Note: The text of Beloved is divided
into Parts One, Two, and Three. Within each part, there are smaller
sections. They function like chapters, but are never designated
as such by the book itself. For ease of reference, this SparkNote
has labeled these sections as numbered chapters. This numbering
system runs continuously through all three of the book’s parts.
Summary
124 was spiteful.
Full of a baby’s venom.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
The 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.
Later, Sethe explains that she was whipped before she
ran from Sweet Home to meet Baby Suggs and her children, whom she
had sent ahead, in Cincinnati. The white girl who helped
deliver Denver said the resulting scars looked like a chokecherry
tree. Sethe cries and says that the men who beat her stole her baby’s
milk before she ran. Paul D comes up behind her and pulls down the
top of her dress. He cradles her breasts in his hands while he kisses
each line of her scars. The house immediately begins to lurch and
shake as the ghost vents its rage. Paul D shouts and fights with
the ghost, chasing it away. Denver resents Paul D’s act—the ghost
was the only company she had.
Analysis
From the beginning, Beloved focuses on
the import of memory and history. Sethe struggles daily with the
haunting legacy of slavery, in the form of her threatening memories
and also in the form of her daughter’s aggressive ghost. For Sethe,
the present is mostly a struggle to beat back the past, because
the memories of her daughter’s death and the experiences at Sweet
Home are too painful for her to recall consciously. But
Sethe’s repression is problematic, because the absence of history
and memory inhibits the construction of a stable identity. Even
Sethe’s hard-won freedom is threatened by her inability to confront
her prior life. Paul D’s arrival gives Sethe the opportunity and
the impetus to finally come to terms with her painful life history.
Already in the first chapter, the reader begins to gain
a sense of the horrors that have taken place. Like the ghost, the
address of the house is a stubborn reminder of its history. The
characters refer to the house by its number, 124.
These digits highlight the absence of Sethe’s murdered third child.
As an institution, slavery shattered its victims’ traditional family
structures, or else precluded such structures from ever forming.
Slaves were thus deprived of the foundations of any identity apart
from their role as servants. Baby Suggs is a woman who never had
the chance to be a real mother, daughter, or sister. Later, we learn
that neither Sethe nor Paul D knew their parents, and the relatively
long, six-year marriage of Halle and Sethe is an anomaly in an institution
that would regularly redistribute men and women to different farms
as their owners deemed necessary.
