physical hardships. Slave women who worked in the fields were separated from their small children, who might be left in the care of older, physically weak women.

A slave woman was regarded not only as a worker but also as a potential breeder of new property—children who would legally belong to her slaveowner. Though most slaveowners did not see this as the primary function of their slave women, childbearing was in some cases encouraged. In fact, a few slave women were promised their own freedom if they would bear as many as ten children. There were also instances of slaveowners who took sexual advantage of their female slaves and then regarded any mulatto children that resulted from these forced couplings as slaves themselves and the owners’ property.

Slave mothers had little control over either their children or the destiny of their family. The owner commonly decided whether or not a slave woman could marry and for how long. Taking realistic stock of the slaves’ circumstances, some marriage ceremonies declared the vows valid until death or until distance parted the couple. In the novel, Sethe’s mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, has endured the pain of such separations:

In all of Baby’s life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anyone Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen, or seized. So Baby’s eight children had six fathers. What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.
(Morrison, Beloved, p. 23)

The Underground Railroad and Ohio

As antislavery sentiment grew in the U.S. in the early 1800s, so did the Underground Railroad, an informal network of people and houses organized to help runaway slaves escape to the North. The Ohio River constituted one of the last boundaries on the pathway to freedom. North of the river lay the free state of Ohio; to the south the slave state of Kentucky. Although Morrison never directly asserts this, characters like Stamp Paid and others who helped in the escape central to Beloved might be considered unofficial workers on the Underground Railroad.

The abolitionists who conducted the Railroad never succeeded in rescuing many slaves—at best probably 1,000 a year of the more than 4 million slaves. Yet their network stood as a powerful symbol of the antislavery movement. So greatly did it concern the slaveowners that they

lobbied successfully for passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. The federal law set up a bureaucracy of commissioners to decide cases and penalized Northerners for aiding runaway slaves. The penalty consisted of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for helping a runaway, as well as another $1,000 in civil damages.

Ohio, where Sethe and Baby Suggs of Beloved establish a home of their own, was a free state, but that did not eradicate prejudice on the part of its residents. The status of free blacks is described in the Ohio House Journal of 1864. The people of Ohio, it said, regarded blacks as a class to be kept by themselves and barred from social intercourse with whites. As late as 1864, three years into the Civil War, it declared that a black man would not witness any improvement in his social and political rights as long as he lived in Ohio. After the Civil War, improvement was halting at best. It was not until 1870, for example, that black people were allowed to sit on juries in Ohio.

Such were conditions in Ohio at the time when the main character in Beloved arrives there to take up residence with her mother-in-law. The nonstatus of free blacks, along with dreadful memories of their former, and even more dismal, slave experience, cast a shadow over number 124, the house in Ohio where the story in Beloved begins to unfold.

The Novel in Focus

The plot

Though much of the story prior to the novel’s time is told in flashback, the central action of the plot develops out of a single dramatic event. In 1855 a nineteen-year-old pregnant slave girl, Sethe, is brutally beaten and runs away from slavery at Sweet Home, a small family farm in Kentucky. Sweet Home had once been a kinder place; Sethe’s original master, Mr. Garner, had been rather good-hearted. He seemed to encourage “a special kind of slavery, teaching [the slaves] what they wanted known” (Beloved, p. 140). But conditions changed when Mr. Garner died and the slaves were given to the care of his brother-in-law, known as “schoolteacher.” In time, schoolteacher’s harsh treatment of his slaves results in the death of one of them, burned alive, and Sethe’s sexual attack at the hands of schoolteacher’s nephews. Learning that schoolteacher may eventually sell her children prompts Sethe to escape to freedom in the North.

Sethe is helped over the Ohio River, a major thoroughfare on the Underground Railroad. On the journey, she gives birth to her fourth child, a baby girl named Denver. Sethe’s husband, Halle, was unable to escape from slavery, but he had previously bought freedom for his own mother, Baby Suggs. Baby Suggs lives in Cincinnati with three of Halle and Sethe’s other children, two sons and a daughter sent there by Sethe. She and Denver eventually join them.

After only a month of freedom, Sethe’s former owner, schoolteacher, locates her in Ohio and comes to capture her and her children, hoping to profit by having her bear more slave children. Seeing him nearby, Sethe takes her baby Denver and her other children into a shed and tries to kill them to prevent them from being dragged back into the horrors of slavery. She attacks the boys and succeeds in killing Denver’s sister by sawing through her throat with a hacksaw, but she is prevented from killing the other children by the character Stamp Paid, who had helped her across the river.

