This is by Toni Morrison (1931-2019). It is her fifth novel; it was published in 1987; and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Shortly afterwards, in 1993, the Nobel Prize in Literature went to Morrison, "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality". Like Mr Loverman, I read it because last month (when I started it) was Black History Month in North America.

Beloved is not an easy book to read. Firstly, you have to piece together what has happened, teasing the story out bit by bit. You're offered not a straightforward chronological narrative, but rather a series of flashbacks and time shifts, as the painful human business of remembering and forgetting and surviving stamps itself inexorably on the pages.

And secondly, it's a gut-wrenching (often stomach-turning) account of what slavery was like. I knew a reasonable amount (I thought), but many of the miseries inflicted on these people were new to me, and all the more horrifying for that. The punishments, the humiliations, the abuses, the suffering, the way they are treated as chattels, to be bought, sold, loaned, or bred from: It all makes for sickening reading. That's intentional, of course. A story about slavery is never going to be a walk in the park.



The novel opens in 1873, eight years after the end of the Civil War. But I already knew from The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B Du Bois, that emancipation was a chaotic business. There was no smooth course from dark to light. Even as the "present" rolls on to the following year, we're told that "whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky." Imagine how much worse the situation was in 1855, when slavery was still in full swing.

It's that earlier time when Sethe, our central character, is planning to escape from Sweet Home, the ironically named plantation in Kentucky to which she was sold at the age of 13. When Sethe first arrives, conditions under plantation-owners Mr and Mrs Garner are still relatively humane. But when Mr Garner dies, his widow drafts in "schoolteacher". He and his entourage are vicious to the bone. Sethe is pregnant. Her three children (the youngest just two) manage to escape, in company with Baby Suggs, Sethe's mother-in-law (whose freedom has been purchased by the unremitting toil of her son, Sethe's husband, Halle). Sethe, waiting for Halle so they can make their break together, gets caught. In a perverted act of sexual violation, the breast milk she was still producing for her two-year-old is forcibly taken. She tells Mrs Garner, but the men whip her for reporting the incident, and her back ends up permanently scarred. Badly injured, and on the point of giving birth, she makes another attempt to escape, without waiting for Halle. Having survived childbirth in the open, helped by a young white girl, she eventually manages to join Baby Suggs at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Sethe enjoys just 28 days of unslaved life. From the others who are staying with her mother-in-law, she learns all sorts of little skills; what is more: "All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and DECIDE what to do with the day."

Baby Suggs is a fascinating character. She's an untrained preacher, and a kind of holy woman. No. 124, under her auspices, is quite prosperous, a haven, a passing-place, a resting-place, a spot where messages are left: "How come she always knows exactly what to do and when? Giving advice; passing messages; healing the sick, hiding fugitives, loving, cooking, cooking, loving, preaching, singing, dancing and loving everybody like it was her job and hers alone."

But, inspired by a gift of blueberries, she decided to throw a party for her neighbours, and "offended them by excess". By inspiring jealousy, she inadvertently brought down doom.


Vanuatu, 2008. In this 2022 post on Joe Arroyo, I mentioned "blackbirding", the trafficking of South Sea Islanders to Australia under conditions of near-slavery in the second half of the 19th century

***

I've been telling the story chronologically. As I've noted, however, events are presented anything but consecutively in the book. The different voices; the different time-periods; the parallel structure and repetition that are rooted in oral tradition; the layering of memories, blending narrative truth and historical truth -- all this builds up a looming atmosphere that is all the stronger because the story has opened with a haunting.

"124 was spiteful," the book begins, "Full of a baby's venom." We know that Sethe buried the child who was not quite two early during her stay in Ohio. "Beloved" is what is inscribed on the child's tombstone. But the baby is a vengeful ghost. Denver tries to befriend it, but it drives out its two brothers, who can't stand its antics and the isolation it imposes on the family. Sethe suggests moving, but Baby Suggs (still alive at this point) says there's no point: "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief."

When the narrative opens, Baby Suggs has died, Halle has never reappeared, and there's still some mystery about how the child came to die.

