Precious Wreckage: Plot Summary

Monday, December 19, 2011

Plot Summary

After escaping from Sweet Home, a plantation that Sethe was enslaved at, Sethe arrives at house 124 with her newly delivered baby, Denver, where she sees her mother-in-law Baby Suggs. Sethe gets to see all her children she sent on before herself to 124. All goes well for a short time then she sees a familiar hat and takes off to a woodshed with her four children. She kills one child before her master, the sheriff and slave catcher all walk in on her and stop her from completing her task. The men leave thinking nothing can be gained from that place and Sethe is taken to jail with her baby girl Denver still nursing on her. When she gets out a little later her oldest children run away and Baby Suggs passes away while the ghost of the baby Sethe killed haunting the house. Eighteen years from the day she killed her baby a Sweet Home boy arrives on Sethe's porch and as things start looking up for the three people a ghost from the past returns in human form known as Beloved. Beloved runs off the Sweet Home man after he and Sethe reminisce on Sweet Home memories. Soon Beloved begins to suck energy from Sethe and as the people from the community diverge on 124 to help the misshapen family Beloved evaporates before their eyes and is soon forgotten.

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About the Author

Toni Morrison birth name was Chloe Anthony Wofford, she was born on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio she was the second of four children of George Wofford and Ramah Willis Wofford. Her parents had moved to Ohio from the South to escape racism and to find better opportunities in the North. She attended an integrated school, in the first grade, she was the only black student in her class and the only one who could read. She later went to Howard University in Washington D.C. and graduated in 1953 with a B.A. in English, then later attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and received a master's degree in 1955. She later married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect she was married in 1958, and had two sons Harold and Slade, then later divorced in 1964. She has many novels including "The Bluest Eye" in 1970, "Sula" in 1973 and "Song of Solomon" in 1977 and then "Beloved" in 1987 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Morrison taught English at two branches of the Sate University of New York. And was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University of at Albany. From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, she held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. And she is currently a member of the editorial board of "The Nation" magazine.