2. Beloved (1987)- for APPSC TGPSC TREIRB JL/DL

 

2. Beloved (1987)

for APPSC TGPSC TREIRB JL/DL

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Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019)

Later known as Toni Morrison, was born in Lorain, Ohio. She was the daughter of a shipyard welder and a religious woman who sang in the church choir. Morrison had a sister, Lois, and two younger brothers, George and Raymond. Her parents had moved to Ohio from the South, hoping to raise their children in an environment friendlier to blacks. Despite the move to the North, the Wofford household was steeped in the oral traditions of Southern African American communities. The songs and stories of Chloe Wofford's childhood undoubtedly influenced her later work. Although Toni Morrison's writing is not autobiographical, she fondly alludes to her past, stating "I am from the Midwest so I have a special affection for it. My beginnings are always there.... No matter what I write, I begin there.... It's the matrix for me.... Ohio also offers an escape from stereotyped black settings. It is neither plantation nor ghetto."

Toni Morrison's writing was also greatly influenced by her family. Her grandparents had relocated from to Ohio during the national movement of blacks out of the South known as the Great Migration. After leaving their farm in Alabama, Morrison’s mother’s parents (Aredelia and John Solomon Willis) moved to Kentucky, and then to Ohio. They placed extreme value in the education of their children and themselves. John Willis taught himself to read and his stories became inspiration for Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977).

Morrison was an extremely gifted student, learning to read at an early age. Morrison, who attended Hawthorne Elementary School, was the only African American in her 1st grade classroom. Because she was so skilled, Morrison was often asked to help other students learn to read.

Morrison's parents' desire to protect their child from the racist environment of the South succeeded in many respects. However, she began to experience racial discrimination, as she and her peers grew older. She graduated with honors in 1949 and went to Howard University in Washington D.C.  She graduated from Howard in 1953 with a B.A. in English. She went on to receive her M.A. in English from Cornell in 1955.

After a teaching stint at Texas Southern University, Toni returned to Howard University and met Harold Morrison. They married, and before their divorce in 1964, Toni and Harold Morrison had two sons. It was also during this time that she wrote the short story that would become the basis for her first novel, The Bluest Eye.

In 1964, Morrison took a job in Syracuse, New York as an associate editor at Random House. She worked as an editor, raised her sons as a single mom, and continued to write fiction. In 1967, she received a promotion to senior editor and a much-desired transfer to New York City. Between 1971 and 1972, Morrison worked as a Professor of English for the State University of New York and worked as an editor for Random House.

The years 1976 and 1977 saw Morrison working as a visiting lecturer at Yale. In 1983, she left Random House. The next year she took a position at the State University of New York in Albany.

In 1987 Toni Morrison became the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University. She is the first African American female writer to hold a named chair at a university in the Ivy League. The next year she became the eighth woman and the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Morrison is a major architect in creating a literary language for Afro-Americans. Her use of shifting perspective, fragmentary narrative, and a narrative voice extremely close to the consciousness of her characters reveals the influence of writers like Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner: two writers whom Morrison, not coincidentally, studied extensively while a college student. All of her work also shows the influence of African-American folklore, songs, and women's gossip. In her attempts to map these oral art forms onto literary modes of representation, Morrison has created a body of work informed by a distinctly black sensibility while drawing a reading audience from across racial boundaries.

 

Novels:

1.   The Bluest Eyes 1970: The novel is set in Lorain, Ohio in 1941 (Morrison's hometown), and tells the story of a young African-American girl named Pecola Breedlove (foster child) who grew up following the Great Depression. she is consistently regarded as "ugly" due to her mannerisms and dark skin. Her mother’s name is Pauline “Polly” Breedlove. Her brother is Sam Breedlove. Pecola is a tenant in the house of Nine-year-old Claudia MacTeer and her ten-year-old sister Frieda who live with their parents. Pecola was raped by her father Cholly Breedlove. Pecola plants marigold seeds, and believes if the marigold seeds grow, the baby will live. In the end, however, the seeds do not grow and Pecola's baby dies. Pecola goes mad by grief and spends the rest of her days talking to her imaginary friend about her big blue eyes.  The novel was well received by critics but failed commercially

2.   Sula 1973- About friendship between two Black women Sula Peace and Nel Wright (major characters). Shadrack, a paranoid shell-shocked WW-I veteran, invents a National Suicide Day to be held annually on January 3. Chicken Little is the little boy who drowns when Sula accidentally playfully swings into the river.  Sula is described as having a birthmark over one eye that darkens over the years as she matures and Sula's close friend Nel thought it looked like a rose. Tar Baby (Pretty Johnnie) is a coward white man in the novel.

3.   Song of Solomon is a 1977 novel- This next novel dealt more fully with black male characters. It is about the life of Macon "Milkman" Dead III, an African-American man living in Michigan, from birth to adulthood, as he discovers his heritage. As Ruth Dead (his mother) still breastfeeds him when he is four years old, so he got the nickname "Milkman". It is both commercial and critical success.

4.   Tar Baby (1981)- 4^th published novel- This novel portrays a love affair between Jadine and Son, two Black Americans from very different worlds. Jadine is a beautiful Sorbonne (University of Paris) graduate and fashion model. Son is an impoverished, strong-minded man who washes up at the Streets' estate on a Caribbean island.

5.   Beloved 1987: It won the Pulitzer Prize. Sethe is a former slave and principal character (who lives with her daughter Denver in 124, Cincinnati. Here, the number 3, i.e., Beloved is missing!) haunted by the Ghost of her daughter named Beloved, who was killed by her in order to escape from the slavery at farm named Sweet Home run by a cruel man named schoolteacher. Sethe fled, although she was pregnant, delivering the child along the way with help from a white woman named Amy. After her escape to Cincinatti with her four children, Sethe enjoyed only twenty-eight days of freedom before she was tracked down by her old master. Rather than allow her children to be returned to slavery, she attempted to kill all of them, succeeding only in killing the baby girl (Beloved). Rejected by her master and also saved from hanging and was released to raise her remaining three children at 124, Cincinnatti. The ghost of the dead baby (Beloved) began to haunt the house. The two sons, Howard and Buglar, left after encountering the ghost. Denver is terribly lonely but is also afraid to leave the yard even though she is eighteen years old. Two visitors come to 124. The first is Paul D, a man who was a slave with Sethe back at Sweet Home and the second visitor is a girl named Beloved who is the ghost of the dead baby come back to life but unable to speak like an adult, and dressed in strange clothes. Paul D eventually leaves when he learns that Sethe murdered her own child. Beloved settles into the house like a parasite, growing ever stronger as Sethe grows weaker. At the end, Denver takes the help of community to exorcise the ghost. Beloved is a haunting and dark novel, full of gothic elements. Opening line: “124 was spiteful. Full of Baby's venom”(opening line); “You got two feet, Sethe, not four” (Paul D to Sethe)"; “You your best thing, Sethe. You are.” (Paul D to Sethe)"; “Today is always here, Tomorrow, never.” (Sethe to Denver); “Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.” (Sethe to Denver); . She is not so afraid at night because she is the color of it. (Denver to Beloved about Sethe)

6.   Jazz (1992)- historical novel. Majority of the narrative takes place in Harlem during the 1920s and the narrative extends back to the mid-19th-century American South. Joe Trace, a door-to-door cosmetics salesman and the murderer of his young lover, Dorcas. Violet Trace (nicknamed violent), an unlicensed beautician, married to Joe.

7.   Paradise (1998) novel- 7^th novel- Paradise completes a "trilogy" that begins with Beloved (1987) and includes Jazz (1992). Morrison wanted to call the novel War. Set in Ruby peaceful all-black town in Oklahoma. Novel is divided into 9 sections, and they are named for specific characters. Story is centred on how the men of Ruby town become intent on destroying the Convent town women.

8.   Love (2003) is the eighth novel, tells of the lives of several women and their relationships to the late Bill Cosey,  a charismatic hotel owner.

9.   A Mercy (2008) is Toni Morrison's ninth novel. It is the story of a European farmer, Jacob Vaark; his purchased wife, Rebekka. Florens, a slave on the Vaark’s farm and Lina, a labour, survived  smallpox plague.

10.            Home (2012)- is the tenth novel. Set in the 1950s. Story of 24-year-old war veteran Frank Money and his trauma from serving in the Korean War.

11.            God Help the Child 2014 is the 11th novel. Original title is The Wrath of Children,

 

Non Fiction Works:

1.   Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)- her first book of literary criticism, on the 'non-white Africanist presence and personae' in the works of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Cather and Hemingway.

2.   The Origin of Others(2017), published in the U.S. by Harvard University Press with a Foreword by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

3.   The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019)- published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S.; Collection of 43 pieces of writing, structured into three sections: "The Foreigner’s Home", "Black Matter(s)" and “God's Language".

Plays

1.   N'Orleans: The Storyville Musical (aka New Orleans) (1982) with Donald McKayle.

2.   Dreaming Emmett (1986)

3.   Desdemona (2011)

Poetry

1.   Five Poems (2002)- with illustrations by Kara Walker

Short Story

1.   "Recitatif" is Toni Morrison's first published short story. It was initially published in 1983 in Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, an anthology edited by Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka, and is the only short story by Morrison.

 

 

Context:

Beloved is Toni Morrison's fifth novel, published in 1987. Beloved became a best seller and received the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Its reception by critics was overwhelming, and the book is widely considered Morrison's greatest novel to date. Beloved could be called a foundation story (like Genesis or Exodus) for black America.

Mythic in scope, Beloved is an attempt to grapple with the legacy of slavery. Beloved is related to events surrounding the Civil War, especially the The Fugitive Slave Act 1950, part of the Compromise of 1850,  which treats escaped slaves as property, and allowed southern slave owners to travel north and reclaim any slaves that had escaped from their ownership. Moreover, the entire novel is inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner, a slave in Kentucky who escaped with her family across the Ohio River in 1856. Slave catchers found her and she killed her two-year-old daughter, rather than seeing her daughter become a slave. Garner was then taken back into slavery. Morrison had come across an account of Garner titled "A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child" in an 1856 newspaper article published in the American Baptist, and reproduced in The Black Book, a miscellaneous compilation of black history and culture that Morrison edited in 1974.

Morrison explores themes of love, family, and self-possession in a world where slavery has only recently become a thing of the past. Beloved is the ghost of Sethe's murdered child (It represents the power of the legacy of slavery), returned after 18 years for unclear reasons, embodied as a full-grown woman at the age that the baby would have been had it lived. Part history, part ghost story, part historical fiction, the novel also seek to understand the impact of slavery, both on the psychology of individuals and on the larger patterns of culture and history.

