Introduction

In the 2019 documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, the author describes the odd experience of feeling alienated when reading early Black literature. Although these writings were designed to testify about the brutality of slavery that so many people at the time were unwilling to confront or, worse yet, eager to deny, Morrison nevertheless felt like many of these formerly enslaved authors were not able to tell the whole story. Reflecting on her first encounter with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), for example, she says, “He’s not talking to me. I can feel him holding back. And I understand that because the people supporting him were abolitionists—white people.”

In this guide to using primary sources to teach Morrison’s 1987 masterpiece Beloved, it is crucial to understand the fraught nature of the historical resources that the author drew upon in her research for the novel. Part of what Morrison observes about Douglass’s Narrative is that the extant records of slavery available to us are all — to different degrees and in different ways — shaped by their relationship to slavery itself. If we want to learn about the lives of specific enslaved people, for instance, our options are relatively limited. Although there were hundreds of first-person recollections of slavery written by formerly enslaved people over the course of the nineteenth century, the overwhelming majority of enslaved people in the U.S. are only documented in records created and maintained by the commerce of slavery (plantation ledgers, property records, sales records, auction records, and enslavers’ wills) or “runaway” advertisements that enslavers purchased in local newspapers when enslaved people escaped from captivity in search of freedom. As we might expect, these sources contain precious little information about the individuals themselves. While a runaway ad might include a name, a physical description that might be used to help identify the escapee, or a list of friends or family members in the area that they might be relying on for aid, many of the administrative and commercial records only include the (often estimated) age, the sex, and the monetary value ascribed to the person.

But as Morrison notes, even when we examine the published autobiographies written by formerly enslaved people—a genre of literature called “slave narratives” or, more recently, “freedom narratives”—these texts are also characterized by a calculated restraint. These authors often deliberately concealed the methods of their escape or the names of their accomplices. They risked withholding these details so as not to make readers in the South aware of their tactics or expose the identities of those who helped them escape, revelations that might result imperil those they left behind or foreclose opportunities for others to flee slavery. Similarly, because formerly enslaved authors needed the aid of the white abolitionists who published and read their stories, much of what they documented was intended to illustrate their humanity, morality, and intellectual capacities to white readers who might be skeptical. Thus, while the first-person testimonies about slavery are invaluable historical resources, these accounts were very much, as Morrison notes, “holding back” in important ways.

In the sections that follow, I offer an overview of three sets of historical records and how they relate to Beloved. This guide is not intended to be prescriptive in its presentation of these sources or directive about how they might be used in the classroom. Instead, I situate these primary texts in conversation with the novel so that readers can determine for themselves how best to integrate some of these historical materials into lectures, prompts, assignments, or group discussions about the novel.

Freedom Narratives and the Culture of Slavery

Significantly, the frustration that Morrison expresses when reading Douglass’s Narrative is not a critique, but rather a recognition of the material conditions that shaped his ability to write, publish, and share his experience with the world. Nineteenth-century freedom narratives like Douglass’s almost always depended on white abolitionists to publish, circulate, and read them. As a result, even though these texts were written with the goal of Black liberation, they were, in a very real sense, written for white people—to persuade them to the antislavery cause, or, more frequently, to intensify their abolitionist politics.

To that end, formerly enslaved authors often detailed parts of their experience that they thought would be most stirring and activating for white audiences. Moreover, they tried to expose the brutality of slavery without being so candid about its excesses of slavery that they  offended white readers’ moral sensibilities. In the preface to Harriet Jacobs’s freedom narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), for instance, the white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child describes the double-bind that many enslaved woman faced in trying to represent the highly gendered experiences of sexual harassment and sexual assault they routinely endured as part of slavery: “I am well aware that many will accuse me of indecorum for presenting these pages to the public; for the experiences of this intelligent and much-injured woman belong to a class which some call delicate subjects, and others indelicate. This peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features, and I willingly take the responsibility of presenting them with the veil withdrawn” (8).

For a formerly enslaved woman like Jacobs, the problem was this: The extent, duration, and details of her enslaver sexually harassing her beginning at the age of 15 were some of the most persuasive arguments that she could make about the kinds of moral depravity that slavery not only allowed for, but also often protected and even encouraged. After all, according to the law, any children that enslaved women gave birth to were legally the property of her enslaver. As a result, the sexual abuse of women (by their enslavers and by other enslaved people) became a routine practice for enslavers to increase their stock of human chattel.

At the same time, however, nineteenth-century readers would have been scandalized by a woman writing openly about sex, meaning that Jacobs, who was sexually terrorized as a young girl, would be judged harshly by her readers for sharing her experience—perhaps even more harshly than her abuser. In trying to prove her humanity and morality to white readers, then, she was forced to navigate a literary minefield that required remarkable tact, talent, and discipline. At stake was not only Jacobs’s personal reputation, but the reputation of all Black women, whom enslavers often framed as supernatural seductresses when they tried to explain to their wives why the women they enslaved kept getting giving birth to biracial children.

