Beloved

Beloved 

Toni Morrison

Beloved was inspired by the true story of a woman called Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in 1856, only to be hunted down by slave catchers. She killed her little daughter with a knife rather than have her raised as a slave.

The narrative was like a muddy stream nearing backwaters, that moved forward , backwards and stagnated in accordance with the tide. It's not easy to glide along and that's how Sethe's mind worked too, riddled with grief and guilt, ambiguous and traumatic. However hard she tried to keep moving forward, she was often flown backwards. Escaped from slavery, she was enslaved by the past.

" Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened."

She couldn't explain the torture she suffered as a slave, at Sweet Home plantation, Kentucky not even to Denver, her youngest child and the only one with her. She didn't want her children to 'stumble on her past memories'. 

Kneading dough for a living, her major work is to bury the past deeper and deeper.

“Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start that day’s serious work of beating back the past.”

After just 28 days of freedom, when she saw the Sweet Home manager( the schoolteacher) coming to gather them back, she took her children to the woodshed. She simply couldn't give her children away to the people who carved "a tree on her back and took all her milk."

"And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe." 

Sethe's mother's love was so thick.

“Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.” 

"Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one."

Baby Suggs , Sethe's mother in law and a former slave of Sweet Home, " did not know where her children were buried or what they looked like if alive, fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like."

Simple experiences of human existence were beyond reach for a slave.

The school teacher told his nephew who tortured Sethe,

“You just can’t mishandle creatures and expect success.”

The mentioned creatures being dark- skinned homosapiens.

"Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another" 

Baby Suggs did claim ownership quite successfully, until things collapsed at home, until her daughter in law murdered her grandchild.

Coming back from jail, Seth was haunted by the baby ghost 'Beloved',  along with guilt, grief and past trauma.

But towards the end, 124, Bluestone Road, Cincinnati , Ohio is cleared of spiteful 'Beloved' , Denver took charge of affairs and Paul D took Sethe's hand and said,

“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow"

Beloved is not an easy read. I should acknowledge  that the forword by Bernardine Evaristo, in the Kindle edition I read, helped to dive into the depths a little better.

Preetha Raj