Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)

 

Finished: 30/10/24

This was my "spooky book" for the month of October, however it was less spooky than it was
disturbing, but in a purposeful way. From what I know, a lot of Toni Morrison's work is about the black experience during slavery and the Jim Crow period in American history. It's not meant to be light reading, it's meant to stick with you and hold the image of suffering close to your face. I really like Toni Morrison's focus on women as the protagonists and how no punches are pulled when talking about how women feel and experience life.

For this summary I'm not going to follow the course of the book. In Beloved, two stories unfold at once, one being the present, and the other being the past that explains the present; it's a really cool literary choice, but a bit hard while relaying a summary. I think I will reiterate Beloved in chronological order because the present of Sethe's story is hard to understand without the past being clear.

Anyways, to start, there is a small slave plantation in early 1800s Tennessee called "Sweet Home." The white owners of the plantation are Mr. and Mrs. Garner and they have six slaves, three of them are named Paul, but Paul D is the only important one later. There's also Sixo who described as being very dark-skinned and he's probably directly from Africa because English is his second language. Then there's Baby Suggs who's the only enslaved woman there, and therefore she's the cook, and her youngest child name Halle. Mr. and Mrs. Garner treat the people they have enslaved relatively well. -As well as you can treat someone who's freedom you own, but I'll talk more about that later.

At some point, Halle buy's his mom, Baby Sugg's, freedom and Mr. Garner drives her across the Ohio river to Cincinnati where she's given a house by some white people who are avid slavery abolitionists. She's allowed to live in this rural house at 124 Bluestone Road as long as she provides some service to the white people who live around her (I'll talk about this later too), which ends up being repairing shoes and occasionally clothes. Back at Sweet Home, the Garners buy another slave to do stuff in the kitchen, which ends up being Sethe. She's only 13 at the time, and even though all of the other slaves there are around her age, none of them will talk to her. After a year, she chooses her husband among the boys at Sweet Home, which ends up being Halle, and after that the men at Sweet Home start talking to her.

Sethe gets pregnant pretty quickly, she has Howard and Buglar and then her unnamed daughter all before she's out of her teens. The Garners get older and Mr. Garner dies. Mrs. Garner becomes bedbound with only Sethe to take care of her, so Mrs. Garner decides to let her brother in law and his two sons move into Sweet Home. The brother in law is called "Schoolteacher," but I'm not sure his kids are ever named. The slaves of Sweet Home are mistreated by Schoolteacher and Mrs. Garner, on her deathbed, can't do anything about it. They start crafting this plan to escape all together, the only problems are that their schedules are constantly up in the air so coordinating is hard, and then Sethe's heavily pregnant with her fourth kid and leaving behind her three other kids isn't an option.

I'm a little bit foggy on how this all goes down, but the Paul's and Sixo all make a break for it one night without Sethe and Halle. I think Sethe sent her kids away to Baby Suggs' in a wagon some time before this; she gets whipped by Schoolteacher and his sons for doing that. During the mass escape, Sixo for sure gets killed, Paul D survives, another Paul gets sold and it's implied that the other Paul dies. Later, Sethe is churning butter and she's leaking milk out of her breasts because she hasn't had anyone to nurse. While churning butter, Schoolteacher's sons come into the barn where Sethe is churning butter and I think they rape her? It's not super clear, but the most upsetting thing to Sethe about this assault is that they "steal her milk." After this, she tells Paul D what happened and Halle somehow finds out about it. That night Sethe starts her escape, she meant to meet up with Halle but couldn't find him at their meeting spot so she goes off alone. Halle's never seen again and Paul D is sentenced to a prison work camp.

