Conditions change once Sweet Home’s owner dies of a stroke and his widow brings in her brother-in-law and his young nephews to help run Sweet Home; the small liberties granted to the enslaved people are revoked by the new leadership, and cruelties ensue. The enslaved people, including Halle and a man named Paul D, plot to escape north; however, Sethe and her children are the only ones who succeed in doing so, only after she is violated by the nephews and brutally whipped by the brother-in-law for informing him of the assault. These events and Sethe’s flight are complicated by her near-full-term pregnancy. Approaching death from exhaustion and exposure, she is saved by a white girl who helps Sethe give birth. Her daughter is named Denver after the contextually benevolent white girl.  

Carrying her newborn, Sethe arrives at 124, greeted by her other three children, into the care of Baby Suggs. The bittersweet happiness of her arrival without Halle is marred one month later by the arrival of a team intending to reclaim Sethe and her kids for Sweet Home. Rather than allow herself and her children to be forced back into slavery, Sethe intends to commit infanticide and suicide, succeeding in the murder of her older daughter. This action effectively prevents them from being taken, and Sethe is exonerated of her charges. Despite this, her act of desperation crushes her family, eventually leading to Baby Suggs’ death and to the flight of her sons from the household. Eighteen years later, Paul D arrives at 124. He begins a relationship with Sethe and manages to evict the poltergeist.  

Soon thereafter, a strange woman arrives by the name of Beloved, the word Sethe had engraved on her child’s tombstone. Sethe is initially unaware of the stranger’s origins, and Paul D is effectively forced out by the new arrival. Once Beloved’s identity as the deceased child is understood, she, Sethe, and Denver become wrapped up in each other, blurring the lines of their identity. Sethe loses her job, but Denver manages to extricate herself to find work. Hearing of the family’s plight at the hands of the “unholy” Beloved, thirty black women of the area band together to purge 124 of her presence. Beloved leaves without a trace. Paul D eventually returns to 124, and memories of Beloved slowly fade into oblivion. 

Beloved is a pure work of art. Toni Morrison crafted a brilliant piece fueled by the lived experiences of enslaved people’s descendants in America and informed by the temporal proximity of the ratification of thirteenth amendment. The summary outlined above fails to capture the impact of the work’s nonlinear form, both in time and perspective. Flashbacks seamlessly interweave with the driving plot. Not only are the past and present difficult to distinguish, but this intermingling also elevates the past in status compared to the present, allowing the past to rival––and often exceed––the present in narrative importance. Time becomes a unique character, one whose primary achievement is the marring of other characters’ physical beings. Through this lens, the recapitulation of Sethe’s tree scars mirrors the historical impact of slavery on the modern-day United States. This context is further validated by the work’s inspiration, the life of Margaret Garner, an African- American enslaved woman who escaped, was recaptured, and who murdered her daughter while being returned to the South. 

Toni Morrison’s mastery of figurative language builds upon the nonlinearity of the piece. Her writing is powerfully displayed through allegories, the most notable of which is found on pages 248-252. Through Beloved’s perspective, Morrison blends hell and slave ships into one entity. This same section of the novel further unifies the perspectives of Beloved, Sethe, and Denver through a mélange of emotion and perception.  

The relevance of this piece to contemporary American politics and social issues is profound and disturbing. American history continues to discredit the experiences of people of color, particularly those of who identify as Black or African-American. This novel demands that we confront the United States’ history of racial oppression. Its magical realism provides new dimension to a historical narrative, allowing for greater imaginative accessibility to the meaning behind its story. As a last powerful image, I refer to the biblically paralleled coming of the four horsemen to “reclaim” Sethe: the sheriff assumes responsibility of reinforcing the dehumanization of Sethe and “addressing” her perceived cultural, psychological, and racialized aberrancy through punishment sans reformation.  

Miscellaneous 

Beloved
Toni Morrison

Awards
National Book Award Finalist for Fiction (1987); Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1988); American Book Award (1988); Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (1988); Frederic G. Melcher Book Award (1988)  

Publisher Vintage 
Place Published United States 
Edition 2004 
Page Count 324 

Originally published on September 16, 1987 by Alfred A. Knopf Inc. 

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database . 
Web image by Alex Conti

The action in James, which is told in the first person, follows a good part of Twain’s story line. James, a slave, overhears that he is to be sold to a man in New Orleans and separated from his wife and family, so he flees his owner’s home and hides on a small island in the Mississippi River to buy time and plan. Meanwhile, Huck’s father, a violent alcoholic, has returned to town, and to get away from him, Huck has faked his own death, has run away from home, and is also sheltering on the same island. Together Huck and James flee down the Mississippi on a raft. With Huck thought to be dead and the runaway James presumed to be his killer, James realizes that Huck’s safety and survival are the only proofs of his innocence.   