Beloved also presents a powerful account of the foundation of black. The institution of slavery destroyed much of the heritage of the Africans brought to the Americas; the novel partially recounts the creation of a new people and culture, a people displaced and forced to forge a new identity in the face of brutality and dehumanization.

Beloved is the book which Morrison continued her narrative experiments. The structure is fragmentary, and written with great psychological intimacy, closely tied to the consciousness of each character and weaving suddenly between past and future (between Cincinatti and Kentucky). More time is spent describing past events than the action of the current moment, than the present. The novel is often repetitive, telling the same stories of the past again and again, giving more information with each repetition. All of the characters of the novel, former slaves and the children of former slaves, suffer a troubled relationship to their own past.

The question of the rightness of Sethe's terrible act is a difficult onemoreover, it is a question that the novel does not attempt to answer in a definitive way. Morrison is more concerned that we understand why Sethe did what she did, as well as the ways that her decision has haunted her ever since. The novel effectively conveys the brutality and dehumanization that occurred under slavery, putting Sethe's act in context without necessarily condemning it or excusing it.

The book's epigraph is from Romans 9:25 (King James Bible): "I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved."

The novel is dedicated to "Sixty Million, and more" -referring to the anonymous Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the Atlantic slave trade (died during the transatlantic crossing). The novel reminds us of their suffering, and invites the reader to contend with the past and the legacy of slavery.

In 1998 it was adapted for a film starring Danny Glover (Paul D) and Oprah Winfrey (Sethe). The film met mixed critical response and was a box office failure, a testament, at least, to the uniquely literary qualities of the novel.

 

 

Three Part Structure:

The novel is divided into 3 parts and 28 sections/ chapters.  Toni Morrison did not name/numbered these chapters. However, we can identify these chapters with page breaks. This division of chapters highlights the narrative progression. The differing first sentences of each part reflects the shifting emotional atmosphere and the changing dynamic of the story.

Part	No of Chapters	Significance	Opening line of each part
I	18	Eighteen years since Sethe's act	124 WAS SPITEFUL
II	7	Seven letters in "Beloved"	124 WAS LOUD
III	3	Three surviving children	124 WAS QUIET

 

Opening line: “124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby’s venom.”

 

Closing line:  

Paul D: “You your best thing, Sethe.

You are.” His holding fingers are holding hers.

Sethe: “Me? Me?”

 

Short Summary

In 1873, Sethe and her 18 year old daughter Denver live in 124, Bluestone Rd., (but referred to only as "124")   in a rural area close to Cincinatti. They are ostracized from the community for Sethe's past and her pride. Eighteen years have passed since she escaped from slavery at a farm called Sweet Home. After the death of Mr Garner, Sweet Home was run by a cruel man known as schoolteacher, who allowed his nephews to brutalize Sethe while he took notes for his scientific studies of blacks. Sethe fled, although she was pregnant, delivering the child along the way with help from a white woman named Amy. Sethe's husband, who was supposed to accompany her, disappeared. After her escape to Cincinatti with her four children, Sethe enjoyed only twenty-eight days of freedom before she was tracked down by her old master. Rather than allow her children to be returned to slavery, she attempted to kill all of them, succeeding only in killing the baby girl. Rejected then by her master, who saw she was no longer fit to serve, Sethe was also saved from hanging and was released to raise her remaining three children at 124.

The ghost of the dead baby began to haunt the house. The two sons, Howard and Buglar, left after having particularly frightening encounters with the ghost. Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe's husband, Halle, died as a broken woman soon after the boys fled, eight years before the start of the novel. Baby Suggs had been a great positive force in Cincinatti's black community, regarded by many as an inspiring holy woman. After what happened to Sethe, she gave up her preaching and retired to bed, asking only for scraps of color. Years after her death, Denver and Sethe continue to live in the house alone. Sethe works as a cook, and Denver spends her days alone. Denver is terribly lonely but is also afraid to leave the yard even though she is eighteen years old.

In 1873, two visitors come to 124. The first visitor is Paul D, a man who was a slave with Sethe back at Sweet Home. Paul D, like Sethe, is haunted by the pain of the past. He witnessed and suffered unspeakable atrocities before the end of the Civil War brought him his freedom, and he has survived by not allowing himself to have strong feelings for anything or anyone. He has particularly dark memories of time spent in a prison for blacks, where he worked in a chain gang by day and was kept in a box in the ground at night. The second visitor is a girl named Beloved. It gradually becomes clear that she is the ghost of the dead baby come back to life, at the age that the baby would have been had it lived. Awkward, unable to speak like an adult, and dressed in strange clothes, Beloved seems vulnerable at first but proves to be powerful and malicious. Her purposes initially seem benign and are never fully understood, but by the end of the novel her presence is deeply destructive for the living people of 124.

Paul D becomes Sethe's lover, staying for a time despite friction between him and the two young girls. Beloved despises him, and she tries to divide Sethe from Paul D. Paul D eventually leaves when he learns that Sethe murdered her own child. Sethe, on discovering Beloved's identity, believes she has been given a second chance. She tries to make amends for the past, but the girl's needs are devouring. The ghost does not forgive Sethe for her actions. Beloved settles into the house like a parasite, growing ever stronger as Sethe grows weaker. Sethe's sanity begins to unravel, and Beloved only grows more demanding. Denver is forced to go to the community for help.

A group of women, led by Ella, a former agent of the Underground Railroad, go to 124 to exorcise Beloved's ghost. The ghost is forced to leave, but Sethe's spirit has been nearly broken. Paul D returns to her, vowing to help Sethe heal herself. Denver, Paul D, and Sethe will build a new life, one in which they learn to deal with their painful past while focusing on the future. The final line of the novel "It was not a story to pass on" reminds the painful story which is impossible to forget.

 

Timeline of the story

Pre-1843: Baby Suggs' Early Life

·  Baby Suggs is enslaved in Carolina.

·  1835: Baby Suggs gives birth to Halle.

1843–1849: Arrival at Sweet Home

·  1843: Halle (age 10) and Baby Suggs are sold to the Garners and taken to Sweet Home.

·  1847: Halle buys Baby Suggs' freedom. She moves to Ohio to work for the Bodwins.

·  1848: Sethe (age 13) is sold to the Garners and arrives at Sweet Home to replace Baby Suggs.

·  1849: After a year of deciding, Sethe chooses to be with Halle. The Garners allow them to marry.

1850–1854: Birth of Sethe’s Children & Schoolteacher's Arrival

·  1850: Howard, Sethe and Halle’s first son, is born.

·  1851: Buglar, their second son, is born.

·  1853: Mrs. Garner falls ill, and Mr. Garner dies. Schoolteacher arrives and takes control of Sweet Home.

·  1854: Beloved, their first daughter, is born.

1855: Sethe’s Escape & the Infanticide Incident

·  Sethe is pregnant with Denver.

·  Sethe, Halle, Paul D, Sixo, and others plan to escape.

·  Sethe sends her three children (Howard-5yr, Buglar-4yr, and Beloved-9 months) to Baby Suggs.

·  Sethe is caught and assaulted by Schoolteacher’s nephews. Halle witnesses this from hayloft and mentally breaks.

·  Sethe escapes alone and delivers her baby (Denver) with the help of Amy Denver.

·  Sethe goes to Ohio, where she joins Baby Suggs.

·  Paul D is caught, beaten, and sold to Brandywine.

Infanticide Incident:

·  27 days after Sethe's arrival, Stamp Paid brings blueberries, leading to a feast at 124.

·  The next day, Stamp Paid comes back to cut wood. Sethe hears that slave catchers are coming.

·  Sethe gathers her children and runs to the shed.

·  In an act of desperation, Sethe kills Beloved and attempts to kill her other children.

·  Schoolteacher sees the broken family and leaves.

·  Sethe clings to her dead child, and Baby Suggs takes the body. Sethe and Denver are taken to jail.

Aftermath:

·  The community ostracizes Sethe and 124.

·  Sethe sleeps with mason to pay for Beloved’s tombstone, which reads "Beloved."

·  124 becomes haunted by Beloved’s spirit.

1856–1864: Paul D’s Journey & Family Disintegration

·  1856: Paul D tries to kill Brandywine and is sent to a chain gang in Georgia.

·  He and other prisoners escape and find refuge in a Cherokee camp.

·  Paul D leaves and travels north, eventually settling in Delaware.

·  1862–1863: Denver briefly attends school.

·  1863: Howard (age 13) runs away.

·  1864: Buglar (age 13) runs away.

·  Baby Suggs dies, leaving only Sethe and Denver.

1873: Beloved’s Return & Sethe’s Decline

·  Paul D arrives at 124 and reconnects with Sethe.

·  Paul D fights off the ghost of Beloved.

·  Paul D, Sethe, and Denver go to the carnival.

·  When they return, a mysterious young woman (Beloved) appears at 124.

·  Denver and Sethe take a liking to Beloved, and she moves in.

·  Beloved unsettles Paul D and later chokes Sethe with her spirit.

·  Paul D moves around the house, avoiding Beloved.

·  Paul D is seduced by Beloved in the shed.

Paul D’s Departure:

·  Stamp Paid shows Paul D a newspaper clipping about Sethe killing her child.

·  Paul D confronts Sethe, and after their fight, he leaves 124.

Sethe’s Obsession with Beloved:

·  Sethe, Denver, and Beloved go ice skating.

·  Sethe becomes obsessed with Beloved, neglecting herself and Denver.

Climax & Conclusion (1873)

·  Denver, realizing the danger, seeks help from the community.

·  The community women exorcise Beloved.

·  Beloved disappears mysteriously.

·  Paul D returns to Sethe, offering her comfort.

 

Beloved Character List

Sethe (had eyes of iron)- Born on a distant plantation that she barely remembers, Sethe is the child of an African-born slave woman whose name she never knew. As a young teenager, at the age of 13, she was brought to Sweet Home, where she took a man named Halle Suggs for her husband. She had four children, pregnant with the fourth when she fled Sweet Home on foot and alone. When schoolteacher, the brutal master at Sweet Home, tracked her down, Sethe attempted to kill her children rather than see them returned to slavery. Sethe has a troubled relationship with her own past, often not willing to speak about it but obsessively reliving it in her own head. Scars on the Sethe's back, resembles Chokecherry tree. Amy Denver tells Sethe that the scar is like a Chokcherry tree.

