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Toni Morrison

Beloved Hardcover – Special Edition, October 22, 2019

by Toni Morrison (Author)

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PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

This "brutally powerful, mesmerizing story” (People) is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

“A masterwork.... Wonderful.... I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Knopf
Publication date

October 22, 2019
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0525659277
ISBN-13

978-0525659273
Lexile measure

870L
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A masterwork. . . . Wonderful. . . . I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times

“A triumph.” —Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review

“Toni Morrison’s finest work. . . . [It] sets her apart [and] displays her prodigious talent.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“Dazzling. . . . Magical. . . . An extraordinary work.” —The New York Times

“A masterpiece. . . . Magnificent. . . . Astounding. . . . Overpowering.” —Newsweek

“Brilliant. . . . Resonates from past to present.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story. . . . Read it and tremble.” —People

“Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature.” —New York Review of Books

“A work of genuine force. . . . Beautifully written.” —The Washington Post

“There is something great in Beloved: a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. It gets you.” —The New Yorker

“A magnificent heroine . . . a glorious book.” —The Baltimore Sun

“Superb. . . . A profound and shattering story that carries the weight of history. . . . Exquisitely told.” —Cosmopolitan

“Magical . . . rich, provocative, extremely satisfying.” —Milwaukee Journal

“Beautifully written. . . . Powerful. . . . Toni Morrison has become one of America’s finest novelists.” —The Plain Dealer

“Stunning. . . A lasting achievement.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“Written with a force rarely seen in contemporary fiction. . . . One feels deep admiration.” —USA Today

“Compelling . . . . Morrison shakes that brilliant kaleidoscope of hers again, and the story of pain, endurance, poetry and power she is born to tell comes right out.” —The Village Voice

“A book worth many rereadings.” —Glamour

“In her most probing novel, Toni Morrison has demonstrated once again the stunning powers that place her in the first ranks of our living novelists.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Heart-wrenching . . . mesmerizing.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Shattering emotional power and impact.” —New York Daily News

“A rich, mythical novel . . . a triumph.” —St. Petersburg Times

“Powerful . . . voluptuous.” —New York

About the Author

TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I

124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, 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 band prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once--the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.

Baby Suggs didn't even raise her head. From her sickbed she heard them go but that wasn't the reason she lay still. It was a wonder to her that her grandsons had taken so long to realize that every house wasn't like the one on Bluestone Road. Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present--intolerable--and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.

"Bring a little lavender in, if you got any. Pink, if you don't."

And Sethe would oblige her with anything from fabric to her own tongue. Winter in Ohio was especially rough if you had an appetite for color. Sky provided the only drama, and counting on a Cincinnati horizon for life's principal joy was reckless indeed. So Sethe and the girl Denver did what they could, and what the house permitted, for her. Together they waged a perfunctory battle against the outrageous behavior of that place; against turned-over slop jars, smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour air. For they understood the source of the outrage as well as they knew the source of light.

Baby Suggs died shortly after the brothers left, with no interest whatsoever in their leave-taking or hers, and right afterward Sethe and Denver decided to end the persecution by calling forth the ghost that tried them so. Perhaps a conversation, they thought, an exchange of views or something would help. So they held hands and said, "Come on. Come on. You may as well just come on."

The sideboard took a step forward but nothing else did.

"Grandma Baby must be stopping it," said Denver. She was ten and still mad at Baby Suggs for dying.

Sethe opened her eyes. "I doubt that," she said.

"Then why don't it come?"

"You forgetting how little it is," said her mother. "She wasn't even two years old when she died. Too little to understand. Too little to talk much even."

"Maybe she don't want to understand," said Denver.

"Maybe. But if she'd only come, I could make it clear to her." Sethe released her daughter's hand and together they pushed the sideboard back against the wall. Outside a driver whipped his horse into the gallop local people felt necessary when they passed 124.

"For a baby she throws a powerful spell," said Denver.

"No more powerful than the way I loved her," Sethe answered and there it was again. The welcoming cool of unchiseled headstones; the one she selected to lean against on tiptoe, her knees wide open as any grave. Pink as a fingernail it was, and sprinkled with glittering chips. Ten minutes, he said. You got ten minutes I'll do it for free.

Ten minutes for seven letters. With another ten could she have gotten "Dearly" too? She had not thought to ask him and it bothered her still that it might have been possible--that for twenty minutes, a half hour, say, she could have had the whole thing, every word she heard the preacher say at the funeral (and all there was to say, surely) engraved on her baby's headstone: Dearly Beloved. But what she got, settled for, was the one word that mattered. She thought it would be enough, rutting among the headstones with the engraver, his young son looking on, the anger in his face so old; the appetite in it quite new. That should certainly be enough. Enough to answer one more preacher, one more abolitionist and a town full of disgust.