The strange equilibrium of Sethe, Denver, and the ghost is disturbed by the arrival of Paul D, a former slave from Sweet Home. He underwent terrible experiences on a brutal chain gang, but eventually managed to travel north to freedom. He successfully drives the ghost from the house, and begins a relationship with Sethe. Despite Denver's resentment, there is a glimmer of a normal future for these burdened people.



Then someone else arrives. A young woman. Flesh and blood, but curiously childlike, she's called Beloved, and we immediately suspect that the ghost has adopted new tactics. Beloved is slyly aggressive towards Sethe, and seduces Paul.

A friend shows Paul a news clipping reporting that Sethe killed her own baby. She tells him how, after Baby Suggs's party, she sees four horsemen arriving: Schoolteacher, his evil nephew, a sheriff, and a slavecatcher... She is driven mad with terror. Convinced that her children would be better off dead than enslaved, she kills Beloved, and (unsuccessfully) attempts to kill the boys.

Paul says this was the wrong thing to do. The children, he argues, have ended up in a worse situation (missing, or dead). "It ain't my job to know what's worse," says Sethe, "It's my job to know what is and to keep them away from what I know is terrible. I did that."

This scenario is drawn from a real case. As Marilyn Mobley explains: "It was during the early 1970s, while collecting the contents of the book, that [Morrison] first found the newspaper clipping from a Baptist newspaper about Margaret Garner, the enslaved woman who escaped from a Kentucky plantation and made it to Ohio -- only to have the slavecatchers come to attempt to return her to the plantation as required by the Fugitive Slave law. According to the news story, when Margaret saw the slavecatchers coming for her and her children, she attempted to kill them all, but only succeeded in killing one."



Paul leaves. So now the three women are alone again: Sethe, Beloved, and Denver. And Beloved starts to metaphorically suck her mother dry. Sethe shrinks; Beloved expands; Denver looks on hopelessly until finally she breaks away -- this is simultaneously a break-out and a break-through -- to ask for help. The local women rally round, first with food, and then with a sort of spiritual exorcism. Beloved melts away. But Sethe's mind seems to have been badly affected. Paul returns, pledging to take care of her.

The final chapter speaks of a sediment of forgetting settling over No. 124 and Beloved. "This is not a story to pass on," we're told... David Hering comments: "In that epilogue Morrison acknowledges the paradox of what it means to remember something that unspeakable, something that has ruined your body and your mind and the bodies and minds of millions of others. Because how can you go on carrying that? And what Morrison suggests is that you can’t, so you have to give it away. But how to give it away, when giving it away gives the memory, and the story, a power that maybe it shouldn’t have? And so you have that repeated final line, that it is not 'a story to pass on,' which of course holds within it the duality of not avoiding but also not retelling. It's such an extraordinary ending."

***

Hering selects Beloved as one of the five best 20th-century American novels: "For me, Beloved is like an object that light bends around -- I can’t think about American literature without it... Beloved is at least partly about looking that fallacious dream of American unity directly in the face and excavating the utter horror on which it’s built."

Margaret Atwood also praised the novel when it appeared in 1987. And she points to an onslaught on family life that is still reverberating to this day: "Above all, [slavery] is seen as one of the most viciously antifamily institutions human beings have ever devised. The slaves are motherless, fatherless, deprived of their mates, their children, their kin. It is a world in which people suddenly vanish and are never seen again, not through accident or covert operation or terrorism, but as a matter of everyday legal policy." That is indeed one of the many, many horrifying elements depicted in the novel. "Men and women," Morrison tells us, "were moved around like checkers".

Tiffany DiMatteo also notes that the book Beloved has gathered its own story. "The novel failed to win the National Book Award for [1988], prompting a large group of renowned, self-identified 'black writers' to publish a protest in the New York Times Book Review. This group, including such figures as Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 'here assert ourselves against such oversight and harmful whimsy' and claim that 'the legitimate need for our own critical voice in relation to our own literature...no longer be denied.' In 2006, a group of writers and critics polled by the New York Times voted that Beloved was the best work of literature of the last twenty-five years... The same year that Morrison's novel was voted to be the best work of fiction, it was also on the top of the American Library Association's list of most challenged books for 'complaints [of] offensive language, sexual content, [and] unsuited to age group.'"

In all, it's a book I can't say I enjoyed reading, but it's one that I'm very glad to have read.