 

Beloved- Beloved is the ghost of Sethe's third child, murdered to protect her from schoolteacher. Her real name is never known. She is the embodiment not only of the baby's ghost but also the legacy of slavery. She represents the power of the past to intrude into the present. Beloved is named posthumously after the first two words said at the funeral- Dearly Beloved- which she mistook as referring to the dead. "Dearly Beloved," however, actually refers to the people at the funeral. Sethe paid for the child's tombstone by having sex with the mason, ten minutes for seven letters, which was enough for the word "Beloved."

 

Paul D Garner- Paul D was one of the Sweet Home men. He was sold to Brandywine after the escape attempt. He has also suffered horribly, and has reacted by shutting away any deep feelings. He shows up at 124 and tries to make a life with Sethe. He describes that his heart is "tobacco tin", and "nothing in this world could pry it open." (but Beloved is not of this world.) He is powerless against Beloved, who seduces him as a way of controlling him and dividing him from her mother. After nearly twenty years of freedom, he is still unsure of the source of his manhood and his humanity.

 

Denver- Sethe's daughter. She is the grown up daughter of Sethe who was born during Sethe's flight to the North. Denver is eighteen years old and terribly lonely. She has not left the yard of 124 by herself for twelve years. She has a possessive need for Beloved, and initially will do anything to please her. But she is also a very dynamic character; by the end of the novel, she is transformed into a strong and independent young woman with a new understanding of her mother. She is 18 years old at the beginning of the novel.

 

Baby Suggs (Jenny Whitlow) - Halle Suggs mother and Sethe's mother-in-law. The Bodwins gave Baby Suggs 124 Bluestone Road, and she began to work as a cobbler. According to Mr Garner, “Jenny Whitlow" was her legal name, the one on her bill of sale. Suggs was her husband's name, and she was always called as Baby (So, Baby Suggs). Halle Suggs (her son) bought her freedom. But freedom transformed Baby Suggs, into a kind of holy woman for Cincinatti's black community. She preaches at a place called ‘Clearing’. Sethe's tragedy, however, broke Baby Suggs' spirit, and she spent her last days bed-ridden and somber. She had 8 children from 6 fathers. She dies at 70 (sixty years a slave and ten years free) in the beginning of the book, 8 years before the main events. The "nigger with the flower in her hat" is Baby Suggs.

 

Halle Suggs- Halle Suggs was Sethe's husband and the father of all of her children. Halle vanished at the time when he was supposed to flee to the North with Sethe; later, it is discovered that he witnessed Sethe's brutalization at the hands of schoolteacher and his nephews. When Paul D last saw Halle, he had gone insane. Halle treated Sethe in brotherly way. Halle had bought Baby Suggs' freedom with money earned by hiring himself out every Sunday for five years. 

 

Schoolteacher - Mr. Garner's brother-in-law. Schoolteacher was a cruel and sadistic master, interested in ways to break the wills of his slaves. He conducted a pseudo-scientific study of the slaves, treating them in his study the way a biologist treats lab animals. His nephews held Sethe down and stole her milk while schoolteacher took notes. When it was discovered that Sethe told Mrs. Garner what they had done, schoolteacher had one of his nephews whip Sethe, giving her the distinctive scars on her back.

 

Amy Denver - A former indentured servant, and a poor white girl She has enough hair for four or five heads. Amy helped Sethe to escape to the North, saving Sethe's life and helping to deliver her baby in a boat. Amy was trying to get to Boston so she could buy carmine colored velvet. Sethe's daughter Denver is named after her.

 

Mr. and Mrs. Buddy - Amy Denver's master and mistress. Mr. Buddy, as vicious as a slave overseer, is said to "whip you for looking at him straight."

 

Howard and Buglar - Sethe's sons and her two older children, she tried and failed to kill them when schoolteacher came. The two boys fled years ago after particularly frightening encounters with the ghost. Sethe has recurring dreams of her boys walking away from her, unable to hear her as she calls for them to come back.

 

Mr. Garner- The old master of Sweet Home, Mr. Garner was generous by the standards of slave owners, and insisted that his slaves were the only male slaves in Kentucky who were real men. His "enlightened" slavery, however, proves to be a sham after his death and was full of contradictions and hypocrisy even in his life. He died due to stroke.

 

Mrs. Lillian Garner- Mr. Garner's sickly wife. She brought schoolteacher to Sweet Home after Mr. Garner's death. She spent the last months of her life bed-ridden and very ill. She gave a pair of crystal earrings to Sethe.

 

Sixo - One of the slaves at Sweet Home. Sixo is "indigo with a flame-red tongue." His dark color, his nighttime dancing, his folk knowledge, and his "knowing tales" indicate he is probably a first-generation slave brought over from Africa. He stopped speaking english because he felt there was "no future in it". Sixo was one of the planners behind their flight to the North. He regularly visited a woman who lived thirty miles away, dubbed the Thirty-Mile woman (Patsy). He was close to Paul D during the time of Sweet Home, but Schoolmaster ordered him orders that Sixo be burned to death during their escape attempt. When he dies, he dies laughing, with his own rebel shouting: "Seven-O! Seven-O!," the name of his soon-to-be baby growing in the Thirty-Mile Woman's womb.

 

The Thirty-Mile Woman (Patsy) - Sixo's lover who joins the group running from Sweet Home and escapes capture when the others are caught.

 

Paul A Garner, Paul F Garner - The brothers of Paul D. All three brothers were at Sweet Home for most of their lives.  Paul F was sold to unspecified owner. Paul A plots to escape, but caught and hanged.

 

Ella- A woman who was an agent on the Underground Railroad. She took Sethe on the final leg of her flight to the North. When Ella was a girl, she was shared by a white man and his son. After Sethe killed her child, Ella becomes one of her harshest critics. Later, she softens her opinion, and organizes the woman to go and exorcise Beloved from 124. Ella is revealed (only to the reader) to have committed infanticide herself. When she gave birth to a child who was the result of repeated rape by a white man and his son, Ella refused to care for it because she considered such forced motherhood to be demeaning, and the baby died. 

 

Stamp Paid (Joshua) - Born with the name of Joshua, Stamp Paid changed his name after his wife was taken to the bed of their master's owner. Stamp felt he had paid all of life's debts in that year. His name also refers to his role as a messenger and envoy for the Underground Railroad- the thing that guaranteed that the thing being sent (the people escaping through the Railroad) would make it to the destination. His name is a badge of honor; like Sethe's scars. By rejecting names given to them by whites, Baby Suggs and Stamp Paid make themselves the definers. Stamp worked as an agent for the Underground Railroad for many years. When schoolteacher came for Sethe, it was Stamp who saved Denver's life. He is a friend to the family and also to Paul D.

 

Vashti - Stamp Paid's wife who, while a slave, was forced to become her master's mistress.

 

Lady Jones -She is educated at coloredgirls’ normal school in Pennsylvania. She teaches the black children of Cincinatti how to read and write. She is mixed-race, with gray eyes and  yellow hair that she despises. She was once Denver's teacher. When Denver flees 124 looking for help, she turns to Lady Jones.

 

Sethe’s Mother(unnamed, simply called as ‘Ma’am’) -Sethe's links to her own mother are painful. Sethe vaguely remembers her own mother. Although her mother did not get to raise her, conditions led both of them to the act of infanticide.  Since her mother was always engaged in field labor, they both could barely share any affectionate moments as mother and daughter. Sethe mentions that when her mother was hanged, she ran to her dead mother, but Nan, another enslaved woman, pulled Sethe away from her mother’s body. Nan told Sethe that the two women (Nan and Sethe’s mother) had come across the sea in the same slave ship. The white crewmembers had raped them repeatedly, but Sethe’s mother “threw away” the children she had by the white men. Sethe was kept because she had a Black father, for whom she was named. Sethe was the only child her mother kept, the only one she named.  In fact, Sethe's named after her father, the only man her mother ever put her arms around. Sethe does not know the name of her own mother, and she has forgotten the language of her childhood.

 

Nan -Nan was the one-armed woman who nursed children back at the plantation where Sethe was born. Nan is a sort of surrogate mother to Sethe, breastfeeding her after the "whitebabies" are fed. Sethe has more memories of Nan than of her own mother.

 

Brandywine- Brandywine is the man who bought Paul D from Sweet Home. Paul D is later taken away from Sweet Home like an animal, with an iron bit in his mouth, sent to prison in Alfred, GA, for trying to kill Brandywine.

 

Nelson Lord- Denver's schoolmate at Lady Jones' school who ends Denver's education by asking her about Sethe's past. He asks Denver whether or not Sethe murdered one of her kids and brought Denver to prison with her. It's this question that halts her hearing for two years and ends her schooling. His question brings to the surface all of Denver's fears of her mother, and intensifies her focus on the ghost. Denver meets him again later in the story when she is seeking help outside of 124, and he tells her to take care of herself.

 

Janey Wagon- Coloured girl, Servant to the Bodwins. She spreads the story of Beloved's return through the black community. She was working for the Bodwins when Baby Suggs first arrived, and she is still working for them when Denver is looking for work decades later.

 

Edward Bodwin and Miss Bodwin- Brother and sister, they are former abolitionists of Scottish origin and try to be helpful to the black community. They own 124, Bluestone Road, but they give it to Baby Suggs and helped Suggs to find work as Cobbler. They also saved Sethe from hanging and helped her to find job as cook in a restaurant. Edward Bodwin witnesses the exorcism of Beloved. They believe that “hated slavery worse than they hated slaves.” At Bodwin’s house, Denver observes a blackboy’s image with a message “At Yo Service.” At the end of the novel, Miss Bodwin plan to send Denver ro Oberlin College. Miss Bodwin, the whitewoman, brought Christmas cologne for Denver and Sethe, oranges for the boys and good wool shawl for Baby Suggs

 

Whitlow - Baby Suggs's former owner in Carolina who named her Jenny Whitlow on the bill of sale.

 

Hi Man - The black convict in the Georgia prison with Paul D who signals that other inmates can rise from their kneeling position, shuffle off on their common chain, and begin the day's work.

 

Reverend Pike - A minister of the Church of the Redeemer.

 

Sawyer - A Cincinnati restaurant owner who offers work to Sethe.

 

Brother- Paul D's old tree, which he named "Brother"

 

Here Boy (= a dog)- It never entered the house (124) after having been injured by the baby ghost. Finally disappeared after the arrival of Beloved (ghost). Sethe asks Denver, where Here Boy has gone to, Denver answers that he has disappeared for good.

 

Mister- Name of the rooster

 

Themes, Motifs, Imagery and Symbols

Eyes of iron

Sethe is constantly described as having eyes of iron, and her refusal to run anymore shows some of her determination-as does the story of her successful escape from slavery while pregnant.

