Word: slaving
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...Sethe, who has run away from her Kentucky master and settled with her mother-in-law on the outskirts of Cincinnati. The details of Sethe's break for freedom are appropriately heroic. Pregnant with her fourth child and apparently abandoned at the last moment by her husband and fellow slave Halle, she nonetheless manages to send her three children ahead of her in a wagon bound for Ohio and then arrives there herself in 1855, after giving birth to her daughter Denver...
When Paul D, another slave from the Sweet Home farm in Kentucky, fetches up at Sethe's address 18 years later, he finds evidence of defeat rather than triumph. Sethe's two oldest children, both boys, have run away. The youngest, the girl Denver, seems hostile and reclusive. The third child, also a girl, is long since dead, but her spirit disruptively haunts Sethe's house...
Morrison's supple prose makes such desperation palpable. Beloved is full of vivid images, freshly rendered. Here is the runaway slave facing the Ohio River, which stands between her and liberation: "Sethe was looking at one mile of dark water, which would have to be split with one oar in a useless boat against a current dedicated to the Mississippi hundreds of miles away." Here are Sethe, Denver and Beloved enjoying a rare moment of pleasurable abandon on a frozen lake: "Their skirts flew like wings and their skin turned pewter in the cold and dying light...
Toni Morrison' s Beloved evokes the violent desperation of a slave struggling for freedom. -- A brilliant novel by Britain' s Ian McEwan...
...imaginary lawyer tries unsucessfully to keep slavery out of the Constitution. But the framers are more concerned with protecting the property rights of slave owners than with protecting the individual rights of the slaves...