Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved (Morrison), based loosely on a real life experience of a Cincinnati area former slave, mirrors her own journey from her early life living in a segregated South to her moving to a more racially friendly Lorain, Ohio (Reinhardt). Her life in Lorain was free of many of the prejudices that would have been present if she had remained in the South but she was still subject to hearing her older relatives relate stories of their prior Southern lives. These memories, like the memories of her characters in Beloved, form the background of many of Morrison's novels.

In Beloved, Morrison tells the story of emancipated woman slave named Sethe who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio after having escaped from slavery in Kentucky a few years following the Civil War. The joys of her escape, however, are short-lived as she soon discovers that her former owner...
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