 

Trees

The tree is often an image of protection, comfort, pleasure and shelter throughout the book (Paul D's tree at Sweet Home, Sethe’s memories of beautiful tress in SweetHome; Denver's boxwood room, the flowering trees Paul D follows to the North in a flashback later in the novel). Denver's time in the green room reveals her painful loneliness, and is yet another example in the book (along with Paul D's old tree, which he named "Brother") of trees providing comfort to human beings.  The tree on Sethe's back (chokecherry tree) suggests the need to aestheticize painful experiences and it symbolizes the legacy of slavery. Through language and imagery, the scars from Sethe's pain and humiliation become a tree in bloom, a source of life and shelter.

 

Colour

Amy’s quest for carmine (red) velvet is reminiscent of Baby Suggs desire for colored cloth. Small pleasures, such as the simple pleasure of looking at a colored piece of fabric, were for both Amy and Baby Suggs a deep relief after a life of hardship.

 

Sex

History is what has brought Sethe and Halle together, and together in bed, they can think nothing of the future: they return obsessively and repeatedly to memories of their past, shared and otherwise. The sex in the present has been disappointing, not nearly as sensual as Paul D's memory of the corn he ate on the first day Halle and Sethe made love. This preoccupation with the past and the disappointing sex in the present emphasizes the power of the past, its constant intrusion into the present, its burden on the characters, its ability to shape/undermine characters perceptions of present events. When Paul D and Sethe have sex, they have thirty years of Paul D's fantasies of her as a burden; no sex can live up to that kind of pressure.

 

Ownership

Ownership is an important theme throughout the book: for the ex-slaves, to feel that something belongs to them, whether a place or a person, is a loaded issue. Sethe stays in the house partly because she feels a bond to the place: it is her own, ghost and all, even if the deed to the property is not officially hers. All who visit know it is her home, and she cannot forget that she was never able to own anything as a slave. Even more significant is the idea of "laying claim" to another person. Sethe remembers that Halle treated her in an almost brotherly way, and not as a person who laid claim. Sethe and Halle were unable to lay claim to each other because even their own lives were not their property. Even though the Garners were generous masters lives of the slaves were not their own. Part of slavery's legacy is this inability to lay claim: one cannot say "my mother,""my husband,""my daughter" with a feeling of security, because they cannot belong to you if they are the property of another.

 

Relinquishment of selfhood

The slaves feel that they have no self of own. Denver and Beloved find the Self lodged in the identity of another. Denver conflates her own identity with the identity of Beloved, just as Beloved conflates her own identity with Sethe's. She cries and feels that "she has no self," showing how absolutely dependent she has become on Beloved's presence and approval. Beloved, in turn, sees herself as one with Sethe. When she sees "her face," she means the face of her mother-which, in her mind, is equivalent to herself. (Like infants). The novel also powerfully conveys the feeling of suddenly owning oneself, of having been a slave and then being free.

 

Absence of names

The unnamed Baby (Beloved) is named indirectly and posthumously. Denver is named after a white girl, Amy Denver.  Thirty-Mile-Woman and Stampaid (Joshua) are other examples. Babay Suggs’ old master never called her by any name at all. Baby Suggs refused to go by her newly discovered name (Jenny Whitlow), keeping instead the name her husband gave her, the name she has been called by other blacks for all of her life. Sixo, perhaps the most absurd name in Beloved, epitomizes the dehumanisation of slavery in Beloved (derived from number given to him).  Other Characters at SweetHome like Paul A, D, F to demonstrate same dehumanisation through enumeration. The "nigger with the flower in her hat" is Baby Suggs

 

 

Chapter wise- Summary

Part One, Chapters 1- Summary:

Opening line of the novel: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom”

The year is 1873, and Sethe, a former slave, lives with her 18 year old daughter Denver in "124," a house in rural Ohio. The house is haunted by the ghost of one of Sethe's children.  Note: In house number 124, number 3 is missing (that is the third child, Beloved). Beloved was killed by her mother Sethe, but now returned as ghost and haunting the house. Denver is the only living child who is still with Sethe; the two boys, Buglar and Howard, had fled by age 13 after having particularly frightening encounters with the ghost.

Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old—as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard).

Baby Suggs, Denver's paternal grandmother, died 8 years ago, shortly after the boys left. Baby Suggs was a weathered woman, unsurprised by the fleeing of the boys, insisting only that Sethe and Denver should bring bits of color into the house, especially during the gray Ohio winters. Baby Suggs was unmoved by the disappearance of her eight children.

Beloved's narrative moves quickly between past and present, frequently shifting forward and back in time and through the memories of characters. Sethe's family life is still haunted by the dead child and the memories of slavery. The power of this past is embodied in the ghost of Sethe's baby.

The spirit of the dead baby is persistent and often malicious (years ago, the baby crippled the family dog, ‘Here Boy’). Sethe paid for the child's tombstone by having sex with the mason, ten minutes for seven letters, which was enough for the word "Beloved." The way the child died is hinted at, as we are told that Sethe can remember the feeling of the baby's blood.

Eighteen years have passed since Sethe escaped from Sweet Home, the farm where she was a slave. Sweet Home was originally run by Mr. Garner, but after he died and Mrs. Garner became ill, a cruel man called schoolteacher came to run the farm. The actions of schoolteacher were the catalyst for Sethe's flight.

Today, Paul D, the last of the Sweet Home men, turns up on Sethe's doorstep. He was one of five men: Paul D Garner, Paul F Garner, Paul A Garner, Halle Suggs, and Sixo. All the men, back in those days, were in their twenties. Back at Sweet Home (in Kentucky), Sethe was originally bought to replace Baby Suggs, Halle's mother. Halle had bought Baby Suggs' freedom with money earned by hiring himself out every Sunday for five years. Sethe arrived at Sweet Home, a young woman with "iron eyes and a backbone to match." The men waited a year while Sethe chose which one of them she would have for her partner. Desperate for women, the men dreamed of Sethe and had sex with calves while they waited. She finally chose Halle, sewing herself a dress so that their legally and religiously unsanctified marriage would have some feeling of celebration to it.

Sethe invites Paul D into the house. Paul D immediately encounters the ghost, in the form of a pool of red light. Sethe explains that the mysterious happenings in the house are the doing of her dead baby's ghost. In the world of the living, Denver receives Paul D with apprehension, feeling left out of the rapport and the shared history between her mother and this new male guest. Denver breaks down and says that she can't stand living at 124 anymore: no one comes by, not only because of the haunted house, according to Denver, but because of Sethe. Paul D's presence somehow allows this breakdown: he is described as the kind of man in the presence of whom woman feel comfortable crying. When Paul D asks why they don't leave, Sethe is adamant: she will not run from anything ever again.

She tells Paul D about the tree on her back, a cluster of scars in the shape of a chokecherry tree. The tree on Sethe's back suggests the painful experiences, unlike the beautiful real trees at Sweet Home.

Right before she fled from Sweet Home, Sethe sent her two sons and her daughter up to Cincinatti, where they were left with Baby Suggs. Sethe was pregnant with Denver, but the third child, the girl, still needed Sethe's milk. Sethe tells Paul D that schoolteacher's nephews took her milk, and when she told Mrs. Garner about it schoolteacher found out and responded by having one of the boys whip her. The scars are still there.

Paul D touches Sethe's breasts and the ghost becomes violent, shaking the entire house. Paul D tries to fight back, shouting loudly and smashing up parts of the house in the process. The rumbling stops. The ghost's presence can no longer be felt, and Denver resents Paul D for having gotten rid of it; the ghost was the only other company Denver had.

 

Part One, Chapter 2- Summary:

Sethe and Paul D have sex, which is disappointing for both of them. Paul D has longed for Sethe for thirty years, and the experience has been quick and unexciting. Paul D, looking at Sethe, dislikes the way her breasts lay flat on her and is repulsed by the clump of scars on her back, refusing now to accept the comparison between the scars and a tree. He remembers the trees of Sweet Home and the shelter they once provided him; under a special tree he called Brother, he rested in the shade with his friend Sixo, one of the slaves at Sweet Home. On a few of the rare free days the men had, Sixo used to take long treks to see a woman thirty miles (Patsy) away. Consequently he was the one Sweet Home man not sick with longing for Sethe

The sex is equally disappointing for Sethe. She resents his earlier exhortation to her to leave the house; it's the first and only home that has been her own. The slaves had to become used to not being able to lay claim to things: although Sethe was lucky enough to be married for six years to one man who fathered all of her children, Baby Suggs eight children had six fathers. Baby Suggs lost all of her children while they were young, except for Halle-and Halle, too, she eventually lost. Being with Paul D reminds Sethe of the way Halle used to treat her-more like a brother, rather than one who could lay claim to her.

When Halle and Sethe decided to get married, Sethe told Mrs. Garner of their decision, who reacted pleasantly (but rather unpassionately) to the idea. When Sethe asked if there would be a wedding, Mrs. Garner laughed and called her sweet. Sethe wanted to have something, so she secretly made a dress. She was fourteen years old.

The first time Halle and Sethe made love, it was in the cornfield. Although the two thought they were hidden, from the rustling in the field all of the Sweet Home men knew that Halle had been chosen. They watched mournfully, and then cooked some of the corn from the field and ate it. The corn, at least, is a simple pleasure that no one takes from them.

 

Part One, Chapter 3- Summary:

Denver has a secret place where she spends time alone, in the woods behind 124. There is a place where five boxwood bushes planted in a circle have grown together into a canopy, forming a round and empty room with green leaves and branches for walls. She spends hours at a time there, paradoxically isolating herself in the room to seek relief from her loneliness.

Years ago, after a session in her secret place, Denver came home and looked in through a window to see her mother kneeling in prayer. A white dress was kneeling next to her mother and had its empty sleeve around Sethe's waist. (White dress without sleeves= Ghost, this apparition of the ghost foreshadowed the return of baby, but as full-grown woman.) The tenderness of the phantom's gesture reminded Denver of her own birth. (Sethe is aftraid of her past but Denver is curious to know about her birth.)

Sethe has only vague memories of her own birthplace somewhere far from Sweet Home. She was not allowed to be with her own mother. Just a child, she helped tend the babies and watched rows and rows of black women, all of whom she called Ma'am, but one of whom was "her own." Sethe learned to recognize her mother, although they were never allowed to be together, because her mother alone wore a cloth hat.

