I finally read Toni Morrison's Pulitzer prize-winning novel, Beloved. I can't believe I never read this incredible novel. It was my October Banned Book read gifted to me by my daughter-in-law, and it is a novel that everyone should read. Taking place shortly after the Civil War, former slave Sethe and her daughter Denver live in Ohio and are haunted by spirit of Sethe's dead baby Beloved. No one in town will associate with them for reasons that become apparent. Another former slave Paul shows up to stay with Sethe and Denver, and soon a young woman appears who shakes up things in the household. Sethe is traumatized by her life as a slave, and Morrison shows the reader the horrors and dangers of treating people as less than human. It is brutal and eye-opening, and heartbreaking. This book should not be banned, it should be required reading. ( )

Sethe es la esclava prófuga que vendió su cuerpo para grabar el nombre de su hija muerta en la lápida: diez minutos por "Beloved", veinte por "Querida Beloved". Muchos años después, Sethe vive en Ohio con Denver, su hija adolescente, y Paul D., un viejo amigo que también fue esclavo. Todos intentan prosperar y olvidar el pasado, hasta que un día aparece una joven que dice llamarse Beloves. Tiene la edad que tendría su hija si viviese y sabe ciertas cosas que sugieren que podría serlo. ( )

This is a great novel that portrays the trauma bestowed on black Americans before, during, and after the Civil War through the telling of a "haint" story of a family haunted by their dead baby. Multigenerational trauma is shown brilliantly, and Morrison does not pull any punches. This is a great book. ( )

I am not going to lie, I have been scared to read this book for a good long time. It exists enough in the culture that I was roughly familiar with what the central wound was at the heart of this book, and I was not ready to bear witness to that, nor to hold it in my own heart. But I have been very slowly making my way through Morrison's work and it was time.

Of course it was incredible. The kind of incredible that had me ready to fight every low rating review on goodreads. Of course no book is for everyone, so I had to let it go. Yes, this book is heartbreaking as advertised, but it is also important, magical, enthralling, painful, so incredibly human, and threaded through with hope. Still processing this one. ( )

I read this haunting novel shortly after it was first published in 1987, at a time I had three young children – an infant and two school-aged – and able only to grab time for reading in small snatches, and books woud take me weeks to read. I have read thousands of books since then, earned a degree in history and political science, with a minor in English, earned a degree in the law, and have practiced law for 24 years. I better comprehend now the horrors inflicted on our enslaved fellow Americans through the vile institution of slavery as it was practiced in this country – and the insidious institutional racism against Black Americans that is its legacy. One would think all of the terrible things I have learned during that time would have toughened me a little for this rereading. Not so. If anything, I understood the horrors better. It was not just a story that happened to remote people at a remote period in time. The horror in this re-reading seemed tangible. Perhaps it was that I listened to the audiobook read by Toni Morrison herself. The inflections, the different voices, were a super-immersive experience.

As I often do, when listening to audiobooks, I read along with some of it. There were times I stopped the audio to go back and quietly read sections to myself. Having just finished a folktalke about a living house that attracts a different kind of haunting (Thistlefoot), reading the story of 124 – the haunted house in Beloved – took on different dimensions for me. For many of the years Sethe and her daughter Denver live at 124, it is haunted by an outrageous ghost, who becomes particularly aggressive when a man from her slave past, Paul D, comes calling. This ghost turns out to be the baby girl Sethe killed rather than let the fugitive hunters take her back to slavery, with only the life of sexual and physical abuse by their master to be subjected to; the haunting, a product of Sethe’s overwhelming guilt. The horrible treatment the former enslaved in this novel have endured is revealed little by little throughout, unspooling, entwining, twisting in upon itself. The novel is based on a newspaper story of a young Black mother who escaped from slavery in Kentucky and crossed the Ohio river to Ohio, a free state, in 1856, and when she was recaptured, under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, she killed her baby daughter to save her from the same fate she endured. The book is set in the years before, during, and after the Civil War. This novel is not for the easily triggered; the many shapes of suffering, the psychosis underlying Sethe's infanticide, and how the horrors where mythically accommodated by the various adult slaves that people this story are not bedtime stories. Even the redemption Sethe finds is tinged with the horrific. A sobering, difficult, but compelling story.
( )