Beloved
• Sethe, Halle (Sethe’s husband), Paul A, Paul D, Paul F and Sixo were slaves at Sweet Home, a plantation in Kentucky. • Sethe was bought to replace Halle’s mother, Baby Suggs. Mr Garner let Halle hire himself out to other farms to earn money to buy his mother’s freedom. • The owner, Mr Garner, is less cruel than most slave owners. • When Mr Garner dies, his wife asks her brother to come and live on the farm. • The slaves name the brother ‘schoolteacher’ because he walks around taking notes.
• Schoolteacher brings his two nephews with him to Sweet Home. He is a cruel man who views the slaves as subhuman. • One day Sethe overhears him telling the nephews to divide a page in two: on one side they are to write her human characteristics and on the other her animal characteristics. • Schoolteacher refuses to let Halle hire himself out so he now has no means of buying Sethe’s freedom or his own.
• Eventually Sethe and the other slaves decide to escape (this is 1855 before the abolition of slavery). • Sethe has three young children (two boys and a baby girl) and is heavily pregnant with a fourth. • She sends the three children on ahead to Halle’s mother’s house. • Baby Suggs lives in Ohio, where slavery had been outlawed in 1802.
• Just before the escape, Sethe is subjected to a disturbing sexual assault by the nephews. • One of them holds her down and the other sucks milk from her breast. Even more disturbingly, schoolteacher treats this as an experiment: he watches and writes in his notebook. • Sethe complains to Mrs Garner. • Schoolteacher finds out and has Sethe viciously beaten (after first digging a hole for her stomach so the baby is not harmed).
• The escape doesn’t go to plan and Sethe is the only one who gets out. • Bloody, beaten and heavily pregnant, she almost gives up, but her love for her child keeps her going. • A white girl called Amy Denver helps her give birth to a girl – Sethe calls the child Denver. • With the help of ex-slaves Stamp Paid and Ella, Sethe makes it across the Ohio River to freedom. • She arrives at the house of Baby Suggs, 124 Bluestone Road. She has an emotional reunion with her three children and is surprised that her third child, the girl, is already crawling. • The chapter we are about to read takes place 28 days after Sethe arrives at Bluestone Road.
Narrative Viewpoint • The chapter we are going to read is written in free indirect discourse. This means the narrative is in third person, but we get that character’s thoughts/viewpoint. It is as if you are getting the person’s thoughts, but without the usual tag of ‘he/she thought’. • Morrison employs this device alongside shifting narrative viewpoints. This means that during the novel we get a range of different viewpoints – and in this chapter alone the narrative shifts (often suddenly) between six different viewpoints.
This is one of the most important chapters in the novel. We are going to read it out together. I will read schoolteacher. We also need readers for: •The Sheriff – you are there to bring justice but you are white and therefore have no emotional ties to the community •The Slave Catcher – you are there for profit, you have no emotional connection to anyone and you view the black community as commodities •The Nephew – you are the one who cruelly assaulted Sethe •Baby Suggs – you are the emotional and spiritual heart of the community, recently, however, you have given a lavish feast for the neighbourhood who have become resentful about your generosity, you can “feel” something bad is coming but you don’t know what it is •The Narrator •The ‘community’ In pairs/threes discuss what you think happened and why Morrison chose to narrative it this way.
• The Fugitive Slave Law or Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern slaveholding interests and Northern Free-Soilers. • It required that all escaped slaves were, upon capture, to be returned to their masters and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate in this law. Abolitionists nicknamed it the "Bloodhound Law" for the dogs that were used to track down runaway slaves.
The real life case of Sethe: •
Margaret Garner was born into slavery on June 4, 1834 in Kentucky.
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She married Robert Garner in 1849; they had four children by 1856.
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The 1850s was also a period in which the Underground Railroad was at its height, in and around Cincinnati, transporting numerous slaves to freedom in Canada.
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The Garners decided to escape. On Sunday January 27, 1856, they set out for their first stop on their route to freedom, Joseph Kite’s house in Cincinnati.
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The Garners made it safely to Kite’s home, where they awaited their next guide.
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Within hours, the Garners’ master, A.K. Gaines, and federal police, stormed Kite’s home with warrants for them.
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Determined not to return to slavery, Margaret decided to kill herself and her children.
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When the police found Margaret in a back room, she had slit her two year old daughter’s throat with a butcher knife, killing her. The other children lay on the floor wounded but still alive.
‘[the story] would have to be something out of the ordinary – something white people would find interesting, truly different, worth a few minutes of teeth sucking if not gasps.’ Look at the language used to report the Garner’s story – what is the intended effect?
"The faded faces of the Negro children tell too plainly to what degradation the female slaves submit. Rather than give her daughter to that life, she killed it. If in her deep maternal love she felt the impulse to send her child back to God, to save it from coming woe, who shall say she had no right not to do so?"
Anti-slavery activist Lucy Stone at Garner’s trial
Questions 1. Why does Morrison withhold the information about the murder until half way through the text? 2. What is the effect of Morrison’s use of shifting narrative viewpoint? 3. Why do you think she makes this chapter so confusing? 4. What is the effect of the juxtaposition of ‘The nigger with the flower in her hat entered’ with ‘Baby Suggs’? 5. What is the effect of the opening words ‘When the four horsemen came’? 6. Whose viewpoint do we not get, and what is the effect? Try to come up with as many reasons as possible.
Analyse the presentation of (a) Sethe and (b) the community
Outside a throng, now, of black faces stopped murmuring. Holding the living child, Sethe walked past them in their silence and hers. She climbed into the cart, her profile knife-clean against a cheery blue sky. A profile that shocked them with its clarity. Was her head a bit too high? Her back a little too straight? Probably. Otherwise the singing would have begun at once, the moment she appeared in the doorway of the house on Bluestone Road. Some cape of sound would have quickly been wrapped around her, like arms to hold and steady her on the way. As it was, they waited till the cart turned about, headed west to town. And then no words. Humming. No words at all.