“Beloved” by Toni Morrison – Slaved by Ghosts

The hardships slaves encountered during their captivity are relatively well documented, and there are plenty of different books and novels detailing them.

However, very few of them have actually gone to explore the lives slaves led after being freed and the kinds of obstacles they had to face when gifted with liberty.

In Beloved by Toni Morrison, we are treated to such a story as we make the acquaintance of Sethe, a former slave of the Sweet Home farm who has been free for more than eighteen years now. However, her life is far from being in order as she is still haunted by ghosts, both figurative and literal ones.

The memories of all the atrocities committed at the farm never leave her mind, in addition to which the ghost of her dead and nameless baby haunts her home, breaking mirrors and leaving prints in cake icing.

The story is told through numerous flashbacks that are out of order, giving the reader bits and details into Sethe’s life and the torments she had to go through while living on that farm. Morrison’s way of charming the English language actually elevates that technique to another level, gifting us with one breath-taking image after the next.

Everything is crafted with an astonishing amount of detail and precision, making for very deep characters, each one having his or her own distinctive “aura” if you will. The author doesn’t explicitly spell out all of the details, and it becomes up to the reader to link certain events to one another, ultimately leading to the true source of Sethe’s demons.

Though it may be a bit confusing to try and piece this puzzle together at first, as you go on it becomes easier and easier, paying off in the end with a heart-wrenching climax where all is revealed and finally put together.

The whole concept of the ghost haunting is actually played out quite well in my opinion, giving it another element to help explore Sethe’s shattered psyche. As she learns to live with the ghost and even becomes accustomed to the hauntings of her own dead baby, we get to witness a very interesting side of human nature touching on the most irrational kind of love we can have, and our unwillingness to let it go no matter the reason.

It even adds a tiny comic relief to an otherwise dark and grizzly novel, though I believe that some people out there won’t take too kindly to this touch of supernatural.

All things considered, if you are interested in slow-paced novels about the human psyche and how spending years in slavery can affect, then I recommend you check out Beloved; in the end, it makes for an educative and entertaining novel that will hook you in and make you keep reading just to find out what hardships Sethe and her people had to face.

---

Toni Morrison Toni Morrison (born as Chloe Ardelia Wofford) is an American novelist and professor whose novels have been making waves in the community for quite some time now for their epic nature and the completeness with which everything in them is developed, with some of her more noteworthy efforts including The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988, a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.