A Son of the Rock

Vintage, 2010, 330 p, plus 5p Foreword.

124, the house where Sethe lives with her daughter Denver, is haunted, by her unnamed baby and by the slavery which caused the child’s death. That other daughter, who was unnamed but whose gravestone bears the description ‘Beloved’ – Sethe could not afford the extra money to have ‘Dearly’ inscribed as well – was killed by Sethe herself to prevent her being taken back to Sweet Home, the plantation from where she had escaped enslavement. Perhaps an extreme reaction but also an expression of the horrors of slavery. Sethe has the image of a tree on her back from the whippings she received in that part of her life.

The ghost is banished after Paul D, another former slave from Sweet Home, arrives at the house and takes up with Sethe. Denver resents this as she had considered the ghost as a kind of companion.

Later, a child who calls herself Beloved arrives at 124 and draws close to Sethe who comes to see her as a reincarnation of the child she killed.

There is a surreal quality to the writing here, verging on but not quite corresponding to magical realism. It is as if the fact of slavery, though not evaded, is too consuming to be confronted head on and must be approached obliquely, its legacy equally as terrible as its existence. Sethe’s act of violence is an extremity in response to an enormity, with its own repercussions on the lives of herself and her children.

Sensitivity note: a book like this, and a subject like this, cannot avoid use of the word ‘nigger’ as when the posse seeking to recapture Sethe discusses their slaves or Paul D asks Stamp Paid, “‘How much is a nigger supposed to take? Tell me. How much?’”

‘All he can,’ said Stamp Paid. ‘All he can.’

To which Paul D says, ‘Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?’”

“Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” is as good a question to ask of slavery as there can be. Indeed, it’s the only one.

Beloved is not an easy novel to read: but it is perhaps a necessary one.

Pedant’s corner:- “the repellant landscape” (repellent,) “Baby Suggs’ place” (Baby Suggs’s,) “had shook the house” (‘had shaken’; but ‘had shook’ may have been slave usage,) “Lady Jones’ house-school” (Jones’s.)