The Literature Book

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were subject to fugitive slave laws

that allowed owners to cross into

free states to reclaim their property.

Piece by piece a story emerges.

Sethe and her husband, Halle,

planned a break for freedom, unable

to endure their treatment at the

hands of the new governor of Sweet

Home, known as “schoolteacher.”

Heavily pregnant, Sethe sent her

two small boys and baby daughter

on ahead. When Halle failed to

arrive at their agreed meeting

place, Sethe traveled on alone,

giving birth to her new daughter

on the way, with the help of a white

girl called Amy Denver. After

reaching safety in Cincinnati, she

found temporary happiness with

her mother-in-law Baby Suggs, a

freed slave. A horrific event—the

details of which are revealed later

in the novel—is triggered by the

arrival of schoolteacher with a

posse to take Sethe and her

children back to the farm.

Moral complexity

Good and evil are not binary

opposites in this story. At its core

is a terrible action committed out

of profound love. The supposedly

“free” society that sympathetic

white folks offer to released slaves

is built on unchallenged racism

and segregation. The absurd notion

of “good” and “bad” slave owners

is addressed by Paul D as he

reexamines life at Sweet Home

under the benign Mr. Garner: on

other farms male slaves were

gelded to make them manageable,

but Garner’s men “are men.” After

Garner’s death, the much harsher

regime instituted by schoolteacher

enabled them to know the real

condition of their slavery for the

first time, and Paul D realizes they

had only been men on home soil by

virtue of Garner’s protection. “One

step off that ground and they were

trespassers among the human race.”

Remembered pain

Self-repression brought on by years

of sociopolitical repression is a

major theme in the novel. Buried

BELOVED

memories are the emotional shards

that make self-determination so

hard, and which are drawn out as

a psychological necessity. Morrison

suggests that black Americans

can begin living in the present

only by confronting the past. The

fragments of earlier events in

Sethe’s and Paul D’s lives slowly

come to the surface throughout

the novel, coalescing into a horrific

account of slavery conditions in the

South—tales that are too terrible

to relate as a consecutive narrative.

“Rememory” is the invented

word that Sethe uses for the kind

of remembering that takes former

slaves deeper into the past to the

appalling places that are always

waiting to reclaim them. Sethe’s

rememories include the time that

schoolteacher instructed his

Slaves were stripped of

their humanity and

treated like animals:

Sethe struggles to build

a sense of self.

Slavery enforced

silence: by recounting her

memories, Sethe confronts

the atrocities in her past.

The bonds of slavery

restricted movement:

Sethe is psychologically

unable to move on

from the past.

The suppression of all

aspects of life under

slavery led to fear and

self-repression, which

hinders Sethe’s progress

as a free woman.

Slavery is a psychological as well as a physical condition.

While slaves are bound in literal chains—shackles, gags, iron

neck collars—the psychological chains that Sethe is left with

as an ex-slave mean that every area of her life is infected.

I never talked about

it. Not to a soul.

Sang it sometimes, but

I never told a soul.

Beloved

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