Counting on the stillness of her own soul, she had forgotten the other one: the soul of her baby girl. Who would have thought that a little old baby could harbor so much rage? Rutting among the stones under the eyes of the engraver's son was not enough. Not only did she have to live out her years in a house palsied by the baby's fury at having its throat cut, but those ten minutes she spent pressed up against dawn-colored stone studded with star chips, her knees wide open as the grave, were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil.

"We could move," she suggested once to her mother-in-law.

"What'd be the point?" asked Baby Suggs. "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband's spirit was to come back in here? or yours? Don't talk to me. You lucky. You got three left. Three pulling at your skirts and just one raising hell from the other side. Be thankful, why don't you? I had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased, and all, I expect, worrying somebody's house into evil." Baby Suggs rubbed her eyebrows. "My firstborn. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember."

"That's all you let yourself remember," Sethe had told her, but she was down to one herself--one alive, that is--the boys chased off by the dead one, and her memory of Buglar was fading fast. Howard at least had a head shape nobody could forget. As for the rest, she worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe. Unfortunately her brain was devious. She might be hurrying across a field, running practically, to get to the pump quickly and rinse the chamomile sap from her legs. Nothing else would be in her mind. The picture of the men coming to nurse her was as lifeless as the nerves in her back where the skin buckled like a washboard. Nor was there the faintest scent of ink or the cherry gum and oak bark from which it was made. Nothing. Just the breeze cooling her face as she rushed toward water. And then sopping the chamomile away with pump water and rags, her mind fixed on getting every last bit of sap off--on her carelessness in taking a shortcut across the field just to save a half mile, and not noticing how high the weeds had grown until the itching was all the way to her knees. Then something. The plash of water, the sight of her shoes and stockings awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her--remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.

When the last of the chamomile was gone, she went around to the front of the house, collecting her shoes and stockings on the way. As if to punish her further for her terrible memory, sitting on the porch not forty feet away was Paul D, the last of the Sweet Home men. And although she could never mistake his face for another's, she said, "Is that you?"

"What's left." He stood up and smiled. "How you been, girl, besides barefoot?"

When she laughed it came out loose and young. "Messed up my legs back yonder. Chamomile."

He made a face as though tasting a teaspoon of something bitter. "I don't want to even hear 'bout it. Always did hate that stuff."

Sethe balled up her stockings and jammed them into her pocket. "Come on in."

"Porch is fine, Sethe. Cool out here." He sat back down and looked at the meadow on the other side of the road, knowing the eagerness he felt would be in his eyes.

"Eighteen years," she said softly.

"Eighteen," he repeated. "And I swear I been walking every one of em. Mind if I join you?" He nodded toward her feet and began unlacing his shoes.

"You want to soak them? Let me get you a basin of water." She moved closer to him to enter the house.

"No, uh uh. Can't baby feet. A whole lot more tramping they got to do yet."

"You can't leave right away, Paul D. You got to stay awhile."

"Well, long enough to see Baby Suggs, anyway. Where is she?"

''Dead.''

"Aw no. When?"

"Eight years now. Almost nine."

"Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard."

Sethe shook her head. "Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part. Sorry you missed her though. Is that what you came by for?"

"That's some of what I came for. The rest is you. But if all the truth be known, I go anywhere these days. Anywhere they let me sit down."

"You looking good."

"Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad." He looked at her and the word "bad" took on another meaning.

Sethe smiled. This is the way they were--had been. All of the Sweet Home men, before and after Halle, treated her to a mild brotherly flirtation, so subtle you had to scratch for it.

Except for a heap more hair and some waiting in his eyes, he looked the way he had in Kentucky. Peachstone skin; straight-backed. For a man with an immobile face it was amazing how ready it was to smile, or blaze or be sorry with you. As though all you had to do was get his attention and right away he produced the feeling you were feeling. With less than a blink, his face seemed to change--underneath it lay the activity.

"I wouldn't have to ask about him, would I? You'd tell me if there was anything to tell, wouldn't you?" Sethe looked down at her feet and saw again the sycamores.

"I'd tell you. Sure I'd tell you. I don't know any more now than I did then." Except for the churn, he thought, and you don't need to know that. "You must think he's still alive."

"No. I think he's dead. It's not being sure that keeps him alive."

