Beloved

Toni Morrison

LitCharts
Beloved Summary
On the edge of Cincinnati, in 1873 just after the end of the Civil War, there is a house
numbered 124 that is haunted by the presence of a dead child. A former slave
named Sethe has lived in the house, with its ghost, for 18 years. Sethe lives at 124 with
her daughter Denver. Her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, died eight years previously after
languishing for years with exhaustion and seeming overwhelming sadness. And her two
sons, Howard and Buglar, ran away from the haunted home just before Baby Suggs’
death.
Paul D, a former slave who used to work on the same plantation, called Sweet Home, as
Sethe, arrives at 124 and moves in, making a kind of family with Denver and Sethe. Paul
D awakens painful memories for Sethe and Denver is jealous of the attention and
affection that Sethe gives to him. But just as Denver is getting used to the new familial
arrangement, a strange woman appears at the house. She calls herself Beloved and says
that she doesn’t know who she is or where she is from.

Beloved asks Sethe many questions about her past and somehow seems to know about
things only Sethe knew, such as about a pair of earrings Sethe received as a gift from the
wife of her former master. Denver loves having Beloved around the house and eagerly
tells her about the miracle of her own birth: Sethe escaped from Sweet Home while
pregnant with Denver and almost died of hunger and exhaustion while trying to make it
to Ohio. But a white woman named Amy Denver found Sethe, cared for her, and helped
her get to the Ohio River, where she gave birth to Denver. Sethe named Denver after the
kind white woman.
Paul D recalls his experience working on a chain gang. He and the other slaves
eventually escaped together and had their chains cut by a group of Cherokee. Paul D
wandered north and stayed with a kind woman in Delaware for some time, but he was
unable to settle. He felt an urge to wander and did so for years before coming to 124.
Missing Baby Suggs, Sethe takes Beloved and Denver to the clearing in the woods where
Baby Suggs used to have spiritual gatherings before she fell into her exhausted state.
Sethe wishes that Baby Suggs were there to rub her neck and suddenly she feels other-
worldly fingers massaging her neck. But then the fingers begin to choke her until they
finally let go. Denver thinks that Beloved is somehow behind the choking, but Beloved
denies it.
Beloved gradually and mysterious forces Paul D out of the house by making him restless,
so that he ends up sleeping outside in the cold house. When he is sleeping outside in the
cold house one night, she persuades him to sleep with her and stirs up his painful
memories. Beloved tells Denver that she wants Paul D out of 124.
The novel moves back in time to follow Baby Suggs as she waits for Sethe and her
son Halle (Sethe’s husband). Sethe has snuck her children out of Sweet Home and sent
them ahead to 124, and she and Halle are supposed to escape together and come to the
house. Halle never arrives, but Sethe does, and Baby Suggs is happy to have at least
Sethe and her children reunited. She hosts a grand celebration for the neighboring
community and her meager stores of food miraculously furnish a huge feast for ninety
people. After the celebration, she feels uneasy, and realizes that she has offended the
community with an excessive display of joy and pride. She senses that something bad is
coming as a consequence.
Soon after the celebration, four horsemen come to 124: Schoolteacher (who became
the owner of Sweet Home after the kinder original master died), his nephew, a slave
catcher, and a sheriff. They have come to take Sethe and her children back to Sweet
Home to work as slaves. The offended community does not warn Sethe or Baby Suggs,
and when Sethe sees Schoolteacher coming, she gathers her children and runs to a shed.
When the four horsemen find her, she has killed one child with a saw and is ready to kill
her other children. Schoolteacher decides that she is crazy and not worth bringing back
to work. The sheriff takes Sethe off to jail.
Back in the present, a former slave named Stamp Paid (who helped Sethe escape to 124
eighteen years ago) tells Paul D about Sethe’s killing her own child. Paul D confronts
Sethe about it, and then leaves 124. Feeling guilty for causing Paul D to leave Sethe,
Stamp Paid goes to 124 to talk to Sethe. But she does not come to the door. Stamp Paid
hears strange voices from the house and sees Beloved through a window.
