African American Identity In Beloved

Nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children (qtd. in Geyh, Leebron, and Levy 303). An important quote in the book Beloved by Toni Morrison that shows just a smidge of what life as an African American slave meant the time this story takes place in 1931. So much of the details surrounding this time period have been lost in myth and altered to better suite societal ideals. We can judge only by the history that is set before us but Morrison dives deeper into the past through rigorous research and by using a true, real life story to mold her own novel. Morrison, who is also a woman of color, found inspiration to write this novel through her own heritage and culture as well as a newspaper article over the history

Sethe, the protagonist and main character, is conflicted by the lifestyle her and her kids endure so much that she believes that her daughter beloved haunts her home in Ohio. She is mentally tormented by the idea of her children becoming the next generation of slaves and makes a horrifying move by slaughtering her daughter so she would not be forced into that life. Halle, Sethe’s husband of six years, had worked long, hard and desperately to buy her freedom to which he succeeded for a brief time. Not a month later she was dragged back to Sweet Home and it was the motive to kill her youngest she calls Beloved. Halle is also conflicted throughout Beloved because he does not believe he is a man but rather an object. Lost identity and oppression of black Americans is a consistent theme that Morrison preserves within all characters. Through the book Beloved we can see how oppression of racial and/or cultural identity and socio-economical positions in society has played its part in shaping our American

Being an African American today is not as it was in 1931. The majority of characters in this novel are slaves who live and work on the Garner’s Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky. Sethe communicates how difficult maintaining herself as a woman has been when she says …she could remember desire, she had forgot how it worked (qtd. in Geyh, Leebron, Levy 301). Paul D, her ex-lover, has just found her after twenty-five years of being apart and Sethe is unsure of her herself as a woman. Author of The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia, Beaulieu, states in her writings that “Enslaved women, when they were allowed to keep their children in close proximity, faced the problem of providing proper child care and forming maternal bonds because the system made no suitable provisions for either.” (Beaulieu 60). Women being oppressed to the point where their babies grow to know only hardship is only a section of topics Morrison covers in her novel. These hardships of being a slave and being treated as an object has left her, as well as other characters, with a lost identity. We can see proof here when a mass of characters are named, He told the story to Paul F,...Paul A, and Paul D (qtd. in Geyh, Leebron, and Levy 304). Instead of choosing different names for the characters Morrison decided to maintain the idea of lost identity by giving them very little of a choice to be different. Kirby notes this too in his