Sethe’s Struggles through Grief, Slavery, and Forgiveness in the novel Beloved

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Beloved is the daughter of a slave known as Sethe. Sethe escaped slavery with the help of runaway slaves and a woman named Denver who helped her when her feet were too swollen to even walk. Sethe was a slave tortured and raped by her schoolteachers and his sons. Sethe had to escape to keep her kids from being in a hellhole of slavery. When Sethe’s schoolteacher showed up at her mother in laws house, Sethe murder her baby girl Beloved because she would have rather killed herself and her children then go back to slavery and take her kids with her. Beloved felt anger at her mom for killing her so she took her spirit and haunted the house. Beloved was the cause for her two older brothers leaving and the dog finally running away. Beloved flipped tables, chairs, pictures, and broke the dog’s leg and popped his eyeball out. Even when Paul D first showed up before he even stepped in the house he felt the negative energy so strong he knew something was wrong. Paul D could feel the evil the baby possessed and poured out into the house of 124, everyone felt it, even Sethe but she ignored the tension (Morrison 2). Paul D finally got tired of the spirit Sethe claimed to be sad instead of angry and forced the spirit out of the house. He finally got Denver and Sethe out of the house and some people spoke or smiled and others just looked shocked to see them, but they all three began to merge into family. On their way back from being out of the house they ran into a woman who looked homeless and helpless, so they took her in and fed her. The woman could not talk or walk that well, she could barely hold her head up. The woman they took in began to ask Sethe questions that caused her to think about her horrible past. She also knew a song Sethe only...

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...r, horrible conditions to live in as a human being. They stayed strong and worked together. Even though they could not read or write, thought to be, and looked at as stupid animals, they were smarter than their school teachers were. They sang songs that had meaning behind them. Some of the songs told them to hang on a little bit longer, God was coming to help them, and how to runaway. This is how most of the African American slaves hung on and survived, through the words and meanings of songs. Schoolteachers even placed bits, which were used to keep horses from biting them, into slaved mouths, which kept them from speaking. Beloved teaches many life lessons throughout this book, but the main one is forgiveness forgive and forget and life would be easier and healthier.

Works Cited
Morrison, Toni. Beloved: a novel. : Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Print.

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