I Loved Beloved

*Spoilers ahead*

When I first read Beloved in 1992, a few years after it came out, it showed me what contemporary fiction could be like at its most beautiful and most meaningful.  I had never read anything so poetic and so gritty at the same time.  Coming back to it now, nearly 25 years later, I find that the book is even more amazing than I remember.  Toni Morrison’s novel is one of the best I have ever read.  There is everything to love about this book; characters, plot, language, scope, dialogue, emotions, meaning—these are all pitch perfect and come together in a way to create a masterpiece of fiction.

Beloved is set in the outskirts of Cincinnati in the 1870s. Sethe is an ex-slave living in a house once occupied by her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, who was bought out of slavery by her son, Sethe’s husband, Halle.  While Sethe had four children, only her youngest, Denver, now 18 years old, lives with her.  Denver’s older brothers ran away from home before they were thirteen, and they haven’t been heard from since.  The third child, a girl whose name we never know, was killed by Sethe’s hand shortly after Denver’s birth when Sethe’s slave master tracked her down and came to reclaim his property.  Sethe attempted to kill her children instead of letting them return to slavery.  She only succeeded in killing the one child, though she and the remaining three children were soaked in the toddler’s blood.  This is the setting for the drama that unfolds when Sethe and Denver receive two new visitors: Paul D, a field slave from Sweet Home, where Sethe was a slave, and a woman calling herself Beloved, and who appears to be the return of the murdered child.

The novel is simultaneously intimate in its setting and epic in its scope.  Most of the novel takes place in 124, the house Sethe occupies.  We occasionally see Sweet Home, and rarely see the streets of Cincinnati and a smattering of other locales.  The thrust of the drama centers on this single family, but through these specifics, Morrison is speaking to the condition all black Americans in the wake of the slavery, both during Reconstruction and, I believe, well into the present.  Everyone we meet in Beloved is deeply scarred by the lives they lived under slavery and continue to live in a world in which white people are an ever-present threat to the autonomy and peaceful existence of black people.  What we see in Beloved, in short, is the way that slavery and the American system of white supremacy has crippled and will continue to cripple black lives.

The continuing criticism of Sethe, for example, is that her “love is too thick” or that she loves too deeply.  To protect themselves from the terror of slavery, the black characters have had to learn to love small, to keep themselves at an emotional distance from anything they love, including their children.  Paul D claims that he no longer has a heart, just a “tobacco tin lodged in his chest” that has been rusted shut to protect him from feeling anything too greatly.  In his love for Sethe and his learning of her actions, that tin is busted open and all of its contents pour out, driving him to solitude and drink until he can put it together.  Baby Suggs has to struggle to learn to live with her new degree of freedom.  When she is thinking about her old masters, she realizes that “ she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like,” or as Sethe observes, “freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that free self was another.”  Baby Suggs knows that “the sadness was at her center, the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home.”  What finally broke Baby Suggs was the realization that no matter how “free” she was, the white men could still invade her yard at any time and cause the destruction of the things she loved.  The appearance of the four horsemen that led Sethe to her desperate actions in the cold house drove Baby Suggs to her bed to contemplate things that couldn’t hurt anybody, namely the colors blue, yellow, and pink.

Beloved is like a war story in which the characters are trying to adjust to a society after the brutality of war, only what these characters suffered is much greater and much more horrifying than anything witnessed on a battlefield.  Generations are ruined and maimed.  Even Denver who is born in freedom is not spared the ravages of slavery.   And even as Denver ends the novel putting her life together, there is no suggestion that everything will be ironed out in a few generations because as long as there is not equality, the white men will always be able to come into your yard.  Love can never be allowed to be “thick” in those conditions, and a cautious love is always a watered-down love.

Among all the other things that Beloved is, it is also a coming of age story.  In the final section, Denver “inaugurated her life in the world as a woman.”  She becomes a part of the community and learns to soldier on like all the men and women before her.  Merely stepping beyond the limits of the yard:

 Remembering those conversations and her grandmother’s last and final words, Denver stood on the porch in the sun and couldn’t leave it.  Her throat itched; her heart kicked—and then Baby Suggs laughed, clear as anything. ‘You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina?  About your daddy?  You don’t remember nothing about how come I walk the way I do and about your mother’s feet, not to speak of her back?  I never told you all this?  Is that why you can’t walk down the steps?  My Jesus my.’

             But you said there was no defense.

             ‘There ain’t.’

             Then what do I do?

             ‘Know it, and go on out of the yard.  Go on.’

There is triumph of courage and determination.  There is bravery and camaraderie.  There is love and support, and there is the promise of better things down the road, such as the suggestion that Denver might be going to college.  In the face of all the hardships, damages, and unbeatable racism that surrounds them, these characters keep forging ahead with admirable courage.

I want to go on and on.  There needs to be discussions about the white people in the novel (such as the Bodwins, who “hated slavery worse than they hated slaves”).  We need to talk about the act of naming.  We need to talk about why the house is referred to as 124.  We need to talk about the absence of young black men in the novel.  We need to talk about the symbolic importance of milk.  We need to talk about ghosts and the brand of magical realism that Morrison employs.  We need to talk about pride and its complicated place at the juncture of individuals and communities.   We need to talk about the uncommon poetry and insight and weight that Morrison creates from the most common of words.  I want to go on and on, but if you get it already you don’t need my elaboration, and if you don’t, you stopped reading ages ago. 

Beloved is one of the most beautiful, painful, insightful, meaningful, and important books I have had the pleasure to read.  Were we as a nation ever to have the conversations about race that we keep insisting on not having, this book would be a wonderful starting point.