Beloved

A house on the free side of the Ohio River, haunted by a mother's choice under slavery. The map runs from the Kentucky plantation of the past, across the river into Ohio, out to a house and a clearing on the northern edge of Cincinnati, and back to the downtown riverfront where the real case behind the novel unfolded.

Sethe

Sweet Home, Kentucky

The past

Before the events of the book, the woman at its centre is enslaved on a Kentucky farm whose gentle name mocks what happens there. Her memories of the place, and of the men held with her, run under the whole novel. Morrison invented the plantation, but its ground is the slaveholding country south of the Ohio, where the real family behind the story lived.

The Kentucky past, recalled throughout

inspired by Sweet Home is Morrison's invented plantation and is never given a real address. It is placed here in Boone County, Kentucky, near Richwood, where the Gaines family farm of Maplewood stood; that farm enslaved Margaret Garner, whose 1856 escape the novel draws on.

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