Love, loss, and life abound in Beloved

Bravo, Toni Morrison. Despite your beloved reputation (no pun), I nearly gave up on you after Jazz (hated it). I gave you a second chance on Song of Solomon (great book until the thud of an ending), and finally in Beloved, I see what all the hype is about.

This book is truly awesome. It follows a family of former slaves in the years after the Civil War, with flashbacks and stories told of their time as slaves before. Sethe is a woman holding onto her sole surviving daughter, Denver, with all of her life, as she’s the only thing she has left in this world. The two live in a haunted “124,” a house at the end of the street in Cincinnati. Neighbors stay away, and you think it is because 124 is haunted, but the real reason isn’t learned until much later. Much has happened to this family over the years, awful things that are hard to write down here in just a few sentences, the kinds of things that only people who have lived as slaves would understand, though Morrison does an amazing job of conveying this hard life to readers. Beatings, rapes, murders, and, yes, even worse, have happened to Sethe, family friend Paul D, and others in the book. For Sethe, these troubles and sufferings have hardened her to just about anything life can throw at her. When, as a young woman, she ran away from her owners, gave birth in a boat, and crawled to a new life with a back beaten so badly that it was a mess of blood and scars, she took it in stride. When her mother-in-law died in the house, she took it in stride. When her two boys ran away from home at age 13, ostensibly because they could not longer deal with the haunting, she took it in stride. In fact, the only thing she didn’t take in stride is one of the big mysteries revealed later in the book and the reason people avoid her: that when a white man came to 124 to take her and her kids back south as runaway slaves, Sethe killed one of her babies (and would have killed them all if not stopped), cutting her throat, so she would not face the life that Sethe previously did.

Beloved is the name engraved on the tomb of said baby, and when a woman shows up on Sethe’s door, with a matching scar across her throat and calling herself Beloved, on the same day that the hauntings stop, the house is thrown in disarray. Denver takes it upon herself to protect Beloved, for fear that Sethe will attempt to hurt her again, but Beloved only has eyes for Sethe. Beloved follows her around, as an adoring child would, but eventually their roles are reversed, with Sethe trying to make amends by doting on Beloved, and Beloved grows spoiled from all the attention. This builds to an amazing conclusion at the very end.

I initially wrote a lot more, but I found that nothing I could write would do justice to this novel. The emotion, the helplessness, and, ultimately, hopefully, the sliver of hope that comes to this family that endured so much, can only be experienced if you read it yourself. It is a magical book about a time that, while not-so-removed in the history of our planet, may as well have been a world removed. It is awful to think much of this probably happened much as Morrison describes, but even in the face of such evil, people persevere. It’s a fantastic read, pure and simple.