When Sethe herself was a mother, fleeing from Sweet Home and pregnant with Denver, she received unexpected aid from a poor white girl named Amy. Amy, a recently released indentured servant, saved her life. Amy and Sethe ran into each other by chance: the white girl was trying to walk to Boston because she was obsessed with the idea of finding some carmine-colored velvet. (Amy’s quest for carmine (red) velvet is reminiscent of Baby Suggs desire for colored cloth.) Sethe, with a baby about to come, a torn-up back, and destroyed swollen feet, was barely able to crawl. Amy led her to a lean-to and massageSd her damaged feet, telling Sethe to endure the pain because "Anything dead coming back to life hurts."

When Denver told Sethe about the phantom dress, Sethe talked to her about memory: even after a thing is destroyed, its presence remains, not only in minds but somehow in the real world. She told Denver about schoolteacher, who was Mr. Garner's brother-in-law. He came with his two nephews and always took notes while observing the men and Sethe, studying them pseudo-scientifically. Sethe explained some of this to Denver and then they both decided that, judging from the apparition of the dress, the baby ghost had plans.

After his failed escape from Sweet Home, Paul D spent time in a prison in Georgia, working in a quarry by day and going crazy in a box in the ground at night. He sings songs, some of which he learned in Georgia, while he works. His heart is described as being closed up, and Sethe's presence threatens to open it. Paul D decides to stay for a while-although he has a pattern of settling in and wandering out soon afterward-and his decision makes Sethe hopeful.

Sethe tells him some of the story of when schoolteacher found her, after she had reached Cincinatti. Somehow she managed to avoid being taken back to Sweet Home, but she did spend some time in prison. Paul D wants to know more, but speaking about jail reminds him of his own experience in Georgia. He drops the subject. Sethe is hopeful about a future with Paul D, but her the future is still primarily "a matter of keeping the past at bay." Her mission is still to protect Denver from this past.

 

Part One, Chapter 4: Summary:

After Paul D has stayed at 124 for a few days, Denver asks him how long he plans to "hang around." The question hurts Paul D's feelings, and he never really answers it. Sethe chastises her daughter strongly and then apologizes for her, but she refuses to hear any of Paul D's criticism of Denver. Paul D sees from Sethe's behavior that she loves her daughter fiercely, and he remarks to himself that it's dangerous for a former slave to love anything so much-love must be rationed, because what and whom one loves can be taken away at any time.

Paul D, in part to make peace with Denver, brings the two women to the carnival, which sets aside Thursdays for black people. The other blacks, who usually shun Denver and Sethe, treat them with some gentleness when they are with Paul D. Paul D has the best time of anyone, buying gifts for the women and bending over backwards to make sure they enjoy themselves. The townspeople fear the haunted house, and they have not forgotten the child's death. But Paul D gives Sethe and Denver a link to the rest of the black community.

On the way to and from the carnival, Sethe sees that their three shadows look like they are holding hands. “They were not holding hands, but their shadows were.” This figures of the shadows holding hands, Sethe sees a symbol of a future the three of them could have together. For once, Sethe is thinking of the future, and the shadows stand as mirror opposites of the ghost baby. (this foreshadows the arrival of Beloved I the next chapter) She wanted to make a new life with Paul D and the two girls. She believes she can take care of all of them, just like when she first arrived in Ohio, when "she had milk enough for all." She understands herself as a provider

 

Part One, Chapter 5 :Summary:

The the narrator tells us that a woman walks out of the water and exhausted, she rests all day and all night by a mulberry tree. The air hurts her lungs. Finally, she manages to get up and slowly walk to the yard of 124, where she sits on a tree stump. Her skin is new, like a baby's.

Coming home from the carnival, Sethe, Paul D, and Denver find the girl in black dress, with two unlaced shoes. On seeing her, Sethe has a powerful urge to urinate (symbilzes losing of water- baby birth), and runs off. She does not make it to the outhouse and voids an unbelievable amount of water-as much as when she lost her water before Denver's birth. Sethe has no idea of Beloved's identity, but she decides to let the girl stay at 124 indefinitely. The disappearance of Here Boy (dog) symbolizes the arrival of ghost. When Sethe asks where Here Boy has gone to, Denver answers that he has disappeared for good.

The girl's name is Beloved, and she does not seem to have a last name. (Beloved is the dead baby returned, in human flesh, at the age she would have been had she lived.) Paul D wants to ask more questions but knows that a black woman on her own must be running from something bad, so he doesn't press the issue. Beloved is feeble and asks for water, of which she drinks an incredible amount. She has a weak command of language. She sleeps for four days. Denver finally has a new friend and started tending to her. When she gets well enough to eat, all she asks for are sweets. She moves like an old woman, supporting herself and taking tiny steps.

Although Beloved acts weak, Paul D has seen her pick up the rocker with one hand. He shares these fears with Sethe, who does not believe him. When Paul D asks Denver, who was there, to confirm his story, she denies it. Sethe has no idea of Beloved's identity, but she decides to let the girl stay at 124 indefinitely. The ghost, at this point, seems benign enough, but her power is hinted at by Paul D's story.

 

Part One, Chapter 6: Summary:

Beloved is obsessed with Sethe, watching her every move, following her around the house. Beloved is also obsessed with hearing stories about the past. Sethe tells her stories that she seldom shares. Beloved also seems to know, before the stories are told, about events and things that she could not possibly know about. While Denver want to know only stories that concern herself, Beloved wants to know everything about Sethe-in part, perhaps, because for Beloved, Sethe is part of her.

Back at Sweet Home, Sethe got a pair of crystal earrings from Mrs. Garner, who gave them to Sethe perhaps out of guilt that Sethe clearly wanted a real wedding and wasn't going to get one. Sethe took to stealing scraps of fabric, from which she sewed an ugly and bizarre-looking dress.

Beloved also asks Sethe about her mother, and if her mother ever fixed her hair. The answer is No: most nights, Sethe's mother did not even sleep in the same cabin as Sethe. She worked from before dawn until late at night in the rice paddies, and on Sundays she slept all day. But Sethe does remember that her mother showed her a mark, like the mark cattle get from a brand. Her mother told her that if something happened to her, and Sethe couldn't tell her identity from her face, she would know by the mark. All of the other slaves with that mark were dead. Later on, Sethe's mother was hanged, but the body was so mutilated that she could not make out the mark anyway.

Sethe's links to her own mother are painful. Although her mother did not get to raise her, conditions led both of them to the act of infanticide. Sethe's name is a trace of heritage left to her, but although she bears her father's name she does not know the name of her own mother, and she has forgotten the language of her childhood. Nan and her mother were of the generation brought over on a slave ship, and the violence of that act has cut off Sethe's heritage, leaving her with no legacy beyond the history that begin with slavery. She forgets her language, but, like her mother, commits infanticide.

Retelling this story brings memories that Sethe had buried deep down: she remembers suddenly that when she was little she spoke a different language, with Nan, the one-armed slave woman who tended the children, and with her own mother. She cannot remember the language anymore, and realizes that it might have something to do with the vagueness of her memories of the world before Sweet Home. She also remembers Nan telling her that Sethe was the only baby her mother kept-her father was a black man, and Sethe inherited his name. The other babies were from when Sethe's mother was raped by white men, and she threw them all away.

Denver wonders why Beloved seems to know what questions to ask about Sethe's past.

 

Part One, Chapter 7: Summary:

Paul D grows increasingly suspicious of Beloved, probing her with questions. Beloved reacts angrily, and Denver sides with her against him. Later, Sethe and Paul D have an argument about her. Sethe insists that it's no trouble to feed her, while Paul D thinks they might find somewhere else for Beloved to live. During the argument, Sethe insists that all men want to wrong women, all men including Halle, because he took off and ran when they were supposed to escape to the North together. But Paul D reveals that he did see Halle again, and Halle had gone mad. He was sitting next to a butter churn, butter all over his face. Paul D believes that Halle was watching from the loft when schoolteacher takes notes as his nephews — the "two boys with mossy teeth" — suck the milk from Sethe's breasts. Paul D wanted to say something to him, but he couldn't because he had an iron bit in his mouth at the time. Halle watched a rooster and felt that his own masculinity was inferior to the bird's (the rooster's name, significantly, was Mister).

Sethe is horrified. When she hears a story, her brain immediately begins to imagine it. She cannot imagine the future, but the stories of the past are vividly imagined in her head. So she sees her husband watching, impotent, while she is abused, and then she sees him by the churn, realizing that he was putting the butter on his face because he was remembering the milk that the boys took from Sethe. She dreads hearing the rest of Paul D's story.

Paul D tells her that while he had the bit in his mouth he watched a rooster strutting around the yard and felt that his own masculinity was inferior to the bird's (the rooster's name, significantly, was Mister). He intends to tell her more, but she stops him by rubbing his knee. Paul D thinks it is just as well-he doesn't wish to show her "the tobacco tin buried in his chest, where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut." Sethe, in rubbing his knee, feels like she is kneeding dough, something she does every day, and the ritual helps her to beat back the past.

 

Part One, Chapter 8:   Summary:

Upstairs, Beloved and Denver dance. Denver asks Beloved what it is like on the other side. Beloved tells her that on the other side she is small, curled into fetal position, and it is hot with no room to move. She has come back to see Sethe's face. When Denver asks her not to tell Sethe what she is, Beloved becomes angry, warning Denver not to tell her what to do. Beloved insists that Sethe is hers. She asks Denver to tell the story of how Sethe gave birth to Denver in the boat. (The dynamic between Denver and Beloved is unhealthy; Beloved is fickle and selfish, like a child, only wants Sethe. Denver often feels rejected and lonely)

Amy showed Sethe where a lean-to was, and tried to tend to her wounds. It was Amy who said that the scars on Sethe's back were a chokeberry tree (symbolizes the slavery's legacy). Amy wondered what God could be up to. Sethe, to everyone's surprise, lived through the night. Sethe and Amy found a boat the next morning, and in that boat Amy helped Sethe to give birth to Denver. They came ashore and tended to the baby that night, dressing the infant in rags from their own bodies. The next morning, Amy asked Sethe to tell the baby about her and then set off on her own, afraid to be caught with a runaway.

 

Part One, Chapter 9: Summary:

Sethe feels the need to go to the clearing where Baby Suggs used to preach. Baby Suggs did not give sermons, but instead instructed the crowds of black folks to laugh, dance, and love their bodies, in particular their hearts and mouths (in sharp contrast to Paul D's need to keep his heart locked away.) Sethe wants to go there now to pay tribute to Halle, and she feels the need to commune with Baby Sugg's spirit. But she remembers, too, that Baby Suggs died in grief, embittered against whites and without hope for the future, all because of what happened to Sethe. Baby Suggs griefs that 'Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed and broke my heart strings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks."

