FACE TO HISTORY, OPEN TO FUTURE
——Book Report of Beloved 2013级汉语国际教育刘倩瑶2013101058
It was not a story to pass on. It was a story about an imagined history of slavery, both reality and myth at once.
Beloved turns on the slaughter of a baby by her own mother. Sethe kills her child rather than have her returned from freedom to slavery. Sethe has escaped from Sweet Home in Kentucky to freedom in Ohio, where she has joined her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, whose freedom has been bought by the labor of Sethe’s husband, Halle. Sethe’s three elder children, two boys and a “crawling-already” daughter are already in the free house, number 124. Sethe has given birth to another daughter, Denver, on the way there. 28 days later, when the slave owner, Schoolmaster caught up to them, Sethe killed her “crawling-already” daughter. “Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and infant by the heels in the other. She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time, when out of nowhere-in the ticking time the men spent staring at what there was to stare at-the old nigger boy, still mewing, ran thorough the door behind them and snatched the baby from the arc of its mother’s swing. ”It is the first part of the story, and in one word, the “crawling-already” daughter was killed by her mother because she didn’t
want her to suffer pain and misery as she suffered in the past. As negro slave, even though we know the history of slave trade, it is still difficult for us to comprehend what did they go through during the dark century. Sethe’s escape is modeled on the story of Margaret Garner, who escaped from Kentucky with sixteen other slaves in January 1856. The fugitives were pursued by a posse of slave masters and sheriff’s officers. They fought back. Margaret Garner cut her youngest daughter’s throat with a butcher’s knife and tried to kill herself and the rest of her children. There was a sensational trial, in which the slaves’ lawyer paradoxically suggested that Margaret be charged with murder and the others with complicity-trying to ensure that she remained in the Free State to be judged as a person, not returned as property. She was, however, returned, and her other baby daughter was drowned when the boat returning them capsized. Margaret is reported as having “displayed frantic joy”at this death.
I was totally astonished by the description of Negro’s grief which came from their miserable experience in this novel-actually we can say in the true history. Baby Suggs has said, “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief.”From Beloved’s monologue, we can know that some Negro was forced to eat nasty themselves, and the men without skin bring them their morning water to drink. If Negro had more to drink they could make tears. They cannot
