Finished: Beloved (Morrison) Stunning Pulitzer Prize winning book written by a Nobel Prize winning author. Morrison's stark naked account of slaves Sethe, Halle, Paul D, Baby Suggs, Sixo and others...and how the atrocities they suffered at the hand of "whitepeople" tragically impacted their emotions and behaviors for the rest of their lives. Oh my God, just such an eye-opening, visceral story. I've known all my life that slavery is a deplorable thing. I've known that no human being should ever own another. I've known that no human being should ever treat another human being lower than an animal. I've seen and read different shows and books that detail some of the horrors of slavery, but I don't think any book has ever brought to light such stark details before. And simple details too...like just describing how Paul D couldn't react to something one time...couldn't speak up and say something because why? Because he literally had a horse bit in his mouth. They attached him to a cart with a horse bit. And he wasn't the only one. Some of the women came to be known as having a certain perpetual smile because their mouths were forced into that shape with horse bits. For God's sake, what kind of human being would put a horse bit on another?? That part of the book made me cry. Or, when Sethe (pronounced Seth-uh) was six months pregnant and she was pinned down and raped by her master's nephews...but that wasn't enough, they "took all her milk". She was still nursing her other baby daughter and they squeezed all the milk out of her. Such horrid, personal violations. And, most of Beloved doesn't even take place back when Sethe, Paul D, Halle, Sixo and Baby Suggs were slaves. But the descriptions of what they went through, as the characters have their "rememories" and confide them to each other and live through the pain all over again are nightmarish. It's just the impact of what they went through....how it shaped their lives...how it caused Sethe to do the worst thing imaginable to the children she loved more than she loved herself that breaks my heart.

I can't regurgitate out the plot of the story all over again because it's all so fresh at the moment, but I'll give a brief synopsis. Sethe and Halle are young married slaves in Kentucky who have two little boys, a baby girl, and another baby on the way when they decide to try and run. The master who owned them for years and treated them very decently has died, and the new master is a horrific nightmare. They hear about a woman who will take them on a secret wagon train to safety in slave-free Ohio. They plan an escape with fellow slaves, Paul D and Sixo. When Sethe shows up to the woman in the meeting place in the corn field, Halle isn't there. Neither are Paul D or Sixo. Sethe gut-wrenchingly parts with her children. She begs the lady to take them on to Halle's mother in Ohio while she goes back to look for her husband. (With the old master, he had allowed Halle to work double-time and "pay off" his own mother so she could be free.) That's when Sethe is cornered by the master's nephews and raped and her milk "taken". Then, they beat her across the back so savagely that her scars become like those of a giant tree. When Halle is still nowhere to be found, she makes a break for it by herself and heads the same direction as the wagon. Paul D and Sixo suffer their own misfortunes which we hear about later. They end up with Sixo being burned to death and Paul D being sold to another owner who keeps him in a cage in a ditch in the mud and works him on a chain gang. Sethe ends up in the woods by herself and goes into labor. About to die anyway from her terrible injuries, she is aided by a poor white trash girl named Amy Denver. Amy helps her give birth to a baby daughter (who Sethe names Denver) and points her in the right direction for crossing the river. Luckily, she is found by an old black man, Stamp Paid, who takes slaves across the river to freedom when he can get away with it. Just his name alone made me shake my head too. Was that the only name he knew because he'd been stamped as "Paid"?? Anyway, he delivers her across the river and then some...right to the home of Baby Suggs, her mother-in-law, who has Sethe's other three children all safe and sound. They have a wonderful reunion and Baby Suggs nurses Sethe back to health. They have a surreal 28 days until Sethe's master, only called "the schoolteacher" comes with the sheriff, looking for Sethe and his other property. Another common horror of slavery...little slave children hardly ever got to stay with their mothers long because they were sold away from them. :-( So, to schoolteacher, the two young boys and baby girl were all eventual money for him. So...when Sethe looks up from the garden and sees the hat of schoolteacher walking onto the property she goes crazy. She runs and grabs all her children and takes them to the shed. By the time anyone can get there, she has cut her two boys with a handsaw, nearly sliced the head off her oldest baby daughter, and is about to smack her infant daughter's head up against the wall. The thought of her children going back to that world and suffering what she suffered made her determined to kill them before letting them suffer a life of those atrocities. Such horrible desperation. When the schoolteacher sees the bleeding boys, and to me I thought it implied they were castrated because he said, "well, they'd be no use to him now", the dead baby girl, and the crazed Sethe, he backs away and writes them all off as a loss. He doesn't force the issue of taking them back. Sethe is taken to jail, but helped out by an actual kindly white man who is letting them live in one of his houses rent free. So, when the story actually opens, it's been about 18 years since the day that Sethe killed her oldest baby daughter...one we only come to know as "Beloved" because that's what is written on her tombstone. In all those 18 years, the unhappy spirit of Sethe's daughter has haunted the small house they all live in and alienated the family from the neighborhood. Even Sethe's two sons at age 12 and 13 run away rather than deal one more day with the haunting, tormenting spirit. Baby Suggs passes away eventually and leaves Sethe and daughter Denver there alone to deal with the "ghost". One day, Paul D shows up at the door and he and Sethe have an instant connection. He asks her about Halle and she says she hasn't heard from him since before they were supposed to meet to run together. She assumes he's dead. Paul D comes into the house and can feel the evil baby spirit. He breaks a few chair legs and some dishes and yells at it to go away, and sure enough it does. He and Sethe start a sexual relationship which Denver is not too happy about, but at least Paul D takes Sethe and Denver and goes to the town fair with them...on the day set aside for the "blacks". They have a fun time but when they come back, there is a mysterious, almost new looking young woman about Denver's age sitting in the front yard waiting for them. Sethe instantly takes her in and before long it becomes apparent that the young woman, who says her name is Beloved, is the spirit of Sethe's dead baby come there in human form. She begins to make Paul D do things he doesn't understand, like not wanting to go upstairs with Sethe...I mean, like he becomes physically ill. When Paul D starts sleeping in the shed, then Beloved comes to him and wills him to have sex with her. It's not like he's just a typical guy who gives in to temptation. It's like she forces him too and he doesn't understand it. Out of guilt, Paul D tells Sethe that he'd like to have a baby with her. When Stamp Paid hears this, he tells Paul D about how Sethe killed her daughter all those years ago. Paul D is horrified. He can't imagine anything he went through that would have made him kill a child of his...and he went through some horrible things himself. He has a heartbreaking talk with Sethe where she tries to explain why she did what she did...because she loved her children more than anything, but he just couldn't fathom them having her same experiences. Here's the end of the conversation between Sethe and Paul D:

