Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1)

by Toni Morrison

pitch a tent in a cemetery inhabited by highly vocal ghosts.

wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book’s population—just

Slavery

Denver. She was ten

Ten minutes, he said. You got ten minutes I’ll do it for free.

Engrave the headstone

Paul D, the last of the Sweet Home men.

six of them who belonged to the farm, Sethe the only female.

Sethe was thirteen when she came to Sweet Home

present for Mrs. Garner who had lost Baby Suggs to her husband’s high principles.

so sick with the absence of women they had t...

rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized.

Sethe had the amazing luck of six whole years of marriage to that “somebody” son who had fathered every one of her children.

Halle

For years they saw each other in full daylight only on Sundays. The rest of the time they spoke or touched or ate in darkness.

Sethe and Halle

winter came in a hurry at suppertime and stayed eight months.

beautiful

the house, regarding it, as she always did, as a person rather than a structure.

Metaphor

“You never told me all what happened. Just that they whipped you and you run off, pregnant. With me.”

None of them knew the downright pleasure of enchantment, of not suspecting but knowing the things behind things.

Ghosts

To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.

Odd clusters and strays of Negroes wandered the back roads and cowpaths

4 years after war

profound satisfaction Beloved got from storytelling.

“In the dark my name is Beloved.”

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

sixty years a slave and ten years free: that there was no bad luck in the world but whitepeople.

Baby Suggs

Death is a skipped meal compared to this.

Loss of Beloved

What’s fair ain’t necessarily right.”

The Yankees in control left the Rebels out of control.

Post war