While making her way to the Ohio river, Sethe's body starts to fail because of her pregnancy and she eventually crashes in some brush. She hears someone walking around and talking, it's a skinny white woman named Amy Denver who helps Sethe out by massaging her feet and patching up her back as best as she can. This is the first time Sethe learns about the "cherry tree" on her back that's formed by the scars she got from being whipped. A day later, Amy and Sethe are walking again and Sethe goes into labor, Amy helps deliver the baby and Sethe name's her youngest child "Denver." Sethe crosses the Ohio river with the help of a man named Stamp Paid and his nephews, she's picked up on the other side and put on a wagon and delivered to Baby Suggs in Ohio. 

Life is good for a month, but then the climax of the story happens. Schoolteacher somehow found his way to Sethe in Cincinnati. Sethe sees him coming down the long driveway of 124 Bluestone Road and she takes all of her kids into the woodshed. While in there, she slits her unnamed Baby's throat and bashes her head against the wall while her other kids watch, she's about to do the same to Denver when Stamp Paid and Baby Suggs step in. Instead of Schoolteacher taking her back to Tennessee, she's sentenced to prison. Denver goes with her because she's obviously still nursing. The unnamed baby is buried, they don't have enough money for the tombstone to say "Dearly Beloved," so it just says "Beloved." Baby Suggs becomes so disturbed by what Sethe had done, that she lays down in her bed for the next nine years and "thinks about color" as she dies. The ghost of Sethe's unnamed baby haunts the house at 124 Bluestone Road, nobody comes to visit anymore and the house becomes very sad and solemn. Howard and Buglar run away as young teens because they can't take living there anymore, leaving just Sethe and Denver.

All of what I described was the past from where this book began; it starts with Sethe walking around her garden and washing her bare legs because she got them all sticky. Paul D comes to 124 Bluestone Road to see Baby Suggs just to learn that she died a decade ago. Sethe invites him in and he meets Denver, who's a young adult now. Paul D remarks at how sad and off-putting the house is and Denver tells him it's because of the baby ghost that haunts the place. The ghost then attacks Paul D and the family. I'm not really sure how this happens but Paul D breaks a table and then they decide that the ghost escaped outside. Denver storms off somewhere, and then Sethe and Paul D end up having sex after Paul D look's at Sethe's heavily scarred, cherry tree back. After sex, Paul D notes how "ugly" Sethe is, and how orgasming cleared his mind of believing she was beautiful (I'll talk about this later as well).

To Denver's dismay Paul D moves in, which isn't hard, he's been living nomadically for the past seven years so he doesn't have much in terms of material possessions. Things are good for a while, despite Denver being a sulky teenager. Sethe, Paul D and Denver even go out to this fair where people say hi to them. They seem to have a lot of fun until they come back home and find a girl about Denver's age fast asleep on a stump in front of the house. Her skin is super dark and she always wears tops with a very high neckline. She's invited in, she says she can't remember where she came from or how she ended up there, the only thing she's certain of is that her name is Beloved. Denver and her immediately become friends, Sethe loves her; Paul D is the only one who finds her presence suspicious.

As time moves on, more of the past unfolds to the reader. The weather gets colder and Paul D stops sleeping in the same bed as Sethe, he feels a deep need to go back to his nomadic lifestyle. While sleeping in the shed on the bags of potatoes, Beloved comes in as asks Paul D to have sex with her. -For some reason, he does repeatedly. Paul D works whatever job he can get, at one of these jobs he runs into Stamp Paid who shows him the newspaper clipping detailing Sethe's infanticide and arrest. Paul D has trouble believing it's Sethe at first, he asks her about it and she confirms that it's true. Paul D leaves, so now it's just the three women at 124 Bluestone Road.

Not really caring about work anymore, Sethe becomes detached from the outside world. Her whole world now is Beloved, who Sethe truly believes is her own daughter come back to life. Sethe indulges in anything Beloved asks for and starts ignoring Denver. Beloved is pregnant with Paul D's child, and Sethe lost her job, so they're running out of food. With a lot of build up of courage, Denver travels out and looks for work, she finds some very quickly as an overnight maid for an elderly white brother and sister: the slavery abolitionists who gave Baby Suggs the house in the first place. One hot spring day as Denver's being picked up from work, Sethe notices a white man (Denver's employer) coming for her daughter (to pick her up for work) and lunges at him with a knife. Luckily, this time, no one is hurt.