When schoolteacher discovers them, the two boys, who ultimately survive the attack, appear to be dead along with the toddler. Schoolteacher at this point decides that a crazy woman and her one baby are not worth claiming. Buried with a headstone that names her Beloved, the slain baby gives rise to a ghost that haunts Sethe and Baby Suggs. The ghost, in fact, unsettles the entire family, ultimately driving Sethe’s two boys away from home.

Many years later, a young woman who calls herself Beloved appears. Near the age Sethe’s murdered daughter would be if she had lived, the stranger comes to live with Sethe. Beloved revives Sethe’s memories of the past, reopening wounds. A demanding young woman, she overpowers Sethe until Sethe finally becomes incapacitated. Denver must even assume responsibility for finding food to eat; fortunately, the women of the community help out. Ultimately, Beloved leaves and a man from Sethe’s past, Paul D, returns to help mend Sethe’s broken spirit.

Narrative structure

Beloved contains a striking narrative structure that varies from traditional plot designs that contain an initial conflict, rising action, a climax, and a denouement, or resolution. Beloved, like Morrison’s other novels, begins in medias res, or in the midst of the action, using very little exposition, or setting up of the scene. Events from the past intrude upon the present constantly. In fact, to assert the novel is set in a specific time period is misleading since it seems to reside in a period outside measured time—a period in which all moments of the past exist in the present.

In the novel, Sethe’s notion of this idea of all time as coexisting simultaneously is expressed in her concept of “rememory,” as she explains to Denver:

It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm—every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you. So, Denver, you can’t never go there. Never. Because even though it’s all over—over and done with—it’s always going to be there waiting for you. That’s why I had to get all my children out. No matter.
(Beloved, p. 36)

Sethe here expresses the notion of time that both structures the novel and explains reality for her as an ex-slave. The novel is a series of rememories from each character’s perspective; the reading of the novel is the reader’s attempt to restructure these rememories, thereby entering into them. Morrison’s use of memory as a structuring device in Beloved allows the reader to experience the novel as an insider. Ultimately, it is this feature of the novel that leads to an understanding of what life is like for its main character.

Spirituality in Beloved

Spirits and spirituality haunt Morrison’s novel. The house known as 124, where the characters live in Ohio, is haunted, but not in a ghostly way—this haunting is palpable, sensible. When Paul D, a former slave at Sweet Home, comes to visit Sethe in Cincinnati, he describes the sensation upon entering the house: “[He stepped] inside her door smack into a pool of pulsing red light.” The description continues, “She was right. It was sad. Walking through it, a wave of grief soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry” (Beloved, p. 9). The acceptance of the dead baby’s spirit as a reality is unquestioned by the characters in the novel. The existence of a spiritual world in the novel parallels Sethe’s concept of rememory, and her claim that nothing ever dies.

The reappearance of Beloved as a flesh-and-blood being who is precisely the age Sethe’s daughter would have been had she lived touches also on the spiritual beliefs of the characters. It takes them very little time to determine that the young lady who has appeared out of nowhere is the spirit of the baby and to accept this resurrected person without question. Her character can be traced back to African folklore of river spirits with distinctive feet and hands; Beloved emerges from a river and the softness of her skin, specifically of her hands, is frequently noted in the narrative. Such a weaving and melding of African traditions into African American culture helps explain the very real sense taken on by spirits in the novel.

Beyond being a spirit-come-to-life, Beloved represents the spirits of all of the slaves who died on slave ships during the journey from Africa to America. As Morrison explains in an interview with Marsha Darling in 1988:

She [Beloved] tells them what it was like being where she was on that ship as a child.... The gap between Africa and Afro-America and the gap between the living and the dead and the gap between the past and the present does not exist. It’s bridged for us by our assuming responsibility for people no one’s ever assumed responsibility for. They are those that died en route. Nobody knew their names, and nobody thinks about them. In addition, they never survived in the lore; there are no songs or dances or tales of these people.
(Morrison in Taylor-Guthrie, p. 247)

Sources

The most direct source for Beloved is a newspaper article Morrison came upon while editing a collection of articles and images called The Black Book in 1974. This article, entitled “A Visit to the Black Mother Who Killed Her Child,” tells the story of an escaped Kentucky slave, Margaret Garner. In 1850 she attempted to kill her children rather than see them enslaved, and she succeeded in killing one. Morrison deliberately did not look much deeper into the Garner story, but went on to thoroughly research the history of Cincinnati, Sethe’s small-town residence in Beloved, and to investigate the history of the Underground Railroad and pre-Civil War abolitionist movement.

Beloved draws more indirectly on the slave narrative of the nineteenth century, works such as Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) (also covered in Literature and Its Times). Such primary sources present a wealth of information about the life of slaves and the institution of slavery. Morrison’s novel, however, aims not to recreate a slave narrative that follows a common structure—describing the suffering under slavery, liberation, and the benefits of freedom—but to imaginatively personalize the ex-slave’s story and to reconsider the nature of freedom for blacks in the wake of slavery.