Within the house, Beloved causes Sethe to remember more and more of her painful past.
The novel follows Sethe’s stream of consciousness as Sethe maintains that her killing
her child was an act of love. Sethe believes that Beloved is the returned spirit of her dead
child. The novel then follows the thoughts of Denver and Beloved. In a series of vivid but
fragmented recollections, Beloved remembers being taken on a ship from Africa to the
United States, the "middle passage" of the Atlantic slave trade.
Sethe begins to get weaker and weaker, falling under the sway of Beloved, whose every
whim Sethe obeys. Denver ventures out of the house in search of work, to try to get food
and provide for the household. She goes to the house of the Bodwins, who once helped
Baby Suggs settle at 124, and tells their maid Janey about Beloved and the situation at
124. The community rallies together to supply food to 124.
As news spreads of Beloved’s strange presence at 124, a group of women join together
to rescue Sethe and Denver from her. They gather around 124 and break into song, in a
kind of exorcism. Mr. Bodwin approaches the house and Sethe mistakes him for
Schoolteacher. Crazed, she tries to attack him but is restrained by Denver and other
women. Beloved disappears.
After Beloved’s departure, 124 seems to become a normal household. Sethe has mostly
lost her mind, but Denver is working and learning, hoping one day to attend college.
Paul D returns to 124 and promises to always care for Sethe. The inhabitants of 124 and
the surrounding community gradually forget about Beloved entirely, even those who
saw and talked to her.

Gradesaver
Beloved Summary
In 1873, Sethe and her daughter Denver live in 124, a house in a rural area close to
Cincinatti. They are ostracized from the community for Sethe's past and her pride.
Eighteen years have passed since she escaped from slavery at a farm called Sweet Home.
Sweet Home was run by a cruel man known as schoolteacher, who allowed his nephews
to brutalize Sethe while he took notes for his scientific studies of blacks. Sethe fled,
although she was pregnant, delivering the child along the way with help from a white
woman named Amy. Sethe's husband, who was supposed to accompany her,
disappeared. After her escape to Cincinatti with her four children, Sethe enjoyed only
twenty-eight days of freedom before she was tracked down by her old master. Rather
than allow her children to be returned to slavery, she attempted to kill all of them,
succeeding only in killing the baby girl. Rejected then by her master, who saw she was
no longer fit to serve, Sethe was also saved from hanging and was released to raise her
remaining three children at 124. The ghost of the dead baby began to haunt the house.
The two sons, Howard and Buglar, left after having particularly frightening encounters
with the ghost. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, died a broken woman. Baby Suggs had
been a great positive force in Cincinatti's black community, regarded by many as an
inspiring holy woman. After what happened to Sethe, she gave up her preaching and
retired to bed, asking only for scraps of color. Years after her death, Denver and Sethe
continue to live in the house alone. Sethe works as a cook, and Denver spends her days
alone. Denver is terribly lonely but is also afraid to leave the yard‹even though she is
eighteen years old.
In 1873, two visitors come to 124. The first is Paul D, a man who was a slave with Sethe
back at Sweet Home. Paul D, like Sethe, is haunted by the pain of the past. He witnessed
and suffered unspeakable atrocities before the end of the Civil War brought him his
freedom, and he has survived by not allowing himself to have strong feelings for
anything or anyone. He has particularly dark memories of time spent in a prison for
blacks, where he worked in a chain gang by day and was kept in a box in the ground at
night.
The second visitor is a girl named Beloved. It gradually becomes clear that she is the
ghost of the dead baby come back to life, at the age that the baby would have been had it
lived. Awkward, unable to speak like an adult, and dressed in strange clothes, Beloved
seems vulnerable at first but proves to be powerful and malicious. Her purposes initially
seem benign and are never fully understood, but by the end of the novel her presence is
deeply destructive for the living people of 124.
