Haley Newlin > Recent Status Updates

“She will forgo the most violent of sunsets, stars as fat as dinner plates and all the blood of autumn and settle for the palest yellow if it comes from her Beloved.”

“The original hunger” - Denver’s hunger for companionship and the need to love someone

“Free North. Magical North. Welcoming, benevolent North.”

Paul D., like so many others, wanted to believe he’d be safe up North

Baby Suggs shares “a lesson she had learned from her sixty years enslaved and her ten years free: that there was no bad luck in the world but white people. ‘They don’t know when to quit.’ “

“Lay em down, Sethe. Sword and shield. Down. Down. Both of em down. Down by the riverside. Sword and shield. Don’t study war no more. Lay all that mess down. Sword and shield.”

Baby Suggs helped Sethe settle out of survival mode, out of reliving her trauma

Beloved gets angry with Denver and Denver is so desperate for her company and love

Sweet Home men, women, and children made to wear a bit in their mouth. Sethe says people who had the bit “always looked wild after that” — recalls “the wild man” she spoke of in the beginning of the book

Cotton roots could be taken to perform an abortion. Taken early in a pregnancy cotton roots would coax the cervix to open early and push out the fetus. Using cotton to cause abortions was like a form of poetic justice. Cotton that enticed slave masters to put pressure on women’s and girl’s “reproductive labor” also gave these women a way to assert a sliver of bodily autonomy

Cotton and wool replaced indigo as the primary cash crop of plantations and slaveholders at the turn of the 19th century

“…territory infected by the Klan. Desperately thirsty for black blood, without which it could not live, the dragon swam the Ohio at will.”

The Ohio River was supposed to be the dividing line between the slave-holding South and the free North. This made me think of American Nightmare by Kelly McWilliams

“Risky…very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous”

Paul D.

Sethe says Denver is a “charmed child” and that nothing bad can happen to her


“Everybody I knew dead or gone or dead and gone. Not her. Not my Denver.”

Baby Suggs was so starved for color and now Sethe feels it too.

“how barren 124 really was”

“The wild man” - the men Sethe describes at Sweet Home are so severely dehumanized and traumatized by slavery. “The wild man” is what slavery turns a man in to

Sweet Home - plantation

“…it rolled out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too.”

B-E-L-O-V-E-D

Sethe relives the exploitation and abuse she suffered in order to get a headstone for her daughter

10 mins for 7 letters

Beloved inspired by a woman named Margaret Garner, a young mother who escaped slavery and was arrested for killing one of her children (and trying to kill the others) rather than let them be returned to slavery

“…the soldiers [Israeli] came with their guns and their loudspeakers blaring the wails and screams of their victims”

Nakba = “catastrophe” in Arabic

Qata’a = “cut” in Arabic

“What was Palestine to a young, mixed girl living in America? What was it to be Palestinian?”

“There is no honor or glory in unconditionally serving an imperialist government.”

“desperation made people unpredictable”

“Anything that threatened white supremacy, anything that represented Black freedom and independence, was seen as evil by our oppressors”

Black conjurers continued on despite the ridicule and mockery

When the U.S. occupied Haiti, soldiers were ordered to take voodoo dolls and other spiritual relics. They reported these spiritual practices as “savage” making incredibly false claims of cannibalism and raising the dead (aka zombies), and then upheld these fears as the reason why Jim Crow and the occupation of Haiti was essential. These falsities made their way into American film — the birth of the zombie

“A tool of oppression can be transformed into a weapon of rebellion.”

“I see the marvel now, that we, who have been ripped to pieces so many times over, who have known such darkness, can still spin and sew lives of such brightness, make music that fills the streets, sing prayers that ring out over the enter city; that we find ways to say over and over, We are here! We are here!”

Men from war go into asylum with ability to speak and move and then leave “very obedient or remain here without speech or mobility”

“Beginnings are sacred, a small glow in a dark room, the breath before the verse.”

“Gossip and fire are the same. A pair. Because they get faster and stronger as they go.”

I’d recommend this book to anyone who likes Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Shirley Jackson, Isabela Livino’s An Immaculate Deception, and the 2001 horror film The Others

“She’s made us one and, in doing so, made me nothing.”

Mrs. H’s plot & betrayal