"What did Baby Suggs think?"

"Same, but to listen to her, all her children is dead. Claimed she felt each one go the very day and hour."

"When she say Halle went?"

"Eighteen fifty-five. The day my baby was born."

"You had that baby, did you? Never thought you'd make it." He chuckled. "Running off pregnant."

"Had to. Couldn't be no waiting." She lowered her head and thought, as he did, how unlikely it was that she had made it. And if it hadn't been for that girl looking for velvet, she never would have.

"All by yourself too." He was proud of her and annoyed by her. Proud she had done it; annoyed that she had not needed Halle or him in the doing.

"Almost by myself. Not all by myself. A whitegirl helped me."

"Then she helped herself too, God bless her."

"You could stay the night, Paul D."

"You don't sound too steady in the offer."

Sethe glanced beyond his shoulder toward the closed door. "Oh it's truly meant. I just hope you'll pardon my house. Come on in. Talk to Denver while I cook you something."

Paul D tied his shoes together, hung them over his shoulder and followed her through the door straight into a pool of red and undulating light that locked him where he stood.

"You got company?" he whispered, frowning.

"Off and on," said Sethe.

"Good God." He backed out the door onto the porch. "What kind of evil you got in here?"

"It's not evil, just sad. Come on. Just step through."

He looked at her then, closely. Closer than he had when she first rounded the house on wet and shining legs, holding her shoes and stockings up in one hand, her skirts in the other. Halle's girl--the one with iron eyes and backbone to match. He had never seen her hair in Kentucky. And though her face was eighteen years older than when last he saw her, it was softer now. Because of the hair. A face too still for comfort; irises the same color as her skin, which, in that still face, used to make him think of a mask with mercifully punched-out eyes. Halle's woman. Pregnant every year including the year she sat by the fire telling him she was going to run. Her three children she had already packed into a wagonload of others in a caravan of Negroes crossing the river. They were to be left with Halle's mother near Cincinnati. Even in that tiny shack, leaning so close to the fire you could smell the heat in her dress, her eyes did not pick up a flicker of light. They were like two wells into which he had trouble gazing. Even punched out they needed to be covered, lidded, marked with some sign to warn folks of what that emptiness held. So he looked instead at the fire while she told him, because her husband was not there for the telling. Mr. Garner was dead and his wife had a lump in her neck the size of a sweet potato and unable to speak to anyone. She leaned as close to the fire as her pregnant belly allowed and told him, Paul D, the last of the Sweet Home men.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf; Special Edition (October 22, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0525659277
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0525659273
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 870L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.34 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #41,868 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Toni Morrison

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Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of several novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved (made into a major film), and Love. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize. She is the Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University.

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I Love Toni Morrison!