The last part of the book is told by Paul D's perspective. He runs into Denver one day and remarks how much she looks like Halle now that she's independent and not a shy little girl anymore. Paul D makes his way over to 124 Bluestone Road. Beloved is nowhere to be seen, Sethe is in Baby Sugg's deathbed talking sadly about color. Paul D says that he's going to help take care of her, started with bathing her, and Sethe just seems confused. A very uneasy ending.

I do like the style that this book was written in where two stories unfold at once. I think its main purpose is to make you relate to Sethe, or to lull you into a false sense of security. When all is revealed that Sethe did, in fact, kill her own baby purposefully, it becomes so easy to empathize with her. She wanted somewhere peaceful to be with her children, and when she saw Schoolteacher coming up the driveway, she just lost it. Death was better than slavery for her, and she was prepared to make that choice for her own children.

I've read a handful of Toni Morrison's poems, but only one of her other books. That being The Bluest Eye, which, like Beloved, really disturbed me. Just from my knowledge of these two books, it seems that Toni Morrison creates a pattern in her literature where her characters "go crazy" by the end. With all that her characters have endured, I can tell why this is their fate. Maybe she does this as a coping mechanism for having to live as a black woman in America? Toni Morrison grew up in the Jim Crow era, there's probably something to be said about the loss of self Toni Morrison and the people around her collectively experienced that drove them mad. When you grow up and live in a place where your agency is not respected, losing yourself, losing your mind, is sadly just the natural conclusion.

I like how in this book there is no "good" slavery. Sweet Home is described as being as good as a place can get for slaves, but Sethe, Paul D, and Baby Suggs all speak about how they still disliked being there. The best way to describe Sweet Home is that it's "the lesser evil." The people enslaved there were trusted and, compared to other places they were enslaved, respected while the Garners ran the place, but they still didn't have freedom. They didn't have any life or connections or anything outside of this farm; their entire wellbeing was all up to the Garner's. But the lesser evil is still, of course, evil. Even if the Garners' let everyone go free and allowed them to have a safe passage north, all the enslaved people there would've still been traumatized by how their value is monetary and their freedom was in the hands of someone else.

I think the biggest question to ask while analyzing this book is: was Sethe in the wrong in regards to killing her own child? -The great thing about this book is that the answer is not clear, but I'm learning towards no, she wasn't in the wrong. Even though Sethe spent most of her time at the lesser evil plantation, she was still very traumatized by it and seeing the people who enslaved her coming to get her, she made what seemed like a split second decision, but it was probably a conclusion that she came to as a child: death is better than slavery.

Throughout the book, Sethe brings up again and again Schoolteacher's son's assault on her, but her main focus on that memory is Schoolteacher's sons "stealing her milk." Specifically her milk meant for her unnamed daughter. Her focus is on what she's able to produce for other people and not her own wellbeing. I think this could be a literary tool to show how selfless she was to her children's needs, but it could also be a lingering traumatic mindset from her time as a slave: she's valued for what she can make and do, not who she is as a person.

Something that I picked up that could easily be missed is Baby Sugg's hypocrisy by being disgusted by Sethe killing her daughter. Baby Suggs is open about how she's had many children and lost them all, but only once during the book is it made clear that she's given birth to some mixed race babies too that she "doesn't count" as her children. She says that she killed those children immediately after they were born, that she just threw them away. Granted, those babies were conceived out of rape, and getting an abortion back then was not a safe option. However, I still can't help but thinking that Baby Suggs is a little hypocritical; I'm very pro-choice, but going to the doctor and terminating a small clump of cells and killing something that's a product of something horrible, but it itself innocent, are different things. This topic of the book really stuck out to me and I'm sure I'll be thinking of it for years.