Paul D becomes Sethe's lover, staying for a time despite friction between him and the
two young girls. Beloved despises him, and she tries to divide Sethe from Paul D. Paul D
eventually leaves when he learns that Sethe murdered her own child. Sethe, on
discovering Beloved's identity, believes she has been given a second chance. She tries to
make amends for the past, but the girl's needs are devouring. The ghost does not forgive
Sethe for her actions. Beloved settles into the house like a parasite, growing ever
stronger as Sethe grows weaker. Sethe's sanity begins to unravel, and Beloved only
grows more demanding. Denver is forced to go to the community for help.
A group of women, led by Ella, a former agent of the Underground Railroad, go to 124 to
exorcise Beloved's ghost. The ghost is forced to leave, but Sethe's spirit has been nearly
broken. Paul D returns to her, vowing to help Sethe heal herself. Denver, Paul D, and
Sethe will build a new life, one in which they learn to deal with their painful past while
focusing on the future.
Beloved is a haunting and dark novel, full of gothic elements and acts of terrible
violence. The ghost represents the power of the legacy of slavery, which continues to
trouble Sethe eighteen years after she won her freedom. Beloved is the spirit of the dead
baby returned but she is also an embodiment of all suffering under slavery; her memory
extends back to the slave ships that first carried blacks to the Americas. The question of
the rightness of Sethe's terrible act is a difficult one‹moreover, it is a question that the
novel does not attempt to answer in a definitive way. Morrison is more concerned that
we understand why Sethe did what she did, as well as the ways that her decision has
haunted her ever since. The novel effectively conveys the brutality and dehumanization
that occurred under slavery, putting Sethe's act in context without necessarily
condemning it or excusing it.
The structure is fragmentary, closely tied to the consciousness of each character and
weaving suddenly between past and future. More time is spent describing past events
than the action of the current moment, reinforcing the idea of the past lingering and
shaping life in the present. The novel is often repetitive, telling the same stories of the
past again and again, giving more information with each repetition. All of the characters
of the novel, former slaves and the children of former slaves, suffer a troubled
relationship to their own past. Their relationships to their past often make it impossible
for them to live for the present or plan for the future, and slavery has often damaged the
ways that they experience love and think about their own worth as human beings.

Beloved Character List

Sethe
Born on a distant plantation that she barely remembers, Sethe is the child of an African-
born slave woman whose name she never knew. As a young teenager she was brought to
Sweet Home, where she took a man named Halle Suggs for her husband. She had four
children, pregnant with the fourth when she fled Sweet Home on foot and alone. When
schoolteacher, the brutal master at Sweet Home, tracked her down, Sethe attempted to
kill her children rather than see them returned to slavery. Sethe has a troubled
relationship with her own past, often not willing to speak about it but obsessively
reliving it in her own head. She has a mass of scars on her back that resemble a tree.
Beloved
Beloved is the ghost of Sethe's third child, murdered to protect her from schoolteacher.
Her real name is never known. She is the embodiment not only of the baby's ghost but
also the legacy of slavery. She represents the power of the past to intrude into the
present.
Paul D
Paul D was one of the Sweet Home men. He has also suffered horribly, and has reacted
by shutting away any deep feelings. He shows up at 124 and tries to make a life with
Sethe. He is powerless against Beloved, who seduces him as a way of controlling him and
dividing him from her mother. After nearly twenty years of freedom, he is still unsure of
the source of his manhood and his humanity.
Denver
Sethe's daughter. She is the grown up daughter of Sethe who was born during Sethe's
flight to the North. Denver is eighteen years old and terribly lonely. She has not left the
yard of 124 by herself for twelve years. She has a possessive need for Beloved, and
initially will do anything to please her. But she is also a very dynamic character; by the
end of the novel, she is transformed into a strong and independent young woman with a
new understanding of her mother.