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2023

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Beloved by Toni Morrison
“Something that is loved is never lost.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved
In observation of Banned Books Week 2023, I decided to treat myself and reread Beloved by my favorite author, Toni Morrison. In 1988, Beloved received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award, the Melcher Book Award, the Lyndhurst Foundation Award, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award. When the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Toni Morrison in 1993, it was said that her novels were characterized by " visionary force and poetic import” and that she “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." In 2006, a survey of writers and literary critics compiled by The New York Times ranked Beloved as the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved has been the object of challenges in school districts and public library systems across the country. For instance, in 2022, the Protect Nebraska Children Coalition brought an extensive list of books to the Wauneta-Pallisade (NE) Public Schools board meeting and wanted the books removed from both the elementary and high school libraries. This list of more than 30 titles includes Beloved. All books were subsequently removed for evaluation. In 2016, Beloved was challenged but retained as an optional summer reading choice in the Satellite Beach (FL) High School Advanced Placement classes. A parent admitted that he had not read the entire book when he addressed the committee, but wanted the book banned because of what he called “porn content.” In 2013, Beloved was challenged but retained as a text in Salem (MI) High School Advanced Placement English courses. The complainants cited the allegedly obscene nature of some passages in the book and asked that it be removed from the curriculum. District officials determined the novel was appropriate for the age and maturity level of Advanced Placement students. In reviewing the novel, the committee also considered the accuracy of the material, the objectivity of the material, and the necessity of using the material in light of the curriculum.
Scholars say one of the reasons Toni Morrison’s books are controversial is because they address dark moments in American history that can be uncomfortable to talk about for some people. Beloved, for example, was inspired by The Margaret Garner Incident of 1856. Margaret Garner was born into slavery on June 4, 1834, on Maplewood Plantation in Boone County, Kentucky. Working as a house slave for much of her life, Garner often traveled with her masters and even accompanied them on shopping trips to free territories in Cincinnati, Ohio. After marrying Robert Garner in 1849, Margaret bore four children by 1856. At this time, the Underground Railroad was at its height in and around Cincinnati, transporting numerous slaves to freedom in Canada. The Garners decided to take advantage of such an opportunity to escape enslavement. On Sunday January 27, 1856, they set out for their first stop on their route to freedom, Joseph Kite’s house in Cincinnati. The Garners made it safely to Kite’s home on Monday morning, where they awaited their next guide. Within hours, the Garners’ master, A.K. Gaines, and Federal marshals stormed Kite’s home with warrants for the Garners. Determined not to return to slavery, Margaret decided to take the lives of herself and her children. When the marshals found Margaret in a back room, she had slit her two-year-old daughter’s throat with a butcher knife, killing her. The other children lay on the floor wounded but still alive. The Garners were taken into custody and tried in what became one of the longest fugitive slave trials in history. During the two-week trial, abolitionist and lawyer, John Jolliffe, argued that Margaret’s trips to free territory in Cincinnati entitled her and her children to freedom. Although Jolliffe provided compelling arguments, the judge denied the Garners’ plea for freedom and returned them to Gaines. He relocated the Garners to several different plantations before finally selling them to his brother in Arkansas.
Emily Knox, author of Book Banning in 21st-Century America, states of Toni Morrison’s body of work, that: “What she tried to do is convey the trauma of the legacy of slavery to her readers. That is a violent legacy. Her books do not sugarcoat or use euphemisms. And that is actually what people have trouble with.” Dana A. Williams, President of the Toni Morrison Society and Dean of Howard University’s graduate school says: “Toni Morrison’s books tend to be targeted because she is unrelenting in her belief that the very particular experiences of Black people are incredibly universal. Blackness is the center of the universe for her and for her readers, or for her imagined reader. And that is inappropriate or inadequate or unreasonable or unimaginable for some people.”
Toni Morrison often spoke out against censorship, both of her work and more broadly. Her comments in the introduction of Burn This Book, a 2009 anthology of essays she edited on censorship issues, are especially appropriate for today. “The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.”
In September 2022, as part of New York Public Library’s Banned Books Week celebration, the NYPL honored Toni Morrison. Her words printed below are engraved on one of its walls at its flagship location on 42nd Street.
Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this mission. No committee decides who may enter, no crisis of body or spirit must accompany the entrant. No tuition is charged, no oath sworn, no visa demanded. Of the monuments humans build for themselves, very few say 'touch me, use me, my hush is not indifference, my space is not a barrier.' If I inspire awe, it is because I am in awe of you and the possibilities that dwell in you.
Resources
Toni Morrison on writing 'Beloved' (1987 interview)
Toni Morrison talks to Peter Florence
Toni Morrison on Beloved | Hay Festival
Why should you read Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”? - Yen Pham
"Beloved" - Banned Books Week 2021
Readout: Beloved - Banned Books Week 2020
Banned Books Conversations - Beloved by Toni Morrison

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Kindle Customer Carol E

Difficult to keep reading

Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2023

Verified Purchase

The style of writing made this a very difficult book to read. With the timeline jumping all over the place and characters reappearing in the story when they had died previously. I read it because it appeared on a list of the 10 most interesting historical novels. I almost gave up on it several times, but I did finish it. I'm not necessarily glad I read it.

14 people found this helpful

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TeeMee-Kraftqueen65-Obsessive Reader

Classic In My Books/Library Loan

Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2023

Verified Purchase

Anything Toni Morrison wrote should be considered a classic, and this one isn’t any different.
It’s my 2nd reading of this and I can’t believe it’s taken be this long to reread it.

The anguish, the torment the distress, you feel through Sethe’s words on the page comes through loud and clear. But so does her pleasure in which she found enjoyment through some of her "re-memories.”
Every character’s actions, past, present and future, jump out at you, expressively painted through the lyrical dialogue and phrases belonging to Sethe.

Her good spirits, her jubilation, even the horrific misery, torment, and humiliation she endured in her lifetime, are painted so clearly, making you feel them all the way deep down from the heart to the soul.

The saddest part, for me at least, is never having a new novel from an author like Morrison come around again. She was a rare and talented writer. All we can doing is continue to honor the gifts she left behind, in all her other books. May she rest in blessed peace.

