100 Fun Facts About Beloved

In Beloved, where does Baby Suggs gather the town's Black community to preach that they should love their bodies?

The Clearing, a wide space deep in the woods, was where Baby Suggs preached, until she gave it up after Sethe killed her baby.

In which city is Beloved set?

Cincinnati was where Sethe's freed mother-in-law had settled, so Sethe sent her children ahead to her there before making her own escape.

In Beloved, which former Underground Railroad agent leads the neighborhood women to 124 to rid the house of Beloved?

Ella had shunned Sethe for years, yet when the grown ghost became dangerous she rallied the women who prayed and sang Beloved away.

Toni Morrison later retold Margaret Garner's story, the real case behind Beloved, as which kind of work?

An opera: Morrison wrote the libretto for Margaret Garner, premiered in 2005, while the real Garner had been sent back into slavery after her trial.

Toni Morrison found the newspaper story of Margaret Garner while compiling which anthology?

The Black Book was credited to Middleton Harris and others, though Morrison helped compile it.

Margaret Garner's trial set an Ohio murder charge against which federal law?

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 won out: the judge ruled that federal fugitive warrants outranked Ohio's charge, and the family was sent back to Kentucky.

Which word completes the opening line of Toni Morrison's Beloved, '124 was...'?

Spiteful: 124 was full of a baby's venom, and the haunting is one reason given for why Sethe's two sons ran away.

What is the dedication of Toni Morrison's Beloved?

Sixty Million and more: Morrison said 60 million was the smallest estimate historians gave her of the Africans who died through slavery.

Beloved's epigraph comes from which book of the Bible?

Romans 9:25 supplies 'her beloved, which was not beloved', though there Paul is himself quoting the prophet Hosea.

Morrison said the image of Beloved walking out of the water came to her at her boathouse on which river?

The Hudson: Morrison had left her Random House job in 1983 to devote more time to writing.

What does Paul D do to 124's ghost on arriving?

Drives it out: as the house shakes, Paul D shouts and smashes things, and Sethe's daughter resents him for chasing off her only companion.

What is the name of Sethe's surviving daughter?

Denver finally overcomes her fear and leaves 124's yard to ask the community for help.

What is the name of the plantation Sethe escaped from?

Sweet Home grew far crueller after its owner Mr. Garner died and schoolteacher arrived with his nephews to run it.

In Beloved, what was Paul D forced to wear in his mouth after the failed escape?

An iron bit: with it in his mouth, Paul D watched a rooster strut the yard and felt the bird was more of a man than he was.

Where has the family just been when they find Beloved sitting in front of the house?

A carnival: on the walk there and back, Sethe saw their three shadows holding hands and took it as a good omen.

What are the names of Sethe's two sons, who ran away by the age of 13?

Howard and Buglar fled the haunted house just before their grandmother Baby Suggs died, and they never came back.

Baby Suggs, the preacher whose son worked to buy her freedom, is the mother of which character?

Halle bought his mother's freedom, but Sethe's husband never joined his family in the North: he vanished during the escape.

Who shows Paul D the newspaper clipping about Sethe's crime?

Stamp Paid was born Joshua; after a grave sacrifice under slavery he renamed himself, feeling every debt he owed was paid.

When schoolteacher and his posse ride up to 124, where does Sethe take her children?

The woodshed: schoolteacher found her there and, seeing what she had done, decided she was no longer worth taking back.

What ends Paul D's rebuke 'You got two feet, Sethe...'?

'You got two feet, Sethe, not four,' he tells her, implying she acted like an animal, and then he leaves 124.

Why was 'Beloved' the only word on the murdered baby's tombstone?

It was all Sethe could afford to have engraved: she paid for those seven letters with ten minutes of sex with the engraver.

What form does Beloved's body eventually take as Sethe wastes away?

A pregnant woman: when the neighborhood women gather to pray and sing, Beloved comes out onto the porch naked and pregnant.

What does Sethe attack Mr. Bodwin with, mistaking him for Schoolteacher?

An ice pick: Mr. Bodwin, a white abolitionist who had helped win Sethe her freedom, was only coming to take her daughter to a new job.

The community's envy of the household began after Baby Suggs did what?

Baby Suggs turned some food into a feast for ninety people, and the resentful neighbors failed to warn 124 when schoolteacher rode in.

What is Sethe's 'chokecherry tree'?

The scars on her back from whipping were her punishment for telling Mrs. Garner that schoolteacher's nephews had taken her milk.

Paul D is said to keep his painful memories locked in what?

A tobacco tin for a heart, its lid rusted shut, holds Paul D's past until his nights with Beloved pry it open.

In Beloved, what is Amy, the runaway white servant who helps Sethe, hoping to buy in Boston?

Velvet, in carmine red: on her way to Boston, Amy rubs Sethe's torn feet back to life and then helps deliver her baby.

