Beloved
SynopsisPlot
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.
Story
About this book
Beloved is set in Ohio after the American Civil War and follows Sethe, a woman who escaped slavery yet remains bound by what she survived. She lives at the edge of town with her daughter Denver and her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, in a house haunted by her baby, who died without a name and whose gravestone carries only the word Beloved.
Eighteen years after her escape, the farm she fled, called Sweet Home, still presses into daily life. Paul D, once enslaved on the same farm, arrives and begins to speak with Sethe about captivity and their brief glimpses of freedom. Then a young woman who calls herself Beloved appears, and the line between past and present starts to give way.
Morrison shapes the novel around the different ways slavery keeps acting on each member of the household: Denver's fear of leaving the house, Baby Suggs' exhaustion of spirit, and Sethe's daily effort to hold the past at bay. Memory, naming, and love take on physical force here. The book received the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
