Beloved

Beloved is a 1987 novel by the American writer Toni Morrison. Set after the American Civil War, it tells the story of a family of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. Beloved is inspired by an event that actually happened: Margaret Garner, an enslaved person in Kentucky, who escaped and fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856. She was subject to capture in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; when U.S. marshals burst into the cabin where Garner and her husband had barricaded themselves, she was attempting to kill her children, and had already killed her two-year-old daughter, to spare them from being returned to slavery. Morrison had come across an account of Garner titled “A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child” in an 1856 newspaper article published in the American Baptist, and reproduced in The Black Book, a miscellaneous compilation of black history and culture that Morrison edited in 1974 The novel forms the second part of Morrison’s Dantesque trilogy on African-American history, beginning with Beloved (1987) and ending with Paradise (1997).