Beloved by Toni Morrison: plot summary, chapters 1-2

Page 1

he novel opens in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio. For the past eighteen years, Sethe, an ex-slave, and her daughter, Denver, have been living in a house that is haunted by the ghost of Sethe’s firstborn baby daughter. Until eight years ago, Sethe’s mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, also lived with them in their house at 124 Bluestone Road. Before she died, Baby Suggs sank into a deep depression, exhausted by a life of slavery and by the loss of all eight of her children. She spent her last days requesting “color”—bits of brightly colored objects she hoped would alleviate her sadness. Her death came only a short while after Sethe’s sons, Howard and Buglar, each ran away from 124 following encounters with their dead sister’s ghost.

Sethe works hard to remember as little as possible about her past, and the memory of her sons is fading fast. Most of her painful memories involve Sweet Home, a plantation in Kentucky where she lived as a slave until her escape eighteen years ago. On this day, however, she returns home and finds an unexpected and surprising guest: Paul D. Paul D was one of five men who were Sethe’s fellow slaves at Sweet Home; these had included Paul A, Paul F, Sixo, and Sethe’s husband, Halle. Although Sethe hasn’t seen Paul D in eighteen years, they slip into easy conversation and Sethe invites him inside. Paul D walks into a pool of eerie red light and feels a wave of grief come over him. Sethe explains that the presence is the sad specter of her dead baby, whose throat was cut before it was two years old. At her daughter’s funeral, Sethe mistook the preacher’s reference to the “Dearly Beloved” mourners for a reference to her dead daughter. Afterward, she agreed to ten minutes of sex with an engraver in order to have the word “Beloved” carved on the baby’s headstone.

Paul D has desired Sethe ever since she arrived at Sweet Home at the age of thirteen to replace Baby Suggs. Baby Suggs left because her son Halle had bought her freedom with five years of weekend labor. Sethe was beautiful then, and the five male Sweet Home slaves waited in agonizing sexual frustration, having sex with calves and dreaming of rape, while she took a year to make her choice among them. She chose Halle, and together they had two sons and a daughter. Sethe was pregnant with a fourth child, Denver, when the family made its escape from Sweet Home. Sethe and Halle were separated during their escape, however, and neither Paul D nor Sethe knows what happened to Halle. Seeing her mother flirting and talking about Sweet Home with Paul D makes Denver feel lonely and excluded. She reacts with surly jealousy and dissolves into tears at the dinner table one evening. She cries that she cannot stay in the house because the community knows it to be haunted. Consequently, everyone avoids Denver and she has no friends. When Paul D wonders aloud why they haven’t moved from 124, Sethe firmly asserts that she will never run away from anything again.