Baby Suggs, all the same, is regarded as a "holy woman," people even say "Baby Suggs, holy," when talking about her. It's interesting to have this god/goddess-like figure that's unwaveringly human and flawed. -It's rare to see that in literature, but it's really refreshing. I don't think it has anything to do with cognitive dissonance or misplace idealizing; Baby Suggs has this mysterious power over people, this power to always help and heal. I think this is to show how big of an impact Sethe made to change the last few years of Baby Suggs' life completely. The whole community abandoned their "holy woman" when someone close to her did something so unimaginable.

Another question I asked myself as I read this book, and even more once I finished it, is that "was Beloved even real?" -By that I mean the young adult human Beloved and the ghost Beloved, not the unnamed/Beloved baby who was definitely real. First I'll start with the ghost: I think in this story, the ghost was only real when Sethe and her children believed that it was. The ghost of Beloved was just the memory of her, and the assumption that her family had that she would've been angry. I think the ghost was made up by Howard and Buglar, who warned Denver as a little girl that their mom was dangerous and the three kids had to be worried for their life around Sethe. Sethe said that the ghost drove her boys away, but it was really just the memory of Sethe's actions.

Secondly, the young adult Beloved: was she real? My answer is that I really don't know. I think I would have to read the book over again and analyze closer to come up with a solid conclusion, however Beloved the young adult was certainly other worldly-like. With her super dark skin, her huge black eyes, her strange behavior, her loss of memories, and then the scar across her neck that Sethe and Denver discovered later in the book. She appeared out of nowhere and disappeared back into nowhere. Was she just a representation of the past coming back to life? a way for Sethe to repent for her actions? or was she real? Maybe all three can be true? 

I want to talk about physical descriptions and "pretty privilege," which wasn't a term back when Toni Morrison wrote Beloved, but it can still be applied in analysis now. As I said in the summary, Paul D only thought that Sethe was beautiful for the few minutes of talking to her before having sex, but after he remarked that he thought she was ugly. He essentially stopped sleeping with her to sleep with Beloved instead, who's always described as being physically flawless and intensely beautiful. The juxtaposition in their appearances changes the way people treat them. Around Beloved, people just accept her strange behavior and always try to appease her, whereas Sethe is bossed around and mistreated everywhere she goes. -This is essentially the idea of "pretty privilege." An additional note, ugliness is associated with evil, while beauty is associated with righteousness or goodness, which is the opposite of who Sethe and Beloved are as characters. Sethe is always selfless, and always does what she thinks is right, while Beloved's only goal is to consume.

I have two final things to talk about that both happen at the end of this book. Firstly, it's unfortunate how Sethe and Baby Suggs escaped slavery, only to wind up back into something similar while they're free. Baby Suggs didn't get paid for repairing shoes and clothes, she only got to keep the house she was living in. Sethe worked as a cook for the Garners and, after her prison sentence, the only job she could get was in a restaurant where she worked long hours. Denver never experienced slavery, but she eventually became a maid for some elderly white people. The idea was supposed to be that black people are free across the Ohio river, but all three of these women ended up doing the same work they would've done back in Tennessee. They escaped only to go back, it's really disheartening. 

And finally, in the end, Beloved started demanding so much from Sethe that just made her weaker and poorer while Beloved laid around the house with her pregnant belly getting bigger and bigger. I think Beloved realized that she had the power to do this and just went for it. Sethe never disciplined Beloved, so she was able to overtake everything. I'm not entirely sure what this is supposed to represent? I just thought it was interesting symbolically that as Beloved grew, Sethe shrank. It's almost as if they can't exist symbiotically.

This report took me forever to write because I've been forcing myself to work on it instead of letting it come naturally. I haven't been super happy this month, I feel like so much of my life is up in the air right now, and as hard I try to reel it in and progress in some way, I can't. I hope things will get better soon. Anyways, that's all, thanks for reading!