307
See also: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 126–27 ■ Their Eyes Were Watching God 235 ■ Invisible Man 259 ■
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings 291 ■ Roots: The Saga of an American Family 3331970s, when authors such as Alex
Haley, Maya Angelou, and Alice
Walker sought new ways to
explore race, identity, and the
legacies of slavery. This affirmation
of the power of black writing has
continued into the present day with
“hyphenated American” authors,
including Dominican-American
Junot Díaz and Haitian-American
Edwidge Danticat.Memory and history
In her early novels—The Bluest
Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon—
Morrison focused on the African-
American experience within her
own lifetime, offering an original
voice on themes such as moral and
spiritual revival, white standards
of beauty, and sisterhood. Her
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
Beloved is regarded as one of the
most influential works in African-
American literature. Dedicated to
the “Sixty Million and more” who
are believed to have died on slave
ships and in captivity, it reclaims
the ascendancy of memory and
history in black identity, resolving
symbolically issues that are still
swept aside in present-day reality.Inspired by the real-life case of
Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave
who killed her baby after she
was recaptured by marshals in
Cincinnati, Ohio, Beloved is a
piece of social history with a strong
political agenda, but it undermines
expectations of its genre with its
use of expressionist fantasy and
rhetorical stylization. Morrison also
asserts her roots and her pride in
African folklore by incorporating
the cultural focus, origins, and
mythology of black Americans
into the novel. She employs the
rhythms and speech patterns
of African-American discourse,
not as a simple pastiche of black
speech but in a lyrical, incantatory
voice, often making use of poetic
repetitions at the beginning and
the end of interior monologues:
“Beloved is my sister,” “She’s mine,
Beloved. She’s mine,” “I am Beloved
and she is mine.” The author invents
a feminine style of narrative built
around motherhood, sisterhood,
Afro-Christian revivalism, tribal
rites, and ghosts. She asks thereader to engage with a retelling
of history that is built on an easy
intimacy with the supernatural.
The book begins in 1873 in
Cincinnati, Ohio. Slavery has
been abolished but racism is still
rife. Sethe, a former slave, and her
18-year-old daughter Denver live in
a home haunted by a spiteful baby
spirit named 124, after the number
of their house on Bluestone Road.
Sethe’s two sons ran away years
ago and her mother-in-law, Baby
Suggs, is dead. The arrival of Paul
D, who lived as a slave with Sethe
at Sweet Home, Kentucky, starts
a process that unlocks the past.The past in the present
Morrison’s time-traveling story slips
back and forth between Sethe’s
present and events 20 years earlier,
when slaves fleeing north ❯❯CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
Freed slaves, such as these men
photographed during the American
Civil War, were technically free, but they
were still affected by segregation and
the psychological aftermath of slavery.Not a house in the
country ain’t packed to
its rafters with some
dead Negro’s grief.
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