“Beloved” isn’t just a novel it is an experience that lingers after the last page story wise and reality wise. Toni Morrison wrote an incredible story based on Sethe, a former slave and her daughter Denver. The story speaks on the physical and emotional scars of slavery. The arrival of Beloved, said to be Sethe’s dead daughter, a ghost, and one who experienced being on the boats used for slave trade, unlocks repressed memories and pushes as they are confronted.

The remarkable thing is, this is not just a story this was thousands of enslaved peoples daily lives and it truly puts it into perspective as it is easy to loose grasp of what once was. Although slavery isn’t prominent or as out there as it was the trauma, experience, its effects on this very generation(my generation), racism, colorism, dehumanization, having thought on how race can play an impact in opportunities even when it shouldn’t, still exists today.

In my class when we discussed this book the discussion on Sethe’s mothering was brought up. The question being if her killing her children when the white men came was “insanity” or “love” and what is the extent of each. Now off the bat the question was a bit off but it made me realize there might’ve not been sympathy because she was a mother or she was enslaved. To me it is a no brainer that what she did was motherly instincts of giving the slight chance that your children would experience a brutal and dehumanizing experience such as one has experienced. Therefore Sethe killing her children made sense because she took on her motherly duties. To think on the surface level of what had been done to enslaved people such as spiked collars, iron bits, iron masks, separation of families made to be hard to trace back to one another, breeding, hunted, etc. all these dehumanizing things are done to another human being because of the color of skin. It makes a 100% sense that Sethe as a human being, as a mother, as an enslaved person, would in a heartbeat save her children from such a life.

At the end of the day the only person who can question Sethe is Denver and the only people to fully know are those at Sweet Home and other enslaved people. “Beloved” challenges us to confront the truths of history and to acknowledge that slavery’s shadow still darkens our present.