Through circular narrative, "rememory," and oral history, Morrison's characters play out their mutual hurt in a wide array of settings, from a Georgia prison camp to a Cherokee village, from an idyllic Kentucky plantation to the banks of the Ohio River.
For Sethe, birth occurs somewhere on a southern plantation, where her unnamed mother bends into the watery fields among a host of maternal ma'ams and slaves who dance the antelope. Maturity nets Sethe separation and resettlement in Kentucky, where she works in a white woman's kitchen and nightly rests atop a mattress on her cabin's dirt floor. Sweet Home, haunted by a "headless bride" and young men lynched in its luxuriant trees (one of which is named Brother), has its own peculiar beauty that is captured in nature, especially the small cornfield where Halle couples with Sethe, making the stalks wave, flaunting the lovers' private first-time tryst. In the one spot Halle expected togetherness, the wrecked rows of new corn evolve into the ruptured maidenhead edged with youthful pubic hair. Morrison, developing the image with lavish grace, stresses the youth of an enslaved virgin still clad in silk that is "fine and loose and free."
Eighteen years later, the scene shifts to 124 Bluestone Road and a spiteful, gray and white two-storied house with shed, keeping room, storeroom, privy, cold house, and porch. Limited in its outreach, it has only one door, through which journeying blacks pass from way station back to the plank road, which leads them on a perplexing odyssey toward scattered loved ones. The front of the lot sweeps past a field and circular boxwoods into the glade as though the house, unprotected from Beloved's spite, must fend for itself in the open.