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Douglass Andrew Morrison

Powerful, painful, and important

Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2023

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I sensed that reading Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved was going to require some courage. Once I started reading, I could not look away despite the pain associated with continued reading.
I will quote from her Introduction, in which she tells you what she will do, and how she will do it in the pages that follow.
“A newspaper clipping in The Black Book summarized the story of Margaret Garner, a young mother who, having escaped slavery, was arrested for killing one of her children and trying to kill the others rather than let them be returned to slavery. She became a cause in the fight against the Fugitive Slave laws, which mandated the return of slaves to their owners (also the theme of Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn). Her sanity and lack of repentance caught the attention of Abolitionists as well as newspapers…

I think now it was the shock of liberation that drew me to what free could possibly mean to women…
Inevitably these thoughts led me to the different history of black women in this country -
-a history in which marriage was discouraged, impossible, or illegal;
-in which birthing children was required,
-but having them, being responsible for them – being, in other words, their parent – was as out of the question as freedom.
-Assertions of parenthood under conditions peculiar to the logic of institutional enslavement were criminal…
The heroine would represent the unapologetic acceptance of shame and terror; assume the consequences of infanticide; claim her own freedom…
To invite readers into the repellant landscape was to pitch a tent in a cemetery inhabited by a highly vocal ghost…
I wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population – just as the characters were snatched from one place to another…without preparation or defense…"
While reading Beloved, I felt kidnapped; transported into an alien environment; and snatched from one place to another; among ghosts of something I could barely imagine...
After reading Beloved I felt compassion, sadness, and emptiness.

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Wortmagie

Eindringlich, psychologisch vielschichtig, unverzichtbar

Reviewed in Germany on August 8, 2017

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Interessiert man sich für weibliche, afroamerikanische Literatur, kommt man an Toni Morrison nicht vorbei. 1993 erhielt sie als erste schwarze Frau den Literaturnobelpreis. Bereits fünf Jahre zuvor wurde ihr Roman „Beloved“, in dem sie sich mit der Geschichte der Sklaverei in den USA auseinandersetzt, mit dem Pulitzer-Preis ausgezeichnet. Das Buch basiert lose auf der Biografie von Margaret Garner, die 1856 ihre zweijährige Tochter tötete, um sie vor einem Leben in Sklaverei zu bewahren. Ich habe lange gebraucht, bis ich bereit für „Beloved“ war. Tatsächlich begann ich das Buch schon einmal, bemerkte aber, dass ich mit dem Schreibstil noch nicht zurechtkam und stellte es zurück ins Regal. Drei Jahre wartete es geduldig auf mich.

18 Jahre ist es her, dass Sethe eine Sklavin in Sweet Home war. Unaussprechliches wurde ihr angetan, bis sie, hochschwanger und allein, floh. Zu Fuß schlug sie sich nach Ohio durch, wo sie im Haus ihrer Schwiegermutter Baby Suggs unterkam. Heute ist die 124 ihr Heim, in dem sie mit ihrer Tochter Denver lebt. Freiheit ist jedoch mehr als ein physischer Zustand. Noch immer wird Sethe von ihren Erinnerungen heimgesucht. In ihrem Haus spukt der Geist ihres Babys, auf dessen Grabstein ein einziges Wort eingraviert ist: Beloved. Als ein Besucher aus ihrer Vergangenheit eines Tages auf der Schwelle der 124 auf Sethe wartet, scheint es, als erhielte sie erstmals eine Chance auf wahres Glück. Doch diese Hoffnung währt nur einige Herzschläge, denn kurz darauf tritt eine junge Frau in ihr Leben, die Sethes Glauben, ihre Mutterliebe und ihr Verständnis von Freiheit hart auf die Probe stellt. Sie sagt, sie heißt Beloved…

