Beloved, Beloved, Beloved

Morrison’s mining of the dimensions of folktale that appeared so prominently in both Song of Solomon and Tar Baby had proved less expansive than she had hoped. She found that many of her readers were still caught up in an all-too-frequently bifurcated world, and much of that world’s bifurcation was premised on a black–white racial division that seemed to come naturally to readers’ minds because Toni Morrison was herself black. Even if Morrison had considered some of her uses of the folk ironic, readers seemed incapable of finding that irony when the African American author was drawing characters who were similarly African American.