Many of the episodes of Twain’s novel are here, but when James and Huck become separated, James’s independent narrative begins. He is left in the service of a blacksmith, where his singing attracts the attention of a leader of a minstrel troupe, who purchases him. But to perform, James must first be made up as a white man and then wear blackface. The troupe also contains a light-skinned black man passing as white, who befriends James and runs away with him. They wind up on a crowded riverboat and James discovers that Huck is on the same boat. The ship’s boiler explodes, the ship capsizes, and James must decide to save either his friend or Huck. He saves Huck (there are multiple reasons for this) and then sets about trying to return home to find his family and get them to safety…and freedom. 

James is often funny, but it is not light. Separation of families, whippings, and killings are presented as the backdrop to daily life—which renders them even more horrible. However, Everett is not just interested in retelling the Huck Finn story from another character’s viewpoint; he is interested in telling a different story: James’s. Turning the racial dynamic upside down, Everett’s slaves speak perfect English among themselves, but purposely revert to deep stereotypical dialect when around white people. They understand that by code-switching in this way they are giving the whites what they want and expect; to do otherwise would challenge the rigid social hierarchy and thus put the slaves in grave danger. Their use of dialect keeps them relatively safe, and importantly, helps them maintain a kind of control of the situation. When you have so little, a secret is a powerful thing. 

For much of the book is about power. There is a wonderful scene early in the novel where James is holding a class for slave children in which he drills them on the way they must speak around whites: 

“White folks expect us to sound a certain way, and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say when they don’t feel ‘superior.’ So, let’s pause to review some of the basics.” 

The children then proceed to enumerate the rules: don’t make eye contact, never speak first, never address any subject directly when talking to another slave. The correct way to report a fire in the kitchen is not “Fire, fire!”, but “Lawdy, missum! Looky dere.”—because “…we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.” In this and other sections Everett lets us peek behind a curtain to see Black resistance in action. He also makes us see beyond Twain’s literary stereotype to understand the enslaved Black characters as fully formed people: aware, articulate, clever, and possessed of deep emotional lives, creators of a complex society within the general society of the time and place. Everett isn’t interested in the myth of the long-suffering, infinitely patient, preternaturally wise servant, except to explode it.  

James suggests that it is the control of the tools of the intellect—primarily spoken language (though James can read and write as well)—that is ultimately the slaves’ power and their defense. Denying the enslaved an education was, of course, a way of keeping them down, and many in the South fought hard to maintain this status quo. James’s treasured possessions are a book, a notebook, and a pencil, and the code-switching mentioned above is not merely a defense, but a way in which white masters can be manipulated.  

Besides education, Everett explores another source of power (or its lack): skin color, its implications and, despite the rigid social system, its malleability. Beyond the primary black/white power implications of the antebellum South, we have in the minstrel performance section white men in blackface, a black man “passing” as white who dons blackface, and a black man who must be made up to look white before he can put on blackface. There is even a biracial character in the novel, who shows up so unexpectedly that the reader is left to wonder about the author’s motivation here; is he saying this is far more common than anyone thought? Is he sending up the Great American Novel? Saying that the black and white roots of American history—and literature— are more inextricably commingled than we could imagine? Everett doesn’t expound on this but leaves us to hypothesize. 

 Perhaps the most obvious signifier of power in the novel is in the title. The protagonist is not James, the name the white world—his enslaver—calls him. but James, the name he chooses for himself. At one point he is told to identify himself:  

He is not someone’s property, no longer to be identified by a name someone else has given him. He has chosen this name, and the ability to name (see the children’s discussion above) is a power in itself. 

James is brilliant, clever, eminently readable, a tale of personal victory and an emotionally rich yet biting commentary on the dynamics of race relations. It is also grimly serious in its portrayal of the horrors of daily life for enslaved people in the antebellum South. Everett starts with Twain’s work and takes it in another direction, with another voice heard from. James’s intelligence, humanity, and determination run through the entire novel; in Everett’s telling, James is not simply Huck’s long-suffering sidekick, the good loyal companion who is ultimately liberated—literally—by Huck and Tom Sawyer. James has his own agenda, and though he may be bought and sold, he is at no time a pawn. He is hyperaware of his situation and always searching for a way to accomplish his ends; he has agency. Near the novel’s end we even have a Biblical moment where James brings down a cataclysm upon his enslavers and leads his people to freedom.  

A retelling of Huckleberry Finn, indeed. 

James is shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Nonso Anozie reads an excerpt:

James
Percival Everett 
Doubleday, New York
320 pp (hardcover) 

Feature image by Guille Pozzi