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Updated, August 2019: RIP, Toni Morrison

Over the past 15 years, I’ve tried a couple of times to read Toni Morrison’s epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about murder, guilt, ghosts and the brutal, complex physical and psychological legacy of slavery.

Something about the dense, poetic prose and the elliptical nature of the storytelling made it impenetrable. After a chapter or two, I’d give up, perplexed. And I’ve read William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf! This made Oprah’s Book Club?

I’m so glad I persevered.

About a third of the way in, I realized just how carefully Morrison had constructed the narrative, which pivots on two horrific events: one involving a mother killing her child (inspired by the actual story of a woman named Margaret Garner), and the other, which informs the first, about an attempted escape by a group of slaves at a plantation �� and its violent aftermath.

The setting is 1873, Ohio. Sethe and her daughter Denver live in a house on 124 Bluestone Road. Once a lively place where freed slaves congregated after Emancipation to get news and socialize, it’s now desolate and creepy, haunted by the spiteful ghost of Sethe’s dead two-year-old child �� not a spoiler, since it’s introduced in the first few pages. The matriarch Baby Suggs (Sethe’s mother-in-law) is now dead, and Sethe’s two sons have fled the premises.

When Paul D enters the home, things begin to change. He and Sethe worked on the same plantation �� called Sweet Home, ironic because it was anything but �� decades earlier. They share history, good and bad, and harbour secrets from the other. Paul D’s presence makes the ghost leave, and he alienates the shy, awkward Denver and begins to make Sethe unshackle herself from the past�� until a mysterious stranger �� with no lines on her hands or face �� appears at 124 to mess things up.

Beloved overflows with stories: some tragic, some vicious, some joyous, some brimming with love.

It takes a while to get all the names straight; I found myself flipping back to see when a character was introduced. It’s not a long book, average length really, but it’s dense and full of layered, complex imagery: about water (it's not a coincidence that Sethe's name suggests "Lethe," the river of forgetfulness and oblivion), colours, milk, metal. I'll never forget the description of Sethe’s back, so severely scarred from whippings it resembles a multi-branched tree, or Paul D talking about slaves having their mouths pried open with horses�� bits (“the wildness that shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back��).

Other things that will haunt and disturb me: the idea of black slaves being compared to animals; the sequence in which Paul D discovers just how much he’s worth in dollars and cents, compared to Sethe, who is basically a breeding machine to create more slaves (imagine what that would do to a person’s �� a people's? �� sense of self-worth). These are balanced out with scenes of kindness and generosity.

Not all the white characters are bad; one feisty young poor white girl helps Sethe deliver her child in a boat, and there’s a subtle portrait of a pair of generous, older white siblings who radiate humanity. And unlike Walker’s The Color Purple, the black men in the book aren’t all fools and rapists. Morrison’s vision is broad, expansive, clear-eyed but ultimately forgiving.

The language is earthy yet majestic, with echoes of Faulkner and even the King James Bible. It’s often hard to read because it feels like you’re wading through an ocean of memories, some of which are buried deep and trying to surface.

The point of view shifts repeatedly. In one remarkable section, we’re given the POV of the dead baby in which she’s caught between death and life. Morrison gives you various takes on the same scene but spreads them throughout the book, so you circle around events trying to get to the truth. Is the truth possible? Do some things remain unknowable?

There’s unspeakable, real human pain at the centre. Shame. Desperation. Guilt. Generations of it. But like much great art, Beloved offers a glimmer of hope and redemption at the end.

"Sethe," [says Paul D], "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow."

Amen.