Beloved

Told from Denver’s perspective in first person, this chapter features her feelings about Beloved’s presence in her life and about her mother. She expresses fear and mistrust of Sethe after learning of Sethe’s attempt to kill all her children. Denver dreams that “she cut my head off every night” (243). Before her brothers left the house, they used to tell Denver how to kill Sethe should she ever try to hurt her again. It is revealed here that Denver has not left the property at 124 since discontinuing Lady Jones’s lessons, except to attend Baby Suggs’s burial and to go the carnival with Sethe and Paul D.

Denver also recalls the stories Grandma Baby Suggs told her about her father Halle, determining that he is an “angel man” (246). She imagines his kindness in contrast to Sethe’s cold detachment. As her dead sister has come back to her, Denver imagines that Halle can return as well. She envisions a family consisting of “me, him and Beloved” (246). She does not care if Sethe remains or goes. Echoing her mother’s sense of possession over her dead sister, Denver also says, “She’s mine, Beloved” (247).

Told from Beloved’s perspective in first person, this chapter features her fragmented thoughts and feelings about her return to the living world. She recalls a memory of being on a bridge where she is separated from Sethe. She remembers Sethe smiling upon their separation. In the afterlife, she sees her father, “my dead man” (250), whose death she watches over. However, Beloved is obsessed with Sethe, the parent whose separation has been the most difficult. She laments, “I want to be the two of us” and “I want the join” (252) as expressions of her desire to be with Sethe again.

This chapter illustrates Beloved’s voice in more coherent prose. She recounts her memory of being separated from Sethe on a bridge once again but does not mention being killed by her own mother as her last memory. She was afraid that she would not be able to find Sethe again but is elated to have found her mother at 124 at last.

The chapter also features mixed dialogue between Sethe, Denver, and Beloved. It is unclear who speaks at different turns, but the dialogue features various identifying refrains such as Denver’s concerned warning to Beloved, “Don’t love her too much” (255). In this statement, Denver warns Beloved that Sethe has a dangerous past. Other times, Sethe seeks Beloved’s forgiveness, asking her dead daughter, “Do you forgive me? Will you stay?” (254). At the end of the chapter, all three women say to one another, “You are mine” (254).

At the church where Paul D has been staying since he left 124, he thinks of his past. The schoolteacher’s presence at Sweet Home was a turning point for everyone: “Schoolteacher broke into children what Garner had raised into men” (260). When things worsened with the schoolteacher, one of the Sweet Home men, Sixo, told Halle about his woman friend, nicknamed the Thirty-Mile Woman because Sixo would regularly walk over 30 miles to visit her. The Thirty-Mile Woman mentioned that several enslaved people were planning to run away to the North and that two knew the way. One of them was a woman who would wait for them when the corn was high. The enslaved people of Sweet Home were divided about what to do.

Sethe became pregnant, and the schoolteacher made routines stricter around the farm. They all had to plan their runaway around these new obstacles. When the corn was high, Paul D could not find Halle, Sethe, or Paul A, so he made his way to their meeting spot at the creek in the hopes that they would meet him there. Only Sixo arrived with the Thirty-Mile Woman. Suddenly the schoolteacher and several other white men were pursuing them. The Thirty-Mile Woman managed to run away, but Sixo and Paul D were caught. Sixo defiantly shouted and sang, so the schoolteacher declared, “This one will never be suitable” (266). The white men burned Sixo alive and shot him. Meanwhile, a shackled Paul D was returned to Sweet Home in a heavy, painful “three-spoke collar” that made it impossible to lie down.

Back on the farm, Paul D relayed what happened to Sethe. He said that Halle was nowhere to be found and that Sixo was killed. Sethe told him that she intended to run anyway despite being pregnant.