The novel Beloved was written by Toni Morrison in 1987. Toni Morrison is an African American citizen from Lorian, Ohio born in 1931. She is a great writer who doesn't mind the fact that people call her a "black writer"" (Rothstein C17) or a "woman writer "(Rothstein C17) or even "black woman author " (Rothstein C17) because she feels that this makes her look bigger. The reason she wrote Beloved was to show more about how ones past haunts their present and also about self-sabotage. "˜Slavery is very predictable,' she said. ˜There it is, and there's some stuff about how it is, and then you get out of it or you don't. It can't be driven by slavery. It has to be the interior life of some people, a small group of people, and everything that they do is impacted on by the horror of slavery, but they are also people' "(Rothstein C17). .
This novel is about a mother named Sethe who escapes from slavery and brings her kids with her. She lives in a house at 124 Bluestone with a woman referred to as Baby Suggs who actually dies shortly after the book begins. The character Schoolteacher is a slave capturer and when Sethe sees a sheriff and Schoolteacher coming to her house, she runs to the woodshed without time to think about what she was really doing. She grabs a saw and cuts the throat of her oldest and unnamed daughter being the age of two, her two sons were bleeding but alive. Her youngest daughter, Denver, was grabbed by Stamp Paid, an old friend of Sethe, before Sethe could kill her by another violent and gruesome act. Sethe pays a man in ten minutes of sex to have the name "Beloved " engraved on the baby's tombstone. Beloved constantly haunts the house by making it known she is there and even a few times by showing up as a ghost. Eventually, Beloved resurrects and shows up at 124 Bluestone as an older person. She stays with them and it takes them awhile to realize that it's actually her.