Login with Patreon
Beloved
Ghost of the Chokecherry Tree
If you aren’t American, there’s a fair likelihood you’ve never heard of the next Rejected Princess: Beloved, from Toni Morrison’s novel of the same name.
Beloved is the story of Sethe, a freed slave in post-Civil War era Cincinnati (and Kentucky). In order to keep her two-year-old daughter from slavers, she ends up slitting the baby’s throat, killing her. Fast forward about a decade, and Sethe is living a fairly settled and peaceful life, when she stumbles upon a beautiful young woman, who appears confused, homeless, and and halfway drowned. This is Beloved.
Book spoilers ahead.
Sethe begins to see it, basically losing everyone in her life in capitulating to the increasingly erratic whims of her spectral houseguest. Eventually Sethe’s other daughter, Denver, arrives with a posse to exorcise Beloved from the house. A fracas ensues (Sethe stabs a white man that Denver brought along — it’s complicated), and Beloved disappears in the process.
The book is about a lot of things, but primarily the effects of slavery on one’s mind — Sethe is trying to make a clean start, but coming up with a new personality as an adult, while keeping her past sealed away from memory, proves too difficult for her to manage. As a result, she’s literally haunted by her past.
You should read it. It’s a great book, even if I did just spoil all of it for you. Not good for kids though.
Art Notes
- The dress is very loosely based off of one that she wears in the movie adaptation. It may not be super period-appropriate, but I liked how it came out, so I kept it.
- Beloved has a tiny, hard-to-see scar on her neck. It’s there, I swear!
- She is tossing rotten roses on her own gravestone (which was pink). Rotten roses are a motif throughout the book.
- The mist behind her is built up a bit more, to give her a faint ethereal glow.
- The mountains in the background are based off a picture of the Black Mountain area in eastern Kentucky.
- The tree is a chokecherry tree, also a motif from the book: the scars on Sethe’s back from being whipped are said to make the pattern of a chokecherry tree.
If you were a Patreon backer,
you'd be seeing some cool stuff right here.
(if you've bought one of the books, you get a month free of behind-the-scenes access - get that started here!)
Read the above piece.
“Hey, picking cotton and washing masters pants is bad but not that bad?!”
Read about the possible inspiration Margaret Garner. (I take the risk and trusts Wiki)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Garner
I have no words….
I think there was a variation of this in an anthology book called “Centuries of Stories” I read once, but it only had the mother and the daughter running from slavers as they go north. There was never any discussion of the afterwards when the mother “got away”, although in the variation I read, it was implied that the mother didnt get away either. I thought when I saw this entry that there were probably many variations on this theme of running and not entirely making it, but its interesting to see a story that goes further then that.
I would like to congratulate you on the brilliance of the idea of having these stories mapped by location. It is extremely interesting to see the spatial orientation of so many of these stories, especially when you consider the TYPE of woman/story they are compared to where they are. (I took enough geography courses to be curious about such things.) Mapping these stories has allowed me to find entries I’ve never seen before, which is awesome, except now I think I’ve read them all more then once. Time to get the book!
“Beloved” is loosely based on Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her daughter to keep her from being a slave as well.