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This is what I’ve been looking for, a true/fictional account of what it is really like to be enslaved in the uniquely American fashion. Having avoided any reviews since this is a famous, Nobel-prize winning novel, I was able to come to it without preconception, and take it all in fresh and purely as the author might have imagined its reader during its preparation. I’m forever changed by this, if I may be so bold to predict the future, because it obliterates any doubt that the race problems we have today were seeded in our national original sin. We must repent and pay that debt, if we are to ever heal. The beauty of this prose pierced and convicted my soul with the stark reality of the consequences of our actions and inactions on the personal liberty of my fellow man and woman. It exposed me to our ugliest legacy, and how the damage carries through generations and in our world today.

This “story� is of a ghost, which normally would have put me off. I’m not much of a a believer in the supernatural nor a huge fan of magical realism (as I understand it). However, this device worked to perfection in this novel, as it was the framework upon which the tale is told: Post-civil war slaves escape the “sweet� home in Kentucky when their relatively benevolent owner passes and a more typical master takes over. The particulars of trauma unfold throughout as the many disparate participants tell their account. The characters (and the reader) discover these actual details throughout the story. Morrison cleverly eases us into the events, as their horror and shock would be almost too much to bear if told at the outset. In the telling, the characters reveal themselves to the reader, and the plot line strengthens as the strands come together. The storyline gains forward momentum as the past catches up with present, hurtling the reader into the action.

The ghost (Beloved) killed as a baby returns as an adult and the story unfolds as the mother is redeemed and the sister made whole. It is left to the reader if the girl is real (never having actually been murdered by her mother) or imaginary. In the end it doesn’t matter � the trauma that led to her death spawned from the essential protection against enslavement, an act of love from Sethe, the mother. Her act drives the story, the recounting of America’s original sin and the prices paid. Never have I felt such anger for what we were and still are and yet longing for what we are could be and may eventually become. Morrison’s craft is experimental yet not hard to follow, a beautifully woven tapestry reinforcing itself in small motifs, fitted together into the whole; nothing less than the story of our nation’s great sin. It is singular.

(p 93) Back when Baby Suggs the elder, the heart and hope of the community, leads like a shaman back to collective healing: “It started that way: Laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and started crying; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her Great big heart. She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the Blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek, its glorybound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it they would not have it.�

(p. 164) The reality of being black in America in the late 19th century: “Because there was no way in hell a black face could appear in a newspaper if the story was about something anyone wanted to hear. A whip of fear broke through the heart chambers as soon as you saw a Negro’s face in a paper, since the face was not there because the person had a healthy baby, or outran a street mob. Nor was it there because the person had been killed, or maimed or caught or burned or jailed or whipped or evicted or stomped or raped or cheated, since that could hardly qualify as news in a newspaper. It would have to be something out of the ordinary- something whitepeople would find interesting, truly different, worth a few minutes of teeth sucking if not gasps. And it must have been hard to find news about Negroes with the breath catch of a white person of Cincinatti.�

(p. 170/171) One of the boys, on the brutal chain gang in Georgia, without hope tries to find a way to survive: “So you protected yourself and loved small. Pick the tiniest stars out of the skies to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees and chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother- a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: To get to a place where you could love anything you choose � not to need permission for desire � well now, ‘that� was freedom.�

(p. 208) The views of white people about blacks of that era weighs heavy, infuses both: “Whitepeople believe that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift, unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more colored people spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them this place with the other (livable) place. It was the jungle white folks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and afterlife, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.�

(p. 210) Sethe’s explanation for murdering her child: “Why I did it. How if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her.�

(p. 247) Paul D, lost, bereft, reminiscing: “A shudder ran through Paul D. A bone-cold spasm that made him clutch his knees. He didn’t know if it was bad whiskey, nights in the cellar, pig fever, iron bits, smiling roosters, fired feet, laughing dead men, hissing grass, rain, apple blossoms, neck jewelry, Judy in the slaughterhouse, Halle in the butter, ghost-white stares, chokecherry trees, cameo pins, aspens, Paul A’s face, sausage or the loss of a red, red heart.�

(p. 265) More about how to read the inscrutable and all-powerful white people: “What was more � much more � out there were whitepeople and how could you tell about them? Sethe said the mouth and sometimes the hands. Grandma Baby said there was no defense- they could prowl at will, change from one mind to another, and even when they thought they were behaving, it was a far cry from what real humans did.