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. 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.
Margaret’s life inspired American writer Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), which bagged the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Morrison, who turns 87 tomorrow (February 18), let her imagination rework Margaret’s story, giving it an incredible emotional, ironic and social sweep.
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. 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 no ordinary house: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”
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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. She is the eponymous Beloved, as simply engraved on her tombstone. The engraver took 10 minutes of her mother’s time for that one word. To prefix it with ‘Dearly’ would have taken more from her mother, a strength for sex she didn’t have. Beloved is angry and she shows up everywhere — breaking mirrors, forcing her tiny handprints into a cake’s icing, smashing plates.
Of cultural importance
A life of slavery with all its horrors perhaps prepares the household for the supernatural. As grandmother Baby Suggs says, “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief. 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.
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Soon, Baby Suggs passes on too. Sethe and Denver live with the tiny ghost till the arrival of two people — one from the past, Paul D, who was at the slavery plantation, ironically called Sweet Home, they all lived in years ago, and a 20-year-old girl from the present who calls herself Beloved. This besieging by ghosts past and present holds up a mirror to race relations that is relevant more than ever now.
In early 2006, The New York Times ’ Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus wrote to a couple of hundred prominent writers and critics asking them to pick the “single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.”
The results, announced in May that year, declared Beloved the winner — it is still a college classroom staple, a classic which has assumed a “burden of cultural importance”. Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 for giving “life to an essential aspect of American reality,” becoming the first black woman to win the prize.
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.