Beloved Essay

“Inside, two boys [Howard and Buglar] bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman [Sethe] holding a blood-soaked child [Beloved] to her chest with one hand and an infant [Denver] by the heels in the other. She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time…” (page. 149). "It is the ultimate gesture of a loving mother. It is the outrageous claim of a slave"(Morrison 1987). These are the words that Toni Morrison used to describe the actions of the central character, ‘Sethe’, within the novel, Beloved. One might wonder what sort of a mother would do that to her own children, how could she kill her own creation? The answer to this lies in the novel itself, wherein we realize that what Sethe did was wrong but it was the only thing she could
‘Beloved’ is definitely ‘a saga of black bodies in pain’, but then again it is not ‘just a saga of black bodies in pain.’ Beloved is not just a novel, but a prayer, a healing ritual for a country's holocaust of slavery. There is so much more to ‘Beloved’ than just the pain & agony of the black bodies. The horrors of slavery are unmasked, the aftermath of slavery on African Americans the endless suffering & anguish which spills over to the leftover lives of the slaves, the identity crisis the slaves go through, the denial of community life, in fact the very denial of being humans is depicted in ‘Beloved’, a novel that relentlessly draws one in. The story is perfect for all who did not experience nor could imagine how it was to be an African American or a ‘Black/Nigger’ as they were called, in America circa the 1860's. The novel is set in post Civil War Ohio, when the war has been won and slavery has been abolished, but not the memories of