Baby Suggs died shortly after the brothers left, with no interest whatsoever in their leave-taking or hers, and right afterward Sethe and Denver decided to end the persecution by calling forth the ghost that tried them so. Perhaps a conversation, they thought, an exchange of views or something would help. So they held hands and said, "Come on. Come on. You may as well just come on."

The sideboard took a step forward but nothing else did.

"Grandma Baby must be stopping it," said Denver. She was ten and still mad at Baby Suggs for dying.

Sethe opened her eyes. "I doubt that," she said.

"Then why don't it come?"

"You forgetting how little it is," said her mother. "She wasn't even two years old when she died. Too little to understand. Too little to talk much even."

"Maybe she don't want to understand," said Denver.

"Maybe. But if she'd only come, I could make it clear to her." Sethe released her daughter's hand and together they pushed the sideboard back against the wall. Outside a driver whipped his horse into the gallop local people felt necessary when they passed 124.

Basic set-up:

Toni Morrison's novel comes a bit later than the classic Magic Realist works, but Beloved has a lot of Magic Realist elements. Here, the ghost of Sethe's baby returns to make trouble for Sethe and her living daughter, Denver. Here they try to reason with the ghost.

Beloved opens with all kinds of weird stuff happening in the house that Sethe and her daughter Denver live in. Above all, we learn that there's a baby's ghost haunting the house. We don't know why yet, but we know that the baby ghost is pretty ticked off about something.

So we're already in the realm of the extraordinary. In Morrison's novel, ghosts are real. In fact, they're so real that they move stuff around the house and generally get up to all kinds of shenanigans, just to let you know how much they're thinking about you.

A lot of weird stuff may be happening here, but this passage shows us how in Morrison's novel, weird stuff is described as if it ain't no thang. The narrator's voice here is totally matter-of-fact: "Perhaps a conversation, they thought, an exchange of views or something would help."

An exchange of views with a baby ghost? Pretty wacky. But it's all told in a very deadpan way, and Sethe and Denver's attitude about the whole thing is also very matter-of-fact. There's a creature haunting our house? Let's just have a chat with it.

Take a look, too, at how the narrator describes the ghost's reaction: "The sideboard took a step forward but nothing else did." Sorry, but if we were in a room and a sideboard took a step forward, we would go running and screaming from the room. But the narrator describes this event as if it's no big deal. Sethe and Denver themselves treat it like it's no biggie—they just continue to sit there.