Beloved, a mysterious young woman whom Sethe takes into her home.

Paul D, another survivor of the farm Sethe fled and.Denver, Sethe’s withdrawn teenage daughter.Sethe’s mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, a 70-year-old preacher whose freedom was bought by her son, Sethe’s former husband, Halle.Sethe, a determined young woman who has escaped across the Ohio River to Cincinnati.Under a dehumanizing legal system, her daughter could not even claim the status of human being: Garner was charged not with murder but with destruction of her owner’s property.įrom these spare and powerful ingredients, Beloved weaves a wholly unique reading experience-part ghost story, part romance, part domestic drama, part gripping chronicle of enslavement-to humanize the historical record through the lives of specific individuals: “Suppose having children, being called a mother, was the supreme act of freedom-not its opposite?” The question was sparked by an actual case reported in a newspaper, The Southern Baptist, in 1856: Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who escaped to Cincinnati, Ohio, in the years before the Civil War, was compelled under fugitive slave laws to return to her owner in Kentucky, but killed her infant daughter rather than see the child returned to slavery.

“ Beloved originated as a general question, and was launched by a newspaper clipping,” Morrison said of this novel. Without warning, Toni Morrison’s Beloved ushers you into 124 Bluestone Road, a house where chairs move by themselves, kettles turn over, and handprints appear in cake icing from nowhere, left by a haunting presence which is both an actual ghost and the specter of America’s unforgettable racial history. This title is no longer available for programming after the 2021-2022 grant year.

Beloved 1987