Wie könnte ich für dieses preisgekrönte Buch weniger als fünf Sterne vergeben? „Beloved“ ist ein moderner Klassiker, der das vor allem in den USA ungeliebte Thema der Sklaverei psychologisch vielschichtig und glaubwürdig bespricht. Erstaunlicherweise halte ich den Roman trotz dessen nicht für eine Abhandlung über Sklaverei. Meiner Meinung nach ist es eine Geschichte darüber, was Freiheit bedeutet, speziell für farbige Frauen. Laut Vorwort entspricht dieser Eindruck auch Toni Morrisons Intention. Die Handlung spielt vermutlich zwischen 1865 und 1890, nach dem amerikanischen Sezessionskrieg und der offiziellen Abschaffung der Sklaverei. Im Mittelpunkt stehen Vergangenheit und Gegenwart der Protagonistin Sethe, die untrennbar miteinander verwoben sind. Sethe lebte viele Jahre als Sklavin auf der Farm Sweet Home in Kentucky, bis sie die Qualen unter ihren weißen Herren nicht mehr aushielt und den gefährlichen Entschluss traf, zu fliehen. Ich war sehr dankbar, dass Sethes Sklavenzeit zur Gegenwart des Buches bereits knapp 20 Jahre zurückliegt. Dadurch erlebte ich ihr Leid mit einem gewissen Abstand und war nicht gezwungen, die furchtbaren Torturen, die ihr angetan wurden, live zu beobachten. Ich will damit nicht ausdrücken, dass ich die Augen vor der Realität verschließe, doch die menschenunwürdigen Methoden der Sklavenhalter in Sweet Home waren selbst als Rückblenden äußerst schwer zu ertragen. Sethes Rücken ist von Narben entstellt, die Zeugnis vom brutalen, rücksichtslosen Einsatz der Peitsche tragen. Morrison vergleicht das Narbengewebe mit einem Baum, aus dem neues Leben entspringt – als ich diesen Absatz las, liefen mir Tränen über die Wangen, weil es mir sehr zu Herzen ging, dass die Autorin für etwas so schreckliches und falsches wundervolle Worte fand. Ihren Schreibstil empfand ich insgesamt als sanftmütig, gefasst und würdevoll; sie wedelt nicht mit dem moralischen Zeigefinger vor den Augen ihrer Leser_innen, sondern lässt die beschämenden Wahrheiten ihrer Geschichte für sich selbst sprechen. Sie deutet vieles erst nur an und führt es später genauer aus, wodurch sich das Gesamtbild der Erlebnisse der Sklaven in Sweet Home und ihrer Strategien, ihre Erinnerungen zu verarbeiten, langsam zusammensetzt. Während Baby Suggs ihr Herz für alle öffnete und sich zu einer spirituellen Leitfigur entwickelte, konzentrierte sich Sethe voll auf ihre Mutterrolle. Es stimmte mich traurig, dass Sethe sich zwar selbst befreite, aber niemals frei wurde. Ihre Vergangenheit bestimmt noch immer jeden ihrer Schritte. Sie verfolgt keine Pläne oder Träume, weil ihre Fähigkeit zur Fantasie irreparabel verkrüppelt wurde. Sie flüchtet sich in Gewohnheiten, die ihr Sicherheit vermitteln. Ihr einziger Wunsch lautet, dass ihre Kinder es besser haben sollen. Ich hatte das Gefühl, dass Sethe unbewusst die ganze Zeit darauf wartet, dass das Leben, das sie sich mühsam aufbaute, erneut von außen demontiert wird. Sie erwartet neuen Schmerz, neues Leiden und konnte deshalb nie lernen, ihr Leben auszufüllen, obwohl ihr Lebenswille unfassbar stark ist. So stark, dass sie als Löwenmutter in Kauf nahm, ihre eigene Familie zu zerstören, um ihre Kinder vor den Erfahrungen zu retten, die ihr aufgezwungen wurden. Bis heute beteuert sie die Rechtmäßigkeit ihrer verzweifelten Entscheidungen, doch auf mich wirkte es, als lechze sie nach Absolution. Sie ist nicht überzeugt, dass ihr Handeln richtig war und geißelt sich jeden Tag. Ich habe versucht, mich in sie hineinzuversetzen, herauszufinden, was ich an ihrer Stelle getan hätte. Ich habe keine Antwort gefunden. Ich kann das Ausmaß der Verzweiflung, das Sethe empfunden haben muss, unmöglich nachempfinden, so sehr ich mich auch anstrenge. Darum urteile ich nicht über sie. Ich bemühe mich lediglich, sie zu verstehen, wie Toni Morrison es meiner Ansicht nach auch beabsichtigte.

