Week 7 Beloved by Toni Morrison

    This is week 7 on feelingsonbooks.com, and I started reading the book Beloved by Toni Morrison.  Being as this blog is my safe place for sharing my feelings on the readings in my college English course, I would like to share that I  allowed my first impression to be based on what I had heard about the context of the story before I even started reading this novel.  I felt that this would be a horror story based on a true story with a haunted house, and the characters being former slaves and a mother who murdered her baby who is only known as Beloved by the name on her headstone. It is true that Toni Morrison begins to develop the plot in Part One with these details, but I was surprised that it is all of these things plus so much more.  

    The beginning had my mind moving quickly back and forth through the life of Sethe, the main character. I feel she had a difficult life full of fear, abuse, shame, uncertainty, as well as bravery, strength, and perseverance.  I could not imagine having been sent away from my family at thirteen like Sethe to be a companion to someone I didn’t know, to have no say in what happened to me.  

    My heart felt for Sethe’s daughter, Denver, as the story unfolded. Her grandma had died and left with her mother and the ghost of Sethe’s first baby who haunts the house. Her two brothers ran away because they could not deal with the weird scary things that were going on and left poor Denver alone. How lonely and annoyed she must have felt when Paul D shows up out of the blue and tries to become part of the family. She’s already dealing with her mother’s mental health, the feeling of grief of losing her grandmother, and now anger as she deals with her mother and Paul D’s relationship.  I wondered what she felt toward the ghost of her murdered sister. Was Denver scared? Was she ok with the thought of her sister’s ghost being in the house? It couldn’t have been easy for her to live there with the town people thinking they were weird or cursed. I felt sad when I read that she didn't have any friends who would come over to her house because of the events that happened there. 

    I have to say it has been difficult for me to distinguish between real time and flashbacks at some points, although I was super surprised when a fully grown woman appeared out of the blue and had the name Beloved just like Sethe’s murdered daughter. That made this part kind of spooky. I’m really looking forward to reading the second part of this book. The questions that come to my mind as I’m going into the second part is, what is going to happen to Sethe and Paul D now that this woman has shown up claiming to be Beloved, and what is Denver going to do? What do you think is going to happen in Part 2 of Beloved? I guess we will just have to read to see.