Beloved

Sethe's impression of Paul D when she saw him after 18 years: "...Except for a heap more hair and some waiting in his eyes, he looked the way he had in Kentucky. Peachstone skin; straight-backed. For a man with an immobile face it was amazing how ready it was to smile, or blaze or be sorry with you. As though all you had to do was get his attention and right away he produced the feeling you were feeling. With less than a blink, his face seemed to change--underneath it lay the activity..."

Paul D's impression of Sethe: "...He looked at her then, closely. Closer than he had when she first rounded the house on wet and shining legs, holding her shoes and stockings up in one hand, her skirts in the other. Halle's girl--the one with iron eyes and backbone to match. He had never seen her hair in Kentucky. And though her face was eighteen years older than when last he saw her, it was softer now. Because of the hair. A face too still for comfort..."

These two paragraphs are excerpts from Toni Morrison's Beloved. A haunting book, a book populated by ghosts, evoking ghosts, evoking memories that haunt stronger than any ghost. Sethe and Denver, her daughter, are setting out to recreate a life of their own. But Sethe is consumed by a passionate guilt for the daughter she has murdered when the baby was only two to save her from a life of slavery. This baby, her beloved, is the focal point of the novel--a novel revolving around the haunted and the one who haunts.

The concept of motherhood presented in the novel haunts like a ghost refusing to be exorcised.

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