Day 123: Beloved

‘Beloved,’ more than any other I’ve ever read, is a story that dawns on the reader over time. Each layer of the narrative progresses incrementally in tandem with one another, giving the impression of a series of events that take place all at once, and all influence one another in turn. It begins at 124 Bluestone Road, where a ghost haunts the land. Where there was once a locus of interconnected characters, memory, and the stories of those many inhabitants that passed through there, a violent episode has left the once vibrant place a shell of its former self. The history of those who live at 124 are told from the perspectives of its only remaining inhabitants: Sethe, her daughter Denver, and Paul D, runaway slaves whose paths diverged at the plantation Sweet Home, and come crashing together again at 124. Dark memories of their shared past are dragged up by the events of the present as they get to know each other anew, fifteen years after their separation. 

Their desire for a shared future is interrupted by another fateful reunion, one precipitated by the great evil that haunts 124. Denver’s loneliness and Sethe’s guilt feed the haunting, but haunting is a word reserved for the intangible, the ghostly. A presence leftover from the dead and gone. The malevolent thing at 124 is much more powerful, a corporeal evil that returns in the form of Beloved. Neither Sethe or Denver can bear to push her away even as she swallows more and more of the sweetness that makes life worth living, literally consuming any and all scraps that they can afford to surrender, and all that they can’t. Beloved was borne from the atrocity Sethe was driven to commit: an infanticide, the nature of which is slowly revealed, drip fed into the reader’s mind until the complete revelation will leave you sick to your stomach. 

Morrison holds the reader as each of her characters are, just barely treading the deep waters of life, and only for long enough to reach the end and feel some semblance of OK. Sethe’s story is not a pleasant one to receive, and certainly not something for the faint of heart. It isn’t enjoyed so much as it is weathered for the sake of understanding. This is a kind of story seldom told, but never forgotten by those who have heard or experienced it. In Morrison’s own words from the introduction:

“The heroine [Sethe] would represent the unapologetic acceptance of shame and terror; assume the consequences of choosing infanticide; claim her own freedom. The terrain, slavery, was formidable and pathless. To invite readers (and myself) into the repellant landscape (hidden, but not completely; deliberately buried, but not forgotten) was to pitch a tent in a cemetery inhabited by highly vocal ghosts.”

I can’t say that I liked reading this book, or that I even comprehend most of the many horrors presented throughout, but I am glad to have read it, if that makes any sense. It feels like this isn’t a story Morrison wanted, but rather needed to tell. Her incredible style brings truth closer to reality than reality ever could, leaving facts behind to eschew the merely clinical history that they can achieve to instead form much more present and powerful ghosts of a past that people would rather forget, forever marking the minds of those who read her stories.

I can’t safely recommend you read this book in the same way that I can’t recommend you go climb a mountain by yourself. It’s rocky, exposed, and terrifying. There were moments when I regretted picking up the book in the first place, not because I wanted to stop reading, but because I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop. It will probably take you longer than you expect, and you may never be the same afterwards. But if you want to take a journey that many others may never take, learn lessons that can’t be learned in any other way, and have a wholly unique experience to draw on for the rest of your life, this is the book for you.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley