Beloved is a 1987 novel by American novelist Toni Morrison. Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of a dysfunctional family of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. The narrative of Beloved derives from the life of Margaret Garner, a slave in the slave state of Kentucky who escaped and fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856.
Toni Morrison (1931-2019), was an African American writer and a Nobel laureate. Her first novel was The Bluest Eye, which was published in 1970. It was written in Albany, NY, and published in 1987. It is a portrayal of slave women who were treated as birth-giving machines and produced as many slaves as they could. Inspired from Margaret Garner escaping the story in 1856. It tells the Fugitive Slave Act on American slaves. ‘Sixty million and more,’ and they think it as a comparison between Jews killed in Holocaust and African Americans who perished in slavery. It's a best novel after WW2. Toni won Nobel prize (1993) for Black Women writing.
Margaret Garner, called “Peggy” (died 1858), was an enslaved African American woman who killed her own daughter and intended to kill her other three children and herself rather than be forced back into slavery. Garner and her family had escaped enslavement in January 1856 by traveling across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, but they were apprehended by U.S. Marshals acting under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Garner’s defence attorney, John Jolliffe, moved to have her tried for murder in Ohio, to be able to get a trial in a free state and to challenge the Fugitive Slave Law. Garner’s story was the inspiration for the novel Beloved (1987) by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and its subsequent adaptation into a film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey (1998).
It was published by Alfred A. Knof Inc. in the United States. Garner was subject to capture under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and when U.S. marshals broke into the cabin where she and her children had barricaded themselves, she was attempting to kill her children—and had already killed her youngest daughter—in hopes of sparing them from being returned to slavery. Morrison’s main inspiration for the novel was an account of the event titled “A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child” in an 1856 newspaper article initially published in the American Baptist and reproduced in The Black Book, an anthology of texts of Black history and culture that Morrison had edited in 1974.
The Black Book is a 2023 Nigerian crime thriller film produced and directed by Editi Effiong, starring Richard Mofe-Damijo, Sam Dede, Shaffy Bello, Femi Branch, Alex Usifo, Ade Laoye and Ireti Doyle. The Black Book, directed by Editi Effiong, starts with the kidnapping and killing of the husband and infant of Professor Craig (Bimbo Akintola), the kidnapping and killing of her family emanated from the professor who also doubles as a minister revealing some dark secrets of corruption in the ministry.
The Marshals Service serves as the enforcement and security arm of the U.S. federal judiciary, although it is an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice and operates under the direction of the U.S. Attorney General. It is the oldest U.S. federal law enforcement agency, created by the Judiciary Act of 1789 during the presidency of George Washington as the “Office of the United States Marshal”. The USMS as it stands today was established in 1969 to provide guidance and assistance to U.S. Marshals throughout the federal judicial districts.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was a controversial law passed by Congress as part of the Compromise of 1850. It extended the provisions of the original 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, which authorized local governments to seize and return escaped slaves to their owners. The 1850 act made the federal government responsible for finding, returning, and trying escaped slaves, even if they were in a free state. It also imposed harsher punishments for anyone who aided a fugitive, such as imprisoning them for six months and fining them $1,000.
The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction a year after its publication, and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award. It was adapted as a 1998 movie of the same name, starring Oprah Winfrey. The book’s dedication reads “Sixty Million and more”, referring to the Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. In 1998, the novel was made into a film directed by Jonathan Demme, and produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey.
The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people to the Americas. European slave ships regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central Africa and West Africa and had been sold by West African slave traders to European slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids. Portuguese coastal raiders found that slave raiding was too costly and often ineffective and opted for established commercial relations.
In January 2016, Beloved was broadcast in 10 episodes by BBC Radio 4 as part of its 15 Minute Drama programme. The radio series was adapted by Patricia Cumper. Beloved received the Frederic G. Melcher Book Award, which is named for an editor of publishers weekly.
Inspired by her remarks, the Toni Morrison Society began to install benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America. The novel received the seventh annual Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award in 1988, given to a novelist who “most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy’s purposes.”
Although nominated for the National Book Award, it did not win, and 48 African-American writers and critics—including Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Angela Davis, Ernest J. Gaines, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Rosa Guy, June Jordan, Paule Marshall, Louise Meriwether, Eugene Redmond, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, John Edgar Wideman, and John A. Williams—signed a letter of protest that was published in The New York Times Book Review on January 24, 1988. Beloved is haunted by the loss of her African parents, and thus comes to believe that Sethe is her mother. Sethe longs for her dead daughter and is rather easily convinced that Beloved is the child she has lost. Such an interpretation, house contends, clears up many puzzling aspects of the novel and emphasizes Morrison’s concern with familial ties. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy explores how primal scenes in Morrison’s novels are “an opportunity and affective agency for self-discovery through memory” and “rememory”.
As Jennings observes, many of Morrison’s novels are set in isolated Black communities where African practices and belief systems are not marginalized by a dominant White culture, but rather remain active, if perhaps subconscious, forces shaping the community. On November 5, 2019, the BBC News listed Beloved on its list of the 100 most inspiring novels.
Black is a racialized classification of people, usually a political and skin colour-based category for specific populations with a mid- to dark brown complexion. Not all people considered “black” have dark skin; in certain countries, often in socially based systems of racial classification in the Western world, the term “black” is used to describe persons who are perceived as dark-skinned compared to other populations. It is most commonly used for people of sub-Saharan African ancestry, Indigenous Australians and Melanesians, though it has been applied in many contexts to other groups, and is no indicator of any close ancestral relationship whatsoever. Indigenous African societies do not use the term black as a racial identity outside of influences brought by Western cultures.
White culture can be defined as the culture of White Americans, which is the culture of people who have origins in Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It can also refer to the way that white people, their beliefs, customs, and culture, act as a standard for comparison with other groups. White culture can influence how people think, behave, decide, and know, and can value some ways of doing so over others. It can also define what is considered normal, good, or unsustainable, and can devalue or make other ways of thinking invisible.
In Virginia, Beloved was considered for removal from the Fairfax County senior English reading list due to a parent’s 2017 complaint that “the book includes scenes of violent sex, including a gang rape, and was too graphic and extreme for teenagers”. His opponent, Glenn Youngkin, seized on the remark, and produced a television commercial in which a parent recounted her effort to get the book banned. The commercial did not mention the title, author, or subject of the book, but focused on the “explicit material” in the unnamed work.
Fairfax County, officially the County of Fairfax, is a county in the Commonwealth of Virginia. With a population of 1,150,309 as of the 2020 census, it is the most populous county in Virginia, the most populous jurisdiction in the Washington metropolitan area, and the most populous location in the Washington–Baltimore combined statistical area. The county seat is Fairfax; however, because it is an independent city under Virginia law, the city of Fairfax is not part of the county.
Glenn Allen Youngkin (born December 9, 1966) is an American businessman and politician serving since 2022 as the 74th governor of Virginia. A member of the Republican Party, he spent 25 years at the private-equity firm The Carlyle Group, where he became co-CEO in 2018. He resigned from the position in 2020 to run for governor. Youngkin won the 2021 Republican primary for Governor of Virginia and defeated former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe in the general election, becoming the state’s first Republican governor since Bob McDonnell in 2009.
Beloved is not narrated chronologically; it is composed of flashbacks, memories, and nightmares. The story of Beloved commences with the Hauntings Of House 124: the home of Sethe, her daughter Denver, and a spiteful spirit, believed to be Sethe’s dead child. Beloved is a novel that explores the topics of motherhood, violence, slavery, and the difficulties of moving forward when you are haunted by the past. Beloved has been among the list of “Top Ten Most Challenged Books” for the American Library Association. In 2007, two Kentucky parents raised concern to the Eastern High School board about violence within Beloved. Beloved was taken off the reading list for AP English Literature the following year, replaced with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. In 2012, public hearings were held in Missouri’s Plymouth Canton School District to discuss whether a list of books, including Beloved, should be banned from AP English Literature classes.
It’s a historical fiction. It follows mainly third person omniscient point of view. It was set in Ohio. Abraham Lincoln dies after American Civil War. This new novel is set after the end of the Civil War, during the period of so-called Reconstruction, when a great deal of random violence was let loose upon blacks, both the slaves freed by Emancipation and others who had been given or had bought their freedom earlier. ’’Beloved’’ is Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, and another triumph. Morrison drew on a Cincinnati murder case arising from a woman’s sacrifice of her children to keep them out of the grasp of slave catchers. Beloved, which is classified as historical fiction, gothic horror story, and bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel), demonstrates Toni Morrison’s skill in penetrating the unconstrained, unapologetic psyches of numerous characters who shoulder the horrific burden of slavery’s hidden sins. In 1838, The Garners learn of the Bodwins’ kindness toward ex-slaves. Garner purchases Baby Suggs and Halle.
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865), was a civil war in the United States between the Union. Decades of controversy over slavery were brought to a head when Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery’s expansion, won the 1860 presidential election.
Reconstruction, in the U.S. history, the period (1865–77) that followed the American Civil War and during which attempts were made to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social, and economic legacy and to solve the problems arising from the readmission to the Union of the 11 states that had seceded at or before the outbreak of war. Reconstruction has since the late 20th century been viewed more sympathetically as a laudable experiment in interracial democracy. In the South, a politically mobilized Black community joined with white allies to bring the Republican Party to power, and with it a redefinition of the responsibilities of government. The national debate over Reconstruction began during the Civil War. In December 1863, less than a year after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Pres. Abraham Lincoln announced the first comprehensive program for Reconstruction, the Ten Percent Plan.
In 1795, Baby Suggs, a slave, is born. In 1803, Ohio becomes a state. In 1805, Edward Bodwin is born. In 1808, The Bodwin family moves from Bluestone Road to Court Street. In 1818, Tyree and John, Baby Suggs’s sons, run away. In 1835, Sethe is born to “Ma’am” in either Carolina or Louisiana. In 1848, Sethe arrives at Sweet Home in Pulaski County, Kentucky to replace Baby Suggs, whose freedom Halle has purchased with voluntary weekend work. In 1849, Mrs. Garner agrees to Halle’s marriage to Sethe. Sethe secretly sews a “bedding dress” from pillow cases, a dresser scarf, and mosquito netting.
Halle is born. Paul D arrives at Sweet Home. The story is based on the real-life story of escaped slave Margaret Garner, who flees a Kentucky plantation with her husband, Robert, and the rest of her family.
Eventually, the law catches up with the family and Margaret kills her daughter, rather than allowing her to become a slave. The novel is an example of magical realism. The novel switches often between its present of 1873 with flashbacks to twenty years earlier in Kentucky. It is set in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the American Mid-west and follows escaped slave Sethe. Although Sethe is free in Ohio she is enslaved by the trauma of her past, a recurring theme in the novel. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. The New York Times Book Review has named “Beloved,” a 1987 novel by Princeton Professor Toni Morrison, while editing a project called The Black Book (1974), a compilation of memorabilia representing 300 years of black history, Morrison discovered the account of Margaret Garner.
According to a newspaper article that Morrison had read, in 1851 Margaret Garner, a former slave, escaped with her children from Kentucky to Ohio. When her owner and a posse formed by the U.S. marshal in Cincinnati tracked her down, Garner threatened to kill her children crying out, “Before any of my Children will be taken back into Kentucky, I will kill every one of them.”
Garner cuts the throat of her three-year-old daughter before being restrained and eventually returned to Kentucky under the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Moved by the story, Morrison used Margaret Garner as a starting point for her story of Sethe, but she intentionally avoided further researching the Garner case, allowing Sethe to emerge as a fully-imagined character.