First is the arrival of Paul D, another enslaved man from Sweet Home (the plantation where Sethe, Baby Suggs, and several other characters were ‘owned’). Morrison doesn’t just give you one inciting incident: she gives you two. never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. The early chapters of the novel sketch out this rough history, and Morrison’s capacity to take your breath away with her blunt insight is on full display. (She would have had “Dearly Beloved” engraved, only her “services” to the engraver only purchased her ten minutes of time to carve a name.) Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law and a fellow escaped slave, also lived at 124 Bluestone Road, but she died shortly after the boys ran away, eight years before Beloved begins. The child was never formally named, but buried beneath a tombstone with the only phrase Sethe could remember from her Christian funeral: Beloved. The house is haunted, see, by the memories and inherited trauma of Sethe’s past, which are personified in the ghost of the child she buried. Sethe’s older sons, Howard and Buglar, ran away years ago. The story of Beloved begins in 1873, with Sethe – a formerly enslaved woman – and her daughter Denver living at 124 Bluestone Road, in Cincinnati, Ohio. And because such a place doesn’t exist (that I know of), the book had to.” Melcher Book Award in 1988, she said: “There’s no small bench by the side of the road. Morrison lamented the fact that there was no true memorial to the deaths of those men, women, and children, and so Beloved became her own personal tribute. But Morrison wasn’t done with Garner’s story it was the seed that grew into Beloved.īeloved is dedicated to “Sixty Million and more” – a reference to the Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the slave trade. Morrison came across Garner’s story in an old newspaper article, and reproduced it later in a compilation of black history in 1974. The motive, as we understand it today, was to prevent her children being returned to a life of slavery – a fate worse than death. marshals busted into her cabin and arrested her, in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, they found that she had killed her own two-year-old daughter and was attempting to kill her other children. She was a slave who escaped from Kentucky and fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856. Thank you!)įirst, a bit of history (because you can’t read or understand Beloved without its history): the story was inspired by the real-life story of Margaret Garner. (And if you do, my beloved Keeper Upperer, I’ll earn a small commission.

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