Baby Suggs
Halle Suggs mother and Sethe's mother-in-law. Halle bought her freedom, which she
accepted because she saw how much it meant to him. She did not expect how much it
would mean to her, feeling while still a slave that she was too old to enjoy freedom
anyway. But freedom transformed Baby Suggs, giving her a new understanding of what
it meant to be alive and transforming her into a kind of holy woman for Cincinatti's
black community. Sethe's tragedy, however, broke Baby Suggs' spirit, and she spent her
last days bed-ridden and somber.
Halle Suggs
Halle Suggs was Sethe's husband and the father of all of her children. Halle vanished at
the time when he was supposed to flee to the North with Sethe; later, it is discovered
that he witnessed Sethe's brutalization at the hands of schoolteacher and his nephews.
When Paul D last saw Halle, he had gone insane.
Schoolteacher
Mr. Garner's brother-in-law. Schoolteacher was a cruel and sadistic master, interested in
ways to break the wills of his slaves. He conducted a pseudo-scientific study of the
slaves, treating them in his study the way a biologist treats lab animals. His nephews
held Sethe down and stole her milk while schoolteacher took notes. When it was
discovered that Sethe told Mrs. Garner what they had done, schoolteacher had one of his
nephews whip Sethe, giving her the distinctive scars on her back.
Amy Denver
A former indentured servant, Amy helped Sethe to escape to the North, saving Sethe's
life and helping to deliver her baby. Amy was trying to get to Boston so she could buy
carmine colored velvet. Sethe's daughter Denver is named after her.
Howard and Buglar
Sethe's sons and her two older children, she tried and failed to kill them when
schoolteacher came. The two boys fled years ago after particularly frightening
encounters with the ghost. Sethe has recurring dreams of her boys walking away from
her, unable to hear her as she calls for them to come back.
Mr. Garner
The old master of Sweet Home, Mr. Garner was generous by the standards of slave
owners, and insisted that his slaves were the only male slaves in Kentucky who were
real men. His "enlightened" slavery, however, proves to be a sham after his death and
was full of contradictions and hypocrisy even in his life.
Mrs. Garner
Mr. Garner's sickly wife. She brought schoolteacher to Sweet Home after Mr. Garner's
death. She spent the last months of her life bed-ridden and very ill.
Sixo
One of the slaves at Sweet Home, Sixo was one of the planners behind their flight to the
North. He regularly visited a woman who lived thirty miles away, dubbed the Thirty-Mile
woman. He was close to Paul D during the time of Sweet Home, but was killed during
their escape attempt.
Paul A, Paul F
The brothers of Paul D. All three brothers were at Sweet Home for most of their lives,
until Paul F was sold and Paul A died during the escape.
Ella
A woman who was an agent on the Underground Railroad. She took Sethe on the final
leg of her flight to the North. When Ella was a girl, she was shared by a white man and
his son. After Sethe killed her child, Ella becomes one of her harshest critics. Later, she
softens her opinion, and organizes the woman to go and exorcise Beloved from 124.
Stamp Paid
Born with the name of Joshua, Stamp Paid changed his name after his wife was taken to
the bed of their master's owner. Stamp felt he had paid all of life's debts in that year.
Stamp worked as an agent for the Underground Railroad for many years. When
schoolteacher came for Sethe, it was Stamp who saved Denver's life. He is a friend to the
family and also to Paul D.
Lady Jones
Lady Jones teaches the black children of Cincinatti how to read and write. She is mixed-
race, with yellow hair that she despises. She was once Denver's teacher. When Denver
flees 124 looking for help, she turns to Lady Jones.
Nan
Nan was the one-armed woman who nursed children back at the plantation where Sethe
was born. Sethe has more memories of Nan than of her own mother.
Janey
Servant to the Bodwins. She spreads the story of Beloved's return through the black
community. She was working for the Bodwins when Baby Suggs first arrived, and she is
still working for them when Denver is looking for work decades later.