    "Your love is too thick," he said, thinking, That bitch [Beloved] is looking at me; she is right over my head looking down through the floor at me.
    "Too thick?" she said, thinking of the Clearing where Baby Suggs' commands knocked the pods off horse chestnuts. "Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all."
    "Yeah. It didn't work, did it? Did it work?" he asked.
    "It worked," she said.
    "How? Your boys gone you don't know where. One girl dead, the other won't leave the yard. How did it work?"
    "They ain't at Sweet Home [schoolteacher's farm]. Schoolteacher ain't got em."
    "Maybe there's worse."
    "It ain't my job to know what's worse. It's my job to know what is and to keep them away from what I know is terrible. I did that."
    "What you did was wrong, Sethe."
    "I should have gone on back there? Taken my babies back there?"
    "There could have been a way. Some other way."
    "What way?"
    "You got two feet, Sethe, not four," he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; trackless and quiet. 
    Later he would wonder what made him say it. The calves of his youth? or the conviction that he was being observed through the ceiling? How fast had he moved from his shame to hers. From his cold-house secret [having sex with Beloved] straight to her too-thick love.
    Meanwhile the forest was locking the distance between them, giving it shape and heft.
    He did not put his hat on right away. First he fingered it, deciding how his going would be, how to make it an exit not an escape. And it was very important not to leave without looking. He stood up, turned and looked up the white stairs. She [Beloved] was there all right. Standing straight as a line with her back to him. He didn't rush to the door. He moved slowly and when he got there he opened it before asking Sethe to put supper aside for him because he might be a little late getting back. Only then did he put on his hat.
    Sweet, she thought. He must think I can't bear to hear him say it. That after all I have told him and after telling me how many feet I have, "goodbye" would break me to pieces. Ain't that sweet.
    "So long," she murmured from the far side of the trees.

Just heartbreaking. So, Paul D leaves Sethe. Beloved finally has her way. Things deteriorate even further when Beloved becomes more and more demanding of Sethe and her attention, to the point where Sethe even quits her job. All Sethe cares about it trying to explain and make amends to Beloved for her behavior years before. Finally, Denver grows a backbone and goes to some of the town women for help. They are starving and her mother's gone nearly mad. As the women gather to finally come and help, the kindly white man who helped keep Sethe out of jail all those years ago is driving up in a cart to pick up Denver. He's going to have her work in his house for pay. When Sethe sees the white man, she has visions of the schoolteacher all over again and runs outside and tries to kill the man with an icepick. She's stopped by Denver and the women. Beloved, disappears, not to be seen again. Sethe takes to her bed, much the way Baby Suggs had done at the end of her life. At the end of the book, Denver has found her independence and is working and being schooled. Paul D grows some compassion and goes back to see Sethe. He finds her in bed and realizes she's just going to let herself die. She tells him that she's lost her Beloved,  her "best thing". Paul D tells her they need to build a future together and that she's her OWN best thing. She is. And Sethe says, "Me? Me?".  The ending leaves you thinking that maybe Paul D sticks by Sethe and they actually have a future together. The entire books leaves me just so gut-sick at what the fellow human beings of my very own ancestors went through...what some of them went through probably at the hands of some of my very own ancestors. It's alot to think about.

Baby Suggs was a character who was good and spiritual who everyone looked up to. She'd also been a slave that had eight children, all of them sold off and taken from her except her youngest son, Halle. I can't imagine just being used as a breeder and having your children taken from you like that. One line I liked from Baby Suggs at the beginning of the book about Halle, who worked double to get her paid off:

    "A man ain't nothing but a man," said Baby Suggs. "But a son? Well, now that's somebody."

And one time, when Baby Suggs was arguing with Sethe who was trying to say that at least some of the whitepeople had been good to them:

    "They got me out of jail," Sethe once told Baby Suggs.
    "They also put you in it," she answered.
    "They drove you 'cross the river."
    "On my son's back."
    "They gave you this house."
    "Nobody gave me nothing."
    "I got a job from them."
    "He got a cook from them, girl."
    "Oh, some of them do all right by us."
    "And every time it's a surprise, ain't it?"
    "You didn't used to talk this way."
    "Don't box with me. There's more of us they drowned than there is all of them ever lived from the start of time. Lay down your sword. This ain't a battle; it's a rout."

Lay down your sword. This ain't a battle; it's a rout. Wow, imagine the hopelessness of feeling that way. Dang, another intense, depressing book, but such a good one.