The Significance Of Minor Characters In Toni Morrison's Beloved

In Beloved, Toni Morrison provides the novel’s characters, both major and minor, with complex pasts. Beloved is an elaborate and complicated novel, in which there are multiple ways to understand the characters’ complex backgrounds. It’s evident that Sethe has a mentally distressing past that continues to haunt her. A quotation that shows the extent to which Sethe is traumatized from her time as a slave is “As for the rest, she worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe. Unfortunately her brain was devious. She might be hurrying across a field, running practically, to get to the pump quickly and rinse the chamomile sap from her legs. Nothing else would be in her mind.” (Morrison 6). However, good things can sometimes come during bad times. Even though Schoolteacher and Amy Denver are both minor characters, they played significant roles in Sethe’s past during her time as a slave.
Garner, Schoolteacher takes over Sweet Home, the Kentucky slave farm where Sethe works. He believed that Mr. Garner was too soft on the slaves, so he changed the way that slaves were treated at Sweet Home. Schoolteacher constantly beat and abused his slaves because he viewed them as nothing more than animals. An example of Schoolteacher’s inhumanity is when Sethe recalls the moment two white boys raped her at Sweet Home. She says, “I am full God damn it of two boys with mosey teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up.” (Morrison 83). This quotation further proves the fact that Schoolteacher viewed Sethe and the other slaves as animals because the schoolteacher did nothing to prevent the rape, just standing at the distance and taking