Edward Bodwin and Miss Bodwin
Brother and sister, they are former abolitionists and try to be helpful to the black
community. They own 124, which they allowed Baby Suggs and her family to use.
Edward Bodwin witnesses the exorcism of Beloved.

Beloved Themes
Grief
Grief is a recurring theme on both a micro and macro level in Beloved. On the micro
level, each of the main characters deals with their own personal grief as they grapple
with their past pain. As Baby Suggs admits, 124 is “packed to its rafters” with their grief
(Morrison 11). Baby Suggs grieves the loss of her children, who were torn from her and
sold across the country. Her son Halle buys her freedom, but even then Baby Suggs finds
it hard to overcome the pain from her past. After Sethe tries to kill her children, Baby
Suggs eventually succumbed to her grief and died in her bedroom. Paul D also almost
died from his grief, but he learned how to box it up and push it away. However, once he
hears of Sethe’s horrible choice, his grief comes roaring out of his Pandora’s box, and he
turns to alcohol to soothe his pain. Denver takes a completely different route to deal
with the grief of losing her family. Initially, she shuts herself away and retreats from the
world, relying on Sethe for human interaction. However, by the end of the novel, Denver
has learned to face her grief head-on and conquers her fear of the world. She becomes a
resourceful young woman who is the breadwinner for her family. Denver manages to
overcome her grief from slavery’s legacy and serves as a symbol of how Black Americans
managed to succeed post-slavery.
Like Baby Suggs, Sethe also has a mother’s grief, but hers takes the tangible form of
Beloved. Not only does Beloved represents all of Sethe’s grief, guilt, and pain from
slavery and the harsh choices she had to make, but she also represents the pain, fear,
suffering, and grief of the millions of American slaves and their descendants. In this way,
Beloved is a representation of grief on a macro level.
Memory
Memory, or “rememory,” is an integral part of Beloved. Morrison uses the characters’
memories and fragmented remembrances of the past to compose her story. The result is
a novel that oftentimes flits back and forth across space and time. For example, though
the story opens at 124 in 1873, much of it takes place at Sweet Home plantation before
the Civil War. Sights and sounds as innocuous as a dog lapping at water or the back of a
sleeping man trigger horrible and painful memories for many of the characters
(Morrison 12 and 51). Once triggered, characters then serve as a gateway to the past,
where the real story lies. This method of storytelling is demonstrated when Paul D
recounts the story of Sixo and the Thirty-Mile Woman. Paul D’s memory of his friend
was triggered by seeing Sethe cross her ankles (Morrison 45). This is a perfect example
of how a pedestrian motion can hold a wealth of meaning and memory for the novel’s
characters.
Memory is also important because of the role it plays in the relationships between
characters. Sethe and Paul D have a fraught shared history because of Sweet Home and
the horrible memories it generated. So when they reconnect years after the Civil War,
their new relationship exists in the shadow of these memories. As Sethe says, the hurt of
the shared memories between herself and Paul D “was always there-like a tender place
in the corner of her mouth that the bit left” (Morrison 107). Memory also influences
Sethe’s relationship to Denver. Sethe’s memory of how she tried to kill Denver fills her
with guilt, and so she keeps Denver at arm’s length. Denver senses her mother’s feelings
and also keeps her distance. The only memory that the mother and daughter regard
positively is Denver’s birth story, because it demonstrates Sethe’s love and devotion for
Denver. Finally, memory is the controlling force in Sethe’s relationship with Beloved.
Beloved is the physical manifestation of Sethe’s grief, guilt, and trauma from slavery.
Because Beloved was absent for much of Sethe’s life, she craves Sethe’s memories and
stories of the past. But unlike Sethe’s behavior with Paul D and Denver regarding her
memories, Sethe enjoys and wants to share Beloved's memories. At first, it’s because
Sethe believes Beloved is a complete stranger, and so there’s a distance that makes the
storytelling easy (Morrison 107). But later on, these memories feed Beloved like food,
and so sharing memories becomes the central component of their relationship.
