Paul DeWitt
Comp. II N92
19 November 2013
Dr. Bates

“. . . the damnedest bunch of coons they’d ever seen. All testimony to the results of a little so-called freedom imposed on people who needed every care and guidance in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred.” —Toni Morrison

The Beloved White Outlook of Slavery Toni Morrison's highly critically acclaimed novel, Beloved, intensely scrutinizes the uttermost excruciating moment of the African American heritage, slavery. By way of what Morrison has called “rememory”, the act of deliberately reconstructing what has been forgotten; in this case slavery is the forgotten memory of the African American culture (Gillespie 23). The novel takes place after the Civil War and emancipation, during the period of national history known as Reconstruction. Throughout the novel Morrison gives a strong sense of white dominance with the purpose of exploiting the roots of the Africa American culture to the reader. As well as exploring the effects of slavery on individual characters, individual black families, and the black community as a whole. Beloved documents both slavery's horrifying destruction and survival of the African American people and their culture (Kubitschek 116-7). In Beloved, Morrison develops the story line behind one of the main characters Sethe; a run away slave, a proud and independent woman, and a extremely devoted mother to her children. Though Sethe herself never truly knew her own mother, her motherly instincts are her most noticeable characteristic (Roberson 198-9). With that being said, a particular scene in Beloved forms the entire back drop of the novel. Characters referred to in the novel as the Four Horsemen consist of Schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher, and a sheriff with the sole purpose of hunting down Sethe to return her and her