As I get deeper into my reading of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” I marvel more and more at how the title shadows over the book’s content. The characters in the story are not loved; they are beloved.
They are buried by love, by the demanding longing of great love gone. Not gone bad, but gone dead. For Morrison’s is a slave story, one that must be read by all who sense the dark desperation that divides the loved from the beloved.
Of course, Morrison offers a way out from the inevitable gore of love: simple acts kindness. The smaller, the better. The gentler, the more defiant of the surreal pain of the grand.