We lucky this ghost is a baby.” But the little old baby harbours a lot of rage and drives out Sethe’s two sons from home. As grandmother Baby Suggs says, “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief. Beloved is angry and she shows up everywhere - breaking mirrors, forcing her tiny handprints into a cake’s icing, smashing plates.Ī life of slavery with all its horrors perhaps prepares the household for the supernatural. To prefix it with ‘Dearly’ would have taken more from her mother, a strength for sex she didn’t have. The engraver took 10 minutes of her mother’s time for that one word. She is the eponymous Beloved, as simply engraved on her tombstone. It’s home to a little ghost, of Sethe’s baby daughter, whose throat was slit by her mother 18 years ago when she was two. It’s no ordinary house: “124 was spiteful. At the heart of the novel is Sethe, a mother in her 30s who lives in a farmhouse, number 124, in Ohio, with her daughter Denver. It’s set after the end of the Civil War when slaves were emancipated, but most characters look back to a time when slavery wasn’t outlawed. Morrison, who turns 87 tomorrow (February 18), let her imagination rework Margaret’s story, giving it an incredible emotional, ironic and social sweep. Margaret’s life inspired American writer Toni Morrison’sīeloved (1987), which bagged the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

It’s a real account of a fugitive slave, Margaret Garner, who in January 1856, while trying to escape Kentucky with her family, killed her daughter and intended to kill her three other children and herself rather than allow them to be captured to be returned to slavery. At the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., is a wood engraving after a painting by Thomas Satterwhite Noble showing slave catchers confronting a lady near the body of the daughter she has killed.

Beloved 1987