crawling” but not yet named baby girl. After serv-
ing time for her crime, Sethe returns to Bluestone
Road to continue her life, while attempting to keep
the past “at bay.”
At the beginning of the novel, Sethe, Denver
(now 18), and the sad, spiteful spirit of Sethe’s
murdered baby girl are living at 124 Bluestone
Road when Paul D—who had been captured dur-
ing the attempted escape from Sweet Home, sold
South, and eventually consigned to a chain gang—
joins them. He immediately drives away the spirit
child, only to have it return in the flesh, the identi-
cal age she would have been had she lived. Identi-
fying herself as B-E-L-O-V-E-D, the letters written
on her gravestone, the fleshly ghost personifies the
composite desire that deprivation under slavery
fomented. A highly disruptive presence, Beloved
not only seduces Paul D and drives him away but
also sets about draining the life out of Sethe, her
guilt-ridden mother, who is eventually rescued
and saved by a communal exorcism.
The other major characters include Baby Suggs,
the spiritual center of the free black community,
and Denver, its symbolic future. Baby Suggs is also
the ancestral presence Denver must invoke to save
Sethe’s life. Present only in the memories of Sethe
and Paul D, Sixo is the most apparent symbol of
physical resistance in the novel. In one detailed
confrontation with Schoolteacher, Sixo is beaten;
in another he is killed during an escape attempt
when Schoolteacher realizes that he will never be
a willing slave. Ella, along with Stamp Paid, oper-
ates the Underground Railroad station, the venue
through which Sethe and her children successfully
arrive at 124 Bluestone Road. Ella, a former slave
who had been made the sex object for a slave owner
and his son, measures life’s atrocities against what
the two did to her. She leads the communal exor-
cism that saves Sethe’s life. Born Joshua, Stamp
Paid renamed himself after being forced to give his
wife over as concubine to his master’s son. When
Stamp Paid shows Paul D the newspaper clipping
with the record of Sethe’s heinous deed and result-
ing arrest, he enhances the wedge between Paul D
and Sethe that Beloved’s presence had set in place.
Shortly after Paul D confronts Sethe with this in-
formation, Sethe realizes that Beloved is, indeed,
her daughter.
In addition to portraying a previously missing
black historical subject, TONI MORRISON aims with
Beloved to depict the inner lives of blacks who were
victimized by New World slavery. She addresses
questions concerning self-identity, manhood,
motherhood, womanhood, sexual and reproduc-
tive exploitation, love, and desire. She makes actual
historical events part of the narrative, displaying
her extensive knowledge of African and African-
American folklore. Beloved received unprecedented
critical acclaim and attention for a work by an
African-American writer. The novel garnered for
Morrison a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and was largely
responsible for her Nobel Prize for literature in- In 2006, a panel of critics assembled by the
New York Times named Beloved the best work of
American fiction published in the last 25 years.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andrews, William L., and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. Toni
Morrison’s Beloved: A Casebook. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Beloved; Modern Critical Inter-
pretations. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999.
Plasa, Carl, ed. Toni Morrison’s Beloved. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999.
Solomon, Barbara H., ed. Critical Essays on Toni
Morrison’s Beloved. Critical Essays on American
Literature. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998.
Lovalerie KingBelton, Don (1956– )
Although Don Belton’s family moved into an inte-
grated Philadelphia neighborhood two years after
the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of
Education of Topeka, which declared illegal “sepa-
rate but equal” practices in the United States, he
grew up in the Hill District of Newark, New Jersey,
cared for by his grandmother, before the riots of- Slipping through the cracks of imprison-
ing spaces to which Newark’s “black boys” were
often consigned (unlike his brothers and nephew),
Belton, Don 41