Memory and desire in Beloved In Toni Morrison's merciless fifth novel, Beloved, freedom is defined as "not needing permission to desire", a freedom that it is almost unattainable for the characters in this book, with their seared memories of slavery, chain gangs, lynchings, and beatings. Ella, a former slave who crossed the river to reach Ohio and some kind of freedom, advises Sethe, a runaway who has just given birth to a baby girl: “If anyone asked me, I would say, 'Don't love anything. " The novel is set in Ohio in 1880. The Civil War has been won, slavery has been abolished, but not its memory. Morrison, with fierce irony, allows Sethe and her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, to recall life under a former "good" slave owner in Kentucky, whose farm was called "Sweet Home" and who treated his men like something different from children or savages. This enlightenment was short-lived. The kind slave owner falls on hard times and sells one of his men. Then he dies and Sweet Home becomes hell under a new, sadistic owner. (Teacher) Sethe flees, dangerously pregnant, from Kentucky to Ohio, gives birth along the way, and when she joins her other children she tries to kill them when the threat of recapture seems certain. He manages to kill a little girl, Beloved, and is able to erect a gravestone for her only by giving himself to the man who carves it. His services are enough to pay for one word, "Beloved" (rather than the entire "Dear Beloved" of the funeral service) to be carved into granite. Morrison's style is both dark and tender. He writes about the unthinkable without histrionics. Its triumph is that through metaphor, dreams and a saving detachment, it blends horror and beauty in a story that will forever disturb the mind..