Reading List: Beloved - Toni Morrison

Hello readers and welcome to this latest entry in the Reading List. As mentioned previously, over the past years I have made it a goal to include more female and BIPOC authors on the list. To that end I decided first up this year would be Toni Morrison’s landmark 1987 novel Beloved.

To start with I must say this was one of the best novels I’ve read in years and taught me a lot about the position of Black people in Civil War era society and how their lives were affected by (as written in the novel) “whitepeople” throughout their lives. The novel follows the main character Sethe as she escapes from slavery and gives birth to her daughter Denver on the way. But that is not the entire plot of the book as it jumps around quite a bit in time, which at first was a bit disorienting but by the time I finished it I realized why Morrison made the choices she did. There is a horrendous choice made by Sethe once she realizes she is going to be caught and brought back into the world of slavery that leads to her losing one of her own daughters, “Beloved” (so named because that was all she could afford on the tombstone). The child goes on to haunt the house where they stay after Sethe goes to jail for her act, causing her two sons to flee the home. However in an odd chance of fate Sethe is seemingly reunited with Beloved eighteen years after the incident and Sethe brings her into the home she has created with another former slave of “Sweet Home,” Paul D. Most of the story takes place at the home for escaped slaves that Sethe’s step-mother Baby Suggs founded but we also get to see the backstory of several of the characters and get an idea of how they escaped the plantation. Baby Suggs was a kind of preacher that assembled others to “the Clearing” where she gave messages and talked about what they had left. Sethe also had a husband at Sweet Home named Halle who did not make the escape.

About halfway through the novel Paul D leaves after some unfortunate encounters with Beloved, and the novel shifts to a perspective of how Beloved takes over the household. Denver is forced to leave to reconnect with the society that had abandoned them in the wake of Sethe’s fateful choice many years ago. She finds work, and once she begins to gain the confidence of the other women in the city they gather up to cast out what has become a malevolent presence in the home. Sethe then has a flashback to her earlier life which leads to a brief outpouring of violence. Thankfully the person she attacks has been helping Black people for many years and lets her return to the home. There she reconnects to Paul D, who had his own journey to make with some other characters, namely “Stamp Paid.”

It’s hard to describe this powerful, phenomenal work in so many words without wholeheartedly recommending it to anyone who is looking for an incredible story set in the Civil War era and afterward, a brutally unflinching look at how slavery affects the entire person and their past, and how escaping it is not so easy even after the fact. I would say I have not encountered a novel that explores these themes so deftly since reading Kindred a few years ago. I would highly recommend this novel for anyone (like me) who is looking to gain a better perspective beyond their usual one. Thank you for once again joining me on this reading adventure.