After Amy left and Sethe was on her own, she walked until she found a black man with two boys. The man was Stamp Paid, who gave her some eel and a coat in which to carry her baby. He left her at a relay station, where a woman named Ella came to pick her up, having been left "the sign" by Stamp Paid. Ella brought her to Baby Suggs, whom Sethe had never met before. Finally, she had made it, although she had to wait until the next morning to see her children so as to avoid frightening them with her haggard appearance. Baby Suggs bathed Sethe and soaked her feet, and Sethe began her life as a free woman. Her third child, a girl, whom she had not seen since she sent her ahead with the Railroad, had started to crawl. Sethe was so happy that for a while the realization that she was free seemed more like a dream, unable to hit her with full force.

In the clearing with Beloved and Denver, Sethe tries to feel Baby Sugg's presence. She feels Baby Sugg's fingers caressing her neck, they way they once did in life, but then the fingers begin to choke her. Beloved and Denver rescue her, and Denver tells her that Baby Suggs would never hurt her. Beloved massages Sethe's neck and kisses her, too passionately, her breath smelling like milk. Sethe tells her she's too old for that. Still, the visit to the clearing makes Sethe feel better, and she also decides that she wants Paul D in her life. She goes back to cook up dinner for all, remember the first day she arrived at 124, when she had milk enough for all.

Beloved hates Paul D, because he takes too much of Sethe's attention. She listens to the two of them for a while and then leaves to go outside. Denver confronts her about the clearing, telling her that she knows Beloved was choking Sethe, even if she did "rescue" Sethe afterward. Beloved warns Denver not to cross her and runs away.

Denver remembers when she used to go to school. When she was seven, she walked away from home and found the house of Lady Jones, a mulatto woman who taught black children reading, writing, and math. The year of school (in which she was avoided by her classmates without realizing it) ended when Nelson Lord asked Denver "the question." When Denver asked her mother "What happened to her mother?," she became deaf, not even hearing her mother's answer or anything else for two years. She regained her hearing when she heard the baby ghost crawling up the stairs.

Nelson Lord had said. “Didn’t your mother get locked away for murder? Wasn’t you in there with her when she went?”

Denver's childhood deafness shows some of the danger of the past, from which Sethe has always tried to protect her daughter. The question represents the power of the past to impair life in the present. But Denver's hearing also returned because of the sound of the ghost baby.

 

Part One, Chapter 10: Summary:

After failing to escape from Sweet Home, Paul D was sold to a new master, whom he tried to kill. He was sent to Georgia. At a prison for blacks, he was kept in a small box in the ground at night and let out during the day to work in a chain gang. At night, he trembled uncontrollably. After months, a powerful rainstorm gave the men a chance to escape. Still chained, they ran until they found a Cherokee encampment. The Cherokee broke their chains. The level of brutality in Georgia far exceeded anything he had experienced at Sweet Home, and showed him how little his life was valued.

Paul D, instructed to follow the blossoms (which would keep him going North) found his way to Delaware, where he stayed with a weaver woman for eighteen months. All of these experiences he put away in the "tobacco tin" lodged in his chest, and "nothing in this world could pry it open." (but Beloved is not of this world.)

 

Part One, Chapter 11:  Summary:

Beloved moves Paul D . Inexplicably, he begins to feel uncomfortable sleeping with Sethe. He begins to sleep in the rocker, then in Baby Sugg's old room, then in the store room, then in the cold house. The moving, he knows, has nothing to do with Sethe, but is involuntary, yet he can do nothing to prevent it.

Beloved comes to him in the cold house and tells him to touch her "inside part" and call her by her name. Paul D tries to resist, but he cannot. She insists, and he does as she asks, horrified by his own actions. As he touches her, he repeats the words "red heart" again and again, like a mantra.

Beloved shows her intent to be rid of Paul D, first by moving him, and then by using sex to try to conquer him. Paul D cannot resist her, and it shows the Beloved's power. He has survived slavery and a Southern prison for blacks, but he cannot resist the ghost. The sex is horrific and desperate and not entirely under his control, but Paul D's vulnerability and defeat by the ghost reminds him of his own human feelings.

 

Part One, Chapter 12:  Summary:

Denver remembers the "original hunger," before Beloved came. She is desperate for Beloved to love her, and she fears that Beloved might leave again. Denver conflates her own identity with the identity of Beloved, just as Beloved conflates her own identity with Sethe's.

Sethe comes to believe that Beloved was locked up by a white man-all Beloved can remember is standing up on a bridge looking down and one white man. We later realize that the one white man is schoolteacher, but Sethe believes that Beloved was locked up and used for a white master's pleasure. Sethe remembers Ella, the woman who took her on the last leg of the Underground Railroad. Ella was locked up by a father and his son for a year, and Sethe thinks something like that may have happened to Beloved.

Denver follows Beloved out to the cold house, where Beloved vanishes into thin air. Denver begins to cry, worse than when Paul D first came: "Then it was for herself. Now she is crying because she has no self." But Beloved reappears, and asks mysteriously if Denver can see "her face." Denver cannot, and asks whose face it is, to which Beloved replies, "Me. It's me."

 

Part One, Chapter 13: Summary:

Paul D wonders about his masculinity. Mr. Garner prided himself on having slaves who were men, and Paul D believed him, but now he wonders about the value of masculinity bestowed on him by a white master. Once Garner died, after all, that masculinity proved terrifyingly easy to take away. And now, he finds himself unable to beat Beloved. He begins to wonder if she is more than just a girl.

He resolves to tell Sethe, but cannot, and instead asks if Sethe will have his child. He is growing to love Sethe more and more, but Sethe gives an ambiguous response. Later that night she tells him that he won't be sleeping outside anymore, but should come upstairs where he belongs. He is grateful to her, only the second time in his life he has been grateful to a woman. The first was in Delaware, when the weaver woman gave the half-starved fugitive Paul D some sausage.

Sethe does not want to have Paul D's baby, but she is happy to have him home. She still dreams that one day Howard and Buglar will come back. She is beginning to understand Beloved's identity, although it is not yet totally clear to her.

 

Part One, Chapter 14:  Summary:

Beloved is infuriated by Paul D's return into the house, but Denver defends him, saying that he is there because Sethe wants him there. It shows some sign of independence, as well as consideration of her mother's feelings and desires.

Beloved fears that her body might fall apart, knowing that it could happen at any moment. Holding herself together takes great effort, and she fears waking up to find herself in pieces. She loses a wisdom tooth and is afraid that the process is beginning, but Denver assures her that it's normal. Beloved tells her it hurts and Denver asks why she doesn't cry. So she does, as if the idea had never occurred to her before.

When she learns how to cry, we see how like and unlike a baby she is: all experiences are new for her and she has to learn them like an infant does, but some of those experiences (like crying) are things that should come instinctively to a human.

 

Part One, Chapter 15:  Summary:

After Sethe's arrival at 124, Stamp Paid got two buckets full of blackberries and brought them to Baby Suggs. With that as the beginning, a giant feast came about spontaneously, a celebration for all of the black people in town. Afterwards, the other blacks in town actually resented Baby Suggs, feeling that her generosity was a sign of pride. They began to resent her preaching and her fortune at having so many members of her family with her.

Baby Suggs originally allowed Halle to buy her freedom only because it had seemed to mean so much to him. She was convinced that she was too old to really need freedom, but as she was driven north by Mr. Garner she suddenly was intoxicated by the knowledge that she was free, noticing her hands and realizing that they were her own, and feeling her heartbeat-noticing it, in a way, for the first time. Baby Suggs then asked Mr. Garner why he and his wife always called her Jenny. He revealed that "Jenny Whitlow" was her legal name, the one on her bill of sale. Baby Suggs told him that Suggs was her husband's name, and she was always called as ‘Baby’, and that no one ever called her ‘Jenny’.

Baby Suggs's first stop was at the Bodwins', a brother and sister who were abolitionists. Janey, their black servant, gave Baby Suggs water to drink and told her that her family all lived in the area. The idea was wondrous to Baby Suggs, who thought then and there that she might be able to find the scattered bits of her own family (after two years of fruitless attempts and letters, Baby Suggs gave up). She met the Bodwins, generous white people who let her stay at 124 and voiced their disapproval of slavery. Mr. Garner spoke up, reminding them that he allowed Halle to buy Baby Suggs's freedom, but she thought silently that her son would be working off that debt for years to come.

After the feast celebrating Sethe's arrival and the arrival of Baby Suggs's grandkids, Baby Suggs could smell the disapproval of the community in the air, and she had a vague premonition of the disaster that was coming.

 

Part One, Chapter 16: Summary:

Twenty-eight days after Sethe arrived at 124, schoolteacher, one of his nephews, the slavecatcher, and the sheriff (they refers to the Four Horsemen: Famine, War, Pestilence (plague), Death of the Apocalypse, as described in the Bible. Their arrival signifies the end of the world) came to reclaim Sethe and her children. Sethe, on seeing them, ran into the shed and killed the crawling baby girl's throat by an handsaw. She tried to kill Howard, Buglar, and Denver, but did not succeed. Howard and Buglar she only managed to wound, and Denver she attempted to throw against a wall. Stamp Paid leapt in and saved Denver's life. Schoolteacher saw then that she would never be a good slave again: "you just can't mishandle creatures and expect success." The sheriff told the other three white men to leave, saying that it was now his business.

Baby Suggs moved in and tried to take control of the situation. She told Sethe to nurse Denver, but became infuriated when Sethe absent-mindedly brought Denver to her chest without cleaning away the dead baby's blood. They fought over the child, Baby Suggs finally slipping on a puddle of blood. Denver drank her sister's blood along with her mother's milk. Then Denver and Sethe were carried into town in the sheriff's wagon, a crowd of blacks looking on disapprovingly at Sethe's straight back and unashamed eyes.

It is narrated from the perspective of schoolteacher and his nephew then shifts back to that of the blacks. This shift in narration shows how schoolteacher dehumanizes blacks: all of them are nameless "niggers" differentiated by what they wear. (here "nigger with the flower in her hat" is Baby Suggs). In the eyes of the schoolteacher all of the blacks are different specimens of animal.

 

Part One, Chapter 17:  Summary:

During the days, Paul D and Stamp Paid work with hogs. Cincinatti is the city of pork, exporting the valuable meat back to the Northeast. Stamp Paid shows Paul D the old newspaper clipping about Sethe killing her baby daughter. Paul D insists that the woman in the picture is not Sethe because "that ain't her mouth." Stamp Paid, remembering that horrible day, thinks about the fact that no black person sent warning to Sethe. The four white people were riding towards 124 with "the Look," and everyone who saw it knew what it meant. Stamp believes that there was some meanness that caused the inaction of the black community, jealousy (about Baby Suggs preaching, fine house and intact family. He keeps these thoughts to himself.

