Beloved pg. 4-51

We just started reading Beloved, and wow, the first three chapters are already intense. The book opens with Sethe, the main character, living in a gray and white house on Blue Stone Road that’s haunted by her baby girl. It’s not just any haunting, though – there’s something really unsettling about it. With random gusts of air, overturned jars and pots, moving sideboards, and earthquakes, you can sense that the house has a really sad and dark history.

Sethe lives there with her daughter, Denver, and it’s obvious from the start that Sethe is carrying a lot of baggage. She is an escaped slave from the "Sweet Home" plantation, and it can be inferred that a lot has happened between the timeline of her enslavement and the present setting. She used to live in the house with her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, before she passed away. Before Baby Sugg's death, Sethe's sons fled the house one after another, driven away by the dark and haunted past of the home. In the present, it is just Sethe and Denver in the house, along with the ghost baby that seems sad and almost resentful toward its mother. Because of the house's haunted nature, most people avoid the house and its residents like the plague. This causes Denver to grow up very lonely, especially after her brothers fled, leaving her to her own devices for 18 years with little to no social interaction. Denver escapes this loneliness and sadness by playing in a grove of boxwood bushes, almost like a treehouse, where she plays and acts out her imaginations.

When the lonesome family of two is joined by Paul D, one of the men who was enslaved on the same plantation as Sethe, we learn more about Sethe's past on the plantation and what life was like. Paul D and Sethe share some intimate moments, and Sethe feels more understood and supported than she has in a long time. She reveals the scars on her back, which she describes as being shaped like a tree, from when she was assaulted while pregnant, and her milk was taken from her. When the house shakes as Paul D kisses her scars, he scares the ghost away by aggressively swinging a coffee table. This angers Denver because he pushed away the only company she had in the house. As Denver grows more annoyed with Paul D's presence and his garnering of her mother's attention, we flash back again to her birth and parts of Sethe's journey to the Blue Stone house.

There are a lot of open holes in Sethe's story, which I am looking forward to filling in as we read more. It sounds like Sethe has a deep connection to motherhood and the weight she has borne. I am curious to learn more about the past of Sethe's lost daughter, her journey to the house on Blue Stone Road, life on the "Sweet Home" plantation, and how everyone's individual stories tie into each other in the novel!