Flashbacks In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Toni Morrison’s Beloved, set in post-Civil War Cincinnati, delves into race relations, and how even after slavery was illegal, the African-American race was still traumatized by what they were forced to endure. The inhumane experiences that former slaves were forced to live through are personified expertly in the interracial interactions that occur throughout this story. Toni Morrison frequently uses flashbacks to show the reader how these former slaves suffered at the hands of the landed white elite. Not only did slavery negatively affect the African American race physically, it also served to mentally and emotionally abuse slaves to the point where their humanity began to dissipate. Toni Morrison shows this in the way that she tells the story of a former slave, Sethe, after she escapes from slavery. The encounter between Sethe and Mr. Bodwin, her white landlord, towards the end of the story exemplifies the horrible state that racial tensions were in during the Post-Civil War era. In this encounter, Sethe attacks Mr. Bodwin as he stops to pick Denver, Sethe’s daughter, up for work, simply because he is a white man who …show more content…
This is exemplified by the quote, “”. In Sethe’s mind, this mistrust is well-justified, because at Sweet Home Sethe was sexually assaulted, beaten, and dehumanized by a white man, named Schoolteacher. Schoolteacher watched as his sons molested Sethe, then whipped her after she went to tell Mrs. Garner what had occurred. He also frequently refers to Sethe and other slaves as though they are less than human and compares them to animals, exemplified by the quote, “Unlike a snake or a bear, a dead nigger could not be skinned for profit and was not worth his own dead weight in coin”. These experiences were the some of the primary reasons Sethe’s humanity began to