But Stamp Paid helps Paul D to read through the article, at the end of which Paul D is still insisting the woman in the drawing cannot be Sethe.

 

Part One, Chapter 18: Summary:

Sethe, confronted by Paul D about the newspaper article, tries to explain herself. She circles the room wildly, starting by talking about the child who died, and then about what it was like to be free. Suddenly, Sethe was allowed to be selfish, to live her life as if it were her own to live. And her children were free; she felt for the first time that she could love them fully, because in Kentucky they had not been hers to love. What she doesn't tell Paul D is that when she saw schoolteacher's hat, it was as if a giant flock of birds was beating in her head. She could not allow her children to be taken.

Sethe still insists that she did the right thing. She still believes that her children were better off dead than under schoolteacher's rule. Paul D is frightened by her and her claims, feeling that Stamp Paid showed him the article not just to warn him of what Sethe had done but of what Sethe tries to claim. Sethe loves her children too much, not knowing where "the world stopped and she began." What she wanted for her children was guaranteed safety, and she was willing to kill them to get it for them. Paul D also is still ashamed of his sex with Beloved, feeling her eyes on him through the ceiling. He tells her that she has two legs and not four, implying that she is a human and not an animal and that she should have found another way. He leaves 124. Sethe's literal circling of the room parallels the way she tells her story, moving around, filling in gaps, trying to explain all the circumstances leading up to the horrible event. Her insistence on loving her children so fiercely actually scares Paul D, who believes that ex-slaves should not love so much. He accuses her of having love that is "too thick," but from Sethe's point of view love is either thick or worthless.

Paul D’s comment that she has “too thick love”, and Sethe’s replies him “Love is or love ain’t. Thin love ain’t no love at all” 

 

 

Part Two, Chapter 19: Summary:

To Stamp Paid, 124 is "loud." He can hear the voices as he approaches the house, like a chorus of the dead. He wants to see Sethe and make sure everything is all right. Ever since he learned that Paul D left 124 on the same day that Stamp showed him the newspaper clipping, he has felt guilty. He worries that he did not take the feelings of Sethe or the well-being of Denver into consideration, and that perhaps he was infected by the feelings of the community toward Sethe. The last time he visited 124 was when he brought Baby Suggs's body out for burial. Sethe did not sing with the others at the funeral, and back at the yard of 124 afterward, the other mourners did not touch the food Sethe prepared. Sethe, in turn, did not touch any of theirs, and she forbade Denver to touch any of it as well.

At the door, Stamp Paid cannot enter the house. At the homes of blacks whom he has helped, he always enters without knocking, but today for some reason at 124 he feels the need to knock-and is not able to do it. He goes to 124 day after day, never working up the courage to knock on the door.

Sethe, to show the girls that Paul D's flight is not going to break her, takes the girls ice-skating. The three have a wonderful time, laughing and falling on the ice, not a soul to see them. At the end of the day, Beloved hums a bit of a song that Sethe made up to sing to her children. Sethe finally realizes who Beloved is. (Beloved is not only a ghost of dead baby but of the legacy of slavery) She goes to bed to consider the significance of what has happened.

Stamp Paid, still trying to make himself go to 124 and knock on the door, remembers how Baby Suggs was broken after what happened to Sethe. She never preached anymore, embittered and retiring to bed to think about colors. Stamp realizes now what Baby Suggs felt; he, too, has begun to feel tired "in his marrow." One day, while in the river, he found a bit of ribbon attached to a black girl's hair, the hair still attached to a piece of scalp. That small discovery was what made him feel fatigue, after a lifetime of tirelessly helping blacks.

Sethe, coming downstairs the morning after her discovery, is overjoyed. She makes breakfast, deciding it's all right to be late for work. The whole world, she feels, is in her home.

As Sethe walks to work, she thinks about all of the things that have taken place, rejoicing at her daughter's miraculous return, but also remembering her time in jail and the way that her own sons had become frightened of her. She remembers the way that Baby Suggs was broken and life became lonely after Sethe got out of prison, but now she feels like she can live with her daughters in the "timeless present."

Meanwhile, Stamp Paid finally knocks on the door. No one answers, and Stamp looks through the window to see Denver and Beloved. Not recognizing Beloved, he is uneasy. The supernatural voices around the house are still loud. He goes to see Ella, who speaks with disapproval about Sethe. She voices doubt that Sethe was even Halle's wife, and suggests that the white girl who supposedly helped Sethe to make it to the North must have been a ghost. Stamp is angry to learn the Paul D is sleeping in the church basement, and that no one in the black community has offered him a place to stay. No black man should have to ask for help, according to Stamp. He sets Ella straight, telling her that Paul D knew Sethe and Halle years ago. Ella suggests that the girl he saw through the window is the ghost of the dead baby.

Stamp, still feeling guilty about showing Paul D the article, searches for him. He also tries to learn the identity of Beloved so that he can help Sethe if he can.

At work at the restaurant, Sethe pilfers supplies rather than wait in line at the general store, where all of the black customers are served last. Her stealing still makes her feel guilty, and it reminds her of Sixo, who stole a baby pig and ate it. He attempted to justify it to schoolteacher, who beat him anyway "to show him that definitions belonged to the definers-not the defined."

Sethe also remembers the difficulty of caring for her children while working; no other women were around, and she had to find a way to do all of her chores and take care of her babies. Sethe's internal monologue in this chapter is trying to explain Beloved why she did what she did, she goes over the reasons again, explaining them to the reader and, perhaps most importantly, to herself. She remembers schoolteacher and his strange questions, his scientific measuring of the slaves body parts. She wants to tell Beloved something she has never told anyone: one day, while Sethe was working in the yard, she overheard him telling his nephews to list Sethe's human characteristics in one column and her animal characteristics in another. Sethe was horrified and was somehow shamed, too shamed to tell Halle about what she had heard. That night in bed, Sethe talked about missing Mr. Garner. Halle was none too eager to judge Mr. Garner too kindly, reminding Sethe that although Baby Suggs was bought and sent to freedom, Mr. Garner brought in Sethe and will own all of their children.

Sethe and the others decided to try to escape on the Underground Railroad. Life under schoolteacher was becoming increasingly difficult. But Sethe got her children through, sending three of them ahead on the Railroad and staying behind to wait for Halle. Later, on her own, she got through the journey to get to her children, walking by a mass of hanged black boys, one of whom was probably Paul A. Still speaking to Beloved in her mind, she seeks redemption and recognition of all that she suffered to reach her children: "Your remember that, don't you; that I did? That when I got here, I had milk enough for all?"

Stamp Paid believes that the voices around 124 are the voices of black angry dead. He thinks about what whites say: that under every black skin, no matter how polite the black person is on the exterior, a jungle is waiting. Stamp agrees that often it's true, but he believes that the jungle has been planted there by whites. The jungle has spread and spread, invading the whites who originally planted it.

The narrator tells us that mixed in with the voices around the house were the thoughts of Sethe, Denver, and Beloved: "unspeakable thoughts, unspoken." When Stamp Paid is out side of the house, the only word he can make out, repeatedly, is "mine,"

 

Part Two, Chapter 20: Summary:

Sethe’s stream of consciousness narration:

The next four chapters are stream of consciousness, the first in the head of Sethe, the second in Denver's head, the third in Beloved's, and the fourth a mixture of all three. Stamp Paid, in previous chapter, heard many voices but did not recognize (they are unspeakable and unspoken thoughts.)

Sethe begins by claiming the returned ghost as her own daughter ("Beloved, she my daughter. She mine”) and insists that she does not need to explain herself because her daughter has come back of her own free will. She remembers the milk that was taken from her, and then she remembers when she herself was nursing, and Nan had to nurse her along with white babies. She remembers her mother's body. She says now she understands why Baby Suggs pondered color-because she had never had a chance to look at her world and enjoy it. She promises to show Beloved the world, colors and smells, the way a mother should. She recalls Amy, Mrs. Garner, what she can remember of the way they looked. She remembers taking the three children to the waiting spot for the Underground Railroad agent and deciding to wait because Halle was nowhere to be found. It was after she had been whipped. Sethe blames Paul D for her not being able to recognize Beloved right away. She wonders about her own mother, refusing to believe that she was hanged for running because she would not have run without Sethe. She remembers her mother's face, which was deformed into a permanent smile from wearing the bit so often. Sethe tells Beloved that she wanted to die with her baby, but had to stay because of the three surviving children. She was not allowed, at that time, to rest in peace. She believes her daughter will bring that peace to her, so that she "can sleep like the drowned." She closes as she opened, claiming Beloved as her own.

 

Part Two, Chapter 21:  Summary:

Denver's stream-of-consciousness narration:

"Beloved is my sister." Denver reminds us that she swallowed Beloved's blood along with her sister's milk, and that the sound of her ghost restored her hearing. Denver has always been afraid of Sethe, although she does not known that she was nearly dashed against the wall by her. Howard and Buglar knew they had nearly been killed, and would terrify Denver with stories of how to kill Sethe if she ever tried to kill one of them again. Denver is afraid that whatever made Sethe do it could come again; she knows it comes from outside of the house, out in the world. She has never left 124 by herself since she was a pupil at Lady Jones' house-and that was twelve years ago. Twice she has been outside of the yard of 124 in that time, and both times she was with Sethe.

Denver feels it is her responsibility to protect Beloved should Sethe try to kill the girl again. She describes a recurring nightmare she had as a girl, in which Sethe decapitated her every night and then carried her head downstairs to braid her hair. Denver has waited years for her father to come, dreaming of him. She idealizes her father, calling him an angel-man. She misses Baby Suggs, remembering Grandma Baby's instructions to love her body. She remembers that Baby Suggs warned her that the ghost was greedy and needed lots of love. Denver claims Beloved as her own again: "She's mine, Beloved. She's mine."

 

Part Two, Chapter 22:  Summary:

Beloved's chapter is the most disjointed and difficult of the four. "I am Beloved and she is mine." Beloved lays claim to her mother, remembering her face. She insists she is not separate from her and that "there is no place where I stop." Her mind does not wander to the past, but insists that she is in a timeless present: "All of it is now it is always now there will never be time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too" She speaks of men without skin (the school teacher and the slave traders)who frighten her, daylight that comes through cracks, a world where there is no room to move and rats that do not wait for them to sleep to attack them. A man's dead body is on top of her. People try to thrash but there is no room. Bodies pile up along with the living.

