Toni Morrison depicts the heritage of black America in a series of brilliant novels, including Song of Solomon and Jazz. Beloved expresses most memorably the legacy of slavery. Sethe, an escaped slave, kills her daughter rather than let her be recaptured. Sethe is tormented by her daughter's ghost, haunted like so many black Americans by the martyrs of their history. Morrison shows that freedom to live in the present is gained only by facing up to the full horror of the past.