Harriet Jacobs’s courageous revelations are crucial context for Beloved. Although the real-life person who inspired the character of Sethe was not so fortunate (at least one of Margaret Garner’s children was believed to be the child of her enslaver), Sethe’s years at Sweet Home are conspicuously devoid of sexual harassment and assault—at least at first. When Sethe arrives, there is an understanding among the Sweet Home men that they will let her choose whom she wants to pair with (not choosing was evidently not an option). Significantly, this moment illustrates that these men are inherently moral actors who recognize and respect Sethe’s sexual autonomy—the fact that they resort to bestiality with the farm’s calves rather than rape is therefore a reflection of how slavery circumscribes the choices available to them rather than a reflection of their innate immorality. This kind of intimate wrestling the ethical complexities of sex as an enslaved person would have been impossible for a formerly enslaved author to navigate so explicitly in the nineteenth century, but Jacobs offers us one of the most courageous attempts at doing so, paving the way for Morrison’s imagination in Beloved.

Other freedom narratives round out similarly important dimensions of the novel. As previously alluded to, Sethe’s recollections of Sweet Home might seem surprisingly idyllic to modern readers expecting to see the violent excesses and deprivations of slavery on full display. However, this initially pastoral portrait of plantation life is actually a common convention of the freedom narrative genre. Many of these texts begin with their authors describing their early life in slavery as relatively happy until they are suddenly, often violently disabused of this notion and become painfully, urgently aware of their enslavement. The initial chapter of Douglass’s Narrative is perhaps the most famous example of this abrupt realization, as he likens witnessing the whipping and likely sexual assault of his Aunt Hester to passing through “the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery.” For Sethe and the Sweet Home men, this realization comes much later, when Mr. Garner’s death and her own declining health force Mrs. Garner to hire a new overseer named Schoolteacher. Schoolteacher introduces a ferocious regime of discipline and punishment that includes not only Paul D’s traumatizing experience of having an iron bit placed in his mouth and the executions of Six-O and Paul A, but also his nephews  sexually assault the pregnant and nursing Sethe by pinning her down and drinking her breast milk. Rather than punishing his nephews for their transgression, he punishes Sethe for telling Mrs. Garner about the incident, whipping her violently and creating the “chokecherry tree” on her back.

Another important freedom narrative for Morrison was also one of the earliest: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). Equiano’s text is especially valuable to literary scholars and historians because it contains one of the only extant first-person descriptions of the Middle Passage written by a survivor. The Middle Passage refers to the weeks-long transatlantic journey from Africa to the Americas in which recently kidnapped Africans were overcrowded into disgusting conditions below deck in order to maximize each voyage’s profit. Captives were cramped into the hold as tightly as possible and shackled together. Without ventilation, bathrooms, or light, disease and infection spread rapidly. When a captive died—from the abysmal conditions of the hold or from a brutal beating by the crew—they were unceremoniously thrown overboard. Other captives exploited their rare opportunities to get fresh air on deck to throw themselves into the ocean, believing that death would return them to their home.

While the Middle Passage does not appear directly in Beloved, Morrison alludes to it when describing where Beloved’s path to 124 Bluestone Rd. When Denver first begins pressing Beloved on where she was before arriving at the family’s home, she replies: “Dark. . .. I’m small in that place. . . . Hot Nothing to breathe down there and no room to move in. . . . Heaps. A lot of people is down there. Some is dead. . . . I don’t know. I don’t know the names” (88). Later in the novel, in one of the only chapters told from Beloved’s perspective (i. e. “I am Beloved and she is mine…”), she returns to the imagery of the Middle Passage. Whether we understand the place where Beloved existed before emerging from the water as a literal experience of the Middle Passage, a kind of Limbo that resembles the Middle Passage, or just an invocation of the Middle Passage as a metaphor for the space between life and death, Equiano’s description of his own experience helps us to better understand what Morrison is trying to evoke in these narratively challenging portions of the novel.

In addition to key excerpts from these first-person narratives, this guide also includes several visuals that, while integral to understanding the novel, are also deeply upsetting. Classroom use of these visuals should be undertaken with caution and care. The first of these is the famous image of “Whipped Peter” (formerly known as Gordon), whose extraordinary scars on his back from being flogged while enslaved were an influential model for the “chokecherry tree” on Sethe’s back. The second of these is an antislavery broadside featuring depictions of various devices used for punishment and torture, as well as another image from Jacques Etienne Victor Arago’s Souvenirs d’un aveugle (1839) that features the iron muzzle or “bit” that Paul D was forced to wear.

Finally, one especially useful primary resource for teaching Beloved is the digital archive Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery—a database of advertisements that Black folks placed in newspapers to enlist the help of readers in locating family members from whom they had been separated during slavery. One of the most harrowing experiences of slavery that was routinely depicted in freedom narratives and abolitionist writings was family separation. Family members were regularly torn away from one another through auctions and private sales—sometimes as a punishment for insubordination, sometimes for the purposes of “breeding” enslaved people, and sometimes because an enslaver ran into financial trouble or died, resulting in the liquidation of their property (including the people they enslaved) to settle their debts. In Beloved, for instance, one of the first moments where the comparative “comforts” of slavery at Sweet Home begin to disintegrate is when the death of Mr. Garner forces Mrs. Garner to sell Paul F. This database of advertisements—many of which went unanswered—contextualizes the small miracle that opens the plot of Beloved: Paul D finding Sethe. The confused emotions of this reunion and their subsequent shared effort to piece together the fates of their comrades from Sweet Home produce an idiosyncratic blurring of past and present that underwrites crucial formal and thematic elements of the novel.