Home Sweet Horror

            Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved recounts the true story of escaped slave Margaret Garner, who slit her baby daughter’s throat to save her from being recaptured into slavery. The main character in Beloved, Sethe, does the same, and is subsequently haunted by her murdered child’s spirit.

            There are two main settings in Beloved: 124 Bluestone Rd. is the house on the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio where Sethe escapes to; the other is Sweet Home, Kentucky, which is the plantation where she was a slave. These locations practically serve as characters in the novel, as they are continually personified, from the first line of the book: “124 was spiteful”(9). Each section begins this way, the second with, “124 was loud”(195), and the third with,“124 was quiet”(275). These moments serve as markers for the progression of the story, as well as the characters. This house, teeming with the spirits, leaves the place and its inhabitants in torment: it causes disturbances and overtakes the consciences of whoever enters. When her daughter Denver begs her to leave, Sethe says, “I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house…but…I will never run from another thing on this earth”(23). Is it that she really doesn’t want to move again, or that she fears being without the spirit, there to make sure she doesn’t forget her lost child?

            While 124 Bluestone Rd. is described as the haunted house, Sweet Home is described in more pleasant terms than one would expect: “although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too” (13). Sethe’s marriage as a slave to her husband Halle she considers a blessing, one which she “could lean on, as though Sweet Home really was one” (33). It is odd—the picture Sethe paints of Sweet Home does not at first seem so awful. However, Sethe kills her own baby to keep her from going back there. It is this juxtaposition of the appearance with the reality that reveals a new facet of truth to this world. We as readers never anticipate that beneath “the most beautiful sycamores in the world” Sethe would get gang raped and whipped so badly with a cowhide she can no longer feel her back. For a moment we were under the illusion that perhaps things would be okay here, which makes Sethe’s nightmarish revelations all the more shocking, terrible and wrong.

            The characters of Mr. and Mrs. Garner represent a similar disparity. Mr. Garner boasts that "'at Sweet Home, my niggers is men every one of em. Bought em thataway, raised em thataway. Men every one'"(18).  He is proud of them, and allowed them “to buy a mother, choose a horse or a wife, handle guns, even learn reading if they wanted to” (125). However, beneath that surface, just like beneath the façade of Sweet Home’s beauty, the Garners were still slave owners. As Halle points out, he did let him buy his mother, but "she worked [t]here for ten years. If she worked another ten you think she would've made it out? I pay him or her last years and in return he got you, me and three more coming up"(226).

            These places, and the characters that occupy them, serve as a startlingly discrepant setting that in the end shows that—of this culture of which so many pictures have been painted—perhaps we will never know the truth.