„Beloved“ ist eine eindringliche Aufarbeitung der psychologischen Folgen der Sklaverei, die unverzichtbar für den amerikanischen und globalen Kanon ist. Toni Morrison sagte einst, dass sie das Buch geschrieben habe, weil es für die Opfer der Sklaverei in den USA keinerlei Denkmäler gäbe. Ich glaube, man muss diesen Roman genau auf diese Weise lesen: als Hommage, als Gedenken, als Anerkennung des millionenfachen Leids, dass die Sklaverei verursachte. Wir müssen uns mit unserer Verantwortung, unserer Schuld auseinandersetzen, nicht nur in den Staaten, sondern weltweit, weil die schiere Dimension der Grausamkeit, mit der Menschen damals wie Vieh behandelt wurden, uns alle angeht. Wir wollen mal nicht vergessen, dass sich auch europäische Länder eine goldene Nase mit dem Sklavenhandel verdienten. Außerdem halte ich eine Aufarbeitung dieses vergangenen Unrechts, wie „Beloved“ sie bietet, für unumgänglich, um gegen dessen Entsprechungen in der Gegenwart kämpfen zu können. Sklaverei wird heute Menschenhandel genannt, aber das Prinzip hat sich nicht verändert. Noch immer gibt es Menschen, die ähnliche Verzweiflung und ähnliches Leid wie Sethe erfahren. Jeden Tag. Überall.

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Muskan Jain

A Must Read!

Reviewed in India on August 16, 2023

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Toni Morrison's Beloved is a compelling and beautifully written novel.A must read for all the lovers of Historical-fiction!!
Also,the book arrived in good condition.I'm happy with the purchase

Antenna

The guilt of the innocent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 31, 2019

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In the aftermath of the American Civil War, former slave Sethe persists in living with her sullen daughter Denver in the Cincinnati house widely believed to be haunted by the angry ghost of her murdered baby, whom she named “Beloved”, having earned the cost of carving this on her headstone by having sex with the engraver, regretting too late not to have spent enough time to pay for “Dearly” to be added first. Her life seems to improve with the arrival of Paul D (so named by his former master to distinguish him from Paul A or Paul F) who breaks a table in his wrestling to cast out the spirit of the furious baby, which has already driven away Sethe’s two sons. Yet her life is at risk of being taken over and perhaps destroyed by a second newcomer with whom she becomes obsessed, the oddly vacant young woman who calls herself Beloved and inexplicably seems to know about aspects of Sethe’s past life without being told.

Toni Morrison was inspired to write this novel by the real-life situation of Margaret Garner, the escaped slave who killed her child rather than have her suffer enslavement in turn. This prize-winning modern classic succeeds in portraying the fundamental evil of slavery, namely in depriving a person of his or her sent of identity. Her characters are bought and sold like objects or livestock, even by relatively humane owners. Relationships are not respected, nor even recognised with small children often unable to identify their mothers, husbands and wives are separated, women violated.

Continually risking bold experimentation in her style, Toni Morrison gave free rein to her vivid imagination and powerful, often poetical prose. Descriptions of childbirth and acts of violence are not for the squeamish. By contrast, the writing is often unexpectedly leavened by observations of wrily humorous clarity.

In the face of strong endorsements by famous feminist writers at the end of my copy of this novel, I hesitate to criticise this book. As an African-American, Toni Morrison was clearly well-qualified and justified in writing impassioned condemnations of the enduring evil effects of slavery long after its abolition. So why did I find it such hard going? This was only partly due to the frequent grimness of the subject matter. Although this will put some readers off, it is clearly relevant to the tale.

Despite appreciating the frequently used device of gradually revealing key facts, one problem for me was the confusing, often repetitive drip-feed nature of explanations for a number of intriguing questions. Why, how, even by whom, was Sethe’s baby killed? What really happened at the inaptly named “Sweet Home” where Sethe and her husband Halle worked for years until the estate was taken over by the sadistic “Schoolteacher”?

The worst aspect for me was what I believe Toni Morrison disliked to hear called “magic realism”. I concede that, being illiterate through no fault of her own, unable to tell the time except for knowing that it was noon when both hands of the clock pointed upwards together, Sethe was likely to be susceptible to superstition. Also, in a deprived slave community, tales of the supernatural passed down from tribal ancestors were all Sethe had of a personal history. However, are readers really expected to believe that the murdered child continues to make her presence felt as a kind of malign poltergeist, and that after being driven away by Paul D she is reincarnated in the body of Beloved who duly appears? Some scenes so resemble corny ghost stories that they seem to me to detract seriously from the calibre of the novel and muddy the "genre".

I prefer the interpretation that the atmosphere in the house was tainted by Sethe’s sense of guilt and the opprobrium of the local community for what she had done, and that she and the young woman calling herself Beloved by coincidence were both disturbed, confused and wanting certain things to be so, such as having respectively a mother-daughter or a compensating love-vengeful hate relationship.

On reflection, having laboured through this novel, it rose in my estimation, and I should reread some passages to appreciate their originality and worth, but the tendency to melodrama, excessive sentimentality and an overblown style deter me from this.

