In January 1986, the New York State Writers Institute commissioned Morrison to write Dreaming Emmett, a dramatization of the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till by Mississippi racists in the 1950s. Having proven herself worthy of stage production from the writing of the musical Storyville and a screen version of Tar Baby, she felt equal to the task of recreating the grisly murder, which was presented in Albany by the Capital Repertory Company.
Three years after Dreaming Emmett was produced, Morrison published her fifth novel, Beloved. With this novel, Morrison returned to a focus on women. The novel arose from Morrison's ten-year contemplation of a slave narrative featuring Margaret Garner, a Kentucky slave woman who murdered one of her four children in 1855 rather than submit her family to what Morrison terms "creative cruelty."
Beloved probes the paradox of motherhood within slavery. This paradox is revealed through the humiliation of Sethe (the character inspired by Garner) and her desperate murder of her infant daughter. Intent on honoring an extraordinary act of maternal love, Morrison had incubated the characters for two years and then withdrew into her house and wrote Sethe's story in longhand. Strengthened by research provided by writer Michael Blitz from sources as far away as Brazil and Spain, she salted the powerful narrative with details about labor opportunities for blacks along the Ohio River, housing, clothing, furniture, prices, torture devices to constrain the tongue or keep a slave from sleeping, Cincinnati society, and particularly white abolitionists who were the black population's lifeline after passage of the Fugitive Slave Laws and during Reconstruction.
