You are listening to Representations of
Slavery and Freedom. A production of the University of Delaware Library
and Museums for the First Year Common Reader.
All of the artifacts on this tour address the legacy of slavery
in the United States. [Background music] As you reflect
on your experience viewing the photographs, books, and other objects,
we invite you to ask: How do these items make you
think differently about suffering, endurance, and the meaning of
freedom? At this time please
view Beloved - A Novel by Toni Morrison as Senior
Assistant Librarian and Coordinator for Public Services, Curtis Small,
describes this piece.
Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved is included in our historical
tour to illustrate how fiction can uncover stories
from the past that allow us reflect on the present.
The novel is based on a true story that was well known
in the nineteenth century but largely forgotten when Morrison
wrote her book in the mid-1980s.
Morrison's novel is based on Margaret Garner, an enslaved
woman in 1850s Kentucky, whose child was about to be sold
away. Garner escaped to Ohio with
her daughter and her other children, via the Underground Railroad.
Later when she and her daughter are discovered by her former
enslaver Garner decides to kill her own child
rather than allowing her to be re-enslaved.
Toni Morrison turns this tragedy from history
into the story of a mother's haunting.
The novel imagines that Garner (called “Sethe” in the novel)
has escaped slavery, but that Beloved, the daughter she
killed years before, reappears from the grave.
Sethe and Beloved (who is now a young woman) form
an intense bond, as the mother tries desperately to make
her daughter understand why she felt she had to kill her.
However, Beloved’s presence wreaks
havoc. She becomes increasingly demanding and manipulative.
She seduces her stepfather, the man Sethe
has come to love. In response, members of the community
organize a type of exorcism.
Just before the situation sparks another violent tragedy,
Beloved disappears for good, and Sethe tries to
come to terms with what has happened in her life.
In Beloved, slavery is trauma from the past
that revisits the characters in difficult and frightening ways.
Maybe the novel is suggesting to us that, even today,
slavery is a ghost to be reckoned with.