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FictionFan

A story to pass on...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 21, 2016

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Sethe and her daughter, Denver, live isolated lives in their community, because everyone knows that their house at no. 124 is haunted. Sethe's two sons have already left, unable to take any more of the spiteful tricks played by the ghost. But Sethe and Denver see the ghost differently. To Sethe it is the other daughter that she lost, a child known only by the single word carved on her gravestone, “Beloved”. The ghost is angry but Sethe understands why and endlessly forgives, no matter how cruel or violent her behaviour. And to Denver, the ghost is her sister, her only companion in her loneliness. Then one day a man from Sethe's past arrives, Paul D, who knew her when they were both slaves on Sweet Home. It seems at first that he has driven the ghost away, until some weeks later a strange young woman arrives at the house – her name, Beloved.

Despite the ghostly presence of Beloved, this is mainly a straightforward account of the horrific treatment meted out to many slaves and of the need for the characters to face their past in order to be able to create a better future in their hard-won freedom. Beloved is an obvious metaphor for slavery itself, still haunting and torturing those who have apparently escaped its chains. And the 'message' is that freedom is as much a state of mind as of body – that slavery's after-effects still have Sethe in its toils, and that even the next generations, embodied in Denver and the missing sons, live their lives in its shadow.

The simplicity of the message does not, however, make it in any way a simple book. Morrison's brilliant writing and imagery turn this into one of the most powerful and emotionally devastating books I have ever read. There is furious anger here, in scenes of brutal horror, cruelty and vile humiliation, but the overwhelming tone is of a sorrowful lament for humanity. And to make it bearable, just, there is also beauty, love, some kind of healing, and ultimately hope.

Sethe was born into slavery and sold to Sweet Home when she was a young girl – the only girl amongst a small group of men. Sethe had her pick of them and her choice fell on Halle. The story of Sethe's time on Sweet Home is told in flashback, so the reader is quickly aware that some horrific series of events led to a heavily pregnant Sethe, alone, on the run, trying to make her way to the Free States. Her three children had been smuggled out before her and she is desperate to get to her youngest daughter, whom Sethe was still breast-feeding when they separated. But we also know from flashbacks to a later period, when Sethe has made it to freedom, that this is the daughter who dies in infancy.

Morrison uses the imagery of milk throughout the book, as a symbol of the bond between mother and daughter, and of the basic right of any woman to nurture her own child. Sethe herself was denied this right as a child – it was more economic for there to be one slave to feed all the children than to allow mothers to feed their own. So for her, giving her milk to her own children is a deep need, an assertion of her humanity. And in an act of extreme brutality, she is subjected to something that for her is worse than rape – the stealing of her milk, her children's milk. It is this moment of fundamental violation that drives her to act as she does – to be willing to do anything rather than see her children, especially her daughters, raised as slaves.

Paul D's story is just as harsh, and Morrison's telling of it is an eloquent indictment of some of the worst practices inflicted on slaves – not just appalling physical cruelty, but a process of psychological dehumanisation that left the men stripped of the strength to rebel. And perhaps the worst aspect of it is that it is entirely believable – the basest cruelties carried out with a casual disregard – man's inhumanity to man indeed.

These are the histories that Sethe and Paul D, and Beloved, must face and understand before they can have hope of true freedom. As the memories, or rememories as Sethe calls them, are told, they will have to be able to forgive each other and themselves for the things they did to survive. And Denver, the one child not born into slavery, if she is to provide hope for future generations, will have to find some way to break the chains that bind her to her mother's history. As the book draws towards the climax, these three women, Sethe, Denver and Beloved, reveal their deepest selves in an intertwining stream of consciousness of unforgettable horror, power and dark beauty.

Even when the imagery is at its harshest, Morrison fills it with a savage poetry that lifts it to something so much more than a mere catalogue of human baseness. The sheer beauty of the writing contrasts so vividly with the ugliness of the story that it, in itself, provides a kind of promise of redemption – a proof that humanity can indeed rise from the ashes, however devastating the fire. In the end, Sethe comes to believe that Beloved's is not a story to pass on – but it is! It is a story that must be understood if we are ever to truly understand ourselves, and ultimately isn't that what literature is for? Tragic that such a book should ever have come to be written, heartbreaking and devastating to read, but I count it a true privilege to have been given an opportunity to hear Beloved's story.

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PPS

Back to the 1800s USA!

Reviewed in India on July 26, 2023

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This is a Historical Fiction that has layers upon layers. Racism explained through metaphors that will really make you brood... As I read, I found myself flinching over the Trauma that the black race suffered in the mid - 1800s USA!

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