A third source for Beloved relates to its style. Morrison explains the influence of African folk tales.

What’s rich … is what the reader gets and brings him or herself. That’s part of the way in which the tale is told. The folk tales are told in such a way that whoever is listening is in it and can shape it and figure it out. It’s not over just because it stops. It lingers and it’s passed on … It has a moment beyond which it doesn’t go, but the ending is never like in a Western folktale where they all drop dead or live happily ever after.
(Morrison in Taylor-Guthrie, p. 253)

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

Morrison, civil rights, and the women’s movement

Toni Morrison grew up with a father who was distrustful of other races and a mother who expressed hope for a better future. Morrison entered the work force at age twelve but still managed to graduate from high school with honors. Afterward she chose to attend Howard University, at the time an all-black institution. In 1964, after several years of teaching, she became an editor for Random House, where she managed such notable authors as Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis. Her career coincides with the black civil rights movements of the 1960s and with the latetwentieth-century women’s rights movement that began with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and the founding of the National Organization for Women three years later. Morrison was an active participant in both movements.

Morrison was particularly active in the women’s movement, as reflected in writings like Beloved that feature powerful female characters. From another standpoint, Beloved portrays women with very real human emotions and concerns who are trying to shake off the terrible burdens of past enslavement. In some ways, this mirrors what African American civil rights leaders of the 1960s were attempting. It is not surprising that some reviewers have seen Beloved as a novel about slavery, while others have described it as a feminist novel. Both positions are certainly supported by the story. It might be most accurate to label Beloved a seminal work of black feminism. Importantly, Morrison began publishing her fiction in the early 1970s along with black feminist writers Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Jane Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Toni Cade Bambera.

Reception

By the time of Beloved’s publication in 1987, Morrison was already a prize-winning author. Her Song of Solomon had won a National Book Award. Still, when Beloved appeared, its strangely organized plot and shockingly vivid detailing of events seemed to confuse the critics. It was described as a book about slavery, a book about the human predicament, and a feminist document. Although critics could not agree on the focus, the work was hailed as another triumph for Morrison. The critics praised the novel for its portrayal of black male characters who are both sympathetic and complex as well as for its powerful female characters. Upon its release, Beloved became an instant success; it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988.

The legacy of slavery in the 1980s

The damage that slavery did to the United States did not end with the Civil War, Reconstruction, or even the civil rights movement of the 1960s. There is a psychological price still being paid by all Americans, and there are ongoing social problems related to slavery—chronic unemployment among black youth, the economic disparities between minorities and whites, crime and the problems of the inner city, and the large number of fatherless black families. As Beloved recognizes, the problems created by slavery do not go away simply because it has been abolished.

African Americans have still not attained an equal economic footing with white Americans. As Mary Frances Berry and John W. Blassingame state in Long Memory: The Black Experience in America:

The black worker was so victimized by the American caste system that it became a truism among economists that while whites generally fluctuate between prosperity and recession, blacks fluctuate between depression and great depression.
(Berry and Blassingame, p. 215)

Even during times of general economic prosperity, standards of living for African Americans have historically decreased. “While the number of poor families in the United States declined by 30 percent between 1947 and 1963, the number of poor black families increased by 2 percent” (Berry and Blassingame, p. 215). In the 1980s, as Morrison was writing her novel, such economic circumstances had changed little for African Americans.

Finding strength in family and community

Morrison, who raised her two sons by herself, feels strongly that a family without a father is not a broken family. That many present-day families do exist without a father is clear from statistics concerning the United States. In 1980, at the beginning of the decade in which Morrison wrote her novel, 55.4 percent of black women were unmarried; by 1992 this figure had climbed to 62.1 percent. The divorce rates for blacks as well as for whites has risen greatly, as has the number of households headed by women with no male present. In 1992 the number of female-headed households (46.4 percent) almost equalled the number of married households (47.1 percent) among blacks.

Morrison’s hope for the future

In 1989 Toni Morrison was interviewed on television by Bill Moyers. In that interview, Morrison explained a modern message that underlies Beloved and her other writings:

Moyers: There is such a gulf between the “inner city” today and the rest of the country in both imagination and reality, in politics and literature. If you were writing for the rest of the country about the “inner city” today, what metaphor would you use?
Morrison: Love. We have to embrace ourselves. James Baldwin once said, “You’ve already been bought and paid for. Your ancestors already gave it up for you. You don’t have to do that anymore. Now you can love yourself. It’s already possible.”
(Taylor-Guthrie, pp. 266-67)