She sees "the woman with my face" in the sea-possibly Sethe. There are clouds between them, and she sees a basket of flowers and Sethe's earrings. She is desperate not to lose her. The imagery is varied: there are clouds, water, then she is standing in the rain, there is night and day, the image of Sethe's face through the water, repeated reference to "a hot thing." Sometimes she is standing, sometimes she is curled up like a fetus. She want her face to join with Sethe's. Finally, Beloved is resurrected, emerging from the water and finding the house and the face she has wanted to join.

Beloved describes world as eternally a slave ship. Sixty million or more died on the voyage from Africa (Toni Morrison dedicates this novel to them), and the slave ships were cramped and deadly places, where the bodies of the living and the dead were crammed into dark, rat-infested cargo holds. The "men with no skin," white men, are both schoolteacher and the slave traders. This world of Beloved's is claustrophobic and eternal, and often she is curled up in it like a trapped fetus, desperate to be born again so that she can return to Sethe.

 

Part Two, Chapter 23: Summary:

All four voices mix for this final chapter in the sequence. Beloved reiterates her need to "join," to be one with Seth. Sethe took her face away, Beloved believes, and Beloved refuses to lose that face again. The voices speak to each other, Sethe and Beloved, Beloved and Denver, and then the three together. Sethe asks Beloved for forgiveness, but Beloved avoids the question. (she does not forgive her mother for the murder) Denver warns Beloved that Sethe is dangerous. Beloved insist on her complete connection to Sethe, saying that they are laugh and laughter, and that she wants Sethe's face. Again and again, we hear the words of one woman claiming another for herself. By the end of the chapter, it is unclear who is speaking, and we close with three repetitions: "You are mine/You are mine/You are mine."

 

Part Two, Chapter 24: Summary:

Sitting on the church porch steps, Paul D drinks and feels that his tobacco tin has been pried open, leaving him vulnerable. He wonders if he should have lost his mind back when Sixo did, if it was going to come to this moment anyway. He remembers his family, and for the first time we hear that Paul A and Paul F were his brothers. He cannot remember his mother and never met his father.

Sweet Home was as good a life as a slave could have while Mr. Garner was alive, although Paul D vividly remembers when one of his brothers was sold and separated from him. No one believed the bad stories Baby Suggs, Halle, and Sixotold about other slave-holding estates. All depended on Garner; after his death, the precariousness of their position became clear. He continues to think obsessively about Garner's proclamations that his slaves were all men: "Was he naming what he saw or creating what he did not?"

Paul D recalls the plan they had made to escape on the Underground Railroad. The plan was made months in advance, but had to be altered because Sethe became pregnant. More and more complications arose, until the final run was a disaster. Halle and Paul A were nowhere to be found. Sixo and the Thirty-Mile woman showed up, but all three of them were pursued. Sixo and Paul D were captured by a large group of men with guns, including schoolteacher. Sixo would not stop singing, until schoolteacher decided he would never be acceptable as a slave again. They tried to burn Sixo alive, but the fire was not fast enough, and Sixo would not stop singing or laughing and shouting. It was the only time Paul D ever heard him laugh. The men shot him to silence him. The white men talked to each other about schoolteacher's problems at Sweet Home, and Paul D learned his price for the first time: $900.

Back at Sweet Home, in chains, Paul D had a final conversation with Sethe. When he saw her eyes, they were all black, like iron, without any whites left in them. He was ashamed to be there, chained in front of her. She told him that she was going to run, and because she was a woman and pregnant Paul D never expected to see her alive again.

 

Part Two, Chapter 25: Summary:

Stamp Paid visits Paul D to try and make him reconsider his decision to leave Sethe. He tells Paul D the story of his name: when he was a young man, his wife was taken in by their master's son. For a year, Stamp (his name was Joshua then) did not touch his own wife. When she finally came back, his reaction was not joy but misdirected rage. He had a fantasy of breaking her neck. To help him deal with his rage, he changed his name, figuring that all debts had been paid during that year.

He defends Sethe's actions. Paul D tells Stamp that he is frightened of Sethe, but even more frightened of Beloved. Stamp is curious about where Beloved came from; he suspects, as Sethe once did, that she might have been locked up by a white man and used sexually until she escaped.

 

Part Three, Chapter 26: Summary:

Sethe has seemingly lost her mind, able only to care for Beloved. It is as if Denver does not exist. Sethe and Beloved play games all day long, and Sethe spends extravagant sums on expensive fabric to make colorful dresses for the three of them. She arrives late to work repeatedly and loses her job. Beloved, in turn, demands everything. When the playing began, Denver was included, but soon it became clear that the two of them were more interested in each other. At first, Denver was afraid for Beloved, but after a time she became more concerned for her mother. Beloved is growing fat while Sethe wastes away, and they are running out of food. There is also constant fighting, as Sethe tries to explain herself to Beloved, who refuses to forgive her. She describes the world of the dead as a terrifying place, and is not interested in Sethe's explanations. When Sethe tries to assert herself, Beloved flies into a rage.

In April, Denver decides that she has to go for help. Beloved is destroying her mother; they are all "locked in a love that wore everybody out," and Denver is afraid for her mother's life. She finds the courage to leave the yard of 124 for the first time since she was seven, and she makes her way to Lady Jones. (transformation of Denver from a timid and awkward girl to a self-reliant young woman)

Lady Jones is a mulatto woman with yellow hair; she despises her Caucasian features and married a dark-skinned black man. Because of her light skin, she was picked to go to a school for black girls, and now she teaches the unpicked children of Cincinatti. She remembers Denver, who was one of her brightest students, and tries to help her. Without mentioning the ghost, Denver tells her old teacher that Sethe is sick, and Lady Jones feels great sympathy for their situation.

Over the next few weeks, Denver keeps finding baskets with food in them, with little scraps of paper on which the senders' names are written. Denver returns the baskets and thanks the senders, and so for the first time she gets to know the people in Cincinnati's black community. Lady Jones gives her reading lessons.

The home situation gets worse, as Beloved grows more demanding. Sethe continues to try and explain herself to Beloved, telling her about the horrors of slavery and why she did what she did. She never wanted her daughter to be whipped or have to break her back working like a beast of burden. Above all, she wanted no one to list her daughter's characteristics on the animal side of a sheet of paper. She wants Beloved's forgiveness, but Beloved will not give it. However, Denver listens to her mother's explanations. Realizing that she cannot depend on the community to feed them forever, Denver resolves to get a job. She goes to the Bodwins to ask for help.

Janey, the servant who was there at the arrival of Baby Suggs, still works for the Bodwins. Compared to other whites, the Bodwins are very generous to the black community. Denver sees about getting a night job, telling Janey that Beloved is a cousin who bothers Sethe and contributes to her illness. Before Denver leaves, she sees a piggy bank in the shape of a black boy with exaggerated features, the words "At Yo' Service" written on the base.

Janey spreads the tale that Sethe's dead baby has returned and is punishing her. The story grows as it spreads, and sympathies in the community are with Sethe. Ella, despite her past distrust of Sethe, organizes the women to go and free 124 of the ghost. When she was shared by the white father and son years ago, she gave birth to a baby and neglected it until it died. She does not want the past to interfere with living now, because living in the present, as she sees it, is difficult enough.

On the day that Edward Bodwin comes to 124 to pick up Denver for her first day of work, thirty women of Cincinatti's black community go to rid the house of Beloved. They stay out in the yard, praying and singing. Beloved goes to the porch to confront them, pregnant and naked. Sethe loses control; when Mr. Bodwin comes up the road she is convinced that schoolteacher has come to take Beloved and she runs at him with an ice pick.

 

Part Three, Chapter 27: Summary:

Paul D returns to 124, knowing from Here Boy's presence that Beloved is truly gone. (Here Boy is the dog who was always terrified of the ghost.)

Stamp Paid has told Paul D about the strange events at 124. The voices he once heard have stopped. Mr. Bodwin has decided to sell 124, but it may take some time to find a buyer. He will not press charges against Sethe for the attempted murder, because he was so fixated on Beloved that he did not realize Sethe was trying to kill him. Before Sethe reached him, the women, including Denver and Ella, were able to tackle Sethe to the ground. Mr. Bodwin believes Sethe was trying to kill one of them. Beloved vanished. One minute she was there, naked and pregnant, and the next she was gone.

Paul D also ran into Denver as she was on her way to work at the Bodwins'. Despite their previous dislike for each other, the two had a polite conversation. Denver confided that she believed that Beloved was more than the ghost of her dead sister, but she does not say more than that. She told Paul D that she believes she has lost her mother for good, and exhorted him to treat Sethe well if he visits 124.

Paul D has been trying to make sense of the stories circulating in the community. Some say Beloved came back to make Sethe attack Mr. Bodwin, because Mr. Bodwin was the man who saved her from hanging for the murder of her child. All say that they saw the ghost and then it vanished. A boy who was in the woods behind the house that day claims he saw a naked woman running through the forest, a woman with "fish for hair."

Paul D contemplates his failed escape attempts, working as a slave in both North and South. He ran from Sweet Home, Brandywine, Georgia, Wilmington, and Northpoint, and every time he got caught. At the end of the Civil War, as he tried to make his way North, he saw that blacks were still unsafe, massacred by angry whites throughout much of the South.

His return to 124 is sad. He sees signs of Beloved everywhere: ribbons and other brightly colored cloth, bought for Beloved's pleasure; a garden planted for a child; and, hanging from a wall peg, the dress she wore when she first arrived. Sethe has nearly lost her mind, and lies in bed, unable to care for herself. She has no desire to live or work for living anymore; as Baby Suggs did, she has retired to bed and never leaves.

Paul D tells her he's moving in, and that he'll take care of her at night, when Denver is away. Sethe remembers all of the people who have been with her and then left her: her sons, Amy, her mother, and Beloved. She begins to cry, telling Paul D that Beloved was her "best thing."

Paul D wants to make a life with Sethe, deal with their past and build a future with her. He tells Sethe that she is her own best thing, and a bewildered Sethe replies, "Me? Me?"

 

Part Three, Chapter 28: Summary:

The narrator tells us that Beloved is slowly forgotten, first by the people of the community, and then by the people of 124. For a time, strange events continue, but memories of the ghost begin to fade. There is not even a name to attach to her: "Everyone knew what she was called but no one anywhere knew her name." They cannot remember what she said or if she said anything; they do not pass on her story. Several times, the narrator tells us that "It was not a story to pass on."

The last line of the novel, which simply repeats the title, "Beloved," serves as a haunting and poignant conclusion.

 

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