According to Paul D, what was Sethe's husband doing the last time he saw him?

Sitting by a butter churn, butter smeared on his face: Paul D believes Sethe's husband had watched the nephews take her milk, and it broke him.

When Sethe mourns that Beloved was the finest part of her, how does Paul D reply?

'You your best thing, Sethe. You are,' he says after coming back to look after her, and she can only answer, 'Me? Me?'

Which major honour did Beloved receive in 1988?

The Pulitzer for Fiction came after Beloved had lost the National Book Award to Paco's Story, a snub that 48 Black writers protested in print.

In Beloved, which light-skinned local teacher gets the neighbors to leave baskets of food for the starving household at 124?

Lady Jones had once taught Sethe's daughter; the baskets came with the givers' names tucked inside, drawing the girl back into the community.

Which newspaper's 2006 poll of writers and critics named Beloved the best American fiction of the previous 25 years?

The New York Times polled about 200 writers, critics and editors, yet one voter, Slate critic Stephen Metcalf, soon questioned the novel's merits.

Which novel is the second book in Toni Morrison's Beloved trilogy?

Jazz follows Joe Trace, who shoots his young lover Dorcas, and his wife Violet, who tries to stab the dead girl's face at the funeral.

Accepting the 1988 Melcher Book Award, Morrison said enslaved people had no memorial, down to what?

A small bench by the road: the Toni Morrison Society answered with a project placing benches at sites in the history of slavery.

Which actor played Paul D in the 1998 film of Beloved?

Danny Glover played Paul D, but the film flopped, taking under $23 million in US cinemas.

Who produced and starred in the 1998 film adaptation of Beloved?

Oprah Winfrey bought the film rights in 1987 and spent about ten years bringing Beloved to the screen.

Who directed the 1998 film of Beloved?

Jonathan Demme kept the novel's shifts between past and present rather than telling Sethe's story in order.

The 1998 film earned its only Oscar nomination in which category?

Colleen Atwood was the nominee.

Who played Beloved in the 1998 film?

Thandiwe Newton played Beloved as a baby in a grown woman's body, true to a ghost who had died as an infant.

In Beloved, which gift from Mrs. Garner does the stranger Beloved ask Sethe about, as if she already knew?

Crystal earrings: Mrs. Garner gave them, perhaps out of guilt, when Sethe was denied a real wedding, and Beloved asked after 'your diamonds'.

In Beloved, who breaks the chains of Paul D and the other escaped chain-gang prisoners?

A band of Cherokee freed the men, who had fled still chained together, and Paul D then wandered north as far as Delaware.

Which state's governor vetoed the 'Beloved Bill', which would have required schools to flag sexually explicit content?

Virginia's bill grew out of one parent's failed bid to have Beloved pulled from her son's AP English class.

Which candidate ran a TV ad in 2021 featuring a parent's campaign against Beloved and went on to win the governorship?

Glenn Youngkin's ad never named Beloved, nor mentioned that the mother's son had been a high school senior when it was assigned.

Which international award did the author of Beloved win in 1993?

The Nobel Prize in Literature made Morrison the first Black woman to win it, and in her lecture she said, 'We die... But we do language.'

What was Toni Morrison's name at birth?

Chloe Ardelia Wofford took the baptismal name Anthony at 12, and in college she began calling herself Toni.

In which Ohio town was Toni Morrison born and raised?

Lorain was where, when Morrison was about two, the family's landlord set their house on fire while they were inside.

Toni Morrison was the first Black woman to hold which post at Random House?

As senior fiction editor, Morrison published books by Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali.

In Beloved's fragmented memories, where does she recall crouching among many others?

On a slave ship: her memories take in the Middle Passage, so she can be read as all of slavery's dead, not only Sethe's daughter.

In Beloved, which enslaved man walks thirty miles just to see the woman he loves?

Sixo made the thirty-mile walk to see her again and again, and when he was captured trying to flee with her, she got away.

In the real 1856 case behind Beloved, which enslaver tracked Margaret Garner's family down with US marshals?

Archibald Gaines was likely the father of Garner's three youngest children, a point abolitionist Lucy Stone raised at the trial.

The director of the 1998 film of Beloved said it lost its cinemas after a month to which Adam Sandler comedy?

The Waterboy was the film Disney wanted those screens for, he explained, insisting the drama had been doing well in many of them when it was pulled.

In Beloved, what do schoolteacher's nephews hold Sethe down and steal shortly before her escape?

Her breast milk was meant for the baby girl she had already sent ahead, which is why Sethe dwells on that theft more than on the beating that followed.

In Beloved, which invented word does Sethe use for a past that lingers on in the place it happened?

Rememory is how Sethe explains that a thing can be destroyed and its presence still remain, out in the real world and not only in the mind.