Motherhood
In many respects, Beloved is a story about motherhood and how slavery impacted Black
women’s ability to be good mothers. Starting with Baby Suggs, who had all but one of
her children sold to plantations far away from her, it’s clear that slavery erected many
physical barriers between a mother and her children. Sometimes these barriers existed
even on the same plantation, as Sethe and her mother demonstrate. As Sethe’s mother
toiled in the fields, another woman assigned to look after the plantation’s children
raised Sethe. This left little time for Sethe and her mother to bond and build a
relationship (Morrison 111). As a result, the physical barrier became an emotional one
as well.
Looking at Sethe, we see slavery’s impact on Black mothers at its most extreme. Rather
than watch her children become slaves, Sethe attempted to kill them. At first glance,
Sethe’s actions seem opposite to our expectations of a mother’s behavior. Everyone who
witnessed her behavior, from Stamp Paid to the schoolteacher, struggles to comprehend
her seemingly evil and barbaric act. However, if we consider the idea that a slave’s life is
a fate worse than death, Sethe’s actions become easier to understand. She believed she
was being a good mother by sparing her children from slavery and all its horrors.
However, since Sethe became a social pariah after her actions, it’s clear that very few
agree with her reasoning.

Sethe also struggles with her guilt and has a strained relationship with her surviving
children. Her children have been raised in a world where they are free, and thus they
cannot comprehend the fear that fueled their mother’s actions. So both sides keep their
distance, further widening the divide between mother and children. By the end of the
novel, Sethe’s relationship with Denver seems to be improving. This is mostly because
Denver recognized the damage Beloved inflicted on Sethe and assumed the
responsibility of caring for Sethe. This is a reversal of the traditional mother-daughter
relationship where a mother cares for her daughter, and it gives us a poetic sense of
closure. Sethe is finally receiving the type of mothering that slavery had kept from her.
Abandonment
Abandonment takes several forms in Beloved. There’s physical abandonment,
demonstrated by Halle, Sethe’s sons, Paul D, etc. Though the specifics surrounding
Halle’s abandonment of Sethe and their children are unknown, it’s believed that he left
after witnessing schoolteacher’s nephews assaulting Sethe. Sethe’s sons left because
they felt unsafe with their mother, and Paul D left once he learned of Sethe’s attempted
killing of her children. While all these acts of leaving are examples of physical
abandonment, they also illustrate emotional abandonment. In various ways, all of these
men abandoned Sethe and severed their emotional ties to her. In particular, when Paul D
compares Sethe to an animal, he is signaling that he no longer views her as a fellow
human being, much less as a potential partner (Morrison 290). He abandons the
intimate and emotional connection they had been forging since he arrived at 124.
Baby Suggs and Sethe are also examples of emotional abandonment. When Sethe arrives
at 124, Baby takes her in and treats her as a daughter because of Sethe’s relationship to
Halle. However, after Sethe commits infanticide, Baby retreats to her bedroom and
recedes from the world. Though she is physically present in the lives of Sethe and her
children, she abandons them emotionally, devastated by Sethe’s harsh decision. Sethe
also emotionally abandons her children after she attempts to kill them. Her guilt makes
it hard for her to forge connections to them. Her only remaining child, Denver, feels the
absence of her family acutely. This feeling is only compounded when Paul D arrives and
begins to take up Sethe’s attention and affection. Lonely and abandoned by her brothers,
grandmother, and mother, Denver turns to the ghost haunting 124 for comfort
(Morrison 25).
Slavery
Slavery is the novel’s core theme and plays a critical role in the lives of each character.
Slavery and its horrors are what led Halle to pay for Baby Suggs’ freedom, sentencing
himself to a crushing debt to Mr. Garner. Later on, slavery and the concomitant sexual
abuse drive Halle insane. Furthermore, slavery and the abuse Sethe suffered under it
compelled her to commit infanticide rather than see her children also suffer. These
examples all demonstrate slavery’s powerful hold over the enslaved.