An 1867 painting of Margaret Garner, whose story inspired Beloved, casts her as which woman of Greek myth?

Medea killed her own children in the myth, and Thomas Satterwhite Noble borrowed her name for The Modern Medea, painted eleven years after the real tragedy.

In Beloved, where does the runaway Sethe give birth to her youngest child while fleeing north?

In a small boat, with a runaway white girl called Amy as midwife, the baby arrives and is wrapped in rags torn from the two women's own clothes.

In Beloved, what does the broken-spirited Baby Suggs spend her last bedridden years thinking about?

Colors strike her as the one harmless thing left in the world, so the woman who once preached to the whole community takes to her bed and studies them until she dies.

In Beloved, Sethe flees on foot toward Ohio from a plantation in which slave state?

Kentucky is where the plantation's owner boasts that his are the only enslaved men in the state raised to be real men, a pride that dies with him.

In Beloved, schoolteacher tells his nephews to list Sethe's characteristics under which two headings?

Human and animal were the two columns, and overhearing that lesson is what convinces Sethe that no child of hers will ever be written up the same way.

In Beloved, the haunted house that everyone simply calls 124 stands on which street?

Bluestone Road is the full address, but the characters and the narrator alike refer to the house by its number alone.

In Beloved, Paul D is sent to a chain gang in which Southern state after trying to kill his new owner?

Georgia is where he spends his nights locked in a box sunk in the ground and his days chained to other prisoners in a quarry.

In Beloved, what finally gives the prisoners chained beside Paul D their chance to escape?

A violent rainstorm turns the men's underground cells to mud, and they get away still chained to one another.

In Beloved, Paul D follows the blossoms north to which state, where a weaver woman shelters him?

Delaware is where he stays for eighteen months, and the weaver's gift of sausage to a half-starved runaway is one of only two times he feels grateful to a woman.

In Beloved, Paul D earns his town wages alongside the old ferryman by handling which livestock?

Hogs made the river city rich, since it shipped pork back to the Northeast, and it is during this work that Paul D is shown the old newspaper clipping.

In Beloved, where does Paul D sleep after walking out on Sethe, since no neighbour offers him a bed?

A church basement is all he has, which angers his workmate, who believes no Black man in town should ever have to ask for a roof.

In Beloved, in which outbuilding does the visitor corner Paul D after something drives him from Sethe's bed?

The cold house is the last stop in a retreat he cannot explain, from Sethe's bed to a spare room and then a storeroom, as if something were pushing him out.

In Beloved, Paul D grows suspicious after seeing the supposedly feeble visitor lift what with one hand?

A rocking chair goes up in one hand of a girl who can barely walk, but when he asks Sethe's daughter to back him up, she denies having seen it.

In Beloved, what does Paul D step into on first entering 124, a sign of the baby's ghost?

A pool of red light meets him in the doorway, and Sethe calmly explains that the strange happenings in the house are her dead baby's doing.

In Beloved, what appears in a cake and helps drive Sethe's eldest son away from 124 for good?

Two tiny handprints pressed into the cake were the last straw for him, just as a mirror that shattered at a glance was for his younger brother.

In Beloved, which fruit, carried in by the bucket, starts the party held after Sethe reaches 124?

Blackberries, two buckets of them, were picked as a treat for the new arrival, and from that small gift a meal for the whole neighbourhood grew.

In Beloved, how does Baby Suggs's son earn the money that buys his mother out of slavery?

Hiring out his Sundays for five years was the price, and Sethe was then bought to take the freed woman's place on the farm.

In Beloved, which name is written on the bill of sale for the woman everyone knows as Baby Suggs?

Jenny Whitlow was only ever a name on paper to her, and she kept Suggs, the name of a husband who had escaped, with the Baby he used to call her.

In Beloved, the ferryman who carries runaways over the river went by which name before renaming himself?

Joshua renamed himself after his wife was taken by their master's son, deciding that after such a year he was in debt to no one.

In Beloved, what is the name of the dog at 124, whose return tells Paul D the ghost is gone?

Here Boy was crippled by the baby ghost years earlier and stayed terrified of it, so seeing him back at the house is proof enough.

In Beloved, how is schoolteacher related to the Garners, who own the plantation before he takes charge?

A brother-in-law, he is sent for by the widowed Mrs. Garner only because she does not want to be the one white person left on the farm.

In Beloved, what does Mrs. Garner do when the young Sethe asks whether there will be a wedding?

She laughs kindly and leaves it at that, so Sethe steals scraps of fabric and stitches herself a dress to be married in.

In Beloved, where do Sethe and her new husband first lie together, watched from a distance by the other men?

The cornfield hid nothing, since the rustling stalks told every man on the farm where the couple were, and the watchers cooked and ate the corn afterwards.

In Beloved, what does Sethe's mother show her daughter so that her body could always be identified?

A branded mark, like the one burned into cattle, was meant to prove who she was, yet when it mattered her body was too mutilated for the girl to find it.

In Beloved, how does Sethe's own mother die on the plantation where Sethe spent her early childhood?

She is hanged, and Sethe refuses to believe it was for running away, because her mother would never have fled without her.

In Beloved, the nurse Nan tells Sethe that she alone was kept by her mother and named after whom?

Her father was a Black man, Nan explains, while the babies forced on Sethe's mother by white men were all thrown away.

In Beloved, what happens to Sethe's daughter for two years after a classmate asks about her mother's past?

She goes deaf rather than hear the answer, and her hearing only returns with the sound of the baby ghost crawling up the stairs.

In Beloved, Sethe's lonely daughter hides in a secret green room formed by a ring of which plants?

Boxwood bushes, five of them planted in a circle, had grown together overhead into a hideaway where she could be alone with her imagination.

In Beloved, what outing does Sethe take the two girls on to show that Paul D's leaving has not broken her?

Ice-skating leaves the three of them falling about with laughter and not a soul watching, and that same night Sethe finally works out who her guest is.

In Beloved, the loss of what makes the visitor fear that her whole body is about to fall apart?

A tooth, one of her wisdom teeth, comes out, and she takes it as the first sign that she may wake one day to find herself in pieces.

In Beloved, how do thirty neighbourhood women set about driving the ghostly visitor from 124?

By praying and singing in the yard, they raise their voices together, and in the confusion that follows the visitor simply vanishes from the porch.

In Beloved, schoolteacher rides up to 124 with a nephew, a slave catcher and which official?

The sheriff sends the other three men away once he sees what Sethe has done, telling them the matter is now his business.

In Beloved, where does Sethe work until her devotion to the returned girl costs her the job?

A restaurant is where she works, quietly taking supplies rather than queue at a store that serves its Black customers last.

In Beloved, what do the three shadows seem to be doing as Sethe, her daughter and Paul D walk out together?

Holding hands is how the shadows look to Sethe, and she takes it as a promise that the three of them could yet become a family.

Which debut novel did Toni Morrison publish in 1970, seventeen years before Beloved appeared?

The Bluest Eye was written in the hours before dawn, with Morrison getting up at 4 am each day while raising two children on her own.

Which president awarded Toni Morrison, the author of Beloved, the Presidential Medal of Freedom?

Barack Obama presented the medal in May 2012, a quarter of a century after the novel was published.

At which Ivy League university did Toni Morrison hold a humanities chair from 1989, two years after Beloved?

Princeton kept her until she retired in 2006, and in 2017 it renamed its West College building Morrison Hall in her honour.

Which 1997 novel about an all-Black town completes the trilogy Toni Morrison began with Beloved?

Paradise closed a set of three novels on African-American history that Morrison said were meant to be read together.

Beloved won a 1988 book award named in memory of which assassinated American?

Robert F. Kennedy's memorial book award goes to work that reflects his concern for the poor and the powerless, which the judges found in Sethe's story.

Which novel beat Beloved to the National Book Award for Fiction, prompting 48 Black writers to protest in print?

Paco's Story, a Vietnam War novel by Larry Heinemann, took the prize in a major surprise, and the writers' protest statement ran in January 1988.

Which actress played Sethe's surviving daughter in the 1998 film of Beloved, winning a Chicago critics' award?

Kimberly Elise was named Most Promising Actress by the Chicago Film Critics, who also nominated her as Best Supporting Actress for the same part.

Which actress played the preacher Baby Suggs in the 1998 film of Beloved, earning an NAACP Image Award nomination?

Beah Richards joined a cast led by the talk-show host who had bought the film rights a decade earlier, before the novel had won its biggest prize.

Although Beloved is set in Ohio, the 1998 film shot its street scenes in which city's Old City district?

Philadelphia supplied the streets, with further scenes shot on a soundstage in its disused Civic Center and at locations elsewhere in Pennsylvania.

Which antislavery activist took the stand on the last day of Margaret Garner's hearing, the case behind Beloved?

Lucy Stone told the packed courtroom that the pale faces of the Garner children showed plainly what enslaved women were made to endure.

In Beloved, what is the only food the newly arrived visitor asks for once she is well enough to eat?

Sweets are all she wants after sleeping for four days, one of several ways in which the grown stranger behaves like a small child.

In Beloved, the sight of which item of schoolteacher's clothing sends Sethe rushing to gather her children?

His hat is all she needs to see, and it sets off a feeling like a great flock of birds beating inside her head.

Unlike Sethe in Beloved, the real Margaret Garner was sent back into slavery and died in 1858 of which disease?

Typhoid fever killed her during an epidemic in Mississippi, according to her husband, who said she urged him never to marry again in slavery.