Slavery also caused devastating emotional and psychological wounds in the enslaved,
and Beloved is one of the first novels to explore this aspect of slavery. Similar to the
schoolteacher’s comparison of Sethe to a horse that needed to be tamed, most novels
gloss over the inner workings of an enslaved person. By delving into the consciousness
of slaves and former slaves, Morrison exposes slavery’s crippling legacy beyond its
physical impact. Sethe’s complicated decision to kill her children shows that slaves were
far from the mindless cattle or livestock their masters took them to be. Rather, they were
complex human beings capable of making bitter decisions in the name of love. Similarly,
after his experiences at Sweet Home and the chain gang, Paul D suffers from PTSD. To
cope, he replaces his heart with a metaphorical tin box where he locks away his
traumatic memories. Again, this contradicts the stereotype of slaves as beings with no
emotional or psychological sentience.
Jealousy
Jealousy drives Beloved’s plot and influences most of the characters. Denver is one of the
first characters to demonstrate this jealousy. When Paul D arrives in Ohio at 124, she is
jealous of not only his shared past with Sethe but also his positive impact on Sethe. This
causes Denver to act rudely and brattily (Morrison 28). When Beloved arrives at 124,
Denver is possessive of her, and she becomes jealous when Beloved gives more attention
to Sethe than to her (Morrison 115). Later on in the novel, this jealousy is extended
when Sethe begins to shower Beloved with attention. Denver views the two women
locked in their own bubble and feels excluded. Paul D also becomes jealous at Beloved’s
arrival, something that even Sethe notices (Morrison 235). Distrustful of Beloved, Paul D
is jealous of her connection to Sethe and realizes that Beloved is creating a chasm
between him and the rest of the family. He eventually leaves Sethe, driven away by
Beloved’s behavior and Sethe’s past choices. Paul D’s departure was Beloved’s goal, as
he was one more person with whom she had to compete for Sethe’s attention. As the
physical manifestation of Sethe’s murdered baby, Beloved is greedy for her mother’s
love and attention, and her jealousy fuels all of her actions. These actions are what set
the novel’s events into motion and drives the story to its conclusion.
Family and Community
Despite slavery’s best efforts to sever the familial ties of slaves, slaves still managed to
forge familial and community bonds. Despite her own fragmented relationship with her
own mother, Sethe feels a fierce attachment to her children. She loves them and will
clearly do anything for them, even sacrificing her own physical wellbeing and sanity.
Baby Suggs also demonstrates the strong familial bonds slaves managed to form in spite
of slavery. She welcomes Sethe and her children into her home based solely on Sethe’s
word that she is Halle’s partner and bore his children. Baby Suggs’s faith demonstrates
her enduring love for her son and her commitment to serving the slave community. Baby
Suggs’ ability to provide a safe place for Sethe and the children is due to her son’s
sacrifice for her freedom. Again, though slave traders and masters did their best to
separate families and stunt familial attachments, Halle was still able to develop a love for
his mother. This love drove him to trade his ability to make his own wages for his
mother’s freedom.
When Sethe runs away from Sweet Home, we witness how the Black community and
white abolitionists set up a system to help runaway slaves reach freed states. And when
Sethe arrives in Ohio at 124, the Black community there embraces her and the children.
Unfortunately, we soon see how jealousy turns this community into a double-edged
sword that can help its members or endanger them. Baby Suggs’ neighbors, jealous of
her success and supposed riches, refuse to warn the inhabitants of 124 when the
schoolteacher comes looking for Sethe and her children. If the community had raised the
alarm, perhaps Sethe could have escaped again and Beloved would still be alive. But
although the Black community failed Sethe the day she killed Beloved, they come to her
rescue years later and help save her from Beloved’s vengeance.